Bakersfield.com

In 1964 a young priest named Father Tod Brown, an assistant pastor at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, knocked on the Martinez family's front door forever changing the lives of the five younger siblings. Father Brown, with his pleasant demeanor and his long black coat, impressed upon my parents the importance of religion over a mug of hot coffee.  My parents promised Father Brown that we would all be in Church and begin our religious training for Holy Communion and Confirmation as soon as possible.  The good Father had been walking the neighborhood streets of 34th to 40th street in the evening darkness  looking for families to attend his church.  In the mid sixties the neighborhoods in that vicinity had a large influx of hardworking, Mexican families new to the area. By the following week we were all enrolled in catechism classes and going to the ten o'clock mass on Sunday. Father Brown had also gone into other homes and all together we numbered  around  twenty boys and girls, between the ages of nine to sixteen that  had been Baptized, but for various reasons  never received the other sacraments.  With Father Brown's guidance and patience we  eventually  made our Holy Communion and Confirmation, some of us as teenagers.    We also attended and graduated from CCD classes, catechism for high-school age teens.  My mother always considered Father Brown a blessing in disguise, showing up at the right time and answering her prayers.  After my mother passed, I was putting some of her things away and came across  an envelope with  yellowed newspaper clippings, these news clippings were about Father Brown' s  rise to Monsignor then Bishop, and all the good works for his parish in Bakersfield and Fresno.  My sisters and I believed in Father Brown then, and now, we will always be grateful to  him for going that extra mile in our direction.