Bill Morrow was the Treasurer, then Financial Manager of BBC, giving over 17 years of service during a pivotal time of growth and change at our church.
Bill was born during World War II, a little more than a year after Pearl Harbor.
As a young man, two days after he graduated from Quinnipiac College, he took a job as an auditor with the US Navy.
He was offered the job on Good Friday.
Madeline Flores Lopez
A few months later, Bill decided for the first time that one plus one equaled more than two and he married Marilyn (Wenzloff) on December 11, 1965, at First Baptist Church, New Britain, CT. Two soon became four, as they became the parents of Bill and Betsy.
Family was very important to Bill, and he would regularly coach his son, Bill, in Little League and take him to baseball games. He and Betsy enjoyed reading together and regularly went on father/daughter dates – even into the last weeks of his life. A couple fun things about Bill:he never answered the phone with “hello,” he always said “good morning,” “good afternoon,” or “good evening.”
Grumpy was Bill’s favorite character. When the family went to Disney World the year after Bill had cancer and heart surgery, given his condition, he was doing a lot – and he was grumpy as could be.
Marilyn and Betsy found Grumpy on Main Street and had a picture taken and bought a mug and t-shirt.
Life-long American Baptists, Bill and Marilyn attended Brewster Baptist when camping at Sweetwater Forest in Brewster. In 1991, they decided to buy property on the Cape. They bought the land in Orleans that summer and broke ground on Good Friday the following year. Marilyn shared that they would come to the Cape and attend BBC all but two Sundays each summer because she had to work back in CT.
In June of 1997, they moved to East Orleans, and Bill kept commuting until January of 1998. Marilyn shared the following story from that time:
“Bill was still working that fall in Connecticut and he would go back and forth. And one week, he came home on Wednesday because he was really sick. On Thursday night, the nominating committee held their meeting. Someone on the nominating committee called, and I answered. We talked, and the person said, ‘Is Bill there?’ And I said, ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, he is.’ So, he got on the phone.
He was in bed, so I was just sitting there watching him. The expression on his face was really, really confused, and he said, ‘Well, okay. Yeah, all right. Sure.’ And they hung up. He looked at me and he said, ‘They want me to be on the hospitality committee.’ And asked if I had any idea why. And I said, ‘Well, maybe they want to get to know you first. I don’t know. I didn’t think that was the way that Doug had it planned.’ About two minutes later, the phone rang. The same person was on the phone and said, ‘Marilyn, I made a mistake. May I talk to Bill again?’
And so I gave him the phone again, and then he got this big smile on his face and that was it. They wanted him to be Treasurer. January 2 was his official last day of work in Connecticut. On January 22, 1998, he was elected Treasurer of BBC at the Annual Meeting.”
A few months later, Bill and Marilyn went with Nancy and Ron Sveden on a mission trip with the high school students to Appalachia.
That experience forged a bond of friendship that would last for the rest of Bill’s and Ron’s lives.
A few years later, as BBC began the project to expand the church facilities to what we have today, it was decided to hire Bill as the Financial Manager.
Marilyn shared, “Bill had a lot of growth in that position, because Shirley [Vogel, the Fundraising Chairperson] was the one who said, ‘Build it and they’ll pay for it.’ And Bill, being the accountant, felt, ‘How can we do this? We don’t have the money.’ He learned so much.
Then, being able to pay off that mortgage in three years provided such growth in faith for him… And, you know, that could have been the real reason why God brought him here, really… that God thought that Bill needed to have more faith in what could be done just strictly through God.”
At his memorial service, Pastor Doug shared,
“When Bill and I began serving together, we were staring up a big mountain of fund raising for our Building Expansion and a growing church budget. I’d like to think that our friendship and work together through the years enriched and blessed us both. I got to be the recipient of Bill’s excellent thinking and wisdom. Bill would invariably come back to me a day or two after we had discussed some issue or problem we were trying to figure out and he would have come up with a solution. I trusted Bill completely and without hesitation in all matters relating to our church finances and I was never disappointed. I’d like to think that in our years together that God used me in Bill’s life to help his faith to grow and deepen. Through the years, Bill went through a transformation – from being very conservative and grounded when it came to money at BBC to a point where he had faith and confidence that God would provide the resources we needed if we were smart about how we used the funds that the Lord trusted to us to manage.”
Bill worked with great faithfulness, wisdom, diligence, and integrity as BBC’s Treasurer and then Financial Manager. He was highly respected by all our lay leaders, who often camped outside his office to ask his opinion about a project or an idea, especially our Buildings and Grounds Team.
Bill was a beloved staff member, and he was instrumental in BBC’s success for many years. His good humor, understanding and support were invaluable, as was his dedication to helping us pursue our mission as a church.
Jane Wallbrown, our Church Administrator at the time, who just recently passed away, was wearing out the carpet going into Bill’s office to bounce ideas off him or to ask him to think about a problem. Jane’s word for Bill was “wise.”
Staff members Mary Scheer and Patti Ricotta appreciated Bill’s spirit and his concern for them. Sandy Light appreciated riding to work here at church with Bill. It was very moving for Marilyn and her family to have Mary, Patti, Jane, Nancy and Doug’s wife, Jill, as well as her friends and neighbor all at the hospital shortly after Bill was unexpectedly rushed to Cape Cod Hospital on Maundy Thursday in 2014.
Bill passed away on Good Friday, April 18, 2014, and the legacy of his financial stewardship still lives on today at BBC.
