Adman at the Foundry

Washington's stone gothic Foundry Methodist Church* is a 141-year-old landmark of the national capital. Abraham Lincoln and seven other Presidents (John Quincy Adams, James Madison, Rutherford B. Hayes, James K. Polk, William McKinley, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman) occasionally worshiped there; Franklin Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill went there on Christmas Day in 1941 to pray. Last week Foundry's pastor for the past 31 years, silver-thatched Dr. Frederick Brown Harris, preached his farewell sermon. At the compulsory retirement age of 72, well-loved Dr. Harris was leaving Foundry to give more time to his other job--chaplain of the U.S. Senate.

Too Many Girls. Foundry's Pastoral Relations Committee scouted for Dr. Harris' successor like a big-business board of directors looking for a new vice president in charge of advertising. The man they picked, after six months of winnowing and weighing, would be an asset to the advertising department of any firm. The Rev. Dr. Theodore Henry Palmquist, 53, of Los Angeles' big (some 2,400 members) Wilshire Methodist Church, has the go-getting drive and the social flair of a successful adman--which was just what he started out to be.

After graduating from business college in Seattle, Massachusetts-born Theodore Palmquist went to work for the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co., but quit because there were too many girls in the office ("I spent all my time opening and closing windows and fixing typewriter ribbons"). At C. M. Lovsted and Co., he worked his way up to be advertising manager. Five years later, at 27, he quit to enter the ministry. It took seven long years of college (University of Washington, College of the Pacific) and theological school (Pacific School of Religion) before he was ordained, but even during his student days Palmquist managed to build new churches and enlarge old ones. In 1938 he was appointed Methodist district superintendent for the San Francisco area. "I had 58 churches under my supervision, 14 of them held by the bank," he says. "In five years I raised almost a million dollars, got the churches back from the bank, and traveled about 30,000 miles a year."

Red on Yellow Paper. Friendly, greying Dr. Palmquist went to Wilshire in 1947, and "only asked them to let me build the kind of church I would have liked to belong to when I was in the advertising business." This meant hiring "the country's foremost Bach organist" and a full-time drama coach (six plays a year), instituting a physical education program, a weekday nursery, a children's church, a Sunday school for handicapped children, a staff psychologist and a full-time "cateress." On the side, Pastor Palmquist served on 23 different Los Angeles committees during his eight years there. "I shook hands with 800 people last Sunday at a reception," he said last week. "And one after another, I met people who had been in trouble, had some problem or other, and whom I had helped. That's the sort of thing I like to remember."

Palmquist looks forward eagerly to his new post because he sees Washington as the center of the world. He is sure to give Foundry parishioners more bounce to the ounce than many a staid Easterner has known. "Who else would print a church bulletin in red on yellow paper?" he asks.

"I think religion is a pageant, not a dirge. I guess it's my advertising background. I like what I'm doing, and I've never been sorry. After all, if I didn't like it, I could go back to advertising."

* Named because its original property at 14th and G Streets was given by one Henry Foxall in gratitude to God for the preservation of his cannon foundry from the British when they invaded Washington in the War of 1812.

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