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| Rev. Eugene H. Hancock |
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White Funeral Home Rev. Eugene H. Hancock, 1922-2011 Rev. Eugene Howell Hancock, an accomplished pastor and gifted preacher who served the largest Methodist churches in Iowa, died Nov. 26 in St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids. He was 89. Rev. Hancock rose from a hardscrabble childhood as one of 10 children during the Depression in Southern Illinois to become one of the most respected ministers in the Iowa Methodist Conference. Known for his strong leadership style and exceptional preaching, Hancock steered his congregations through trials and triumphs in five different Iowa towns and cities from 1951 until he retired in 1987. At St. John’s Methodist Church in Mapleton, Iowa, he survived a McCarthy-style campaign against his liberal theology, eventually tripling the size of his congregation. By the end of his six years in the Sioux City district, eleven young people from his church had pledged to join the ministry. First Methodist Church in Independence, Iowa also grew in strength to 1,000 members under his leadership from 1957 to 1962. From that relatively small Northeastern Iowa charge, Rev. Hancock was selected in 1962 to become the youngest pastor to step into the pulpit at First Methodist in Iowa City, a dynamic church with 2,000 parishioners at the time, half of whom were university students. Another 200,000 would tune in to his sermons on KXIC radio every Sunday. The 60s were turbulent times for the nation, the university, and by extension, the church. The Vietnam War, which Rev. Hancock opposed from the outset, pulled the congregation in various directions; the Civil Rights movement, which he supported, brought them together. Rev. Hancock was a founding member of a nondenominational association of religious leaders in Iowa City that organized around fair housing to protect the rights of minority students on campus, and for national civil rights legislation. In 1972, Rev. Hancock moved on to become senior pastor at First Methodist Church in downtown Des Moines, where the congregation honored him by establishing a preaching scholarship at his alma mater. After six years, he began his final ministry at St. Paul’s U. Methodist in Cedar Rapids, then the denomination’s largest church in Iowa. He served that congregation until retiring to Independence, Iowa in 1987. Bishop James Thomas wrote in 2001 that Rev. Hancock was “one of the finest examples of excellence in ministry that I saw in my 24-year tenure.” A graduate of both Illinois Wesleyan University in 1948 and of Garrett Theological Seminary in 1951, he was also awarded two honorary Doctor of Divinity degrees—one from Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, the second from Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois. He was always generous with his time in service outside the church. In 1973 he was honored for his leadership at Rust College, an historical black college in Mississippi. He served as Rotary President in Mapleton, Independence and Iowa City from 1957 to 1970, and as a member of the Board of Trustees at Oaknoll Retirement Center, MethWick Manor, Cornell College, St. Luke’s Methodist Hospital and Iowa Methodist Medical Center. Over the course of his ministry he chaired the Board of Pensions, the Commission on Finance and Administration and the Board of Ordained Ministry in the Iowa Methodist Conference. Of all his honors, Rev. Hancock was especially proud of a scholarship in his name established in 1978 at Garrett at Northwestern University, awarded to a mid-year student with outstanding promise as a preacher. Eugene Hancock was born on September 18, 1922, in West Frankfort, the heart of coal mining and railroad country in Southern Illinois. He was the fourth of ten children—two would die as infants. The Depression cast the family onto the brink of destitution for many of his early years. His father, Pat Hancock, lost his job as a roundhouse clerk for the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad in the 30s. His mother, Beatrice, a former school teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, managed to raise eight children while taking in other people’s laundry. The family would move to Salem and ultimately to Villa Grove, Illinois, following intermittent railroad jobs and the collapsing economy. But it was his early days in “Little Egypt,” which was for all intents and purposes the Deep South of Illinois, where his future was formed. He once witnessed Ku Klux Klan members interrupting a church service by walking down the aisle in their white sheets and hoods, leaving bags of money on the altar. He was deeply affected by the bodies of three black men, lynched by drowning, tied to rocks in the Missouri River and left for public display. Even as a young child, he rejected the commonly held belief that racial segregation was “God’s plan.” Later he would attribute these childhood stirrings of injustice as part of his calling to be a minister. “My earliest disturbance of soul had been my awareness of blacks in Southern Illinois,” Rev. Hancock wrote in his memoirs. “And though just a small lad, I was angered at the racial attitudes and actions. I didn’t know why, particularly, for bigotry was widespread among all the ‘good’ Christians at the time.” His mother took him as a toddler to hear the razzle-dazzle tent revivalists, like Billy Sunday, who once hurtled a chair across the stage while in full-throated evangelizing. Rev. Hancock would take another, more scholarly route in his religious quest. He enrolled in Illinois Wesleyan University, at the time the only one of his brothers and sisters to go to college. After Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, he left college to enlist in the Army, where he was first sent to join a tank battalion in Fort Benning, Georgia. As a relatively naïve theology student from small-town America, Hancock was shocked to experience the widespread illiteracy among some of his fellow soldiers. He volunteered to teach his barrack mates to write their names and read so they eventually could read the Bible. One experience mid-war changed his fortune. Because of his high score on the Army IQ test, the War Department plucked him from his tank battalion and sent him to St. Bonaventure College in Olean, New York to train with the Army Specialized Training Program as an engineering student. While there, he broke his leg playing softball. That injury prevented him from being dispatched to fight in the Battle of the Bulge along with the rest of the elite St. Bonaventure unit. Only five of his fellow soldiers returned. Crashing into the catcher at home plate had saved his life. It also hastened his marriage to Marna Ruth Beaman, who took the train from St. Louis, Missouri to New York at age 19 to marry her fiance in January of 1944. They lived in Olean together briefly, before Pvt. Hancock was reassigned to Panama to guard the Canal until the war’s end. Long before the war, he had learned to love athletics. He was a lifelong competitor. As a father, he always had time to challenge his children in tennis, snow sledding, basketball, ping pong in the basement or horseshoes behind the cottage on the Wapsipinicon River. To his family, Hancock was a rock of reliance and a gentle source of wisdom. He was a genuine and a decent man, who lived a life that was true to himself and to his faith. He could laugh, too, even in his last painful days, wiping away a happy tear and exclaiming at the Three Stooges, “Gosh, they know how to have a good time!” He is survived by his wife Marna Hancock, brothers Thomas and Byford Hancock of Villa Grove, Illinois, daughters Lora Lea Edwards (Charles) of Cedar Rapids, Iowa and LynNell Hancock (Filip Bondy) of Montclair, New Jersey, son Jeff Hancock of Independence, Iowa, four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Visitation will be held first in White Funeral Home at 400 First Street West, Independence, Iowa, on Friday, Dec. 2, from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., where a time of prayer begins at 6:30 p.m. A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, 1340 Third Avenue, S.E. in Cedar Rapids on Saturday, December 10. Family will receive visitors an hour before the service. In lieu of flowers, gifts may be sent to: The Eugene Hancock Scholarship The Foundation at First United Methodist Church |
