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Missionary kid born in Khargpur India in American Baptist MissionBeginnings: Time and PlaceI was born shortly before midnight on November 8th, 1925, in the first floor bedroom of the American Baptist Mission bungalow in Khargpur, Bengal, India. British India, as it then was. My mother, Helen Irene Humphrey Brush, wife of the Reverend Mr. Edwin Charles Brush, was attended by a midwife, Nurse Huston-Avis. She was a medical staff member of the Bengal Nagpur Railway Hospital, an institution located just a few blocks from the American Mission. Aside from the fact that I turned out to be a boy – my parents had been hoping for a daughter – the only unusual aspect of the newly emerged little person, I was later told, was my extremely deep-set eyes. This gave rise to a short-lived concern about whether the infant would be able to see. The first name “Stanley” was my mother’s choice in honor of her closest college friend, Iva Stanley, at Denison University. The middle name “Elwood” was my father’s choice in honor of the Reverend Dr. Elwood Harrar, minister of the First Baptist Church of Camden, New Jersey, the clergyman who had married Dad and Mother in 1918. These names, I might as well confess, were an embarrassment to me as a boy. They did not carry the masculine cachet of names such as William, Richard or Scott. But they have worn well and are perfectly acceptable now. This birth, these names and the signatures of the principals involved appear on a document, Report of Birth of Children born to American Parents (Form No. 240-Consular), signed and dated
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