Dan Eakin
My name is Dan Eakin (Akin). At age 86, I am pastor of Woodrow Baptist Church in Silsbee, Texas.
I would love for a live person to call me so I can tell them more about my many experiences with W. E. Hawkins and Oliver Price. My number is 214-543-6256.
Oliver and Betty Price had gone as missionaries to Brazil in the early 1950s, but Betty soon became ill and the medical attention she needed could not be provided in the jungles where they were serving.
So they returned to the United States and Radio preacher W.E. Hawkins let them move into a house at Piney Grove Bible Camp, which Hawkins owned near De Queen, Arkansas.
Oliver would help with the five Bible camps held each year at Piney Grove, and would preach and even teach Vacation Bible Schools in small churches in Southwestern Arkansas and Southeastern Oklahoma.
At the age of 12, in 1952, I went forward and made a profession of faith in the open air tabernacle on the Piney Grove campgrounds. During the next three or four years, I would travel with Brother Price to attend many of the services that he held.
I felt the call to preach at the age of 13. When I was 15, Brother Price let me preach my first sermon one Sunday afternoon at the Chapel Hill Methodist Church, which had been closed but Brother Price had gotten permission to have Sunday afternoon services there.
Brother Hawkins was in charge of the Piney Grove camps. He had lost his voice preaching on the street corner as a young preacher and when it came back it continued to be raspy for the rest of his life. Brother Hawkins sang with such joy anyway, but he was not a song leader.
Oliver Price usually led the singing at the camps, mostly choruses from a small hymnal called Youth Sings. He baptized me and about a dozen others one afternoon in the Rolling Fork River just outside of De Queen.
He had become Brother Hawkins' right hand man, and the eventual successor to the Radio Revival ministry and other ministries that Brother Hawkins had founded.
In either 2001 or 2002, at an annual meeting at Scofield Memorial Church, Brother Price recognized Jim Dickson and me as two who were brought up at Piney Grove who became Baptist ministers.
As of this writing, with both of us now in our mid 80s, we still pastor churches, with more than 60 years each in the ministry.
Had it not been for the ministries of Brother Hawkins and Brother Price, this would never have been possible.
