1953 Strangers and Pilgrims

1953   Strangers and Pilgrims. Grade 4, Nellie Siegenthaler, Spell downs, Flag salute, Melvin Schlabach, William F. (Bill) Miller, Emmanuel Schrock, Joseph John Clauss, Witnessing and Amish Christian Fellowship Bulletin, David A. Miller meeting; Fourth Amish Mission Conference in Hutchinson, Kansas, September 3 birth of Rhoda, Signs of Andrew’s separation from the Amish.

I entered the fourth grade at Holmesville School with Nellie Siegenthaler as our no-nonsense, sharp-eyed teacher. Ms. Siegenthaler was with the outstanding 1926 Holmesville High School class of Roy Stallman and Eva Sterling Humrichouser, and though short of stature, she was considered one of the strictest teachers in the Holmesville School. Ms. Siegenthaler or Nellie, as we students called her among ourselves, liked to do spell downs as a featured activity every Friday. Fourth grade spell downs were a learning game in which the class formed two sides, lined up on the two sides of the room in a random way, and if you miss-spelled a word or got the wrong answer in mathematics, you had to sit down. The turn would go from one side to the other to see which side was left standing. 

Other times we would all line up, and if you got the wrong answer you simply went to the end of the line; thus whoever was left at the front of the line (think Benny Miller, Joyce Paulocsak or Sarah Miller) at the end of the period, was the winner. She also had flash cards for addition, subtraction, simple division and multiplication, and again they were in the form of answering correctly, and you would stay; if not you were down, or heading to the back of the line.

Though sharp- eyed and rigorous, Ms. Siegenthaler also had a soft and funny heart on an individual basis. For spelling words, she would say the word, use it in a sentence, and then say the word again. Here we might get some of her humor, such as when the word “mischievous” fell to Jacob Mast who was in fact quite ornery and got into trouble with Ms. Siegenthaler. She said the word “mischievous,” “Jake is sometimes mischievous in our class,” “mischievous.” Jake often missed school and failed to bring written excuses from his parents, but we knew that she liked him. Jake wrote his absentee excuses himself on behalf of his father Andy Mast.

During the year I also remember taking my younger brother David along one day; it was not unusual to bring a younger family member along if there was a special day. Anyway, one day we dressed up as circus and zoo animals, and had a parade, and I took David along. I was a lion and David walked along as a cub and a big hit; the girls all said that David was cute and Ms. Siegenthaler liked him too.   

About once a month, we had an all-school assembly and one of the classes would take turns in leading an assembly. In November it might have been on the origins of Thanksgiving in the United States, and in February it may have been on the presidents such as Washington and Lincoln. Every morning we would do the American flag pledge of allegiance or the salute. This was an ambiguous issue for Amish and Mennonites; we carried national symbols and patriotism lightly, growing up in homes and a church of conscientious objectors to war. Everyone stood, most of the Amish did not put up their hands in a salute, some recited the pledge and others did not. No one meant any disrespect to our nation, and I think there was a great deal of gratitude to be able to live in a country which had religious freedom. It was never a public issue, and Ms. Siegenthaler and the other teachers would respect the children’s non-resistant responses.

But one flag salute became memorable for me. Ms. Siegenthaler was looking for people to lead parts of an all-school assembly and I--eager to please-- immediately raised my hand for the flag salute, along with Roy Snyder. But after I volunteered, I realized that this was not the proper role for an Amish Mennonite child to do, much as it was quite appropriate for a Boy Scout such as my friend Roy Snyder. I did not feel well the rest of the day, and that evening I asked Mattie what to do, not wanting to back out of my assignment nor wanting to make a scene with Roy or the other students. But my Mother was sympathetic and said, yes, go ahead with it this time, but you’ll know better the next time. I suppose that early incident became my default stance as a Christian pacifist, trying to follow my conscience as a Christian pacifist, but also trying to be respectful to others and grateful for the freedom of living in United States of America.

   

Our relationship to the government was in Christian terms to be strangers and pilgrims on this earth, and that our citizenship was in heaven. So you can imagine our parents and grandparents dismay when my mother’s brother and our Uncle Melvin registered to enter the U.S. Marine Corps upon his eighteenth birthday. My parents took it especially hard and sent out letters asking for prayer that he would change his mind, and often at family prayers Melvin would be noted as a special petition to God, in hope that he would repent and turn to God. But none of this seemed to deter Melvin. 

