Father gave $500 seed money to each state leader to pioneer the church. I headed south in a van with half a dozen other pioneers. They dropped me off at a grocery store in New Orleans. I headed straight for the YWCA. I began a three-day fast and a seven-day condition to walk around the city all day picking up garbage. In my trek, I witnessed to a nun who invited me to board at the Dominican College, a women’s college. Here, my roommate was going out on a date with a fellow named George Glass. It wasn’t a serious relationship and as she talked about him -- he had studied to be a priest -- I felt that I should witness to him.
I found a tiny apartment and bought a small table and two chairs at the Salvation Army. Next came a blackboard and I was all set to teach. To support myself financially, I also got a part-time job as a cleaning lady at the LSU dental school.
I had been studying my notes from Pres. Young Whi Kim’s lectures intensively. With great anticipation, I invited George, who came for a series of eight lectures -- the first I had ever taught. Not amazingly, everything made a great deal of sense to him. He even took the Conclusion in stride and simply asked, "Okay. What should I do now?"
That was lucky since the bus team headed by missionary David Kim was arriving in a few weeks and we needed to find a larger center for them to stay. By that time, another sister and I had rented a New Orleans "shotgun" house (long and narrow) in the historic section on. Still with no furniture, we made a large, beautiful felt banner with our movement’s motto: "Let us go forth in the shoes of a servant, shedding sweat for earth, tears for man and blood for heaven."
I had already been to the city’s major paper, The Times Picayune, which had written an article about my mission to found a church in Louisiana. Now I told the press that a very important bus team was coming -- and this time the TV cameramen showed up -- albeit a little disappointed at the size and humbleness of our bus team! David Kim was incredible -- energetic, supportive and fatherly. As a truly veteran pioneer, he taught his bus team and we New Orleans members to street preach and witness up a storm.
With the bus team gone, I continued witnessing, mostly on the nearby campuses of Tulane and Loyola Universities. Students would come for a two-day seminar at our house. After each spiritual child heard the conclusion, I did a 3-day fast for them to accept DP and dedicate themselves to the cause. George had a full-time job so I had been able to quit my lady janitor job. (This was during pre-fundraising days.) George came with a fire engine red Pontiac Firebird and a little later Mitch Dixon joined with a florescent blue late-model car as well. I think we had the fanciest wheels of any pioneer center. The working members kept their jobs and by pooling our resources, we did fine financially.
From Tulane University, six students joined and dedicated themselves -- five of them are still dedicated members. Everyone of them left Tulane University, considered an ivy league school of the south, very shortly after hearing the Principle. They were that kind of people. They understood immediately the depth and importance of the Divine Principle and the need to dedicate themselves totally to help Father.
Their parents all came to visit them. They listened to Divine Principle themselves and trusted the decision of their children, God bless them. This was before the days of the media hysteria about brainwashing. When I think of the fine families all these members have today, I know those parents are still glad they trusted their children, although it could not have been easy.
My faith and focus had been to fulfill 1-1-1 (one new member each month each year) and with some help from the bus team, it was fulfilled our first year!
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The 1972 purchase of the 4411 Canal St. house was most fortunate because Father, Mother and their entourage stayed there during the 1973 Day of Hope Tour, leaving Louisiana forever with a priceless landmark. I can never forget how at speech time we all squeezed into that house: Father and Mother in the prayer room, Col. Pak in a bedroom, Mrs. Won Bok Choi in the breakfast niche we had enclosed, Pres. and Mrs. Salonen and other assorted members of the entourage were in bedrooms in the basement.
There were a couple of firsts. At the banquet Father was presented with the keys to the City of New Orleans from the mayor’s representative. This was the first time Father received this honor. Soon it became the standard. I also wrote and published New Hope News, the first tabloid newspaper about our movement. We printed 20,000 of them and distributed them all over the city as we visited house-to-house inviting people to the lecture. Father liked it so much he ordered that it be done by National HQ on a regular basis: New Hope News later evolved into Unification News.
With a publicity budget for which New Orleans members had fundraised, I had huge billboards of Father and his message "Christianity in Crisis" put up all over the city. It was an exciting experience when Father and Mother drove in from the airport to see their faces as they spotted a huge picture of Father on a billboard along the highway. Of course, they stopped and took photos!
From 40 Years in America, pp. 77-78, 97