1955 My First Story

1955    A first story, horses, books and reading; Roy’s mechanical skills, builds a tractor; finishing hogs and the Wooster livestock auction, bulls and auctioneers; Maple Grove Mission organizes, the dilemmas of Amish and Mennonite modernizers; Lorie Conley Gooding, the poet; a Thanksgiving program; citizens and subjects; Stalin to Khrushchev; responses to the Cold War.

In the fifth grade, I wrote my first story on little tablet of 26 pages which I still have; the story is about a horse who has many adventures with his owner Tom. The pencil-illustrated story is a growing up story of a horse Skipper who encounters adventure at every stage after leaving his safe stable. He’s  racing cars, running red lights, performing in the circus (with Tom along, of course), going to the fair (and winning first prize), and finally going on a camping and hunting trip. The dramatic climax is this overnighter when Tom bags several rabbits for supper and during the night shoots two raccoons which become part of the breakfast menu. Also during the night a deer wanders by disturbing Skipper, and Tom shoots the deer. If that is not enough excitement, the next day Tom and Skipper are attacked by a wolf pack, “a flock of wolves,” which turns nasty when Tom now out of ammunition has to beat them with the gun barrel while Skipper “was kicking and biting” them. By the end of the fight, the wolves are all dead and Tom “tied them all together and hung them behind the cart.”  

Finally on the second day, they meet a panther in the woods, and a fierce fight ensues with Tom and his faithful horse eventually prevailing. The young author describes the ending: “The panther was all bloody from Skipper biting and kicking. Skipper was all bloody too.” In the meantime, Tom somehow gets more ammunition, and shoots the panther, after which “they tied the panther with the wolves” to the back of the cart. So our horse Skipper returns home and is acclaimed by everyone as a hero for saving Tom’s life; that evening Skipper is well fed in his stable, and the last drawing has Skipper contentedly out in the pasture with the sun shining.

If subtlety in character and difficult choices did not rate high with this young author, the imagination seemed to thrive on as much excitement and conflict as possible in the small space available—and a happy ending. If the story elicited responses from anyone who read it, I do not recall it. But the story had all the things I enjoyed most in my imagined and lived reality including loving animals, the horse especially and the wolf and puma (panther) stories I read during those years. I suppose one hears American Western and the biblical Samson themes in the hero being the horse, of course. Reading it as an adult a half century later reminds me of how much the rural hunting culture was a part of our community, although much of the violence and fighting with the wild animals was also a fifth grader’s summary appropriation of the horse stories and the western wolf stories I read at that time. The main horse stories I remember from that period were Walter Farley’s Black Stallion books; my first book of that series was The Black Stallion’s Sulky Colt (1954), but then I eventually read most of them from the school and Holmes County Library backwards to the original The Black Stallion (1941).

The wolf and the wild horse stories were in the spirit of Jack London’s Call of the Wild in which the untamed wild animal life is described and idealized. For the horses, usually a stallion, this wildness meant leadership of the mustang herd by a loyal lead mare, the stallion’s annual driving off the young studs and the eventual displacement of the old stallion himself. Some were told from the hunter or rancher’s point of view but most were from the animal’s sense of remaining in the wild, my idea of the good life. We had these dime novels in our school library which were shelves in the back of the room, and we could buy them from a TAB series which were sold monthly in our schools. These were inexpensive books for our various age levels and had a brand name in Tabatha the Cat; and my parents allowed us to buy them.

During these years, the Holmes County Library also opened a branch in Holmesville along Main Street in what used to be Bucher’s Store. It was open in the evenings and I remember visiting it. Reading was encouraged in the public schools, and I still have a 1954 certificate for completing a four-year course of prescribed reading in what was called the Ohio Pupils Reading Circle. The book I most recall on the list was, you guessed it, an animal story, Dusty of the Grand Canyon. Actually, I drew illustrations of the book which was chosen to be in the Holmes County Library for an exhibit. At that time the county Library was on the bottom floor of the Holmes County Court House.  Aside from the Bible, at Christmas of this year, my parents gave me my first book, an illustrated nature guide called In Woods and Fields (1950). I still have it in my library.

