Appendix III:

Dr. Lorenzo Makes It into the Guinness Book of Records

(Along with his Alma Mater)

“First institution of higher learning in the world to use one of mj lorenzo’s books as a course textbook:  Wrigley College, Wrigley, Illinois”

Course:  Advanced Anthropology

mj lorenzo book:  Tales of Waring

year:  1993

By 2018 almost every institution of higher learning in the Western world was using mj lorenzo books as textbooks, and many schools in developing countries were as well.

The first such use was by anthropology departments, and the book was not The Remaking, surprisingly, but Tales of Waring. And the school? The author’s alma mater.

What a shock.

Why a shock? Because he had been critical of Wrigley College in The Remaking.

And because he had been slapped with the reputation of being ‘liberal’, neither correctly nor fairly, since it was an oversimplification and was based on that one book, his first, The Remaking, which he had written when wild and lost all over the place.

Wrigley was a conservative, evangelical, four-year ‘liberal-arts’ college, many of whose students ended up in Christian education, church ministry and missionary work around the world, yet mj, though he just wanted to be a family doctor at the time, had actually chosen to go to Wrigley rather than to a number of more liberal secular schools his parents had supported. Wrigley’s grads were mostly ‘Christian leaders’. Some made it to the U.S. House of Representatives. But it was also famously good for pre-med.

Mj’s uncle, Percy Crawford, a popular radio and TV evangelist, had gone to Wrigley. But Wrigley’s best known alumnus was Billy Graham, number one evangelist of the twentieth century worldwide; virtually a saint; and frequently consulted on religious and other world-shaking matters by every U.S. president (12) without exception, regardless of party or faith, starting with Truman, through Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, elder Bush, Clinton, younger Bush, and finally Obama. Billy was a rock. Absolutely predictable.

And yet Wrigley’s second most famous graduate was the quirky and seemingly unpredictable mj lorenzo.

while mj lorenzo’s mother’s people were urbane Philadelphia Germans

who supported the Union effort during the civil war

his preacher father, Rev Lorenzo

was born in the South of people from Northern Virginia

who were Confederates during the civil war
and, on Rev's father's side, owned slaves in Maryland before that

Rev Lorenzo’s mother’s family, the McDonalds (above), owned a farm named ‘Clifton’

in the Shenandoah Valley near or on the Opequon Creek

photo from around 1900: mj’s father’s (Rev Lorenzo’s) mother ‘Nannie’ McDonald (upper left)
three of her four sisters, her brother and their mother and father

Nannie’s mother’s father (not shown) was John Wesley Kelley, a circuit riding preacher

(probably Methodist, since he was named for the founder of the Methodist denomination)
while mj's coddled (great) 'Uncle John' (seated, middle) would become the family
bachelor jokesmith and storyteller  

A Princeton University lit professor (who was a Wrigley grad) told CSPAN cable channel:

“We use mj lorenzo books, and picture shows too, in our classes because our students, while laughing their way through them at poor old fumbling picaresque anti-hero mj, learn from almost every area that should be covered in a good and thorough liberal arts education: science, religion, philosophy, education, psychology, political science, civics, history, archaeology, anthropology, medicine, writing, English vocabulary, travel, geography, life in developing countries, human sexuality, illegal drug ethos, web page design, linguistics, literature, rhetoric, logic, music, and the rest of the arts, and too many more critical areas of knowledge and wisdom to name.”

Lorenzo’s great popularity among faculty and students at his alma mater, however, was disconcerting to its administration, board of trustees, and alumni organization for years.

Most Wrigley faculty and students, by the 1990s, understood mj lorenzo to be 'quirky and unpredictable' in a good way, because for a good reason. They grasped the fact that he was always looking for tricky ways he could reach out to all sides of the spectrum worldwide at once, and especially the two extremely hyperpolarized U.S. sides called 'left' and 'right' which fought over political and cultural values. Whereas the Wrigley administration, trustees and alumni association failed – or refused – to understand this, and preferred to see his 'unpredictable quirkiness' as a bad thing. Probably they had never gotten over the fact he had criticized Wrigley administration in The Remaking (principally in subsections 35 and 36; and then further, in 45 and 46). They called him 'quixotic', uselessly fighting fantasms, and making himself a bad example therefore to their students.

