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Our Building
... continued
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Mr. Wright, with tongue in cheek, referred to the church
design as "pole
and boulder Gothic" (these words can be seen in
his writing on the framed drawings in the church school hall).
He stated that the design was to represent the form of a tent,
the ancient dwelling of Israel, as a symbol of temporary,
migratory and transient lives. Thus the church appears to grow
out of the earth, and even the pulpit area was designed to
resemble a cave. The entrance to the building is a gradual
descent to suggest a return to God's creation, and to his
forgiving and protecting love.
As anticipated by Clayton Kantz, the design, based on
equilateral triangles, was complex and bewildering to the
contractor and the congregation. Only one contractor dared to
bid; he was not sure how to build it, so his bid came in at
$360,000. This was rejected. After much discussion, members
meeting in the home of Helen and Charles Miller voted we would
do the building work ourselves.
This, of course, involved organizing work parties for
months, even years. Since the design was not easy to comprehend
nor to construct, the Building Committee had to interpret the
drawings to the congregation and the community. Construction
depended on the efforts of all the members of the congregation.
The mammoth task of organizing a time schedule, making the
most of members' skills and inspiring them to keep going all
these tasks fell to David Packard, our first moderator, who, in
Ray's words, "was a true David when the church
confronted a real Goliath."
Skilled excavation work was done by our member Del Hansen, a
"powder monkey" who had worked on Shasta Dam. He used his
expertise to dynamite the site, clearing away the rocks. David
Packard, in addition to his organizational skills, "turned out
to be a 'rebar' installer as good as any in northern California,
" according to Clayton Kantz. "He measured the length and angles
for all the reinforcing steel used in the concrete bents and
participated in placing the steel in those bents." Members also
did the work of installing reinforcing bar for the concrete
flooring.
Special mention, too, must be made of the work every day of
Gwynn Bland, who, with carpenter/foreman Gray Smith, figured out
the exact dimensions for forms for the concrete bents, as well
as the placement of the wood beams that fit into notches in the
concrete to go alone to the outside.
To create the massive rockwork that forms the walls of the
church, members of the congregation first gathered 91 tons of
rocks all kinds, greenstone, lava, sandstone, etc. To haul the
rocks, Ray Welles begged and borrowed flatbed trucks and other
vehicles from U.S. Plywood (thanks to our member Ken Morrow).
Tom Arias recalls man handling the rocks for the ''sunken
garden" area. Mel Hammer and Jim Mallory remember the struggle,
as members brought in rocks special to them from faraway places
such as Haiti and Tahiti, as well as from various nearby
locations some from an old Chinese wall on the Pearson ranch at
Ono, some from Iron Mountain mine, many from the area where
Keswick and Shasta dams had been constructed in the 1940's.
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Mr. Wright had developed a method of construction
in the1930's for rock work similar to that used at
Taliesin West. This method utilized forms which
we built from donated plywood. We wired rocks to the
inside of the forms, and once all of a section was
ready, concrete was poured. In various places,
holes were cut in the forms so parts of the rocks
would protrude.
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| When the concrete had cured, the women cut the
wires that held the rocks in place. The forms were
removed and reused many more times.
During one period we ran out of money; it was
discouraging, meeting in the unfinished building
with "wind and weather blowing through those
wonderful concrete bents," as Ray says. Mel Hammer
recalls that in that depressing time, members
decided to "dig a little deeper" and buy a window
each, those who could.
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continued
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