The Rev. Dale Turner
- Russ Ware
- Aug 6
- 11 min read
Minister at Plymouth Congregational Church from 1948 to 1958
“I determined at the hour of ordination that I had to involve myself in community life beyond the walls of the church. I reasoned that 75% or more of the people of the city do not come to the church so for the church to be effective, it has to go where they are.
- Dale Turner
The Reverend Dale Turner was the minister at Plymouth Congregational Church from 1948 to 1958. He was a much respected and beloved pastor.
Dale Turner was born November 22, 1917 in Glen Dale, West Virginia, on the West Virginia/Ohio border. The family moved to Akron, Ohio, when he was a small boy, and his father worked in a Goodrich rubber factory in Akron.
Turner’s father was a Catholic and his mother was a protestant, and although they were religious people they did not go to church. Dale was raised without a church. Although his father (Charles) had a grimy factory job he would leave the house in the morning wearing a suit, ride the bus to the factory, and change into his work clothes at the factory. After his shift he would shower, change back into his suit, and ride back to his family in a suit and tie. When Dale polished his shoes, as a boy, his father would insist that he polish the heels. “Dad,” he would say, “Nobody polishes the heel. I just polish the parts that people see.”
“People see you when you are walking away, too,” the father insisted. “Polish the heels.” Dale would use this lesson in his sermons, years later. One of his sermons was entitled “Polish the heels.”
When Turner was 18 an evangelical minister visited his high school basketball team “to shoot some baskets with the team.” Turner liked the man and began attending his church. He had what he would term “a conversion experience”, which somewhat distanced him from his family, and led to his decision to attend West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buchannon, West Virginia. In High School they would have dances in the high school gym, and his basketball coach instructed the players that it was their responsibility to dance with the girls who came. “They may not be the prettiest girls, but think what it would mean to them if they had to go home and say ‘I went to the dance, but nobody asked me to dance.’ You can’t let that happen.” Turner said that that was a very important life lesson for him, that it was a responsibility of those who were able to do so to address the needs of those whose needs were not being met, including the emotional needs, and it was a responsibility of a coach or leader to instill those lessons. It was Turner’s goal and focus in that period to become a football coach.
He played basketball and football in college, with athletic scholarships. Although he would mock his academic record, Turner was offered scholarships to pursue an advanced degree in P.E. at Columbia and in Divinity at Yale. He chose Yale. His friends urged him not to go there, arguing that the liberals at Yale would undermine his faith. They were somewhat right. Under the influence of Reverend Harry Fosdick, who became his mentor and friend, Dale remained deeply committed to his religion, but drifted toward a liberal religious viewpoint emphasizing openness and tolerance, rather than the fundamentalist tenets he had originally embraced. He called it a second conversion.
Turner said that whereas almost all of his classmates at Yale had been raised in a church of some particular denomination and returned to it to work, he had been raised without a church, so he was free to look around. He felt that the Congregational philosophy was most compatible with his own, so he took a position as an associate pastor at the Plymouth Congregational Church in Lansing, Michigan. He was ordained in Lansing.
Leone (Shavey) Butters, a Michigan State graduate, was interim organist and choir director at the Lansing church, presumably interim because someone was away due to the war. Turner became close friends with Leone and her husband, Tom, an Army Lieutenant. William Thomas Butters, a pilot assigned to the 603rd Bomber Squadron, was killed in Germany of January 23, 1945, leaving Leone a widow with a two-year-old son.
In 1946 Turner took a position as an associate at a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In Grand Rapids he became friendly with a man named Steele. Steele somehow was friends with Freda and Karl Klooz, members of our church, and learned from them that the Lawrence church was searching for a new minister. Steele suggested that Dale might be the man for the job. Freda and Karl Klooz visited Grand Rapids with Jim Postma, a distinguished Lawrence attorney and later our church historian. Freda, Karl and Jim all were impressed with Turner, and began working on his behalf, although there were other good candidates. (The Turners stayed close to Freda and Karl Klooz, and stayed with them when they visited Lawrence in 1970, twelve years after they had left town.) In 1948 Turner thought he would not get the job because he was young (30) and had never been what he called a “speaking minister”, as the other candidates had. In a letter endorsing his candidacy, another member of the search committee reported that Turner, who never turned down an invitation to speak anywhere, had become the most popular after-dinner speaker in Grand Rapids. Dale married Leone Butters on September 26, 1948 in Lansing, Michigan, after which they got immediately in the car with her six-year-old son, Greg, and drove to Lawrence.