And so, in 1996 the admissions office brought to the college president’s attention, both in writing and by a surprise dramatic multi-person visit to his office, that “Fully 20% of applying students mention mj lorenzo as a reason why they want to come to Wrigley, and half of those actually quote one of his books in their application essay as if they were books of wisdom. Last year,” continued the admissions office, referring to 1995, “a full 5% of applicants built their entire application essay around mj lorenzo and his life and writing.”

The college president and chaplain were devastated. They informed the Board of Trustees immediately.

The New York Times told the story:

“What will happen to our precious and immutable, God-ordained Evangelical Christian tradition, if our students begin to model themselves on mj lorenzo instead of on Billy Graham or Christ?” asked the Board of Trustees in a letter to the President of Wrigley College, which was leaked to The Times.

The president wrote back: “Should we reject students who feature Lorenzo, Class of ’64, in their application?”

“NO!” cried half of the Wrigley faculty professors when it was put before them. “We like Lorenzo not because he is perfect, for certainly he is not, any more than we are, but because he makes our students think. They tell us so. Lorenzo also helps them learn HOW to think, they say. We want students who want, and are able, to learn how to use their God-given hearts and brains and souls and spirits to feel and think and be, and To Be with Ultimate Being!”

“But he doesn’t reflect Wrigley’s values!” answered the administration.

“He’s not that far off,” said a theology professor. “Wrigley students are not so stupid as to think mj lorenzo could be a replacement for Christ. He is in a different category!”

“Would you define that category, please,” the Chaplain publicly asked the student body and faculty – (during a school-wide chapel service designed to deal with the issue) – in a tone ‘maybe a tiny weeny bit sarcastic’, as the student newspaper afterwards hinted – tiptoeingly.

Ninety-five percent of students and faculty replied in an anonymous survey (with nearly 100% response rate), “culture hero.”

Four percent, “buffoon” or “clown.”

A half of one percent, “nitwit.”

And another half percent was divided among “Idiot; savant; idiot savant; Witless of Wallingford; dimwit; devil incarnate; saint; Holy Shit!” etc., etc.

Whereupon the students formed a committee and wrote to the Wrigley College president:

“Many of us mentioned mj lorenzo in our applications because we felt he proved that Wrigley provides a top-notch, well-balanced, thorough, four-year post-high-school Evangelical Christian education. Dr. Lorenzo is Wrigley’s best advertisement. When we tell people we go to Wrigley, they say, ‘OH, that’s mj lorenzo’s school. That must be a really good school!”

“That’s just the problem,” answered the college chaplain in another chapel service two weeks later, especially designed to continue discussion on the ‘problem’ and solicit prayer intensively, night and day, asking – no, the word was begging – the Lord’s guidance regarding it. “We want people to say, ‘OH, that’s Billy Graham’s school. That must be a really good school for following Christ. Billy went there.”

Billy Graham, like mj lorenzo, came from a family of many preachers

his parents’ people, on both sides, had been Southern Confederates

he was born in 1918 in this frame farmhouse near Charlotte, North Carolina

about 3-400 miles south of mj’s Southern relatives

shown at the top of the page[1]

“A few of us are here because of Billy Graham,” answered the student body president, who later that year went on to Harvard Medical School and eventually became head of Pediatrics at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts. “But most of us are here, at least in part, because of the fame of the obviously very well-educated mj lorenzo. Speaking for myself, he was my father’s roommate here at Wrigley for two years, and I met him at our home in Centerville when I was ten. We are not claiming him because he’s a saint. He may not be, but then only the Lord knows for certain. We are proud of him because he is well educated, and this school played a large part in his obviously top-notch education. And by the way, his infamous ‘sermons’, while revolutionary, have had an electric impact on young people of every decade since the seventies.”

That was when Wrigley’s chaplain and president discovered that a number of Wrigley students and alumni – and even Bible Department faculty (!) – were among the feisty group of mj lorenzo pundits known since publication of The Remaking as mj lorenzo ‘sermon pundits' or 'sermonary pundits'; despite the fact that mj lorenzo’s so-called ‘sermons’, scattered disrespectfully at fitful points throughout his ‘crazy’ works, were anathema to most older conservative Christians, who loudly decried them as anything but sermons, just as mj’s own Methodist preacher father had done. ('Sermon' and 'sermonary' pundits are first mentioned in subsection 47 of The Remaking, where we also find Rev's famous reaction to mj's first ever famous – or infamous – 'sermon'. The sermon itself follows in subsection 48 of The Remaking.)

