The Transformation of GI Joe

            Sometimes God makes dramatic changes in people’s lives. He did in Joe’s.

            The son of Italian immigrants, Joe grew up in Hornell, New York, where his father worked on the railroad. His parents were Catholic. They never went to church, but the priest occasionally came by for a donation. Joe never saw his mother read the Bible or pray, though she had once lived in a convent. He attended a Catholic school for two months, but the nuns were strict and frightened him with their long faces. 

            When Joe was ten, his father went back to Italy. Joe’s oldest brother, Marshall, quit school to support the family, while their mother took in laundry to help make ends meet. She had little money for food after paying the rent. Marshall soon married and moved away, leaving Don, the next oldest, to go to work. At age 17, Joe was next in line to drop out of school. He got a job working 60 hours for $8 a week at the Market Basket.

            Then came World War II. Joe was drafted into the signal corps under General Eisenhower and sent to Europe in 1944. He came close to death many times. While traveling to Europe in a convoy of 100 ships, Joe’s ship was surrounded by German submarines trying to sink any American ship.

            After reaching London safely, Joe and his friends began to rely more on alcohol to give them courage. “We all had the attitude that we weren’t going to come out alive,” he recalled.

            He experienced nightly V-2 bombings for three months. People were killed and buildings destroyed. Often there was little warning to get to the bomb shelters, so many people slept down there all night. Meanwhile, Joe and his buddies, fortified with alcohol’s false courage, often stayed out all night, in spite of the danger. Through all this, God protected him.

            After London, Joe was transferred to Paris, where he worked in an underground structure with walls that were 12 feet thick. Then he was called into the infantry and headed to the front lines in Germany. Still God was in control.

            “The day I crossed the Rhine River, the war ended and I was shipped right back to the signal corps,” Joe said. He stayed in Germany for ten months monitoring German radio and decoding messages. His company earned a Presidential Citation for radio signal intelligence work.

            But the dangers were not over. En route home, his Liberty ship encountered a hurricane. Tilting at 45-degree angles, the ship nearly sank in 100-mile-an-hour winds.

            “The Catholic boys were scared,” Joe recalled. “They were going to confession every morning. One guy fell out of bed and broke his arm, so we had to tie ourselves into bed.”

            Joe made it home safely, escaping the perils of war. But one problem remained a threat—his growing alcohol habit. “I became a carousing, gambling, womanizer,” he admitted.

            During one of his bar visits he met a beautiful blonde. Esther came from a church background—she had even taught Sunday School. But she had grown disillusioned with the negative preaching and the list of things she wasn’t allowed to do—like going to movies and dances. She began going out with the wrong crowd.

            Forty days after they met, Joe and Esther married.

            The night before the wedding Joe was drunk as usual. His friend Pete tried to sober him up and took him over to his future in-laws, the Wilcoxes’, to sleep it off.

            Because he did not marry in the Catholic church, Joe was told he was living in adultery. The priest said if they would remarry as Catholics, their marriage would be accepted. The newlyweds refused, and began attending the Methodist Church with Esther’s parents instead.

            The Wilcoxes were dedicated Christians, and they prayed for Joe daily. In fact, they asked many of their church friends to join them. Joe began attending services Sunday mornings, evenings, and Wednesdays at the invitation of his in-laws.

            “I wanted to go to church,” Joe, said. “I guess indirectly I felt God was there and that these were godly people.”

            Joe also enjoyed going to Gideons’ meetings with Mr. Wilcox. In the military, Joe had received a Gideon New Testament. He’d never read it, but he kept it in his barracks bag, knowing it was important because it was the Word of God.

            Alcohol continued to dominate Joe’s life. He’d been drinking every day for 12 years now. One night he spent his entire paycheck buying drinks for friends. Alcohol made him happy, or so he thought. Sometimes he would be too drunk to come home and would call Esther saying he’d stay at his mother’s home in town.

            Alcohol became a strain on their relationship. People said the marriage wouldn’t last. When Esther sought advice from her mother, Mrs. Wilcox said, “You knew he was a drunkard when you married him. Stick with him.” So Esther did. Mrs. Wilcox, however, was secretly afraid of what Joe might do in a drunken state.

            When drunk, Joe would sometimes end up somewhere without knowing how he got there. He began to experience delirium tremens (DTs) and nightmares. He would wake up shaking, and sometimes see bears by his bed. Once Esther tried to wake him, and he nearly choked her. He told her never to touch him again when he was in that state.

            Joe’s brothers were trapped by alcohol too. Marshall later died of diabetes and heart problems caused by alcohol. Don developed an ulcer from drinking and eventually died of bladder cancer. Joe was headed down the same self-destructive road.

            In November of 1950, nearly three years after their marriage, Joe and Esther attended special meetings at church. Each night Mr. Wilcox invited his son-in-law to go forward for salvation, but he refused. Joe thought the evangelist was preaching directly at him.

            On the last night of the meetings, Joe and Esther stopped in at her parents, where the evangelist was staying. In this relaxed setting, Joe felt more at ease with the evangelist. There in the Wilcoxes’ living room, Joe and Esther responded to the evangelist’s simple invitation and accepted Christ that night. They were the only converts during those two-week meetings.

            Joe made a deal with God: if God would remove his sinful habits, Joe would follow and serve Him. Virtually overnight a miraculous change took place in Joe! He became a new person.

            “The desire for smoking and drinking was gone the next day,” he said. “I never had the desire again. It was a miracle! I didn’t swear, curse, or ram around anymore. Everything was gone.”

            Immediately Joe wanted to study God’s Word. He bought his first Bible and went on visitation with the pastor the next day.

            Joe also gave away his huge record collection. “It was keeping me from studying the Bible and was affecting my Christian life—like serving two masters.”

            Shortly after his commitment to Christ, Joe began teaching the junior boys’ Sunday School class. Two weeks later a missionary visited their church. During the meeting Joe felt called to preach. His pastor and in-laws discouraged the idea because his finances were limited and he had never finished high school. But Joe was determined. He took a surveying job to pay the bills, intent on going to Bible school.

            Meanwhile, Joe’s relatives were so upset at his conversion that they disowned him. They thought he was insane. Many refused to speak to him. His drinking buddies ignored him. They thought Esther had converted him, even though they saw a difference in his life.

            Four years after accepting Christ, Joe moved his family to Massachusetts to enter Bible school, his dream. It wasn’t easy with three children, a night job, and daytime classes.

            After Bible school, he got a job surveying near Niagara Falls, NY while continuing his studies by correspondence. He was ordained by the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church and helped open an extension work. The little group, which met in an old schoolhouse, had grown to 39 people when Joe moved almost three years later.

            By this time his old friends realized he had changed. His former high school classmates began to respect him. He told his friend Pete how God had changed his life, but Pete would not listen. Pete’s wife and children left him, and he later died an alcoholic. Joe conducted the funeral.

            If he had continued on his original course, Joe, too, would have lost his wife, children, and health. But God’s life-changing power made a dramatic turnaround in his life. He went from being a drunkard to a minister of the gospel, pastoring three churches in 23 years, and preaching even on into retirement.

            Joe influenced many lives for Christ during his years of ministry. One of those lives was mine. You see, he was my pastor all 23 years. Joe DeSerio was my father.

On Easter Sunday 2018, at age 96, Dad moved on to his heavenly reward, having lived his life for God.

JoAnne DeSerio Jones