This song was used as the music for Psalm 25. Boy Scouts were not popular with friends at school when my boys were growing up. As they got a little older, they felt like it was shameful to admit to their friends they were involved in Boy Scout activities. Ben would have been 15 when I made him go on the Boy Scout campout to Simonton. He stayed in his tent until it was time to leave in protest to having come on the campout. This was probably not one of my best parenting moments. I remember Allen Peterson saying, “That just isn’t natural.” I believe this was about when Allen was in Steve Feil’s Bishopric as a counselor with me. Why did we go to Simonton? There were a lot of fire ants. It was hot. We sweated a lot. Lyle Rowbury had put his sweaty clothes on top of his tent, and fire ants had climbed up the support rope to his clothes to get some of the salt water and take it back to their nest. “Sweating in your tent in Simonton, in Simonton.” We went to Simonton because my Uncle Glenn had gone bankrupt again. I had loaned him some money, and had bought some of his cattle. He had transported them to Houston, and I had placed them on the property of a friend who had moved out of Nottingham Country Ward and lived in Simonton. Several of us had agreed to use these cattle as the basis for a United Order experiment. Thus, the lines in the song “where the animals run free” and “the home of the order is Simonton, is Simonton” and “feeding hay to cows in Simonton, in Simonton” and “Listening to the moo’s in Simonton, in Simonton.” After the divorce and the tax problems (see Song 078 – Rain), I ended up selling the cattle to my partner in China Cattle Corporation, Chuck Edwards. It turns out Roice’s wife, Sarah Nemec, was raised in Simonton. Her father was a policeman there. There was a good Christian movie made about a murder case he was involved in there, and an excellent example of true Christian love. This happened years after the campout, and shows not all of the lines in my songs are right: “No one makes the news in Simonton, in Simonton.”
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