Upon arriving in Lebanon, Malcolm still had his doctoral dissertation to write, and as the church had an electric typewriter, after the completion of the building he spent many an evening until quite late working on the text. Even more important was the contribution that church member Mona Owens made to his work, as she volunteered to type his final product. As it was a textual study of several manuscripts in the Aramaic language, many spaces had to be left in the text for him to later fill in with the square Hebrew type used for the Aramaic portions. With Mona’s help, he completed the work, submitted it by mailing it across the ocean, and was awarded the Ph.D. degree in 1962.

The Doubles family lived in three different houses while we built our fellowship hall/education building and the Castlewood Church organized and built its sanctuary. Two more babies were born to them, John Carroll in 1961 and Mary Blake in 1963. In 1963, Malcolm helped those involved start the Communication Action Organization and begin a Head Start Program a year later by serving as its Chair. The churches grew, they were happy, and in 1964 he accepted Lebanon High School’s invitation to teach its Latin class, the teacher having died in August.

In the spring of 1965, Malcolm accepted the invitation of T & T Clark of Edinburgh to be a part of the team established to translate and update Emil Schurer’s second edition of his three-volume History of the Jews in the Time of Christ. To help prepare for this, in June he enrolled in a Berlitz total immersion program in German, and while doing that was invited to join the religion faculty at St. Andrews Presbyterian College, an invitation he accepted, and they moved to Laurinburg. NC, in August of that year, saying goodbye to many dear friends after five happy years in Lebanon.

Next month, Rev. Dr. Malcolm Doubles returns to LPC to help lead our worship and celebrate our 60th anniversary. Come join us for a spirit filled service and fellowship luncheon on October 6th at 11:00am.