And so a new category of regular and sincere beseeching prayer was initiated among the Board of Trustees, Alumni Association Board of Directors, Admissions Office, Office of the Chaplaincy, Office of the President, Faculty Association, College Athletics, Office of Student Activities, Student Government, Student Missions Project, Concert Band prayer meeting, Chapel service schedule committee, pre-class prayer group, student prayer meeting and other areas of Wrigley College leadership and stewardship. It went something like this: “Dear Lord and Christ, you who have ordained that we follow your holy path of salvation and righteousness, please direct us in helping our humble institution and helping us individually to address the enigma and conundrum of your creature, mj lorenzo, we humbly ask,” etc. etc.

Yet, despite – or maybe, as a result of – all that heartfelt prayer, by 2006 the percentage of applicants mentioning mj lorenzo as a reason for wanting to be admitted had skyrocketed to 50%, and by 2016, 70%, according to the June, 2018 edition of Wrigley, the magazine of the alumni association. While by 2016 the percentage of applicants mentioning Billy Graham, maybe the most Christlike Wrigley alumnus ever (or at least the most famous for seeming so), as a reason for wanting to be admitted, also had increased dramatically!

When this came to their attention, the administration were truly kerfluffered. They consulted statisticians who were Wrigley alumni, and were compelled, against their will, by statistics (and those understanding them) to announce that the fame and glory of mj lorenzo, like that of ‘the Prodigal Son’, in the parable-story Jesus had told, were actually boosting the fame and glory of the school, and that of Jesus Christ, of Billy Graham, AND of the Evangelical Christian Lord and God, all at once, and all over the world; and bewildered and nonplussed, they actually fell quiet about ‘the problem’ of ‘quixotic’ mj lorenzo – finally – at least for a little while; for they were still silent on the matter, this difficult subject of their second most famous alumnus, mj lorenzo, as of May 31, 2019.

The tension between the school and lorenzo was understandable, as Sammy Martinez often pointed out. After all, Wrigley's school motto was "For Christ and His Kingdom," and each member of the administration tried to live by her or his understanding of what was best for 'The Kingdom', at any given moment in time. Whereas mj lorenzo, said Sammy (who knew mj more intimately than anyone, having studied him from the age of 14), had narrowed down his guiding light to John 7:16-18 (J. B. Phillips translation), regardless of consequences. As Jesus said to the Jews in the Temple in Jerusalem, "My teaching is not really mine but comes from the one who sent me. If anyone wants to do God's will, he will know whether my teaching is from God or whether I merely speak on my own authority. A man who speaks on his own authority has an eye for his own reputation. But the man who is considering the glory of God who sent him is a true man. There can be no dishonesty about him."
 

since both mj lorenzo and Billy Graham were from families

loaded with theologically conservative neo-Calvinist Protestant preachers

the two preacher families were bound eventually to cross paths, as here:

on the left mj’s uncle, Percy Crawford, well-known American radio and TV evangelist

(during the 1950s, on coast-to-coast major network TV every Sunday night

right after Fred Waring’s weekly TV choral spectacular)

then Percy’s wife, mj’s 'Aunt Ruth' Lorenzo Crawford (Rev’s baby sister)

then Ruth Graham, Billy’s wife

and Billy

at Percy’s 1948 Pinebrook Summer Bible Conference in the Poconos of Pennsylvania

(near Stroudsburg, East Stroudsburg, Delaware Water Gap, Shawnee on Delaware, Minisink Hills,

and the rest of the Fred Waring stomping ground)[2]

Dr. Lorenzo tells the story that on another occasion the two preacher families crossed paths
in a way that involved him:

when he was a freshman at Wrigley his Uncle Percy died of a heart attack
he went home for the funeral in Philadelphia
Billy Graham gave the eulogy in a huge auditorium and afterward
Rev took mj up to the platform to meet Dr. Graham and shake his hand