Aside from books, my brother Roy gave us excitement with his mechanical skills in building things. During these years he built a little tractor which he would drive around the farm, and to which we would attach our children’s wagon on the back for rides. It was a simple tractor powered by a Briggs and Stratton motor and with a gear box and lever to reduce the speed as the power went to the back wheel; only one wheel did the pulling. Roy worked on it for a long time, and even took it over to Holmesville occasionally driving it on the streets where it got considerable attention. Roy was like my father with the ability to do about anything mechanical or so it seemed to me; as I write this he regularly builds and flies model airplanes.

Later before the age of sixteen and a driver’s license, Roy stripped down a car and made it into an off-road vehicle; we called it a hoopey. This was an open vehicle with the top, doors, and sides off and only a seat. Roy somehow shortened the wheel base, and we ran it around the farm through the fields. One time one of us took it to Holmesville, and an Ohio State Patrol followed us home, and told us not to take it on the road again. I don’t think any of us had a driver’s license at that time anyway. Later on in the summer when we had bought a small combine to thresh our oats, barley and wheat and it was always breaking down; Roy was good at fixing it.

  

Some of us were more animal than mechanical, and a favorite farm activity during these years was going to the Wooster Farmers’ Livestock Auction. Aside from our small dairy in which we sold milk to the Ramseyer cheese house west of Holmesville, we also raised hogs for the market. Although at an earlier stage we bred sows and had litters, mainly we raised feeder pigs from the time they were weaned to their market size of about 225 pounds. My father Andrew had a half-ton Ford pick-up truck upon which we had made a rack for the back and we would regularly go to the Wooster Auction and buy small feeder pigs. This was interesting because we would walk over the top of the pig pens looking for the ones which we wanted to buy; then my father would get a number at the office and bid on them.

The pigs and all the animals would be shooed into the ring for display and selling. The front row seats usually went to the main buyers from the various meat companies, unless vacated for a coffee break, The rest of us were scattered all around the ring. The pigs were sold early in the evening, and when my father had bid up a litter, we would go up into the office above the ring, and pay for them, and we were soon going home again. Andrew preferred the white Yorkshire pigs or some mix of them which would stay quite lean, good for bacon he said, and generally brought a top dollar when we would sell them.

   

But sometimes we stayed longer, and saw the other animals selling, the beef and butcher cows being last. The highlight of the evening was when the bulls would come into the ring; this was our weekly Pamplona, the running of the bulls. At Wooster, a big caged animal scales was right behind the auctioneer and a holding pen was behind the sales ring door. One heard extra shouting by the aides, and then you could see the bulls’ big thick necks and heads behind the ring, sometimes some rumbling or kicking of their hoofs; it was anticipation. The auctioneer would say now clear the ring and the first row seats were cleared of children and all hands off the rails. The door opened and in charged a bull often snorting and moving from one side of the ring to the other as the stock men warily goaded them to move around so the buyers could take a look.

The cattlemen in the sales ring stayed close to a door or gate in case they needed to escape from the bull. Of course, sometimes a bull was quite calm and simply stood there like some Ferdinand, looking out over the crowd into the bright evening lights and smelling the fat cigars. The cattlemen were quite savvy about animals, and I don’t know of anyone who was ever hurt in the livestock yards. The main excitement and entertainment may have been in the anticipation of the bulls’ themselves; so be it, bulls are attractive animals. The bidding started, and soon the auctioneer would say “now let him go,” and the bull would go out the other side and back to his pen. When the bulls were finished, usually not more than a dozen, it was back to the routine animals. Years later, one evening in Moscow our hosts took us to a fine restaurant, and I ate some bull testicles for dinner. Whether it added to my virility as the Russian waiter claimed, I do not know. It did bring back many good memories of the Wooster bulls.

