The minister who last year was voted Seattle's "First Citizen" is leaving Seattle to take over the most famous Congregational pulpit in the land: the pulpit of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, once occupied by the greatest preacher of Civil War days, Henry Ward Beecher, and later by the prime ministerial drumbeater of World War I, Newell Dwight Hillis.
Their successor is husky, cleft-chinned, 50-year-old Dr. L. (for Lawrence) Wendell Fifield, for the past 14 years pastor of Seattle's Plymouth Congregational Church. Downtown churches, such as his in Seattle, have special, tough...