Dr. Sam Logan - Former President of Westminster Theological Seminary
I have many recollections of Sam that stand out as I quickly reflect over the past:
• An exceptional teacher who could make church history alive and simple.
• A two or three finger typist who could peck out volumes of detailed reports.
• A man who would look you in the eye when he saw you coming, and with a teeth-gritting smile, he would swing his arm behind his back like he was going to tee off and hit your right paw with a vice-grip hand-shake when you were in range.
• An administrator and wife team who were more interested in Westminster and the faculty and staff than their own selves.
• A President whose leadership model sometimes makes me ask, “How would Sam have dealt with this?”
• A person who will never be murdered because nobody can find him
But the one incident that both of us refer to and laugh about from time to time goes back to Northwest Iowa where Sam and I would occasionally roam over that snowy, lunar landscape in the winter. Cornie Granstra was an elderly rancher and donor prospect who owned thousands of cattle up in Sheldon, Iowa, and in other surrounding states. He had made his money from the time he was a young boy buying and selling cows all over the West. I knew he was loaded, and I had for some time been working him to give up a few hundred head for Westminster. In the meantime, that fragrant stockyard smelled like an endowed chair to Sam. So out to Iowa he came to meet Cornie and his wife one night for a steak dinner in Sheldon’s Iron Horse Restaurant. We were fortunate to be there at all that evening because not long before this I had met another one of our very aged donors, C.J. Schemper, at this same place. On that occasion, C.J. and I were leaving the restaurant in his car. Somehow he got all turned around and shifted into reverse instead of drive. We both had settled back for the trip home when he hammered down on the gas pedal. The giant Buick shot into reverse with instant acceleration like an amusement park ride and raced for the front door of the Iron Horse. As I was wildly screaming in his confused face, C.J. plowed right into one of the poles holding up the enormous outdoor canopy attached to the restaurant and nearly brought the whole restaurant down on us. So as we all entered the simple but cozy atmosphere of the Iron Horse to enjoy an award-winning filet mignon that only Iowa can produce, I took one more look over my shoulder to make sure that C.J. Schemper and his big Buick with the bent bumper was not in the parking lot after he had just knocked off another meal at the Iron Horse.
Sam and I feasted like prize hogs at the 4-H Club Fair as we sat with this rancher and his wife and tried to engage them in conversation. But Cornie was a man who all his life was used to standing up to his waist in cow manure in a stockyard and talking in soliloquies to the herd without ever receiving an answer in return. So his responses were very terse, and they pretty much stopped with a “yes” or “no” to any inquiry offered up. Without really conspiring together, Sam and I went into a good cop/bad cop routine and began to play him like a piano in order to loosen up his tongue. There was an actual purpose to this. If we could get him waxing eloquent on his life story, it would give Sam time to wolf down the filet before he began to close in on the donor about how the Lord needed his money. So Sam went first and tested some of his tried and true, open-ended conversational tactics on him that he knew had opened up some of the most taciturn people he had ever met in his life. When those questions met the stop signs of “yes” and “no”, I took over and offered a few of my own that I had honed to a point. I was convinced mine would surely break open even a man who had no lips and had lived in solitary confinement in prison all his life. In the meantime, Sam’s knife and fork were flying as he took his time and savored his filet like an alley dog who swallows a steak whole. For some reason, Sam always ate like it was his last meal one minute before his hanging. But not even my best interrogation even phased this cow-whisperer. Nothing moved him. He stayed with yes and no and parried all attempts to invade his mind and prompt him to give us the total of his bottom line and how to subtract some of it for ourselves. My best questions that I had reserved for the most resistant conversationalist went nowhere. We cajoled, pried, probed, and picked with everything we could think of. I was sure that between the two of us there was no man now living on earth that could stand against a tide of such provocative cross-examination and only give a single answer without suddenly gushing out the history of his existence and the combination to his vault at world champion auctioneer speed. But here he sat before us, as we knocked off those filets, the one human on the face of the earth who could do it.
I have always felt that conversation that opened a person up was the gateway to Montezuma’s gold mines. So He had to speak. I did not care what he said about anything, but he had to say something other than yes or no. I was determined he was going to sing like a canary before I was done with him and mutter something of significance before the night was over. We were going to get some clue about him and the gold in those pens across the road eventually. Now this very same thing had happened to me in Milwaukee a few years earlier with a heavy-duty donor who herself became speechless. She owned an entire airport and held promise of great wealth flying from her coffers to Westminster when she finally went to her reward. Working off of the principle that a garrulous donor leads to a giving donor, in frustration and desperation I eventually reached in the air for anything I could think of and grabbed one of the dumbest questions I have ever come up with, “What kind of gas do you use in your car?” Well, lo and behold, that question did it. She started in as if I had used a can opener on her. So now here in the Iron Horse of Sheldon, Iowa, I was in the same place with this prospect as I had been with her. Again, out of nowhere, it suddenly came to me as if I had channeled it from on high. I reached into oblivion and plucked the fundraising question of the year out of mere atmosphere and said, “What is the biggest bull you have ever seen?” The question was too much for Sam and the effect upon him was immediate. Sam belted out that boisterous laugh-cackle guffaw thing that he does as he folded over the table and pointed his finger at me, and said, “You. You are the biggest bull he has ever seen.”
I don’t remember now if that question went any further than anything else we had tried, but to this day, I still get a card in the mail or an email from Sam with merely this sentence in it – “What is the biggest bull you have ever seen?”