Today, I can appreciate that this was a big step for Melvin to take to go from an Amish farm boy to entering the United States Marine Corps. This was during beginnings of the Cold War, the Korean War, and perhaps Melvin felt defending his country was his duty. Melvin would later in life point out that the Marines were also his opportunity to get more schooling education, that his parents would only allow him to go the eighth grade. The rest of the family’s interpretation, however, was that Melvin was in rebellion against his father Levi, the church, and God and needed to repent.  

If Uncle Melvin’s decision jolted our world, I also had my first encounter with the sadness and terror of severe mental illness during this year, and my father often prayed for Emmanuel Schrock at family devotions. Andrew and Mattie visited their friend Emmanuel quite regularly at the Massillon State Hospital during this year, and sometimes we children went along. Emmanuel and Andrew ran around together as youths and used to play musical instruments together, and I think my father sympathized especially for his friend who had been engaged to be married to his sister, our Aunt Esther Miller. The wedding had been called off as the family had become increasingly aware of Emmanuel’s emotional illness.

But the Massillon visits were scary to me with a big brick building which had bars at the windows, even though the building and doors were quite open when we would visit. I was seeing people who looked straight at you and said random things; one woman came up to me and tried to pet my hair in a strange way. My mother and father would visit with Emmanuel, and give him reading material, and he seemed quite normal to me. Still to see someone I considered a relative and dressed in Amish clothes seemed incongruous and fearful, and I knew he could not go home. We used simply to say that Emmanuel had gone insane, and I would at night wonder if I might also go insane and need to live in a terrible building separated from my family. Years later as an elderly man, Andrew  would again visit Emmanuel regularly at a day care home and sing for him, and give him tapes of his music.

    

At that point our religious economy of the Amish and the world and Christians was pretty clear to my parents and to us. You might be a good heathen or a moral person but you may still not make the grade if you were not among the Christian faithful, as our family and church understood it. In real life it was of course not always that clear, especially with our neighbors. Our nearest neighbors across the road at Holmesville were Eli and Alma Weaver; we called him Peter Sam’s Eli, and they were Amish. They did not live there for very long, and I remember the Weavers mainly for their animals. Eli had big Belgium horses, and occasionally his stallion would mount a mare in the barn yard, or someone would bring a mare on the truck for breeding. It was quite a show, and then there was his dog which fought with our Buster.

But the Weavers soon moved, and were replaced by William (Bill) and Maxine Miller, whose religious affiliation I never knew. Maxine’s parents Arthur (A.E.) and Mellanie Parrot lived up the road on another farm, and her brother Rollin Parrot and his wife Jill Menuez lived in a stone house also near the home place of the Parrots.  Maxine was quite vocal while Bill was a man of few words. Religiously, I did not know exactly what to make of the Millers because they were thrifty moral neighbors, but they were not very religious at least not in the sense that they worked in the fields on Sundays, drank some beer, and did not attend church worship often, at least the way we did.

Most of Bill and Maxine’s farm land was on the south side of the Fredricksburg road and ours on the north, but they farmed the land along side ours behind the railroad tracks and along Salt Creek. Quite often Bill would drive his big Farmall M tractor on the little driveway in back of our lawn to get to his fields.  Anyway, one spring Paul, Roy and I were back cultivating our corn field with the horses, and then we went across Bill’s field and put the cultivator down and plowed out some of his corn. It was sheer boy vandalism, and why we did it, I do not know. 

Several evenings later we were playing ball in our front lawn, and we heard Bill back in his field cultivating corn. It was almost dark when we heard Bill approach on the big Farmall M from back of the railroad tracks. The big diesel roared louder and louder as Bill approached closer, and when he came even with our lawn and playing field, he stopped the tractor. The engine idled a little; he let the cultivator down, and then he shut off the engine. Paul, Roy and I immediately stopped playing and stood in attention, down cast faces and all ears.

All was quiet, and then Bill spoke slowly: “Okay, boys, I saw what you did.” He sounded angry, and perhaps even sad. All was quiet, but then he added. “I’m not going to say anything to your parents this time. “ He seemed to be piecing this together, and there was a pause. And then he finished, “But don’t you ever do it again.” Immediately, the big Farmall M started up; he pulled up the cultivator on the hydraulic lift, went past us on the Fredricksburg road and drove home.

We just stood there; we did not have time to apologize, and he did not even give us a chance to thank him for saving us from the spanking which Andrew would have given us. But that was the end of it; Bill never brought it up again, ever, and we had been taught and important lesson on grace. For the next several decades, our families lived side by side in different cultural and religious worlds, and we never socialized together. Perhaps Bill’s personality of being a hard-working man of few words made him seem impersonal. But to us boys, we knew Bill had another side, a soft side of grace.   

