Miracle at the Penn Theater
Biochemical engineer Carey Reams was a long way from his Orange County, Fla. home on New Year’s Day, 1945.
His World War II United States Army company had just been ordered from the beach head of Luzon to drive toward the Philippine capital of Manila to free the American prisoners of war captured by the Japanese nearly four years earlier. The 34-year-old could not have then imagined that the road he was about to travel would lead exactly 5 years later to a miracle at Butler’s Penn Theater on New Year’s Eve.
It would be a hard, wet and dangerous week-long journey to free the American captives. Engineer Carey Reams and the rest of the soldiers of his company were forced to march through jungle marshes on the first day due to the highways, making men highly visible to the snipers hiding high in the dense treetops. The second day brought typhoon strength rains shooting down from the sky making progress difficult.
Standing only six feet away from his captain on the mission’s sixth day, Reams witnessed a Japanese sniper, who had taken aim through his rifle’s high-powered scope, execute the officer with a single bullet.
The dead commander’s replacement had his own engineer and ordered Reams to report for duty with another company six miles away. It was while traveling to join his new squad that the transport vehicle carrying the transferred engineer encountered a washed-out bridge.
Forced to detour over a recently constructed dirt filled viaduct, Reams recalled after the war “It was while on the fill that we hit a land mine. The truck [full of men] was blown to smithereens.” Only five men, including a severely injured and unconscious Carey Reams, barely clinging to life, survived.
A month later and 2,500 miles away back in the states, Reams lay on an operating table for the first of the dozens of surgeries he would undergo to try to fix a crushed pelvis, a missing right eye, a broken jawbone, neck and back. Six weeks later he arrived back home in Florida to children who believed they might never see their father walk without the aid of crutches ever again!
Over the next five years, the now disabled veteran would have many more surgeries, suffer hemorrhages and lose most of his ability to eat. His children watched as their father’s life slowly began to fade away. Carey Reams sensed that without a miracle he would not see many more tomorrows.
Through a moment of serendipity in 1950, he happened to read a magazine article about Missouri-born, ordained Christian minister Kathryn Kuhlman. The controversial faith healing evangelist traveled extensively around the United States and the world conducting services. Later in the 1960’s and 1970’s she would appear on her own weekly Sunday morning television show.
The desperate father discovered that one of these services would soon be held in Pittsburgh on Dec. 28, 1950 and he knew he had to go!
Reams explained "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, did not seem so remote to me, for my wife was from Pittsburgh, and I also knew Clyde Hill, a driver for the Yellow Cab Company. The thought flashed through my mind that perhaps I could stay with my friend, should I decide to make the trip. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that getting to a miracle service was my last and only hope."
So, in the last week of December 1950, Reams willed himself physically to board a bus for the “Smoky City.” Riding alone for 36 hours, he arrived at Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood filled with hope, only to find that the Friday healing service had ended an hour before his arrival. His dream of walking again seemed lost. Luckily, a door attendant informed him that Kuhlman would be conducting another service at Butler’s Penn Theater in two days.
After watching the hands of the clock slowly go around twice, Carey Reams on Dec. 31, 1950, with the help of his friend Clyde Miller’s yellow taxicab, headed north on Route 8 towards Butler. He believed in his soul that his prayer to walk again and for God to heal him from pain would be answered.
Arriving under the glow of the Penn Theater’s brightly colored art deco neon sign on New Year’s Eve, the determined believer must have been emotionally crushed when told by an usher that the theater was filled, and all seats were taken. By a stroke of good fortune, a woman overheard the crushing disappointment in Carey's voice and witnessed the despair on his face. In an act of charitable grace, she offered her seat to the man being held upright by a pair of wooden crutches and with the help of two men gripping his upper arms.
Reams, expecting a New Year’s Eve miracle, must have sat with the feeling of sad emptiness as the melody of the closing hymn faded and Kuhlman began to raise her hand to begin the benediction. The crippled man’s hope to walk again seemed to be vanishing. Had the physically exhausting yellow cab trip to Butler failed to deliver the healing from God he had traveled so distant to receive?
But before she uttered the first syllable of the benediction’s first word from the stage, Kuhlman paused, and her eyes began to search the spellbound crowd. A dead silence fell upon the auditorium as her eyes looked up and down the aisles and across the rows of deep red colored seats filled with believers. Then her piercing eyes came to a stop on a man holding crutches.
She raised he arm and pointed a finger at Carey Reams asking, “Are you from Florida?” After replying “Yes” according to Reams, “she asked me to stand up and I said; ‘I can’t–and she said firmly, ‘In the name of Jesus, stand up and look up, and walk!”
Carey slowly rose with the help of his crutches and Kuhlman then demanded “Take those crutches away!” Reams complied and was astonished when his legs for the first time in five years held his weight and the bodily pain he's been experiencing since that tragic night on a dirt filled bridge in the Philippines was gone “like a light going out” as Reams described the miraculous moment.
The faith healer then ordered Reams up onto the stage. Turning down the aid from two men in the audience, Reams joyfully remembered “I walked up onto the platform (stage) like a flying bird. I seemed to hardly touch the floor, and I didn’t walk toward Miss Kuhlman, I ran.”
A Butler Eagle reporter witnessed first-hand the miracle at Butler’s Penn Theater that night and wrote about it on the front page of the newspaper’s New Year’s Day 1951, edition.
Carey Reams, the amazed journalist wrote, “walked up and down the aisles and back and forth across the stage, stretching his leg muscles . . . with a beaming Miss Kuhlman carrying his crutches, later casting them aside.” It was the New Year’s Eve miracle healing at Butler’s Penn Theater the almost completely paralyzed former army engineer had prayed for!
The next day, with the use of his legs restored, Reams borrowed money from his cab driving friend Clyde to purchase a used truck. Loaded it with furniture his wife had in storage in Pittsburgh and drove himself and his miracle back to the Citrus State.
Three days later, Carey Reams walked unaided and unannounced into his home. There in the living room sat his three children playing. Barely able to remember when their father could walk, the youngsters gasp with child-like astonishment when they looked up to see their daddy standing in front of them. Reams recalled their reaction to seeing him without crutches “Half-laughing and half-crying, they jumped up and down and clapped their little hands, and then just looked!”
Carey Reams spent the remainder of his life as a Consultant Agricultural Engineer in Florida working to help improve the health of others. For the next 35 years until his passing in 1985, he lived forever grateful for the New Year’s Eve miracle he received at Butler’s Penn Theater.
Bill May of Butler is a historian, speaker and tour guide.
