This is my two hundred and third monthly teaching letter and continues my seventeenth year of publication. Since WTL #137, I have been continuing a series entitled The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, and have been expanding on its seven stages ever since: (1) the courtship, (2) the marriage, (3) the honeymoon, (4) the estrangement, (5) the divorce, (6) the reconciliation, and (7) the remarriage.

At this juncture, I have decided to discontinue this series, The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, and give the reader some of the background of my personal life instead, as “the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:9) might lead to a lot of unnecessary conjecture.

It is my desire here to witness to how my eyes became opened to the message of Christian Israelite Identity. Since learning that my origins are from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob (renamed Israel), and predominantly of the tribe of Judah, I came to the realization that I was born blind to my inheritance, and now find myself in a community of several White Israelite nations who are likewise blind to their Christian Israelite Identity. I have become aware that when any White mixes their genetics with a nonwhite alien, the half-breed child from that union is the unforgivable sin, and must be severed from the pure White members of that family! (See, e.g., Ezra 9 and 10 and Neh. 10.)

My first memories are when I was about three years old. As I was born in 1927, the Great Depression of 1929 was under way for about a year. What I have been told by the various members of my family is that my father had a good job at the Union Carbide Company in Fostoria, Ohio, and had he not quit that job, after being encouraged by my grandfather Keiser to be hired out to a contractor building houses, my father would have had at least a three-day-a-week job with the Union Carbide Company during the Depression. As it was, my father had to work at some not-so-pleasant, low-paid tasks whenever or however he might find one, as the construction business had gone to hell.

Anyway, at the age of about three, I found myself with my father, mother and sister living out in the middle of the country in Perry Township, and my father was picking tomatoes. He was a general farm hand for a truck farmer by the name of Peeler. We lived in what had formerly been an abandoned house about 1/3rd mile back a dead-end mud road with a small running ditch running along side of the road. There was an old barn, but no one ever seemed to use it. Somehow my father begged, borrowed or bought a milk-cow, so we did at least have some milk to go along with the salvageable tomatoes. Have you ever eaten green fried tomatoes, or fried corn mush (the Great Depression foods)? I remember that I spent most of my days walking up and down that mud road, and I don’t recall of there being any traffic. One job that my mother had me do was search around the grounds and barnyard for some thoroughly dry wooden sticks. She needed them to start a fire in her old fashioned kitchen range. She would crumple up a few sheets of paper; place some of the dry sticks on top of the paper, and then either a chunk of coal or a piece of pre-split, dry fire wood on top of the sticks so she could start cooking the evening meal. In the winter time, the fire in the kitchen range was burning all day, to keep that end of the house warm. In addition, there was always a large oval, copper reservoir holding about 2½ gallons of water for general washing of dishes, clothing or personal cleansing. After washing the dishes, the dish water was thrown out in the garden area.

Before living at the end of that mud road, I have a slight memory of somewhere in the country where my father had a job on a ditching gang. I remember for a short while living in a movable cabin on wagon wheels, but I cannot remember who did the cooking or how the other necessities of life were taken care of, but I do recall the shape of the wagon wheels, and the wagon’s tongue. I relate this incident only to give the reader an idea of some of the jobs one had to take just to keep food on the table at that time.

After living at the end of that mud road for a couple of years, our family had the opportunity to move to another farmhouse with a barn, which was a rental only, and didn’t include any farm land. By this time I was nearing five years old, and my father regained his former employment with the Union Carbide Company, probably on a three-day-a-week basis. But he still required other part time work. Whoever lived at this second farmhouse location had electrified the house with a Delco wind generator and batteries, but evidently could not keep up the expense of operation, labor, parts, and batteries. Additionally, if the wind didn’t blow for a couple of days, they would have to revert to using kerosene lamps or candles. When we moved in, the Delco system had sat idle so long the wiring, switches and electrical fixtures were useless. And like the first farmhouse, we still had an outdoor toilet, and had to hand pump our water.

By this time, my father did scrape up enough money to buy a car made in the 1920s, but other than driving it to work, we seldom traveled any distance in it, as the Great Depression was still causing great monetary distress.

