Faith drove Everett man to serve around the nation

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, March 11, 2006

From humble beginnings in Depression-era Lake Stevens, Edwin Swanson grew up to be a minister and therapist, a writer and radio broadcaster, a husband and father.

All across the country, he opened churches, schools and counseling centers. Locally, he helped build First Baptist Church in Marysville.

In 1963, he published a book of poetry titled “Out of My Heart.” The last line of one poem, “The Blind Soul,” attributes Swanson’s tireless journey to one driving force: “God is the only cause.”

Edwin C. Swanson died Feb. 6 in Everett. He was 91.

Edwin Swanson (top row, far left) played basketball on the Lake Stevens High School team in 1933 with Marv Harshman (front row, far right).

He is survived by three children, Keith and Glenn Swanson and Sylvia Burks; grandchildren Erik, Tait and Jason Swanson, Jeanie Pritchard and Samantha Alexander; several great-grandchildren; and many nieces and nephews. His wife, Muriel Rae Norleman Swanson, died in 1994.

Edwin Swanson was born July 5, 1914, in Idaho Springs, Colo. His father, Nels, was a miner who died when Edwin was just a year old. Swanson’s daughter said the family then moved to Lake Stevens.

To help his mother, Anna, and four older sisters make ends meet, Edwin delivered The Everett Daily Herald and took a little wagon around town selling his mother’s homemade bread.

Glenn Swanson said that even as a boy, his father felt a calling from God. “He would go into his closet to pray,” he said.

Always an athlete, Edwin played on the Lake Stevens High School basketball team with Marv Harshman, later the University of Washington’s head basketball coach.

As a teen, Edwin and a friend rode freight trains to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. He later talked of the misery he saw among men riding the rails looking for work, his son said.

Back home, he found work building roads in the Cascade Mountains with the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of President Roosevelt’s programs to create jobs during the Depression.

Glenn Swanson said his father was always “a strong man, physically, emotionally and spiritually.” At 6-foot-2, Edwin was a boxer in his early years.

In the late 1930s, he enrolled at Western Seminary in Portland, Ore. In 1939, he earned a graduate degree in theology. Later, he earned doctoral degrees in theology, clinical psychology and literature at the Evangelical College and Seminary in Denver and at Pacific Western University in Los Angeles.

In 1939, he married Muriel Rae Norleman, the daughter of a Methodist minister.

Their journey took them from churches in tiny towns, beginning in Coquille, Ore., to large congregations in Seattle, Southern California and Dayton, Ohio.

Burks, a nurse in Bellingham, said her father earned little more than rent money at his first church. He also spent time in Lyman, near Concrete, and returned there in 1995 to preach for the church’s 50th anniversary.

“A lot of the old people came to hear him,” Burks said.

As a preacher, Swanson’s daughter said, “he was very extemporaneous. He would have his notes, but he’d leave the notes and go up and down into the audience. It was in his heart and mind.”

Later in Mount Vernon, he helped remodel the old First Baptist Church and coached basketball.

In Marysville, he was involved in the construction of First Baptist Church. Burks said the family attended services there for about 12 years.

They moved often. They went to churches in The Dalles, Ore., and in north Seattle on Lake Washington. In the 1960s, Swanson was at the Christian Tabernacle in Dayton, Ohio. There, he had a regional radio program, “The Doctor’s Advice.”

In all, he helped build five churches, established counseling centers at three of them, and helped start two schools. He was also involved in Stonecroft Ministries, which took him to rural areas, and was on the board of United World Missions.

During the 1970s, he was a minister at Nutwood Street Baptist Church in Garden Grove, Calif., and at El Dorado Hills Baptist Church. In California, his son said, he served as director of counseling for Billy Graham’s crusades.

Burks said the lifelong habit of her father’s life was prayer. Living in a retirement community in Marysville, “he would go out and drive or walk so he could pray,” Burks said. “All these creative things came to him through meditation.”

Glenn Swanson said his father would sometimes take his ideas straight to the top, writing letters to presidents. His father had correspondence from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, he said.

“The letters were usually based on a particular cause he had. Essentially, his whole life he was a catalyst,” Glenn Swanson said.

“He had incredible faith,” Burks said. “When he would pray, he had a confident expectation that God heard his prayer. It was a necessity for him to pray.”

Sometimes when he thinks of his father, Glenn Swanson thinks of a line from a funny movie. In “The Blues Brothers,” the characters Jake and Elwood Blues are heard to say, “We’re on a mission from God.”

“My dad’s life was like that,” Glenn Swanson said.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.