PROFILE: Pastor Gary Beatty

If it is wrong to lie about your age when you are 16 so you can earn money to help your mother support the family, Pastor Gary Beatty has probably been forgiven. What was truly wrong was how poor he and his mother and five sisters were. Someone had to relieve the burden, so young Gary took it up as his responsibility. He joined the National Guard to get a paycheck.  The Beatty family was not the only poor family in Lancaster, Ohio, and Gary was not the only underage boy who enlisted in 1956.  “It wasn’t that uncommon,” Pastor Beatty recalled. “There were probably eight or 10 of us in our company who were underage.”