I remember, when I was still five years old, in September, 1932, the Perry Center school bus stopped at our house; the driver wondering whether or not I was old enough to enter the first grade. I can recall my mother calling out to him, informing him I was only five, and that he should stop around the next year, in 1933. Well, September 1933 finally rolled around, and I found myself on the school bus, ready for the first grade. The first thing I knew, they issued me a reading book, and it wasn’t a McGuffey’s Reader! We weren’t very far into the book, where there was a story about a “Little Black Sambo” who lived in the Belgian Congo. I didn’t realize it then, but I found myself face to face with the major race problem of our day. Even then, the story was distasteful and disturbing to my spirit. This began a series of things in my life that seemed to be pointing me toward the ministry I’m doing today. The question I have today is: Why is it necessary to have a black history month? It is no more necessary today to have a black history month than it was to have a first grader’s reading book in 1933 with a story entitled “Little Black Sambo” who lived in the Belgian Congo.

I remember another incident before entering the Perry Center school, when I would have been somewhere between four and five years old. Some friends and my grandmother and grandfather Keiser decided to kill and butcher a sizable hog. I remember that my grandfather got the honor of shooting the pig. The next thing I knew, there were several people in the kitchen sawing and cutting the hog up in smaller pieces. Then, some of them helping started to collect all of the fat from the critter, cutting it up into small pieces, placing it into extra large porcelain enamel cooking pots, and placing them on top of the red-hot cast-iron kitchen range for hours, to render all of the lard from the leftovers into cracklings, which some of us were eating like candy. After all of the butchering and rendering was finished, the group divided up the various portions of the pork, lard, and cracklings evenly, and after cleaning the kitchen each party departed with their share. At this point, it was necessary to find two large earthenware crocks in which to prepare a strong saltwater solution, then fully submerge the pork 100% to keep it from spoiling, by placing a large plate up-side-down on top of the pork and placing a heavy brick or large stone on top of the up-side-down plate to keep the pork fully submerged in the brine. Even a small portion of the pork left exposed to the air was enough to make one deathly sick! Then, to help keep the pork from spoiling, my parents placed the two crocks in an upstairs unheated room during the winter. Then, when my mother was planning an evening meal, she would send my three year old sister, and myself (being about five), upstairs with a container and remove the stone and the up-side-down plate, setting them aside, while fishing out enough pork for two adults and two children. Then, the up-side-down plate and stone weight were returned on top of the pork, and most important of all, making sure all of the remaining pork in the crock was fully and safely submerged in the brine. Looking back at this, it frightens me to even think about it!

But this was not the only way we had for preserving food, other than canning (if one can consider pork as food, which it is not). I can remember my father building a box, covering it with hardware cloth, and securing it just outside of one of our windows. Then, when the weather got cold enough, all we had to do is raise the window and place the leftover food or milk in the box, and then lower the window back down and we had an energy-free refrigerator, or if the weather got below freezing, we had an energy-free deep-freeze. Back in the 1930s, a refrigerator was a toy for the super-rich, and during the Great Depression, one couldn’t afford ice for an icebox! It wasn’t until about 1936 that General Electric came out with an affordable, efficient sealed compressor unit on top of the refrigerator, that a low-wage earner could afford. However, I still remember that my grandmother and grandfather Keiser were still using a manual icebox until shortly after World War II.

Back to my first grade days at the Perry Center. Perry Center was originally a one room brick schoolhouse (which was usual at the time, teaching grades one through eight). Somewhere along the line, before my time, evidently the student body outgrew the one room, and they added a second white, wooden frame classroom for grades one through four, and grades five through eight were held in the old brick schoolroom. I attended Perry Center school throughout my first grade, and then our family moved into Fostoria, Ohio, where I started attending the second grade in the Fostoria school system in 1934.

At Perry Center, I never did get used to the teacher (though she was a very nice lady) going from one row to another, continually teaching one subject to one grade at a time. Instead of focusing on the material that was assigned to my grade, I found myself listening to what she was teaching to the other three grades. What was happening was, I was learning a lot, but not getting any credit for it. Besides, that reading book with the story entitled “Little Black Sambo”, who lived in the Belgian Congo, had other stories that bored me beyond measure. The problem was, the school curriculum and I were on two different railroad tracks.

