The photo of the headquarters of the Watch Tower in the article is the building I worked in for nearly eleven (11) years. If walls could talk, what stories they would tell!
I have a little story to tell about the first time I heard about that building I came to work in, known before the WT purchased it as one of the Squibb buildings. In 1959, going house-to-house in Palm Beach, Florida, I met a man who lived in a beautiful waterfront mansion. He told me he just came from a meeting with Nathan Knorr (he actually said, "I just came from a meeting with your boss") in Brooklyn, NY. He told me that the Watch Tower wanted to buy the two Squibb buildings. (He was one of the owners.) I called Joe Anderson at Bethel, who I was engaged to, telling him about the WT's negotiations to buy the Squibb buildings. Was that ever a surprise to him as not many Bethelites suspected that the WT was interested in purchasing those buildings.
Although the WT did not buy the buildings until ten years later, it was fun back then to know something about what was going on in the private business world of WT leaders. Little did I dream back in 1959 that I would end up in 1982 as a volunteer working at the building that became the WT headquarters when it was renovated in the 1970s.
I have so many memories from those years at Bethel and quite a number of things I learned about while working at 25 Columbia Heights, I'm happy to say, have helped many a JW out of the organization.
It was here that I learned all about the WT's hidden child abuse problems and I'm thankful to this day that it was possible for me to go public about this horrible mess some 14 years ago. Like I said, "If walls could talk, what stories they would tell."
Barbara