Paul H. McGehee
Paul H. McGehee was born November 4, 1898, in Nevada, Missouri. He was the eighth child in a family that, beside the parents, included thirteen children. As a young lad, he attended grammar school at the Bethel and Fern rural schools in Vernon County, Missouri, and, later, the High School in Nevada, Missouri. Sometime after graduation from high school, he took work at Draughton’s Business College in Springfield, Missouri.
At the age of fourteen, he was converted one evening in the year 1914, while kneeling alone in a persimmon grove across the road from the Bethel schoolhouse. He obtained the experience of entire sanctification some months later in the camp-meeting at the Bridalveil Park in Fort Scott, Kansas. For several weeks prior, he had yearned for the experience of perfect love. On a weekend he drove the thirty miles from Nevada to Fort Scott in an old buggy pulled by a blind horse, with the intent to seek and obtain the experience for which he craved. On the day following the evening of blessing, he drove the buggy on the return home, stopping occasionally to wrap the buggy tires with baling wire to keep them from coming off. He later said that, soon after leaving the camp-meeting that morning, he heard the strains of an exquisite heavenly music.
On July 11, 1926, Paul assumed a position at The Herald and Banner Press, which was then situated at Fort Scott, Kansas. He took the position at the suggestion of a friend. In a 1985 feature in The Johnson County Star, a subsidiary of The Kansas City Star, he says that there was more involved in his decision than the merely fortuitous: “I believe that if you live for the Lord He will direct your ways.” Ray L. Kimbrough was then the editor of the Church Herald and Holiness Banner” and the administrator of the Press. He informed Paul that, if he were offered the position, he would be expected to remain with the Press for a long period of time. It may be that Kimbrough did not fully realize the significance of the demand; for Paul took Kimbrough at his word and remained with the establishment for more than sixty one years! In a culture marked by indecision and insecurity, by the inability of many to forge a unified destiny, this achievement of Paul’s is without question an example par excellence. It is a testimony to the singleness of purpose, to that which the Danish philosopher/theologican Soren Kierkegaard has called: “purity of heart is to will one thing.”
Paul’s salary was $25.00 a week. The tools he used are now obsolete. In The Johnson County Star there is a picture (Note: link opens 57k picture) of Paul standing by some of those tools: a metal label and an open hand feed press. The first press he operated was a Model X Intertype, which, he said, “looked like a mountain.” During his relationship with the Press, he served in various capacities: Office Editor, Managing Editor of the Church Herald, and Editorial Assistant.
Miss Maybelle Harris of Cuba, Alabama, had come to Fort Scott with the Kimbroughs to care for their children and to work in the Banner office. The circumstances of Paul’s and Maybelle’s taking more than a causal notice of each other are quite out of the ordinary. Shortly after he went to work for the Press, he had an accident in which his arm became entangled in some machinery and was broken. Maybelle hurried to his aid, and in comforting him ran her hands through his hair, inadvertenly covering his head with ink. As he puts it in his interview with The Johnson County Star: “It was at that moment I decided she would make a good wife.” They were married on February 3, 1929.
When one reads the tributes to Paul in the October 22, 1987, memorial issue of The Church Herald and Holiness Banner, one is impressed with the uniformity of the testimony to Paul’s sense of responsibility to do excellent work in the printed page, his interest in and concern for the welfare of others, his love of nature particularly in the form of gardening and care of roses, his ethical sensitivity, and, finally, his absolute and total commitment to the Will of God. He was, indeed, a superb Christian gentleman.