Eva Heiliger's Book about Meta Chestnutt Sager (1)

Although never published, a book about the life of Meta Chestnutt Sager has already been written. As early as the 1940s, Eva Heiliger, Sager's great niece, aspired to tell her story. Heiliger was a freelance writer with over a decade of experience as a reporter for a small daily newspaper.[1] Her mother had attended El Meta Bond College. Sager had visited in the Heiliger home on at least one occasion. And the two women carried on an extensive correspondence for several years, due mainly to Heiliger's fascination with her great aunt.[2] Even with that, Heiliger felt she knew far too little to write a book about her subject when Sager died in 1948. For the time, she contented herself that she had published an article or two about her illustrious relative. But thirty years later, at the age of sixty-three, Heiliger was thinking about film, not print, and she had new resolve: "It just seems that the life of Aunt Meta should be told." She wrote those words to Katherine Stenholm of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina.[3] By then, Stenholm was well-known in American fundamentalist circles as the founding director of Unusual Films, a production company affiliated with BJU. In 1950, Bob Jones Jr. had announced to Stenholm, a speech instructor at the school, "Dad says we're starting a film program, and you're going to head it." Overwhelmed, Stenholm explained to Bob Jones Sr., the president of the school, that she would need training for a job like that. Soon, she was spending the summer on the west coast, where she took film classes at the University of Southern California and completed an internship in Hollywood with Stanley Kramer who would go on to produce High Noon (1952) and direct films like Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1967). Upon returning to South Carolina, Stenholm devoted herself to the new challenge. She served as chairperson of the School of Cinema at Bob Jones from 1950 to 1989, during which time she produced dozens of Christian films, including five feature-length movies she directed.[4] In 1977, just two years before Heiliger first wrote to her, Stenholm had directed her magnum opus, Sheffey, a film about nineteenth-century, circuit-riding preacher Robert Sayers Sheffey (1820-1902).[5] Heiliger thought that if the life of Sheffey was worthy of a Christian film, then why not the life of Sager?

Notes

[1] Mrs. Dick Heiliger to Mrs. Katherine Stenholm, February 1, 1979, box 1, folder 4, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[2] Several long letters from Sager to Eva Heiliger, written between 1940 and 1945, are in box 1, folder 10, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[3] Mrs. Dick Heiliger to Mrs. Katherine Stenholm, Bob Jones University, January 16, 1979, box 1, folder 4, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection.

[4] Ellyn Bache, "Unusual Films started with Katherine Stenholm," Greenville (South Carolina) News, April 18, 2001, 57, 60; "Katherine Corne Stenholm," Greenville News, November 7, 2015, A10. On Stanley Kramer, see David Thomson, New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 6th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 574-75.

[5] Internet Movie Database page for Sheffey, accessed August 17, 2021, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0278031/. Stenholm's movies flourished only in the world of distinctively-Christian film. There is no entry for her or any of her movies, for example, in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, 4 vols. (Detroit, MI: Thomson Gale, 2007).