One thing of interest did happen that I have never forgotten during my first grade experience at Perry Center. One day the teacher made an announcement to all four grades she was teaching, saying it was the oyster season, and that she was going to get some fresh oysters, and make some oyster stew and bring it to school and give all of her students a treat! Well, the day finally came, and I had no Idea what oyster stew was all about. Here were these grayish-white lumps in some highly seasoned heated milk. I really didn’t know what to do with them, so I broke one oyster open, and inside was this funny looking blackish-brown gunk, so I decided to eat the one I had broken open, and it tasted awful! Someone should have warned me that oysters need to be swallowed down whole, and never mind the oyster crackers! Strange though, all the other students thought the oysters were just fine! So now you know how the average day went at Perry Center school. However, we moved, again, into the city of Fostoria, Ohio, and that meant going to a new school.

Finally, September 1934 arrived and I was entering the second grade at a school on the corner of Columbus Avenue and Town streets, as we moved into a house on Town street across from the Union Carbide Company where my father was re-employed. Most people called the Union Carbide Company “the Carbon Works”, as when the day shift was being dismissed, hundreds of men filed out as black as niggers, as they had no showers for them in those days to wash the carbon off. All the women were simply delighted at this, as not only was she responsible for having a hot meal ready for her husband, but her husband walked into the house leaving a black soot trail, and when the husband took his carbon soiled clothes off, this meant that before she served the evening meal, she had to start the old fashioned wringer type of washing machine, and clean up the bath room after her carbon soiled husband left black marks all over the bathtub, lavatory-sink, and much of the floor and walls, let alone dirtying up a lot of towels and wash-rags. So, one can begin to comprehend what kind of a routine my mother was facing each and every evening when my father came home from work.

Not only did we have problems like this, but my second grade in the Fostoria, Ohio school system turned out to be a disaster. During the 1934-1935 school year we had one epidemic after another from September until the end of May. To name a few: there were the measles, mumps, chicken pox, chronic whooping-cough, scarlet fever, and other serious maladies in lesser numbers. All of these maladies spread over Fostoria in epidemic force. We didn’t have a single epidemic on our hands, but six serious epidemics marauding our area at the same time. However, Fostoria was not inexperienced with epidemics, as the influenza epidemic that struck just after WW I, left many dead in Fostoria. I can remember my grandmother Keiser relating how in her block alone, there was a corpse on view in every house in that block. Having experienced something like this before, the city officials took drastic action. They enacted severe regulations for quarantining all of the infected indoors, and keeping out all of the uninfected. All I know is someone, somewhere got busy and made up a large number of bright red signs about two feet by four feet with the name of the disease, and a caution notice forbidding anyone to enter an infected house, under severe punishment.

Here is an example of how the quarantine worked: About three weeks after school started, my two-year younger sister got sick with what I believe was the measles, and that barred me from leaving or re-entering my house. So here is an example of how, because my sister was sick with the measles, while I being well, could not attend my second grade classes until my sister had recovered from her illness. Well, shortly after this, I got sick with one of the six mentioned epidemics. So between my sister’s illness and my own, I had missed six to seven weeks of my second grade classes. This kept occurring between my sister and I over and over, with one disease or another all school-year long. As a result (and I have never come to an exact account of the days lost), I surely didn’t attend more than 25 to 30% of my second grade class-days. The school teacher did, though, keep sending me assignments, to read such and such pages, and then answer a few questions. If I, as a second grader, would have had someone to oversee my progress, I might have succeeded a little better, but I didn’t, and the assignments never got done. The teacher probably thought she was doing me a favor by passing me to the third grade, but she couldn’t have been more wrong!