Turner remembered that when he began his service here average attendance was in the 200s, but with only about a dozen children attending the children’s ministry. The church’s only employee other than Turner was the church secretary (although there must have been a part-time Sexson.) One thing Fosdick had told him was “when you get your own church, don’t try to change anything in the first year. People will have settled expectations, and some people will resent any efforts you make to improve anything.” To bring more students into the church was a primary focus for Turner throughout his career. Turner held off as long as he could, but began the children’s service in 1949 or 1950, and founded the children’s choir about the same time. Leone was de facto director of the children’s ministry, and director of the children’s choir.
In 1950 Turner introduced the Christmas Eve service. Jim Postma recalled that for the first candlelight service they had just enough people to circle the sanctuary.
The first (of three) major construction undertakings while Turner was our minister was to dig out the space under the sanctuary to create the basement area. The work was done with horses, mules and shovels. In 1950 Turner introduced the “Fun Fest” for students, which included dances. At first the dances were on the main floor, but after the basement was open they were in the basement. The Fun Fest was a huge success, drawing 200 to 250 students from all over town to the dances.
And this also created a career crisis for Turner. Black kids attended the dances. “The black kids began tapping the white boys on the back to dance with the girls, you know, the tap dance. I began to get a lot of calls from parents who said “my kid loves to come down to your dances, but I don’t want my daughter dancing with a black boy. Some of them weren’t that careful with their language.”
It became a very serious issue for him, and Turner said that he frankly didn’t know what to do. He decided to do nothing. “It’s a problem that you will have to deal with as a parent,” he told one angry father. “I can’t tell the black kids that they’re not people.” It led to friction in the church and in a number of families. One mother told Turner that her daughter just cried and cried because all of her friends went to the dances and she wasn’t allowed to go.
One day he got a call from a woman he didn’t know. “I understand that you are at least one minister in the city who would be amenable to performance of a black/white wedding, and I’m calling to see if you would marry me to my fiancé.” Another issue in the church.
Making alliances all over town and particularly through the rotary club, Turner tried to convince the owner of the local theater to allow blacks to sit anywhere in the theater. The theater owner refused. He tried to talk the owner of the local swimming pool to open the pool to blacks one day a week. The swimming pool owner told him to do that he’d have to drain the pool, clean it and disinfect it with a strong solvent after the day.
Turner tried to follow Fosdick’s rule that a minister should spend an hour of preparation for each minute that he spoke from the pulpit. He spoke without notes, so parishioners sometimes thought he was speaking extemporaneously, although he certainly was not. He had committed the sermon to memory. Occasionally he would forget what he was supposed to say next.
In the fall of 1949, less than a year after arriving here, Turner was asked to teach a class at the KU school of religion. He asked the church trustees if it would be alright for him to do that, give three lectures a week as well a sermon. They okayed it. It became two sermons a week, one for the students and one for the regular members. The sermons were essentially the same, but with different examples and different illustrative points for the two audiences. Leone would read his sermons and give him feedback in advance, sometimes not things he wanted to hear, and then would sit through both deliveries. Turner would say later that he really had no idea how he was able to do that, prepare three lectures and two sermons a week. He had 100 students at a time, and papers to grade.
One of his students at KU was Wilt Chamberlain. Turner said that Wilt was a very good student who had been raised in a religious family, and that he felt Chamberlain was a person of good values. His first assignment for each student was to write an essay which was their religious biography. The purpose of the essay was to help him relate to each student, and he would never discuss any student’s essay without the student’s permission, but he kept Wilt’s essay and would quote from it (with Wilt’s permission) for many years.
