Bus driver Wes Travis has memorized all the stops as he threads his way through the foothills and valleys and unmarked roads near Graysville, Tenn. He pauses at battered mobile homes patched with scrap tin and tucked into off-the-grid hollows; children run out and leap into the bus as if they're escaping a burning house.
The bus climbs a ridge, where children come out of the housing projects as soon as they spot its orange color. One grandmother rolls her wheelchair up to the bus, grandson in her lap, then watches Travis help him up the stairs.
In this rural area of Rhea County, many kids clearly get themselves ready without adult help. In winter, some are coat-less and wearing thinly-insulated sneakers. If they worry that Travis has forgotten him and have minutes left on their prepaid phones [known as burners], they text him anxiously; he always sends a reassuring text back.
His fans regard 6-foot-2 Travis as a teddy bear and bring him crayon drawings. When all his kids were collected last week, he waved the Icee truck ahead to the curb and treated his passengers to Popsicles.
"One time, some kids were telling me how they stuffed their T-shirts with wads of newspaper then used them as pillows," says Travis, who will get about three hours of sleep tonight because his shift at La-Z-Boy factory in Dayton starts at 4 a.m.
"I asked my bosses at La-Z-Boy if we could donate some pillows to the children," he says.
The corporate response was a Mount Everest of plump pillows that volunteers handed out to each child.
Graysville is one of Rhea County's poorest communities yet the Rev. Jimmie Talley's Graysville Church of God performs the feat of feeding as many as 200 children each Wednesday. Many kids may not get another hot meal for days.
When the program began years ago, some congregants worried that the low-income kids would corrupt church-going kids with bad language and sullen attitudes. But the youth outreach program continued offering all children food, music, crafts and educational tidbits wrapped in eye candy.
This year's opening day theme was the underwater world. The sanctuary stage was graced with a coral reef made from neon-colored pool noodles and four giant brown clamshells decked with an orange inflatable octopus, a blue dolphin, a pink seahorse and a shiny black shark. Leading the kids in songs and dances, adults toss two enormous polka-dotted beach balls into the pews for the children to bounce overhead.
"Some people thought we should use the money for the program to improve the church building, maybe attract affluent churchgoers that way," says Talley, whose Graysville church is 40-plus years old. "But a church is more than a building. This program is what a church is."
The church kept the program going for 12 years despite the 2007 recession and a toxic political climate in which Talley was criticized for coddling the poor. Then, a week ago, Talley announced that, after 14 years in Graysville, he was being transferred to a Hixson church. The congregation wept - but vowed to carry on the children's outreach.
The devoted congregation believe they give the children something beyond fun.
"Other churches have accused of us of worshipping Jimmie Talley, but they are just jealous," says Donnie Hutchins, who routinely works 14-hour days in his small business and volunteers as a Civil Air Patrol observer in the small private planes that search for lost hikers or hints of wildfire. "He taught us how to be a church. And this program is our heart."
Different worlds
"I wanted to get here so fast; I didn't wait for the bus so I rode my bike," 10-year old Weston Cranfield tells the ladies giving each bus rider a color-coded wristband so he or she will board the right bus home from the program.
"But that's a two-mile bike ride!" one of the ladies marvels.
The corn dogs, hamburgers, chili and chocolate cake that volunteers cook for the children are one attraction, but there are others. Dr. Nicky Circolone and his wife, Kim, wear wore their scuba wetsuits, flippers and oxygen tanks - a sweltering outfit on the hot, sunny day - to the delight of the children. When empty ice chests are passed around in lieu of offering plates, Bobby Combs, a Rhea County sheriff's deputy, gives every child without money a quarter or dime so they can participate in the offering. His wife, Elise, is volunteering after having surgery for kidney cancer just eight weeks earlier.
"I'm fine," she insists to anyone who asks as she doles out hugs and helps the kids each don a "lucky number badge" on blue or red strings for a prize drawing.
Hutchins recalls that, when growing up on a farm where he fixed broken equipment with wire, duct tape and imagination, the namesake of the show "MacGyver" became his hero. Opening day at last year's summer program featured a Mount Everest theme, and he helped decorate the church with giant photos of the Himalayan Mountains on all the walls, red crepe-paper campfires and strings of Buddhist prayer flags. And he MacGyvered a Himalayan breeze out of an Igloo cooler equipped with dry ice and a tiny fan. When the children put their faces near the hole he had cut into the cooler, they could feel frosty air on a muggy day.
The last activity in the program usually concludes around 8 p.m. and Travis shepherds the children onto the right buses according to the color-coded wristbands given them earlier.
"When Pastor Talley first proposed this program years ago, I thought I would be too tired after working at the end of the day to be at church until 8 p.m. with hundreds of energetic kids," Hutchins says. "Jimmy said, 'Give it a try. Remember, when you smile at one of these children, it may be the only time an adult smiles at them all week. It gives them something to hold onto.'"
Most of what the children can hold is ephemeral. During one program's storytime, a female volunteer mentions the Bible story of how Joseph (of the Coat of Many Colors) is thrown into a dungeon alone. She asks what they should do when they feel scared and alone, just like Joseph. The children fling their arms around their torsos to give themselves a tight hug and shout: "Hold on!"
Making memories count
Talley was just a Lee University sophomore when his home church in Maryville, Tenn., asked him to serve as youth minister. In addition to his studies and church duties, he also served as a program counselor and child and adolescent specialist at psychiatric hospitals in Chattanooga and Knoxville. He graduated from Lee with a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1991. In 2006, he graduated from the Church of God Theological Seminary with a master's of divinity with a focus on family and marriage therapy. He became pastor in Graysville in May 2002.
Fourteen years later, he's proud that so many of his 350 congregants participate in the children's program, particularly millennials.
"I've always been interested in how a person's economic or social class affects the way he's treated and how he sees himself, especially when the person is a child," says Talley, who has a son and daughter with his wife, Renee. "It isn't something we discuss much in America.
"When I was a teenager, I didn't have much money, but once for a party I put together a look for myself that I thought was just so cool. I had the right shirt, the right pants. My hair looked great. And I remember walking up to a popular girl who I wanted to impress."
The girl glanced at his freshly cleaned sneakers and asked sarcastically, "What's the deal with your shoes?"
"That's all it took to destroy my confidence that night and, look, I still remember that moment all these years later; I know it probably isn't even a moment she remembers," he says.
He wonders why memories like that have the power to trigger pain decades later, even after someone has achieved a happy life.
"Then I try to imagine what children go through who have no one to say something loving or encouraging to counter the cruel things that are said to them."
His transfer to the Hixson church happened so quickly he hasn't had time to talk much with the new congregation members to hear what programs they might want to launch or what outreach they currently do. He notes that there is a children's home nearby that the church might want to partner with on some activities.
"Children who have parents but not a parent's love are spiritual orphans," he reflects. "If we can't give them a true home, at least we can show them through this program how it feels to have someone care about them for a few hours. Maybe that feeling will be powerful enough to survive the passage of time and help them find their way to safe ground."
Contact Lynda Edwards at ledwards@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6391.