Andrew had another time of inter-religious exchange when he and Yost H. Miller of Berlin took the bus to Goshen, Indiana and visited extensively with Joseph John Clauss, a Catholic professor at the Mount Saint Mary of the West Seminary in Cincinnati. Clauss’ family was in Mishawaka, Indiana, hence the travel with Andrew and Yost. After the meeting, Andrew sent Clauss a letter noting that he and Yost felt a certain “oneness and fellowship” with Clauss,  and “my wife and I and brother Yost had been led” to send him some Bibles and books. Andrew encouraged Clauss to read them with an open mind and seemed to identify Clauss’ Catholic tradition with his own Amish background, noting that “the Lord of mercy and compassion opened my heart and mind to His blessed gospel of salvation,” otherwise “I would have had to reap the harvest of the deluded, the superstitious, and misinformed who know not God, nor obey His Gospel.”

After telling the priest the story of his own Christian conversion experience at age seventeen. Andrew concludes the letter: “I hope and pray that your superior learning and status will not make a barrier between us. We send our love. Andrew A. Miller and wife.” A year later the two were still writing to each other, and exchanging periodicals as Andrew now sent him his new publication Christian Fellowship Review, and Clauss returned the favor sending Andrew  the Catholic weekly called, Our Sunday Visitor. Clauss thanked Andrew for his letters and literature but noted: “As you no doubt realize, I am in complete disagreement with many of the ideas.” Other magazines which Andrew received that year were: Healing Waters, “America’s healing magazine” with the editor and founder Oral Roberts listed; and the Mennonite magazines: Youth Christian Companion and Gospel Herald.  

This was another busy year for Andrew as chair of the Mission Interests Committee. One of the first projects of the committee was to begin its own periodical separate from the earlier Russell Manaiaci newsletter called Amish Mission Endeavor Bulletin. The Amish committee now saw Manaiaci as a liability and moved decisively (at Andrew’s urging) to separate from Manaiaci. In retaliation for the unhappy parting, Manaiaci withheld his extensive mailing list from the Amish committee. According to the Amish Mission Interest’s Committee, however, Manaiaci’s leadership was causing opposition because (1) he was not Amish himself, (2) he did not know the German or Pennsylvania German dialect, and (3) he was too inter-denominational.

Andrew led the committee in a separation action, calling Manaiaci’s proposals “unthinkable.”  The committee named Harvey Graber of Indiana as editor of the new paper called Witnessing. Andrew volunteered to get the publication going by printing the first issue on his own mimeograph machine at Holmesville.  The publication began to about 300 addresses with an April- May issue, but by the third issue, the printing had moved to The Mennonite Press in North Newton, Kansas.

In the meantime, Andrew was doing some publication and writing of his own. In the December of 1952, Andrew released a mimeographed newsy paper called Amish Christian Fellowship Bulletin which told of the various Amish Christian fellowship meetings held that year in Holmes County, the first one being on August 31 at the Andrew and Mattie Miller home and others on alternate weeks at homes of interested families such as Homer (Dien Eile’s Homer) and Fannie Miller of Fredricksburg, David (Heine David’s Davey) Yoder, Jacob S. (Steffy’s Jake) and Elizabeth Miller of Mt. Hope. Andrew said “what the future holds for the Amish Christian Fellowship we do not know. We want to be fully resigned to the word and will of God.” 

These bi-weekly Sunday afternoon meetings began in the summer of 1951 at Beechville School and were held in homes until the summer of 1954. Of his bulletin, he said, “Christian Fellowship Bulletin is published occasionally in the interest of Bible study, unity, missionary endeavor and fellowship of nonresistant Christian believers and followers of Christ.” But after one issue, Andrew discontinued it “for the time being,” as he later told Gertrude Enders Huntington: “Perhaps when I retire from farming I’ll start it up again.”  

Andrew’s biggest writing project that winter was the front-page article of the Mennonite Gospel Herald on March 17, 1953. Entitled “Illicit Fellowship,” the article called for the traditional Anabaptist separation from the world, although Andrew allowed some exception: “Differences of opinion concerning certain outward observances, cultural and personality clashes, denominational bickering and prejudice, and the like, are not biblical grounds for ‘putting away’ and withdrawal of fellowship.” As examples of being unequally yoked with those outside the true saving faith, he included: “business enterprises, community social and civic associations, sitting on juries, and holding public office, however innocent it may appear.” During the next months and year, Andrew got numerous complements from his Amish Mission friends on the article. 

