How I joined the Unified Family

Robert Sayre
September 18, 2013

September 18, 1973 was my first day as part of the Unified Family in Missoula, Montana. It was in inauspicious beginning. I had met Pat Hickey a few months earlier and they had left Lorenzo Gaztanaga there to kind of tend me and three others who had been witnessed to, that being Ray McCready, his girlfriend and Ray's cousin, Alex Colvin. Pat had gone somewhere else.

I was working as a diesel mechanic at a truck stop and had helped Lorenzo get a job and buy a car. He explained the Divine Principle to me over more than one meal and I was intrigued. He invited me to come to a workshop in Bozeman, but somehow I got it in my head that a "workshop" meant doing crafts all weekend, so I declined. I worked on Saturday's anyway and Sunday was my only day off.

I helped them drive 100 lb. bags of peanuts to Spokane in the back of my pickup truck so they could sell them on street corners. I went fishing and felt kind of sorry for them until I heard how much money they made! They sold all the peanuts and bought vegetables and broccoli and sold it in bags. Why broccoli and other vegetables? I have no idea. I was astonished. They made more money that weekend than I did in a month.

They rented a nice, large home not far from the Univ. of Montana and invited all of us to "move in" there. Having previously scheduled an antelope hunting trip to eastern Montana with several of my co-workers, I determined to move in after that. We went hunting for a week, bagged 5 or 6 antelope and drove all night back to one of their homes, where we skinned the animals and processed the meat. It was now about 4:00 am, so I drove my truck to the center and not knowing where to crash, I simply went to sleep on their couch. My 270 Remington, a weeks worth of dirty clothes and hunting equipment were on the floor and I was still in these dirty and bloody clothes. Having learned a thing or two from my mother, I did take off my boots.

Needless to say, when the European sisters and others living there came down to pray in the morning, they were more than surprised to find me! They cleaned me up, fed me breakfast and put me back to bed. I had one more hunting trip that fall where I bagged a very large deer. We had lots of meat that fall.

It is rumored that this deer skin and antlers found their way to Barrytown somehow, but I don't know if this is true or not. I did teach Lorenzo how to shoot, a fair exchange for learning the Principle. No one else was interested. I actually did attend a workshop a few years later in Boulder, Colorado, my hometown.

I continued to live at the center and go to work each day. My normal shift was 2 pm-10 pm, so when I began rising at 5 am to pray and study, I was well prepared for living and working from 5 am-midnight. In Dec. 73, we all went to Seattle to help on the Day of Hope speech there, but that is another story.