After this, I found myself ready for my summer vacation between the second and third grades, and my memory is a bit fuzzy from June to December, 1935. I didn’t realize it at the time, but there had been some trouble brewing between my father and mother for some time, but as an eight year old boy, I couldn’t detect it. But as a 87 year old man, I now understand a lot of strange things were happening. Early in the summer of 1935, someone had obtained a Ford trimotor airplane and made arrangements with some farmer at the edge of town to use one of his fields for a runway and a parking area for clients who wanted an airplane ride. Asking someone why that airplane was flying overhead, I was informed they were flying sightseers who paid for a ride over town. When I was growing up, I dearly loved airplanes, but it was a rare thing to sight one. I knew the family was short on money, and my chances of getting a ride on that plane were almost nil. However, one day that summer I found myself in an automobile with my grandfather Keiser and my uncle, Merrill Keiser, heading for the farmer’s field. Before I knew it, we had boarded the Ford trimotor airplane and we were bumping across the field, and then suddenly everything became smooth as we became airborne.

Somewhat later that same summer, I found myself living with my grandfather and grandmother Keiser, along with my uncles Merrill and Lowell. Suddenly, I did not see or hear anything of my father or mother, and my younger sister was also absent. It seemed as though all three of them had simply disappeared into thin air.

I do have one item in my possession which documents where I was in the month of December, 1935. It seems that my uncle Merrill Keiser thought I needed a Bible for Christmas, and he evidently stopped into a Five and Dime store to get me one (or he might have gotten it from the American Bible Society). Although the print is quite small, there is no text missing in either the Old or New Testaments. Inside the front cover, my uncle Merrill wrote: “To Clifton Art from his uncle Merrill for Christmas, 1935.”

Upon receiving this Bible, I could not understand why my uncle Merrill would want to give me such a thing, for in my short life of eight years, I could not remember one time when my father or mother attended a church or spoke of Biblical things. I thought to myself, ‘well here’s this Bible, what am I going to do with it?’ After considering this, I decided to start reading the end of the book to see how everything turns out. After fumbling the Bible around for a little while, I finally managed accidentally to open it at Revelation chapter 12, and all the words seemed so large it frightened me. By this time, though, I had learned to read slowly, very carefully sounding out each word syllable by syllable.

The first verse seemed to be talking about some strange woman having twelve stars over her head. Then there was the very large word, “travailing”, whatever that meant or however it was pronounced. (One must remember, I was only eight years old, going on nine.) I could make out that it had something to do with a child of some kind. Then things really got complicated as it started to speak of “a great red dragon” with a disproportionate number of horns and crowns. Then in verse four, somehow this dragon uses his tail to drag one third of the stars out of heaven to persecute the woman’s child (whatever that means). These were terrible things to imagine in the mind of an eight year old boy! Then, it speaks of someone by the name of “Michael” (whoever he is), who is going to get in a war with some terrible creatures: “old serpent”, “the Devil” and “Satan”!

Although I didn’t understand what I was reading at that time, this passage would become the main theme of my writing for the last seventeen years. Had I done well in school, I would have been brainwashed by our educational system, and may never have come to the light of our Christian Israelite Identity Message! As a result of missing most of the second grade, I had to do the third grade twice and the forth grade twice.

Well, getting back to the time I spent living with my grandfather and grandmother Keiser, and my two Keiser uncles. Things were changing for the better concerning my parents. I only know these things because I have been able to pick up bits and pieces of the story over the years. There was a minister in Fostoria at the Evangelical Church who, along with his wife, took interest in the situation with my parents. I don’t know just what the original problem was, nor how the problem was resolved, but what I do know is one Sunday morning someone in the Keiser household got me up early and dressed me up to go to church. The church was about three blocks away, and my uncle Merrill walked me over to the church and introduced me to someone in charge of the children’s Sunday School, which had already started. This lady took me down to the basement and placed me with the group that would be my class. But before we went to our classrooms, the children’s assembly sang the first song I ever heard in any church! The song was entitled, “Jesus Loves All The Children”, and the words go like this: “Jesus loves all the children, All the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they’re all precious in His sight, Jesus loves all the children of the world.”

After a period of about 40 years since I first heard this song, Yahweh finally turned the light of the Christian Israel Message on for me, and I came to the realization that this song promoted a damnable lie, although I am sure that Karl Marx and Ivan Pavlov (aka, Petrovich) would have been very happy with it! I didn’t know it at the time, but years later I realized that Yahweh was preparing me for the ministry I have today. But as it turned out, that church as a whole became both a curse and a blessing to me in more than one way! Although I never remember either of my parents or sister ever going to church before this, all at once we were attending church every time the doors were open!

