Published: April 15, 2008 11:38 pm         

A devastating blast, and a call to service

Vida Chenoweth’s epiphany, as epiphanies are prone to do, began in a flash one spring morning in 1959, in New York City, in a small near north side Manhattan studio apartment.

Vida was a concert marimbist. She was doing well, too. She had a recording contract with Columbia Records and in 1959 played a concert in New York City’s Carnegie Hall. It was the only marimba concert ever in the famous hall.

On the aforementioned morning, Vida lighted the oven in the gas kitchen range in her apartment. Then she lighted one of the burners. A few minutes later she opened the oven and noticed it had gone out.

She struck a match and stuck it into the oven to light it again. There was a boom and a flash of fire. The gas had accumulated in the oven, and the match ignited it. The ball of fire that whooshed out only singed her face as she jumped back.

But, it got her right hand. It was burned rather severely — possibly enough to damage the tendons and joints. Was her career as a concert marimbist over? Well, yes and no.

What followed has all the earmarks of divine intervention.

First there was the emergency room doctor who turned out somewhat of a fraud. He bandaged her hand and sent her home. Several days later her hand was worse. “It hurt clear up to my shoulder,” she said.

A friend who didn’t think that sounded right took her to a plastic surgeon she knew. He wasn’t optimistic, explaining she could lose her fingers. He hospitalized Vida. They bandaged her hand again and soaked the bandages with acetic acid, naturally found in vinegar.

They changed the bandages and reapplied the acetic acid every three hours for five days. According to Vida, changing the bandages was an ordeal that made even the nurses wince, because the bandages stuck to the damaged skin.

Late on the fifth day, a nurse came to begin the ordeal again. Vida said she held out her hand and the bandage fell off.

The amazed nurse looked at her hand, touched it and exclaimed, “That’s the skin of a newborn baby.” Vida said she could hear her running down the hallway. Soon other nurses were looking at her hand.

It truly was a miracle. The skin was healed, but it would require a lot of physical therapy before it was able to function normally. She couldn’t turn over a bar of soap with her right hand. She couldn’t write. What about playing the marimba? Manual dexterity is a big part of her talent.

While she was in the New York hospital, nurses brought her reading material about the Wycliffe Bible translators. The information clicked with Vida. It was the click that changed her life. It ignited, or maybe it just awakened, a passion. Some might say she was “called.”

That blast in the kitchen range — was that the “call?”

There was a summer school taught by Wycliffe field workers at the University of Oklahoma. Even though she could not yet write with her injured hand, she traveled to Norman and enrolled anyway.

It was the beginning of a new life for the 30-year-old daughter of one of Enid’s most prominent musical families of the mid-20th century. Her parents and many of those in their family owned and worked in the Chenoweth & Green Music Co. store on the west side of Enid’s downtown Square, next to Security National Bank. The store was a magnate for everything and everyone musical. It was like a musical beehive.

Vida spent the summer of 1959 at Summer Institute of Linguistics at OU, all the time doing physical therapy. She still was practicing the marimba as well, and while she was at OU she played a marimba concert.

From there, she went to Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky to study Greek, because she wanted to read the Bible as it was written in Greek.

Then it was back to Institute of Linguistics.

It was about this time Vida — an ethnomusicologist who had traveled up and down coasts of Africa, Peru, Central America, Mexico and the Solomon Islands from 1957 to 1959 recording native music — began to feel her goal with Wycliffe was as Bible translator rather than ethnomusicologist.

By the way, Vida has given the recordings of more than 1,000 native songs to Library of Congress. In future years, anyone wanting to hear the music sung and played by a tribe in some remote area can find it at the library.

Vida prepared to undergo survival training — something all Wycliffe translators need.

She spent three months in southern Mexico jungles, learning how to survive in the wild.

Wycliffe translators must pay their own way. They must provide their transportation and supplies. They are, by necessity, funded by sponsors, whether that be an individual or a corporation, foundation or church.

Vida left New Orleans in the summer of 1964 aboard a freighter, bound for Papua, New Guinea, in the South Pacific, where she would work with Usarufas, a tribe living in the almost inaccessible highlands of New Guinea.

The Usarufa culture had not changed much since the Stone Age. Vida said they had no knowledge of anything or anyone more than 20 miles from their home. They never had seen metal tools — like an axe — until the mid 20th century.

How long had the Usarufas been there? Vida just shrugs, “Who knows? Forever!”

The Usarufas have dark skin and wiry hair and are short, well-proportioned people.

Did the Usarufas embrace an introduction to Christianity? “Oh yes,” Vida says, “they had never heard of anything like it before.”

The Usarufas believed spirits dwelled everywhere — in rocks, trees and ground.

They did fear strangers to a degree. Vida said walking the countryside was OK, as long as one stuck to the roads or trails. If they got off the beaten path, onto someone’s property, they might be shot with an arrow.

She said the thing the tribe feared most from strangers was sorcery. They feared someone they didn’t know might put a curse on them or somehow poison them spiritually.

In the Usarufa culture, a wo-man cannot spend a night alone in a village. Men can live alone but not women. Consequently, all women must have a partner, be it male or female. Vida teamed with Dr. Darlene Bee, another Wycliffe translator. She said Wycliffe had discovered a man living alone in places like New Guinea “just can’t cut it” in that environment.

So, here is Vida Chenoweth — daughter of an Enid entrepreneur in the music business, a concert marimbist who performed in Carnegie Hall, a former college professor at Wheaton College, a musicologist who spent a big chunk of her life recording and preserving the music of people in remote parts of the world — who spent 15 years among a Stone Age people in the highlands of New Guinea where she helped establish a written language and translated the Holy Bible into that language. She holds a degree from Northwestern Oklahoma State University University and a PhD from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Vida returned to live in Enid for several years but has since moved to Oklahoma City. Needless to say, she is one of the most unusual women to emerge from 20th century Enid. Even though she no longer lives here, I believe we can still claim her as our own.



Brown is a former managing editor of the Enid Morning News.