Motley Moose – Archive

I am very happily in Valparaiso, Indiana for my step father’s 90th birthday party.

Karl Lutze was born in 1920 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.  As a boy he watched his father and his uncle pull up in the Automobile his father had ordered, picked up at the train station, read the operators manual and driven home.  During WWII Karl studied to be a wartime pastor, but by the time he finished seminary school the war was over.  Instead of going overseas, Karl was assigned to a poor black parish in Muskogee, Oklahoma.  The rest of Karl’s life was cast at that moment.

Happy Birthday, Karl.  And thank you.

In the first week of April, 2008, we had a small family get together at my brother Brad’s house in Key West, Florida.  Donna and I and our kids, Brad and and his wife Jen, my mom and her husband Karl Lutze.  It so happened that the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination occurred that week, and Brad and I spent the night watching Senator Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech on my laptop on his porch.  Both children of the sixties – Brad born while JFK was president, me born while Bobby and Martin Luther led our nation towards a better future – the anniversary and the thoughtful speech of Senator Obama struck us as a moment to reflect on the period our lives had spanned.

Moreover, it gave us reason to ponder the period that Karl’s life has spanned.

Karl was in Selma, Alabama and walked across a bridge.  That was not the beginning of Karl’s involvement in civil rights, just one of the things he had been doing for twenty years by that time to create the world that we live in now.