By Susan Shinn Turner

For the Salisbury Post

An 18-year-old cat. A 10-year old dog. Two cellphones. A set of hearing aids.

That’s all Pastor Tom Ford and his wife, Elsie, escaped with on Jan. 7 when flames from the Eaton Fire in California took over their home.

“The fires are about 30 percent contained,” Ford said Tuesday evening from a Residence Inn Marriott in Burbank, about 12 miles from where their home stood. “The Santa Ana winds blew hard today.”

Although they have not been allowed to return to their neighborhood in Altadena — located about three miles from Pasadena, the home of the annual Rose Parade — they do know that their home was reduced to ashes. Amazingly, Elsie Ford’s Little Free Library remains standing in their front yard. Meanwhile, Ford’s personal library of 3,000 books went up in smoke.

Ford, who turns 78 on Jan. 24, is a son of Lutheran Chapel Church in China Grove. He graduated from South Rowan High School in 1965 — back when the mascot was still the Rebels — Lenoir-Rhyne College in 1969 with a major in English and minor in German, and the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago in 1973. He and his wife, a Winston-Salem native, married on Aug. 27, 1967, at Lutheran Church of the Epiphany in Winston-Salem. They’d met at L-R. He was 20; she was 21. They were the first couple to be married at the newly built church.

Ford served a number of calls in his ministry, working in 10 different states. Besides parish ministry, he worked for Lutheran social services organizations, as well as Habitat for Humanity (see sidebar). Two years ago, he received a certificate signed by Bishop Elizabeth Eaton of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) celebrating his 50th anniversary as a pastor.

Ford’s last call was in California. The Fords had lived in their retirement home for the last 15 years. Elsie is a retired nurse. Like all homes, theirs, too, contained “treasures”: numerous quilts Elsie Ford made, as well as the quilts Ford inherited from his grandmother, Frances Rebecca “Fannie” Clark, who grew up in Organ Lutheran Church.

The Fords knew that evacuation orders would probably be issued the night they evacuated. They settled into their recliners, cellphones close at hand. At 3 a.m., the call came. The couple had just enough time to grab their dog and cat and leave the house.

The winds were blowing anywhere from 80 to 100 mph that night, Ford said. The fire jumped 12- to 16-lane highways. Unlike the Pasadena fire, in which arson is suspected, a combination of high winds and power lines above ground sparked the fire.

“The power lines were arcing and swaying,” Ford noted.

The power company, Southern California Edison, has been trying to move power lines underground, but that’s tough in older, established areas, Ford acknowledges. The result? Settlements of $80 million to $90 million, which have happened “many times before,” Ford said.

The Fords hope to rebuild in their neighborhood, which was formed by African-American families during the turbulent Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Now, Asian and Latino families live there, as well as white families.

“We get along beautifully,” Ford said. “We have a very diverse neighborhood.”

When they left their home, the smoke was so thick that Ford couldn’t see to drive. He put his lights on dim and drove slowly, the turns already memorized. About a mile later, the smoke cleared.

“It was terror,” Ford recalled of that night. “We were scared. We wanted to survive, just as any other human would. We had to keep our wits about us.”

Besides significant family heirlooms, the couple lost all their important papers. They pretty much lost everything.

Or did they?

“We’ve never been caught up in material possessions,” Ford admitted. “We’ve got each other, and we’ve got our faith. We have many loving people helping us.”

That includes their two adult children, John and Anne, who paid for their hotel stay until they moved into an apartment.

John’s wife is Alex Yun. They have two children, Aiden, 18, a college freshman, and Sydney, 13, an eighth-grader. Anne Ford is married to David Figlio.

Other loving helpers include members of their congregation, St. Matthew’s Lutheran in Glendale, Calif., who helped furnish their new apartment. They moved in on Wednesday.

“We moved into our new apartment yesterday afternoon,” Ford said Thursday afternoon. “Our son and daughter-in-law and members of our church and one movie producer whom I married in 2010, Clark Peterson, met us, along with a couple trucks of donated things.

“We had a very warm welcome that included lots of boxes to be unpacked, a bed and table to be set up, and dishes and food stuffs to shelve or refrigerate. Everyone left by 9 p.m., and we slept the sleep of the truly blessed.

“So many evacuees are still in the hotel trying to find places to move into. I wish we were physically able to go back to the hotel to help others find a place to live.”

It’s funny how life tends to move in cycles.

In 1974 at Ford’s first parish, Grace Lutheran in Liberty, the congregation served a Vietnamese family through the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services program. Congregants found the family of three a house, furnished it, acquired a car for them and taught them how to drive it, and helped them get jobs.

“I don’t need a job,” Ford noted, “but now it’s the reverse.”

He continued, “I think we’ll succeed. We are equally concerned about others. Our hotel is filled with evacuees. We ran into our neighbors there. We want to rebuild, but it will take time to achieve it.”

Freelance writer Susan Shinn Turner lives in Raleigh.