Allen Michael ~ Galactic Messenger
As published in God – Ultimate Unlimited Mind – Speaks:
Allen Ward Noonan, born in 1916, spent the first 19 years of his life in Britt, Iowa, where his main claim to fame, as he tells it, lay in the fact that he was always enterprising and able to take care of himself from a very young age. For example, Allen was the one who got people together to build an ice rink in the winter when he was thirteen, flooded it, cleared it of snow, etc., and did so each winter until he left Britt six years later. And again, when he was sixteen, he bought a telescope over in Mason City which, typically, he made pay for itself by setting up on the main corner of Britt for its 1800 residents to look thru, charging ten cents for people to view the heavens for a couple of minutes. It was a fairly good telescope, too, that could pick up the rings of Saturn. That Allen knew enough about the heavens to tell people what they were looking at gives a clue to the sort of person who was opened up 16 years later to the reality of his cosmic origin and the very special mission he was to fulfill.
From the time he entered high school, until he graduated several years later, he was his school’s star runner. In his senior year he won three races at the Tri-state regional championships, setting the record for the mile run, of 4 minutes, 28 seconds – a record for the high school mile which stood for 8 years. He gained such a reputation locally for being able to run interminably that a group of his friends bet him he couldn’t run to the next town 13 miles away. He took the bet, and they arranged to follow him in a car one Saturday morning. So, amidst much fanfare, hooting and hollering, he ran over to the next town and collected the money. Allen was not even winded.
From early in his life Allen was interested in art. He was always called upon when there was a stage set to make and decorate, or posters to be done for social events. But, whatever outer activities he was involved in, to use his own words: “As I grew, I began to develop more within myself, cutting myself off from the outside world, because I began to slowly realize that people did not hold to my ways.” His track talent earned him a four-year scholarship to Drake University in Des Moines, but he was soon bored with college studies. So, while home during Christmas vacation of his first year, when a visitor from Omaha who noticed Allen’s signwork in many of the local stores asked him to go to work for the Omaha (Nebraska) Power District as a display artist, he said, ‘Let’s go!’ He was 19, and the year was 1935.
Once at work in Omaha, because of his experience and well-developed artistic talent, Allen quickly discovered that the manager of the display shop, an older man, who was not an artist, needed some help. Allen pitched in, and four years later, when the manager retired, Allen was appointed manager of the display division at age 23, a job which paid a thousand dollars a month in 1939 – a year not remembered for the great number of people earning that much money.
The country was still in a depression, one that would not end, in reality, until the beginning of the Second World War, which began for this country in 1941. Along with many of his generation of like conscience, Allen agreed to serve in the Army, but only as a noncombatant, for he would not take a gun and kill another man. His other choice would have been to refuse military service and go to jail instead. It was common practice at that time to accept pacifists into the Army as noncombatants, and he was assigned to the Camouflage Group in the European Theater of Operations, where he spent the years 1942, ’43 and ’44 moving from England to North Africa, and finally to France and then Germany, as the war ended.
When he returned to America in 1945 he continued his work in Omaha as display manager. By 1947, Allen was ready for a change. He had seen for himself the madness of war and could see that a peace treaty, signed by national governments, was just another piece of paper leading people right back into the next war. During the two years following the war, Allen had been working with others toward a lasting peace thru the Presbyterian church in Omaha which he and his wife belonged to. They had one son, Dennis, who was then 4 years old.
Finally, in order to expand and grow, Allen decided to move to Los Angeles, since many creative artists and liberal, peace-minded people had gathered there. He secured a job as a set designer for 20th Century Fox, and was ready to get into a new life experience, when the strikes that beset the movie industry for several months that year began. Instead of designing sets, he found himself with a sign on the picket line.
For a while it was interesting, but soon it became necessary to find a way to support his family, and he took a job in Long Beach with Foster-Kleiser, an outdoor advertising company – where he remained for four years as a pictorial billboard artist, learning how to work on large surfaces. He also maintained an art studio and cabinet shop on the side.