The auctioneer had a special recognition and status in our community, somewhat on the level of a secular preacher, and the Wooster auctioneer was the fairly low-key Chester James of Ashland. Our Holmesville auctioneer was Glen Lecky, and area’s best known auctioneers were the Kidron Auction standard bearers, John F. Andrews of Holmes County and the Kidron owner auctioneer Silas C. (Cy) Sprunger. The auctioneers usually wore genteel western hats and sometimes even a string tie such that they looked like Western country gentlemen. They often had lines which they predictably used; Andrews used to say of an especially fine dairy cow’s udder, that if she is not a good milker, she should take the signs down. Cy Spurnger of Kidron shocked us all when he ended his life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound on July 14, 1956.

We took the little pigs home and raised them for several months to prime meat status of about 225 pounds. We sent milk to the market from our dairy, and then we got whey back from the cheese house which we in turn mixed with grain feed and fed to the pigs. When they were ready for market, we loaded them onto the pick-up, washed them nice and clean with the hose, and took them to Wooster again. Sometimes we even took two loads, taking one load and returning home and getting another load by sale time. We would wait and watch for our batch to enter the ring, always hoping they would bring top price.  Andrew would buy us a treat at the restaurant, maybe a hot dog or a milk shake, and we would head home. Even though there were also nearby livestock auctions at Mt. Hope, Kidron, and Farmerstown, it was mainly the Wooster Auction which we patronized when we raised hogs for sale. The auction and stock yards are long gone, since the by-pass of Route 30 was built south of the city in the early 1970s.

If our farm life was fairly constant and attached to the seasonal rhythms of 1950s rural Ohio agriculture, our religious and church life now took on a new intensity. The Amish church for all its strictness is actually a low intensity church with few explicitly religious ceremonies and most norms simply caught rather than taught. We would have worship services every other week or about twice a month, and most of the time the ministers were simply part of the cultural geography. Religion and daily living were mixed in a fairly casual way and the folk tradition seemed to guide us as to what was God’s will. Now at Maple Grove Mission all that changed; there was no tradition.

So we picked up what other churches were doing at this time; we had three weekly services, Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and a Thursday evening meeting which included prayer, singing, teaching and Bible study.  My father had been busy with the Amish Mission Movement but most of this activity was distant from home and adults only or through letters and ministerial visits. Now, my father was superintendent of the Maple Grove Mission and the entire project revolved about our family, even at this young age.  By the end of the first year, Andrew listed “your mission staff” in the August 28, 1955 Maple Grove Mission Bulletin, and over half of the 15 offices were filled by family members. These included my mother Mattie as primary-aged children’s Sunday school teacher and finance secretary; my brother Paul (age 13) as usher and soon to be named librarian; my brother Roy (age 12) as recording secretary and later often listed as chorister or song leader. Grandfather Levi L. Schlabach, somewhat to our surprise, also decided to change from the Amish to Mennonite about this time coming to Maple Grove and immediately helped lead the adult class.

And there was my father’s cousin Albert with his wife Emma Troyer and family. Albert served as mission treasurer, assistant superintendent, and Sunday school teacher, helping my Grandfather Levi with the adult class. Also a musician, Albert and my father Andrew enjoyed playing the guitar and mandolin and various arrangements in evening singings. Amos Olinger from Holmesville sometimes joined them on the fiddle, and we would all sing along.  Although at this point we did not use the musical instruments in church, we often played together in homes. Being able to play instruments again meant a lot to Andrew; I remember one time we went out the Maple Grove Mission during the week to fix something, it may have been cement work by the steps. My father took along the mandolin which he played during the noon lunch and left the instrument lying on the lawn beside the truck. That afternoon, I accidently dropped a cement block on the mandolin and broke the neck. When Andrew saw it, he picked up the broken instrument and he did not say anything angry to me; he simply wept. I felt terrible.    

Maple Grove during these early years was really a mix of ex-Amish who were somewhat outreach oriented and becoming Mennonites. Later in life I was often in Amish study conferences in which sociologists or a graduate student would compare the traditional old order communities with the various Beachy Amish and conservative Mennonite groups which had Amish background. Inevitably in these comparisons, the liberal Amish or conservative Mennonites such as our Maple Grove Fellowship were compared unfavorably because they had developed doctrinal or explicitly biblical markers. They were becoming conservative Protestants in the way they defined their community in verbal and written forms as opposed to the traditional unwritten folk traditions of the old orders. It always seemed to me understandable why the casual old order folk approach was more appealing and comfortable to the outsider.