Suddenly, and I don’t remember all of the details, I found myself living with the other members of my family at 521 College Avenue in Fostoria. In the next three or four years we started moving to various locations in Fostoria. That meant that nearly every time we moved, I was assigned to a different school, and my education was literally shoved from pillar to post! Actually, no two Fostoria grade schools had the same curriculum or the same text books. Here I was, trying to catch up for what I had missed in the second grade, but all I was getting was a mass of confusion thrown at me. In the four years where I repeated both the third and fourth grades, I had an assortment of teachers; two very good; some average; and some not so good.

During my first shot at the fourth grade I had less than a favorable situation. On the first day of the school-year, this teacher divided the girls from the boys. She placed most of the girls on the north side of the room, and the boys on the south. And when she would start teaching a particular subject, she would stand in front of the rows of the girls. After presenting the lesson, she would then walk up and down the rows between the girls to check on how each girl was progressing with the assigned paperwork, and when one of the girls was having difficulty, she would stop at her desk and personally walk the girl through the assignment so the girl could arrive at the right answer. The teacher did this repeatedly, girl after girl. The teacher appeared like a mother hen hovering over her female chicks. As for the boys, they got little or no attention at all. Looking back, it appeared to me she was selecting the girls who had parents in high positions in Churches, service clubs, thriving business families, and popular political figures. As for the boys, she simply ignored us.

Before this, in my second shot at the third grade, I had a very good lady by the name of “Longacre” for my teacher. The school-year didn’t get off to a roaring start, but after a few weeks I got the teacher’s attention. One day during a class, she had a very important premise she wanted every single pupil in her class to understand, bar none! I don’t remember what her question was about anymore, but I had the correct answer. So she started systematically going down the far left row, starting with the pupil at the first desk, and was determined to ask every single pupil in the room until she got the correct answer. Time and time again the students failed to answer it correctly. After a few students failed to answer, the succeeding students simply answered “I don’t know?” After about twenty tries, she arrived at my desk, and I gave her the correct answer. She seemed shocked at first, as I, of all her students, would know the answer. She then went into a long orientation to the other students of just why they should have known the answer, and said to them: “If everyone told you the moon was made out of green cheese, you would believe that also!” From that time on, Teacher Longacre took more interest in my progress, and gave me more help where I needed it.

In my second go-round of the fourth grade, I got the best teacher that ever came my way. She had a way of drilling the class like no other teacher I have ever experienced. Somewhere in the second semester, she announced to the class we were going to have an Iowa Test coming up soon. At that time the Iowa Test set the standard for the nation, and she was going to see to it that her fourth grade class was going to score high in the ratings. So she set the greater part of our regular studies aside for what seemed like about six weeks, and we were drilled from morning until the P.M. school closing time. She had a way of identifying any student that was falling behind, and she would take measures to bring that student up-to-speed. She also had the ability to spot any student who hadn’t studied certain material before and plug up that hole. She had a pretty good idea of the various questions the Iowa Test would cover, but she had to be prepared for a certain amount the Iowa Test might add to their list. So it was drill, drill, drill, throughout the school day, and day after day, and week after week. She gave us sample Iowa Tests, and analyzed the results to re-ask the questions that had been asked on previous sample Iowa Tests. I probably learned more preparing for that Iowa Test than all of the time I had spent in grade school up until that time. My only regret is, I don’t remember the teacher’s name! But for me, she was an angel sent from heaven! Finally, the Iowa Test day had come, and a several page questionnaire was placed on each student’s desk, and it was time to give the Iowa Test our best shot.

