Larry Huntley '50: A lifetime of "affirmative" minis try

"Treatment and care of the retarded in this country range from shameful, to inadequate, to underfunded, to innovative, to excellent," says Larry Huntley 'SO. Huntley has worked to improve programs and opportunities for the retarded for 12 years while serving as chaplain and choir director for the developmentally disabled at the Sunland Center in Gainesville, Fla.

Huntley became chaplain at Sunland in 1972, leading two Sunday services, designed for different levels of residents, and five choirs, all structured to prepare the residents to live and worship in the community outside Sunland. "We built our ministry on the affirmative, teaching, expanding, supporting hymns of the church," said Huntley. "By my second week there, members of my choir had taught me they were not children, not dummies, but people with a great capacity to learn, to share, to worship, to love and care. Many of them went home for vacations; so many were striving to be one of the very few in those days who went into successful community living. Our chapel programs developed to give our people the kinds of experiences arid opportunities they were seeking.... to equip [them] to function confidently outside the gates."

In the next eight years, the Sunland choirs held more than 100 pablic concerts, appearing at the Daytona Beach Spring Music Festival, the Gainesville Art Festival, on television and radio, and at the governor's annual Christmas program in Tallahassee.

Huntley, an enthusiastic supporter of community placement, during his tenure at Sunland has helped to locate about 1,400 residents in communities outside the center. He was also one of the first Sunland administrators to encourage mixing of the sexes in its programs and allowing residents to handle their own money novel and controversial ideas a decade ago.

Before he joined the staff of Sunland, Huntley had worked with young people and with the handicapped in a variety of ministries: as a scoutmaster, as a Boys' Club program leader, and as dean of students at the Rhode Island School for the Deaf in Providence. He attended the Andover Newton Theological School in Massachusetts, where his thesis was "The Church's Responsibility for the Community's Youth," and he earned his master's of sacred theology at Boston University. He credits his experience at Dartmouth with having an impact on the direction of his career in several ways. As a member of the Outing Club and of the Ravine Lodge trail crew during summers, he found value in out-door education and later made it a part of church educational programs. In addition, "One of the things I am especially grateful to Dartmouth and to President Dickey for is the understanding that upon graduation my education was just commencing, that it should be a life-long enterprise," says Huntley. He has sought to help others fulfill their potential as well in all his ministries. He has received countless letters from Sunland alumni telling of their enthusiastic participation in new living and working situations, and he has had feedback from more than 20 churches where the former residents were welcome participants in the worship and life of the churches.

Huntley summed up his Sunland experience by saying, "I felt that I needed to have one foot firmly planted in the church,and one foot firmly planted in the community; Sunland was the final fulfillment of this dual expression of ministry." Huntley will retire from Sunland next spring. The choir program will not continue, a victim both of its own success, becoming reduced in numbers as its members left Sunland, and of cutbacks in federal funding. A volunteer chaplains' program will take its place.

Chaplain Huntley plans to take a year's sabbatical and then will consider new challenges, such as part-time chaplaincy and community service. He is "in the middle of writing five books," one of which is about his experiences at Sunland, entitled Hymns ofFaith, Hymns of Joy. He is working to complete a progam before his retirement that will enable some 100 of the present 875 residents to attend church services in town, and he hopes to establish an open-air lunch program.

"How well a community state, nation, or what ever - cares about its handicapped is a measure of that community's humanity," says Huntley. "Jesus capsulized all the scripture into two commandments: 'Love God' and 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Enough to keep anyone busy for a lifetime, isn't it?"

Larry Huntley '50 has led a career in the ministrya bit different from that of most pastors.He retires this spring after 12 years as chaplain at a home for the mentally retarded, anexperience of which he has said, with characteristic good humor, "I was being comparedto Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Rex Humbardand was expected to measure up!"