D. Carey "Murf" Polan
Ill wind changed local man's life
Tornado 54 years ago started Youth For Christ leader on religious course
by Christie Campbell
D. Carey "Murf" Polan still remembers the day he dedicated his life to Jesus Christ: June 23, 1944.
Polan was among a group of boys who raced from a dining hall at the YMCA's Camp Buffalo, flung themselves over a low hill and clutched small trees as a tornado spun overhead.
"Why doesn't someone pray?" Polan yelled into the howling wind. Then he realized it was up to him to pray. So he recited the one Bible verse he know: the 23rd Psalm.
Today, a framed copy of that psalm hangs in Polan's Youth for Christ office in the basement of the YMCA building in Washington. Also hanging on the wall are two photographs from the tornado that killed two dozen people in Washington and Greene counties. One photograph shows a car crushed into a ball of steel. The other is a 13-year-old Polan next to the sapling that kept him from being swept away.
"If you get me out of here I'm yours," he remembers saying as he held tight to the tree while hailstones pelted his arms and back. "I knew the Lord had something for me further down the road in my life."
But Polan had no inkling the road would involve him in a 40-year ministry to children. Last month, Polan celebrated that anniversary with many of the now-grown children at a Youth for Christ banquet at the Holiday Inn Meadow Lands.
About 75 former YFC singers returned to perform in a reunion choir and a number of people offered testimony about how YFC influenced their lives.
They are but a handful of people who were touched by the ministry Polan helped start in 1958.
Forty years ago, Polan was a Montgomery Ward employee, making good money in the store's automotive department. Members of the Christian Businessman's Committee convinced him to attend a YFC meeting in Pittsburgh with the hopes of getting a chapter started in Washington County.
The first Youth for Christ rally was held that February with an estimated 800 teenagers attending.
Because Polan was the youngest member of the group, the others pressed him to head the organization. Today, at 68, Polan still retains a youthful appearance mindful of Dick Clark.
Polan remembers talking to the Rev. Charles Gifford about whether he should give up his job and take the YFC position that paid considerably less than his Montgomery Ward job. Gifford advised him not to do it unless he was sure the Lord was calling him.
While speaking that night with his wife, Carolyn, Polan ran across a verse Gifford gave him. From John 9:4, it reads: "I must do the work of the one who sent me, for there is little time left before the night falls and all work comes to an end."
There was no longer any doubt that he was being called to YFC.
Polan estimates between 500 and 750 kids are touched weekly by YFC. At chapter meetings, YFC challenges youth on a variety of moral and ethical issues, and provides wholesome and fun activities.
Several years ago YFC recognized it needed to reach children at a younger age. So, in addition to Campus Life, for those in grades nine through 12, Junior Varsity was established. It is for students in grades six through eight.
"It's a relational ministry," Polan explains. "It's getting alongside kids and loving them, not shoving things down their throat."
"The pressures that kids go through are far, far greater today," he added.
"When he started YFC, students got in trouble for putting gum on someone's chair. "Today it's kids killing kids," he said.
But few kids faced the pressure Polan did as a child when his father started losing his eyesight.
Polan took the trolley each day from Washington High School to East Washington High School, where his father was the school janitor. As his father's sight deteriorated, Polan quit after-school sports to help him [his dad] clean the school. On winter weekends he slept overnight in the building to stoke the coal furnace.
After high school, Polan enrolled at Waynesburg College, where he met his wife. They are the parents of two daughters, Lenee and Christy, and have four grandchildren.
Polan has no immediate plans to retire but admits there are times he would like to leave the administrative work or the fund-raising behind. He still prefers to sit down with a group of kids and get to know them.
"The problem today--and everyone is saying it--is the lack of role models. It's the home. Families don't even eat together."
In spite of societal changes, Polan believes in many respects "kids are kids" and their problems are the same as they were 40 years ago.
"You gotta love kids. You gotta know where they're at. You gotta speak with them and not to them," he said.
Leafing through a worn Bible held together with duct tape, he reads from the many sayings and prayers he has collected and pasted into the book over 40 years. He reads one of his favorites: "Kids don't do what you say, they do what you do."
Sources:
The Observer-Reporter newspaper, Washington PA, "Ill wind changed local
man's life: Tornado 54 years ago started Youth For Christ leader on religious
course." Campbell, Christie. Washington, PA: The
Observer-Reporter, June 23, 1998.
numerous articles.
Information from ex-Campers.
Information from personal knowledge.