But I also sympathized with the modernizers’ dilemma. They had taken the big step of leaving the traditional community and its security and needed more guidelines which now were provided by explicit biblical quotations or doctrinal statements. The Mennonite academics especially should have been sympathetic to this project because their own church had gone through a similar change several generations earlier when it moved from a nineteenth century folk tradition to a more rational theologically based fellowship. Even the nonresistant peace teaching had undergone this change. The 1940s and 1950s Mennonite pacifist was often a conscientious objector because parents and family had been; it was our church tradition and simply what Jesus simply taught in the Sermon on the Mount.

Now this tongue-tied nonresistant became an embarrassment; I heard many a Mennonite’s complaints of having served in 1940s Civilian Public Service Camps and 1950s alternative service IW with young Mennonite and Amish rubes who could not give a rational explanation for their service. By the fifties Mennonites were supposed to give a consistent biblical and theological explanation for pacifism in quite a rational way. Some who had mixed with secular pacifists and Fellowship of Reconciliation’s religious and political pacifists were expected to give some explanation of how pacifism may contribute to better citizenship or even to provide American foreign policy initiatives. 

But back to Maple Grove, the main exception from our family and Amish Mennonites from the beginning was the poet Lorie Gooding (1919-1992) or as my father would say Lorie C. Conley Gooding. Born in Pennsylvania, Lorie Gooding was already known among the Mennonites when she had lived in Wayne County, and she got to know my parents when they would pick her up walking along the road with groceries. The Goodings lived on one of the hills several miles west of Holmesville, and the first we knew of the them was when the elderly father Joseph Gooding would come into town with a mule in the summer with wild  blackberries to sell in Holmesville; it seemed like something out of a nineteenth-century storybook. Joseph Gooding died in 1955 and was the first burial on the grounds of Maple Grove Mission.

Lorie Gooding’s poetry had been published regularly in the Mennonite periodical Gospel Herald, and a part of the editor Paul Erb’s interest in Maple Grove was to visit Lorie Gooding. But my father Andrew also cultivated Erb’s friendship because of his own writing interest, and because of similar millennial views regarding the end times. My father invited Paul Erb to come to Maple Grove to give his The Alpha and the Omega lectures which resulted in a book by the same title in 1955. In any case, Lorie Gooding soon began attending Maple Grove Mission, and except for our own immediate family I believe she was the only one who attended for the entire decade of Maple Grove’s existence. When Maple Grove ended in the mid-60s, she wrote a brief history of it. Herald Press published a volume of her poetry under the title Let There Be Music. Her poetry was pietistic, rhyming and spiritual, all traits which fell out of fashion during most of my adulthood, and she was not published as much after the sixties.

Lorie was a large woman and got into the car with a child on her lap, often Christina (also called Kippy) or little Danna. Lorie’s husband Raymond never seemed to have regular work outside the home and the family lived on modest resources, but in the 70s Lorie went on to school and got a licensed practical nurse degree and worked at the Castle Nursing Home. Her son Joe was my schoolmate for our elementary years at Holmesville. Lorie was always a good friend to our family, and when our family ended up in Millersburg Mennonite Church during the seventies and eighties, Lorie Gooding attended there too, now living in Killbuck.   

Lorie Gooding often wrote a poem for special occasions at Maple Grove, and by the fourth Thursday of November 1955, Maple Grove had a Thanksgiving program with over 30 parts to it of songs, scripture readings, brief meditations and poems, and a word on “our eternal inheritance” by Bishop Harry Stutzman. I along with five others (including Mary and Joe Gooding) had a poem; it was probably to us that Andrew noted in the program announcement: “speak plainly; learn your part well.” Andrew also noted Thanksgiving Day’s religious and national origins in the early Pilgrim and Puritan settlers in Massachusetts in 1620. Andrew wrote that the wild turkey, hominy, and venison had been replaced with native foods preserved and prepared by up-to-date methods, but that the custom remains. In the November 24, 1955, Maple Gove Mission Bulletin, he concluded: “We appreciate the recognition given to such a religious holiday by our honored president Eisenhower. May God bless the rulers and those in authority as they recognize the hand of providence that made America a land of plenty.”

