Heirlooms of UCN History #36
by Will Frank
On May 20, 1934, the congregation of the Unitarian Church of Norfolk accepted the resignation of the Rev. Harry Lutz “with extreme regret.” The church would be closed for the summer, and everyone wondered what the American Unitarian Association had planned for Norfolk.
In August the church received a letter recommending that the Rev. Gerald FitzPatrick be the candidate for the vacant pulpit. The 33-year old FitzPatrick would come to Norfolk and preach on August 26 and September 2. If he would then be acceptable to the Norfolk congregation, he would become the settled minister of the Unitarian Church of Norfolk. The AUA hoped this young and energetic minister would give the Norfolk church a needed boost. The Trustees agreed to the AUA proposal, and set out to plan to receive Gerald and Jifka FitzPatrick and their children in their midst.
The Rev. Gerald Russell FitzPatrick was born on May 1, 1901, to Samuel (a newspaper printer) and Lucy (a homemaker) FitzPatrick in St. John, New Brusnswick, Canada. Growing up in the Methodist Church and encouraged by his father to be a newspaper editor, young Gerald was instead attracted to the motion picture industry, for which he quit high school. He managed a theater for awhile, then became a traveling salesman for a grocery company. At the age of seventeen he joined the Canadian Army and fought in the First World War. With peace in 1918, Gerald returned to his salesman job, but by 1920 he felt called to the Methodist ministry, and was granted a licence to preach.
While still working toward his high school diploma at Mount Allison Academy in Sackville, NB, FitzPatrick started serving seven small rural Methodist churches, “giving me plenty of opportunity to preach,” he recalled, preaching at four one Sunday and three the next. “The church year consisted of twelve months for me in those days. There was no vacation. I recall that the first year I went home for Christmas. A member of one of the churches died, and I returned to the field for the funeral which took place on Christmas Day. In fact both Christmases were marked by funerals.” FitzPatrick went to college at St. Andrew’s College, and while in Saskatchewan served a Methodist church in Leney. He then became a missionary in back country British Columbia among Indians, prospectors and trappers.
He began to doubt the Methodist faith, however, and in 1927 “after much thought” entered Harvard Divinity School to prepare for the Unitarian ministry. Upon graduation he served the Unitarian Church of Winthrop, Massachusetts, and two years later received a call from the Channing Unitarian Church of Rockland, Mass., a church which Harry Lutz had also served, 1900-02, and where FitzPatrick was ordained in 1930. While in Rockland he married Jifka Popoff of Sofia, Bulgaria, who was a graduate of Radcliffe College of Harvard University. They would eventually have three sons. From Rockland he received the call to Norfolk.
From Norfolk, Harry and Mary Lutz served the Harvard Street Church in Cambridge, Mass., which he helped merge with First Church, Harvard Square. Then in 1936 Harry Lutz suffered a stroke, which he attributed to “burning the candle at both ends.” Confined to wheelchair or bed, Harry Lutz lived on the loving attention of Mary. They were able to go to Orlando by train for the winters, and after lingering five years, he died on January 3, 1941, at age 70, his long-nurtured hopes for world peace without victory never realized. Mary Lutz lived on into her 90s in the home of her son Robert in Charlottesville, Va. The Lutzes’s grandson Roger before his death was a member of the Unitarian Church of Norfolk in the 1970s and 80s.