The big event for the whole Miller family that summer however was hosting a meeting of the Thomas, Oklahoma traveling minister and evangelist David A. Miller. On the evening of August 7^th Miller preached before a crowd of “approximately 800 people under the open heavens in Holmesville” as Amish historians would report a quarter century later. I well remember the lanterns spread across the front lawn as the evangelist spoke to the large crowd. Miller stood on the large stone slab by the house in the front lawn, and I remember going to the stone afterwards to see if it was okay after everyone left, and then going out to the chicken house where our Rhode Island Red hens were roosting, as if to see the animals had some form of normalcy. David A. Miller, often called Oklahoma Dave, was an engaging and passionate speaker who the Amish mission people saw as their own answer to the Mennonites’ evangelists such as George R. Brunk II and Andrew Jantzi.

A week later Andrew attended the Fourth Amish Mission Conference held August 12-14, 1953, at Harmon Yoder farm near Hutchinson, Kansas. Again, this same Oklahoma David A. Miller was the featured speaker, giving three sermons during the three days. Andrew also gave a talk at the meetings on “Witnessing by the Printed Page—Bibles, books, Periodicals, and Gospel Literature.” The committee secretary David L. Miller’s report in Witnessing, noted: “[Andrew A. Miller] gave an intensely interesting historical survey of how we got our Bible. He mentioned the various translations and remarked that he did not see a reason for becoming unduly alarmed at the RSV [Revised Standard Version].” The report concludes with Andrew’s personal testimony of conversion and reading only the Bible for six months.

As chair of the organizing committee Andrew Miller also closed the last session “with an expression of gratitude to the local group.” Andrew “told all of us that the mountain-top experience upon which we had been dwelling the past few days could be ours at home with the same means that we had experienced [it here], that of intensive Bible study and prayer.” In the business meeting, Andrew was again elected to the continuing committee, this time as assistant chairman.  When Andrew returned home, Mattie soon delivered the family’s sixth child and first daughter on September 3: Rhoda.  Mattie and Andrew liked to give their children biblical names.

Throughout the year Andrew wrote widely and received letters from all over North America, especially where there were Amish dissenters or religious seekers such as a Homer Dotson of North Lima, Ohio, and he wrote to his confidante the young Witneslsing editor Harvey Graber on how criticism can help us. But Andrew and Mattie also were increasingly aware of the precarious nature of their relationship with the Holmesville local district where norms were largely maintained by extending or withholding fellowship. Andrew wrote to the minister Noah Keim, father of the Eastern Mennonite University history professor Al Keim, inviting him to come and speak at a Sunday afternoon Amish fellowship meeting. But Keim declined, saying that much as he would like to come, if he fellowships with Andrew’s group, Keim would no longer be invited to preach among the other Amish districts in Holmes County.

By December 30, Andrew writes a deeply personal letter to his friends Harvey Graber and Daniel Beachy of Goshen, Indiana, noting that “a good brother” had been unfairly disciplined by those Andrew called “the Judiazers” in his own church. Clearly, Andrew’s days in the Amish church were coming to an end. He concludes the letter on a domestic note, that he said he is at home baby sitting with Rhoda, and that Mattie and the boys went to Wooster on the bus. His busy correspondence, committee work and farming also did not keep him from organizing a Christmas package project to local needy families with boxes of food, comforts, coats, mattress, and quilts with contributors individuals such as the “June Weavers, Ammon Wengerds, John Hochstetlers, Ivan Hochstetlers, Neal Wengerds” as well as groups such as various Mennonite sewing circles and Bible classes. These kinds of personal charity drives would characterize much of the rest of Andrew’s life.

The Andrew Miller and Catholic priest John Joseph Clauss correspondence is found in the files of Andrew A. Miller personal collection in the Archives of the Mennonite Church (AMC). All the other correspondence quoted is also found in these same files. Information of the Amish Christian Fellowship meetings comes from Amish Christian Fellowship Bulletin (Volume 1, December 1, 1952, Number 1), published once from Holmesville, Ohio, in the files of Andrew A. Miller (AMC). Andrew’s comment on only publishing one issue appears in Gertrude Enders Huntington, Dove at the Window, unpublished dissertation at Mennonite Historical Library at Goshen College. The David A. Miller evening meeting is noted in Edward Kline and Monroe L. Beachy, “History and Dynamics of the New Order Amish of Holmes County, Ohio," Old Order Notes (Fall Winter, 1998, pages 7-19).  Andrew’s talk at the August Hutchinson, Kansas, conference was reported in Witnessing (September October, 1953, Number 4, page 4), in the Andrew A. Miller collection of AMC.