Andrew’s sentiments of appreciation and gratefulness for living in America and respect for the rulers and the President were probably quite typical for Amish and Mennonites during that period. We viewed ourselves more as subjects than as citizens who were living through the heating up of the Cold War. American Mennonites and Amish were aware that not all was well for Mennonites and Christians in the Soviet Union. In 1955 Barbara Smucker’s gripping juvenile story of the Mennonites heroic escape from the Soviets in Berlin was published as Henry’s Red Sea. The destruction of the Mennonite communities and what were called the “suffering brethren” among all Christian groups in the Soviet Union was becoming well known. In the Soviet Union itself a major leadership change was underway from Joseph Stalin (1894-1953) to Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971). 

Stalin had died in 1953, and Khrushchev was consolidating his power as first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and in 1956 would give the secret speech to the party congress denouncing the atrocities of Stalinism.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn was about to be released from the Gulag and forced exile while secretly writing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The Gulag Denisovich story would not be published until 1962, but Khrushchev’s speech did signal some change in the Soviet Union and recognition of oppression and how an internal prison system of killing and exiling its own citizens had become a part of the Communistic system. The next year the American Mennonite Harold S. Bender and Canadian Mennonite David B. Wiens made a goodwill trip to the Soviet Union in order to try to visit and help their coreligionists. But they had little success and much disappointment because the authorities would not allow them to visit a single Mennonite settlement in the Soviet Union.

During these school years I had my first awareness of the Cold War when our teachers talked about what we should do in case of a bomb attack. In school we would hear talks of a bomb shelters or going to a basement, and the first Soviet name which I was aware of was Khrushchev, often pronounced in our community as rhyming with handkerchief. In retrospect, although I was somewhat of a fearful child with anxieties and bad dreams, the Russians bombing us did not register as one of them. Bomb shelters were too far away, and anyway my parents said they did not believe in them; I suppose in part guided as much by a pacifist impulse, and a certain Christian fatalism which said when it is time to die, one should accept death.

The debate of the Cold War and the competition of the Western democracies and Soviet communism would go on for most of my adult life. This same year 1955, William F. Buckley began the magazine National Review and became a major public intellectual for the American conservative movement. I never read the National Review, but I did read Buckley’s op ed column in the Wooster Daily Record as a youth, in fact often reading him until he died in 2008. Buckley was a devout Catholic, and during the seventies, I especially enjoyed his Public Broadcasting System “Firing Line” program on our Pittsburgh station with entertaining guests such as the British journalist and Christian convert Malcolm Muggeridge. Equally entertaining and informative were a variety of public figures with whom he disagreed and debated such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Germaine Greer and Noam Chomsky. But as a child the Soviet Union seemed far away, and I thought of myself, similar to my spiritual ancestors and my Amish Mennonite parents as an American subject. I was grateful that somehow in God’s providence, we had been blessed to find our way to a relatively free and we thought benign America.

Most of this comes from memory, but David Acker and Dempsey Becker gave me background on the 1950s Wooster Auction in a telephone conversation November 16, 2011, and November 28, 2011, respectively. The section on Maple Grove Mission draws from the Andrew A. Miller Collection at the Archives of the Mennonite Church in Goshen, Indiana. A fairly complete set of Maple Grove Mission bulletins are in those files. Some of the Cold War material appeared in a paper I presented at a May 1999 conference in Zaporozhe, Ukraine: “Not Totally with Honor: American Responses to Soviet Repression of Mennonites;” appeared in Mennonite Life (September, 2004) on line http://archive.bethelks.edu/ml/issue/vol-59-no-3/article/not-totally-with-honor-us-mennonite-church-respons/