497 - Edward's Odyssey: An Autobiography

Edward's Odyssey: An Autobiography
By Edward F. Gallahue
216 pp. New York, Doubleday & Co., 1970. $5.95.

A Hebraist once said in my hearing that it takes a genius to make the Old Testament dull or uninteresting. I couldn't make Ed Gallahue or his recently published autobiography dull or uninteresting if I tried, but I'm no genius. Here is a man of uncommon ability and enthusiasm who was a business success before he was forty, who relentlessly pursued a career of self-education in psychology and religion, and who at the same time supported and sponsored various kinds of civic and educational enterprises. When such a gifted man sets down his honest reflections on life, the result offers us a glimpse into the dynamics of "the successful executive" mystique.

This might be a perverse reason for reviewing such an autobiography in a religious journal, since theology rarely deigns to pay any attention these days to a straightforward business-lay point of view. But there is another reason. Edward F. Gallahue, as regular readers of THEOLOGY TODAY already know, was the generous and visionary sponsor of a conference on "Next Steps for Church and Theology," held on the Princeton Seminary campus in April, 1968. I happened to be the director of that conference, several of the major papers of which were reprinted in various issues of THEOLOGY TODAY.

Edward F. Gallahue was born in 1902 near Indianapolis, Indiana, where he has lived, worked, played, suffered, and dreamed ever since. He was raised in a divided family and, as his autobiography underscores, mental illness, disillusionment, divorce, physical suffering, and anxiety punctuated almost every year of his existence. Devoted to his ailing mother, young Edward did not go to college and remained unmarried until relative maturity. Casting about for odd jobs, he initiated with his brother a new insurance company specializing in automobile coverage. Growing by leaps and bounds, the American States Insurance Company reflected the management ability and executive imagination of Edward himself.

Looking back from the relaxed perspective of retirement, here are some of the business principles he singles out for special mention: "Most things which I have accomplished have been against the mainstream of others' opinions…. Many things in life are matters of compromise, a choice of alternatives…. In compromising, try to be as liberal as possible, give away the Kings but keep the Aces…. Keep in mind that you can afford to lose a few battles if you win the war. . . . If a man has creative ideas plus the energy and personality to translate them into action, he has an almost foolproof foundation for success."

498 - Edward's Odyssey: An Autobiography

Edward's Odyssey is not just the story of business success. As the author notes early in his book, "I found it impossible for business to constitute my whole life." And near the end of the book, he puts down three impulses that pushed him along: ". . . an overpowering drive to succeed, an intellectual desire to learn, and restlessness and yearning for meaning."

Successful businessmen are a dime a dozen and usually dull and uninteresting. But Edward Gallahue was always exploring the life of the mind and consorting with innovative thinkers in all kinds of fields. He began with a correspondence course from the La Salle Extension University. He read, among others and in no order, John Watson, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Will Durant, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Rosseau, Kant, Locke, Hegel, Spencer, Russell, William James, Whitehead, Kierkegaard, Einstein, Pascal, Fosdick, Elton Trueblood, all of whom are named in the book.

The religious quest of Gallahue's odyssey involved a search for a modern view of the Bible, a tenable theology, a meaningful relation between psychiatry and religion, and the possibility of convergence in the world religions. Devoting himself not only to the study of these issues, he directly involved himself in the civic, educational, and religious furthering of special causes.

After careful consideration, Mr. Gallahue joined the Methodist Church and immediately became engaged in a program for recruiting nurses in the Indianapolis Methodist Hospital. The effort was unexpectedly and extraordinarily successful. He went on to sponsor the Indiana Mental Health Association, putting in his own money and enlisting the aid of Drs. Karl and Will Menninger. He headed a public hospital financial campaign which raised more money than the city had ever raised for anything. From 1954 to 1960, he organized six conferences on mental health and religion at the Menninger clinic in Topeka, Kansas. He initiated the formation of Elton Trueblood's lay religious movement at Earlham College, known as "The Yokefellow Associates." And from 1963 to 1968, he worked with several members of the Princeton Seminary faculty to set up two conferences on world religions and one on contemporary theology.

In the midst of all this business and conference activity, Mr. Gallahue was constantly distressed in mind and body and deeply involved with the ills and misfortunes of other members of his family. His self-analysis is acute and realistic. His first encounter with mental illness, visiting his father in an alcoholic sanitarium, was traumatic, and yet he can write: "I cannot recall ever being bored as a child." He was through it all a bon vivant, enjoying good food and drink and mixed companionships.

499 - Edward's Odyssey: An Autobiography

The autobiography ends with these lines: "My life has often been confused and some of it tragic, but suddenly I realized the deep wisdom of Aristotle, that meaning is better revealed in the end than it is in the beginning. I saw that after all the commercial and personal struggles, all the painful search for purpose and meaning, these made sense only if, conjointly, they contributed to a purpose larger than my own life."

Hugh T. Kerr
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey