Since 75 years have passed, perhaps it is time to write about a family secret that caused a big change in my mother's life.

Church had very different meanings to my mother and father. He came back from France at the end of the first World War as a very changed man. He never talked about what happened, but he didn't have any place in his life for church. My mother was very much into being at our church every Sunday for the sermon, and sometimes in the summer she would go on Wednesday evenings, also. They only comment I ever heard my father say was that the preacher at her church believed God was hard of hearing because he yelled at him all the time.
My mother insisted that I attend the church with her and also go to Sunday school before the sermon. The only part I liked was the singing during the regular church service.
The trouble at the church probably happened because I had started collecting stamps at 8 years of age and learned a lot about geography while reading about the pictures on my stamps. If you collect stamps, you learn a lot about other countries, their rulers and their history, or at least I did. My trouble at the church started because I had run across Mount Everest and read about it being the highest mountain on Earth.
The Sunday school teacher on this particular day decided to tell us all about Noah's Ark and the great flood.
The story was pretty interesting about Noah building this huge boat he called an ark and how he knew there was going to be a really bad flood that would kill everybody on Earth.
I never did really understand how he was able to gather up a male and female animal of every kind on the Earth and bring them to the ark, but I didn't say anything. The rain started and went on for 40 days and 40 nights, and water began to fill up everything until the whole Earth was full of water up to the highest mountain on Earth. That's when my trouble first started. The teacher said the water came up to the tip top of the highest mountain on Earth, Mount Ararat.
I held up my hand and told the teacher that the highest mountain on Earth was Mount Everest. He told me, “At the time of the great flood, Mount Ararat was the highest mountain on Earth.”
The trouble would probably not have occurred had I not asked him a question. If the entire Earth was covered to the top of the highest mountain, how did the water go down? Where did it go? That's when the other boys in the class started agreeing with me and asking, “Yeah how could it go down?”
Then I caused more trouble by asking, “Where did it all come from?” All the other boys chimed in with me, asking the same thing. The teacher said, “God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.” He dismissed class but told me to stay in my chair.

The teacher got together with the preacher while I sat all alone in the classroom, and after they talked for a while, the preacher wrote something on a piece of paper, put it into an envelope, called me out of the room and told me to give the envelope to my mother.
When I got home, I gave the envelope to my mother, and after she read the note, she began crying and asked me, “What in the world did you do?” I told her what had happened and asked what the note said. She said they told her to move me to another church for Sunday school.
As a 12-year-old, I had been exiled, banished from my mother's church for causing the other boys in Sunday school to misbehave.