Bill B"s post on "New member/SAGE acronym

Bill Burleson's post left me both laughing and a little pink-to-red in the face.
 
I realized I had not shared much of my AIS history on-line and a short version may help fill in the blanks.
 
My grandmother joined AIS in the early fifties.  My own interested in iris predated that by a few years but a kid in his pre-teens was not the normal member of the Society on his own.  On a visit with my mother to Grandma Olson's place I was fascinated by a row of iris behind the abundantly blooming peonies we'd come to admire--and my grandmother told me of a woman some five blocks away that had thousands of iris.  My mother nodded agreement, so I took off on foot and met Mary Tharp, the grand, old pioneer of Region 11 irisdom, then in her late seventies.  I've submitted an article to the *Bulletin* remembering all this.
 
That visit blossomed into a friendship lasting a number of years until her death brought it to an end.  Through her I met Melvina Suiter, one of the region's Garden Judges and a hybridizer whose irises are scattered all over the world, and also was prompted into an active correspondence with both Wilma Vallette, another "G" judge in the region, and Tell Muhlestein.  Through them and another iris friend I was able to attend the 1960 Convention of AIS in Portland, OR.  There, I met a lot of people with whom I maintained contact for many years, including Dr. L. F. Randolph, Keith Keppel, Steve Moldovan and a host of others.  Keith invited me into the "Teens and Twenties Robin" which included himself, Joe Ghio, Glenn Corlew, Moldovan, Larry Harder, and I believe Dave Niswonger, although I may have met Dave in a Hybridizing Robin Wilma Vallette coordinated, rather than the Teens, etc.
 
All of us in those robins were raising large numbers of seedlings.  My disadvantage lay in lack of ready cash to get really good, new materials, "the best of the best" to work with, so was always ten to twenty years behind the times in most of my crosses.  I was also juggling marriage, child-rearing and work in a large Agri-business corporation, then later taking over the management of our own family holdings.  Concurrently I had gotten more and more deeply involved in lay ministry and church government in the local Eastern Oregon diocese of the Episcopal Church.
 
I became an AIS judge around 1963 or 4, and continued in that role and the office of RVP of the region for a year until I folded up our farming operations at the end of the 1970's.  My wife, children and I left Idaho for a second go at graduate school in 1982, this time in a seminary for The Episcopal Church.
 
In the life of the region I had traveled widely, judged shows all across southern Idaho and in Missoula, MT, visited gardens in Utah, Oregon and inland Washington, making friends with Opal Brown and Gordon Plough in the process.  All that ended abruptly with the folding of our farming operations which severed me from the land and ended, I thought permanantly, my growing of iris.
 
The ecclesiastical life brought me to middle Tennessee, then to SW West Virginia on the Kentucky border, then into the middle of North Carolina.  I took a sabbatical leave and with the permission of my bishop worked in secular work for two years.  I managed an electronics department for Wal-Mart in Albemarle, NC, something I found both hard work and great fun.  The NC bishop in the Raleigh/Charlotte area diocese put me to work on weekends, so I served as a visiting, emergency replacement or supply priest in area congregations, mostly in and around Charlotte.
 
Late one Saturday night I received a panic-voiced phone call from a member of a new mission in Harrisburg, a small town on the eastern metro fringe of Charlotte.  I cheerfully agreed to be there the next morning to replace the priest who had arranged to be absent several weeks in advance, but whose arrangement had been forgotten by the congregation's leaders.  When I arrived I found a tiny, store-front layout with some five families in membership.  What an incredible opportunity!  A few months later I was asked to take charge, and so for my remaining two years there, served as missioner. 
 
My wife and I had gone our separate ways, then she abruptly died.  I cannot begin to describe the devastation I felt.  She had been my partner and best friend for many more than thirty years.  I felt like I had had two-thirds of my "innerds" removed without anaesthetic.  At the same time my relationship with The Episcopal Church was ending for a number of reasons that had nothing of animosity or dissention involved.
 
I left that church and became a Roman Catholic petitioner for priesthood in November of 1994 and was assigned here in Asheville/Arden as Pastoral Associate in a parish of some 2000 persons, a bit of a contrast to the store-front mission.  I remained in that role for three and a half years, began writing, engaging a lot of adult education and goup-formation events and series, and pursuing a re-study of the seminary curriculum from the point of view of the Roman church.  I retired, married one of the parishioners, then my health began to give out.  The eventual diagnosis was esophageal cancer, leading to a series of surgeries over the last two and a half years. 
 
Somewhere in the middle of that sequence I had gotten a letter from Keith Keppel.  He had been in Idaho, had asked around if anyone knew where I was, and eventually uncovered the name of an uncle of mine or of my late wife, I've never known which, and got my address.  That, and making the acquaintance of J. Allen in TN, a member of AIS, brought about my re-engaging my first love--irises.  Our move out to Avery Creek allowed the beginning of a hybridizing program again, once I had dug out a whole lot of rocks and worked in huge piles of compost.
 
There is a great deal more to this story than I've told, but it would take a book or two to tell the story of crises, triumphs and tragedies, the years filled with fun, laughter and tears.  Perhaps one day I will.
 
Neil Mogensen  z 7  western NC

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