Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Lollie Starbuck.
Lollie Starbuck was a Pasadena child performer who grew up to lead rhythms and singing at Camps Farthest Out. Her real name was Laura Lee. She came to CFO around 1962 and spent decades leading youth, rhythms, and singing at camps across the West and Midwest.
After her first husband, Gibb Soldwisch, passed away, she married the Rev. Harry Starbuck in 1983. They became partners in marriage and ministry, teaching together at CFO camps and traveling throughout the world.
She was born Laura Lee in Los Angeles in 1922, named for her Uncle Lauren. “My name is Laura Lee.” Her parents divorced when she was six, and her father left the family. She came to know God as Father in the absence of her own. “My daddy God.” “And that’s what He became for me.”
Her mother was a schoolteacher and president of the local WCTU. The family moved so often that Lollie later joked: “I lived on every street in Pasadena.” She took ballet, drama, and elocution lessons. By the time she was four or five, she was already performing on stage with adults. Her mother took her to a New Thought church, and Lollie grew up around metaphysics without knowing the personal Lord Jesus she would later come to know.
During World War II, Lollie broke off another engagement and married Gibb Soldwisch, who had been raised Lutheran. Her story is preserved in “Sealed in His Love”. Gibb was sent overseas for two years. “I was the only war bride in our little church.” She was also the church’s only Sunday school teacher.
They settled in Pasadena and had four children. The busy years filled up with family life and bridge games. Her mother saw what was happening. “You know, honey, you’re nourishing the weeds in your life instead of the flowers.”
Then her mother died of a heart attack the night before the Fourth of July, with Lollie at her bedside. Lollie later called it a quantum leap in her spiritual life. She began reading her mother’s Glenn Clark books and found a prayer group.
Around 1962, Lollie drove two elderly women to a CFO camp. “The two little old ladies needed a ride.” She went on a scholarship. At that first camp, she found something she had been looking for all her life. “I found, at my very first CFO, a family that I had always longed for.”
Not long afterward, she met Jesus in the bathtub. There had been a family fight around the dinner table, and Lollie escaped by running a bath. There, in the quiet, she heard: “Lolly, I love you just the way you are.” “And I will always love you.”
She never tried to make the story more impressive than it was. “Some people have beautiful experiences at Wollaston Beach in Maine. But I am more practical, and the bathtub was my spot.” For five years, her prayer group met every Monday to pray for the sick. “It was a prayer lab, because we weren’t afraid to try anything.”
Lollie became a CFO youth leader during the years when the camps were being touched by the charismatic renewal. She did not receive the gift of tongues. “I talk so much, God wants to give me the gift of silence.”
Early in her Christian life, she made God a promise and kept it. Her story is told in “Saying Yes to God”. “And I made a secret vow to God that I would love people to their greatness.” She preferred working behind the scenes. “I even call this the ministry of the secret service.”
She led rhythms for the first time at Alliance CFO, with Celeste Shambrey at the piano. After that came Camp Sierra, Grand Canyon, Montana, Oregon, Iowa, and other camps. Lollie objected to calling what she did “performing.” “I reject the word performing.” “I was sharing. I was sharing.” She led singing, served on council rings, and helped compile the CFO songbook.
Lollie and Gibb renewed their wedding vows at Camp Sierra, with Tommy Tyson marrying them again. “We were remarried in CFO.” Gibb took early retirement and began leading rhythms with her. They moved to Scotts Valley in the Santa Cruz mountains.
They had been married nearly forty years when Gibb died of cancer around 1982. His death opened another part of Lollie’s relationship with God. “I had a real new experience in knowing the Holy Spirit as my comforter and my guide.” As a widow, she went back to college.
At a CFO camp at Lassen, Lollie wrote a letter to God describing the husband she hoped for. Then she added a postscript. She told campers for years afterward to do the same. “And be sure and put a P.S. on it, because I have found in my life that it’s those P.S.’s that have the power.”
In July 1983, Lollie was the song leader at Camp Sierra. A recently widowed Methodist minister was there. She felt she needed to tell him that he must wait on the Lord for a wife. So she told him. After the camp, Harry Starbuck wrote her a formal letter from his church in Dinuba, asking her to lead a song retreat. Lollie wrote back.
Her own P.S. asked what the L in Harry’s name stood for. “I told him it stood for lovers.” After six letters, Harry proposed over lunch in Sacramento. “I know it’s too soon to propose, but all I do is think about marrying you.” They married at Thanksgiving in 1983. “You know, at our age, we don’t have to fool around.”
Lollie and Harry spent their honeymoon learning to teach a course in couple communication. Their teaching included “The Four C’s in Marriage”. She became a clergy wife at Fremont First United Methodist Church until Harry retired in 1986. They then moved into Lollie’s old home in the Santa Cruz mountains and later to Carlsbad. They taught marriage together at CFO camps.
Lollie was frank about what she had learned from both marriages. “I wish I’d known in my first marriage that a wedding isn’t living happily ever after.” “It’s a lifelong building project.” Ruth and Bill Woodworth brought her to Iowa to lead rhythms, and Iowa became one of her home camps. She and Harry served on the CFO International Board and traveled together to Russia, Sri Lanka, India, Australia, and New Zealand.
Lollie taught surrender without making it sound easy. “The most dangerous prayer you can hear is your letting go and letting God.” She had a practical test for whether she had actually surrendered something. “If it keeps coming back, I haven’t really surrendered it, right?”
She taught that prayer reaches farther than the person praying. “We are, each one of us, a broadcasting station.” And: “You receive what you believe.” She taught forgiveness without pretending it erased the past. “Forgiving is not forgetting.” She also had a way of seeing God in the ordinary things that happened around her. “No coincidences. God incidences.”
That was Lollie’s Christianity: personal, practical, and often funny. She could lead a room full of people in singing and rhythms, but she was just as happy working quietly in what she called the secret service. She could talk about marriage, surrender, healing, prayer, or the Holy Spirit, and somehow make all of it sound like something a person could actually live.
In her later years she taught English to people learning it as a second language and volunteered at senior centers. Lollie Starbuck died in 2022 at ninety-nine, after a life that had taken her from a child’s stage in Pasadena to CFO camps across the country and finally around the world. She had made a promise to love people to their greatness. She spent her life doing it.
*Note:
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