Dale and Leone had three children, all boys, and all born in Lawrence. Chuck was born June 26, 1949, on a Sunday morning during church service. Dale would say that the first boy was born nine months, two hours and twenty minutes after they were married. The second was born in July, 1951, during a devastating flood in which several families in the church lost their homes. Turner said that to lose your home to a flood was worse than a fire, because you had to see everything as it had been, a beautiful house with a grand piano, just rotted away from the flood. Leone said that Dale visited the flooded area in a boat, came home and held the baby and just cried and cried. Art Wolf, who was head of Centron Pictures and a member of our church, made a movie about the flood years later and persuaded Dale to act in it. Dale felt he was terrible as an actor, and didn’t see the movie until the 1980s. They lived in Lawrence at 1332 Strong Street, which would have been on what is now Sixth Street, near Michigan Street. Their boys attended Pinckney Elementary.
In 1953, due to Turner’s efforts, the church was able to secure an associate pastor, Bill Bryant. The seminary had been refusing to send us an associate because the church was not in a 150-mile radius of the seminary, so the student could not come back weekly and report. 1954 was the centennial of Lawrence and the centennial of the church. Most of the year was devoted to getting the church cleaned up and fixed up for the centennial, which was in October.
There had been a series of fires in Lawrence, one in an abandoned storefront, one in a school, a small one in another church. People suspected an arsonist. There was a woman in town who hated churches and hated clergymen, and was very outspoken about this. She liked Turner because, she told him, “you come closer to being no preacher than any of them.”
About 4:00 AM on September 10, 1955 this woman called Turner at his home to tell him that the church was on fire. “How do you know that?” he asked. “You should just let it burn,” she said, and hung up. Leone and Dale wondered if she was the arsonist.
Fortunately the Plymouth board had recently increased our fire insurance in reaction to the other fires. The city and the insurance company decided that it was not arson, and the church was paid $86,000. The fire seemed particularly cruel after the long effort to get the church in shape for the centennial, but the payout was enough to rebuild and repair the destroyed South church and the damaged areas of the main building—the second major building project of Turner’s ten years in Lawrence. The third was the north church, which was planned in 1956 and completed in 1958.
Turner was on the original board of directors of the Bert Nash center, along with Bert Nash and Al Bramble, the Methodist minister from across the street, with whom Turner was close friends. The Nash center was originally a four-hour, once-a-week counseling center run by Dr. Sigmund Gundel at LMH. The quote at the beginning of this article is from an interview Turner gave in 1987, when he returned to Lawrence to celebrate the opening of the Bert Nash Center’s new building.
Turner liked to go into schools and other places where there were children. He did magic tricks to break the ice with the kids. Leone said that people say that music is the universal language, but the real universal language is magic. People respond to it everywhere in the world.
In late 1957 Dale and Leone were approached by University Congregational Church in Seattle, Washington, which is right across the street from the University of Washington campus. It had 1600 members at that time. Despite its proximity to the campus, very few UW students attended the church. Church leaders heard about Dale Turner because of his success at attracting KU students to the church. Dale and Leone told them No; we love Lawrence and we are staying here. The Seattle church came back a second time. The Turners explained that their son (Dale’s adopted son, born Greg Butters) was now in High School. They couldn’t leave. Seattle came back a third time. The North Wing of the church was dedicated in April, 1958. A week later Dale announced his resignation from the Plymouth pulpit, effective July 1, 1958. They were in Seattle by the start of the school year.
Dale Turner was pastor of the University Congregational Church for 24 or 25 years, retiring in 1982 or 1983 (sources differ.) The church continued to grow, and Turner was tremendously successful and tremendously popular there as he had been in Lawrence. A church member saw him on the street and said “Boy, Turner, they must be paying you a mint to leave this beautiful place to go out there.” Turner responded that he was actually taking a $2,000 pay cut. He just couldn’t resist the challenge of it. A bigger city, a bigger college to draw from, and all that nature all around them. An avid fisherman, Dale caught a whopping 46-pound salmon in 1974, and his Christmas letters record numerous fishing trips. Over the years the church treated him well. In 1961 they paid for him to spend several months in Japan as a part of an ecumenical outreach. Turner spent hundreds of hours getting private lessons in Japanese, gave sermons in Japanese and used his magic tricks to grab the attention of Japanese children. In the 1960s and 1970s the family, and Dale in particular, traveled very, very extensively, with their Christmas letters almost annually recounting trips to Russia, Greece, Israel, England and other locations. In 1972 he began broadcasting his sermons on the radio, adding a newspaper column in 1977.
Comments