Very soon I began to realize the questions were quite easy, as our drill sessions were paying off big-time, as the Iowa Test felt quite comfortable and I believe I was making a high score on them, but I don’t believe they published any grades for the pupils taking them. Worse yet, the Iowa Test didn’t show up on the student’s grade card! This 2nd redo of the fourth grade finished up my 1938-1939 school-year, but this wasn’t the end of the problems with my education by a long way. Yes, my parents decided to move again; this time back into the Perry Center school district. As I had to redo grades three and four, I found myself in the same grade with my sister. One can see that although my parents did start attending church regularly, and demanded my sister and I attend every meeting with them, our education could go to hell, as neither my father nor my mother themselves went beyond the eighth grade (and maybe not even that far), I was born April 15, 1927, when my mother was 16 years old. So she must have gotten pregnant with me around the July-August period of 1926, at 15 years old. So she is kind of like a sixth grade mother having sixth grade children. The only one who took an interest in my education was my grandmother Keiser, and she was restricted by her own limited education. One year where it was evident that I needed help, my grandfather and grandmother offered me grandpa’s like new, well taken care of bicycle. Well, that gave me the incentive I needed, and I did bring up my grades so I could pass that year. After passing my tests to advance to the next grade, I received grandpa’s bicycle. And because my mother had always preferred girls over boys, it wasn’t long until my parents purchased her a brand spanking new girls bicycle. My mother had gotten sidetracked somewhere along the line, for she had read the book, The Melting Pot, written by one Edomite-jew, Israel Zangwill, who falsely taught that all White, Caucasian, European, Americans were of mixed race, and my mother believed him strongly! As I recall it, it was my sister who asked my mother, “What race are we?” with my mother citing The Melting Pot, which I found out nearly forty years later was written by the Edomite-jew, Zangwill. It was less than a two minute conversation between my sister and my mother, without me saying a word. But that conversation lodged in my brain, and I have never forgotten it. As a matter of fact, I have the bad habit (blessing / curse) of remembering things of this nature. The cover of The Melting Pot is posted at my website.

Sometimes it amazes me how my mind can capture a couple or three words, passing like a shadow in the dark, and then recapture them forty years later, almost word for word, and remember from where I was standing in the kitchen of the house we moved into on the then U.S. route 23, about three quarters of a mile northwest of the city limits of Fostoria, Ohio. I remember well where my mother was standing and where I was standing, but vaguely as to where my sister was standing. But I knew that all three of us were present, and no one else was nearby.

This move back into the Perry Center school district proved to be yet another obstacle to my learning. The teacher in the brick building accommodating grades five through eight was a man by the name of Mr. Ralph Banks. Banks was an odd appearing person, with a strong square jaw and very thick black hair. He might have passed for a white person in some circles, but he surely wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon. From what I can remember of his features, I would estimate he had a touch of Arab blood, or maybe even Jew. Banks generally did well in presenting his lessons, but at test-time he would use tricky questions in order to deceive the students into answering the questions incorrectly. I don’t know what kind of euphoric feeling he got by doing that, but he seemed maniacal in doing it, and his ecstasy would show up on the students’ grade cards as a lowered grade.

This type of thing continued on until the 1941-1942 school-year. What always happens, when the teacher is playing the game of asking trick questions, is that the class will always start to compare answers. This happened to the row of students in the seventh grade, including my sister and I, along with the others in the seventh grade row. Banks discovered this and accused the entire seventh grade of cheating. How my parents finally got the news of this, I don’t fully remember, but when they did, they were as mad as hell. At the time my grandparents were still living within the Fostoria, Ohio city limits, so my parents moved us in with grandfather and grandmother Keiser, officially making my sister and I their wards, and the Perry Center School district lost some of their tax allocations as a result. This move was made right in the middle of the school-year of 1941-1942. Soon after this, the entire School Board of Perry Center got together and made arrangements to join the Fostoria, Ohio School District. To this day, all the children in Perry Township are bussed into the Fostoria schools.

Actually, in the 1942-1943 school-year, the combined school districts of Perry Center and Fostoria didn’t have to purchase any school buses, other than the two they already had, as the route mileage they covered was about the same. There were two fewer schoolrooms to heat and keep up, and one less tricky teacher to pay. Today, the only building left is the white frame building which they use for a township house and other gatherings.

This is only the beginning of my strange story, and I will continue relating how my peculiar experiences eventually led me to the Christian Israel Identity Message, opening my blind eyes to the Light of Yahweh, and my life hasn’t been the same since!

My story is turning into a much larger project than I had anticipated, and before I am finished, the reader will better grasp why I am recounting it to my readers. As I go along, I keep remembering other details I should include in my narrative.