1962 Optimism and Running

1962   Optimism and Running. Spring track season and running; visit of military and college recruiters to Waynedale; the death of Harold S. Bender; graduation week, end of classmates; summer activities; Sunday radio broadcast on WWST; youthful optimism and hope; building basketball court; end of summer camping trip to Michigan.

In the spring of 1962, I began and ended my high school sports career by running for the Waynedale track team. We were winding down the farm operation in dairy, so I had more time and somehow got it into my head that I could be a distance runner, at that time the mile run. During the winter before the season started, I would put on gum boots and run along the Holmesville Fredricksburg road, sometimes even in the snow, trying to build up stamina. Team members were often called into duty for a number of events, and I, eager to run, would often begin with the mile run always early in the meet, the half-mile a half-hour later in the middle of the meet, and finish up with a leg of the mile relay, or one lap around our track. Part of the enjoyment of doing the mile was the pacing, knowing about how fast I could run in the first three laps and still have gas in the tank, as we used to say, for the last lap and rounding the last bend to the finish line, teammates lined along the track encouraging with “push, push, push!”

I imagined I was a race horse, one of my old elementary school author Walter Farley’s black stallions running free on some Arabian desert. The reality, of course, was closer to our family’s trotting Bess or our Belgian draft horse Dick. My modest five-minute mile won a number of dual meets, and I still have the ribbons of races at Doylestown, Loudonville and Orrville. I also won the senior class decathlon trophy (with an arm missing these days) which our coach Wayne Wachtel gave to the top athlete of each class at the end of the season. I suppose the event had additional interest because the American Rafer Johnson had won the gold medal in the event in the 1960 Rome Olympics and greeted us each morning on a box of Wheaties. Okay, dear reader, you have boxes of trophies in storage, and here I’m wasting your time on one of the all-time smallest trophies. All true, and I can only plead for context and patience; aside from debate, this was the only trophy I ever won in school. And anyway, I’ll try to spare you anything but the briefest mention of my running the Caracas Marathon and the little medallion they gave me.  

I continued to run the rest of my life, finding it the all-weather and all-places natural stress reliever after a busy day at the office or long meetings at a hotel conference room. Running was equally good in the mornings; if I was away on travels or at home in Puerto Rico, Pennsylvania, or Venezuela (very briefly again, dear reader, I actually did run a marathon in Caracas), I was out early in the morning getting a few turns around the block, road, trail, or  track. I would get an on-the-ground feeling for the city, seeing the street sweepers on Bourbon Street at dawn or seeing the early morning teachers arrive at the Scottdale Elementary School.

Running is a democratic activity; available to all at little cost and you can take it at your own speed from walking to a faster pace. And I always felt better, a natural euphoria of little salty drops of water appearing on my back, forehead, crotch, and arms. Running, of course, became popular because of the fitness craze in the seventies, but I enjoyed it before and after. And after running, a good shower, what a good way to start the day or to come to dinner; it was almost as good as my seventh grade noon hour when I would run and play all sweaty, and then listen to Elsie Snyder read a book.

Two things happened that spring which somewhat shaped my life, both related to my future after Waynedale High School. One day all the boys in the senior class were called to the gymnasium for a meeting in regards to the American armed forces. Representatives of the various armed forces spoke to our assembly and mentioned the issues in defending the homeland as well as educational opportunities, how our fathers did this for us, and encouraged us to consider enlisting rather than waiting to be drafted after we registered at age eighteen. I remember the recruiters saying at the end about the draft, that because we live in an area with a number of conscientious objectors to war, they especially needed to have more recruits. 

As we walked out, one of my classmates said that he was considering enlisting, or he said loudly, he could turn yellow like the Amish and the Mennonites. I did not respond, and I chose to consider it a part of the usual school yard banter and put-downs. But it did make me think again of my beliefs and how we made choices regarding military service. This was before the Vietnam War was heating up or before the military became unpopular by the end of the decade.

A good number of my classmates served in the armed forces among them: Durbin Hartel, Stanley Haskins, Marvin Edwards, Jacob Ritchie, and Roy Snyder. I’m sure there were others, but these I knew quite well, and I remember meeting my oldest school friend Roy Snyder at Holmesville very briefly before he was leaving; I think he told me that he was shipping overseas. Again, it brought into stark relief that he had made a costly decision, and I hoped mine was equally so as a Christian pacifist.

My commitment called on me to live defenseless as a nonresistant, and during most of the rest of my life I worked among pacifist Christians.  Beginning with the Vietnam War our Age of Aquarius hippy generation moved against the military, and I thought all wars would cease. I later worked with a number of religious political pacifists who often carried a thinly veiled condescension toward all military personnel. But I never could feel quite this way; I would think of my old classmates, all honorable people like the centurion whose daughter Jesus healed.  

But I knew that my path went in another direction. That spring I was called to the Waynedale office and met by a counselor from Goshen College by the name of Walter Yoder. It was the only college interviewer whom I had ever seen or met. Someone must have given him my name, and I remember well his telling me about the college and for some reason he thought that I had a calling for the Christian ministry. I, of course, had zero interest in becoming a pastor. Somehow, my father’s experience of being a minister was enough for our family. But there was no point in going into this story with Yoder, and I remember his specifically talking about the Goshen Biblical Seminary and that I could go on to school and get some financial assistance. If he mentioned his most notable faculty member, Harold S. Bender (1897-1962), I do not recall it.

Bender died that Fall soon after giving the benedictory prayer at the gathering of twelve  thousand at the Mennonite World Conference in Kitchener, Ontario. He had made the biggest influence on the Mennonite world in the first half of the century, and I worked with his thought, especially what became known as The Anabaptist Vision (see 1944), during my entire adult life. This vision of Anabaptist Mennonites as a distinctive church of love and nonresistance, accountable community, and Christian discipleship inspired me. But I never met Bender nor would I, so I simply imagined him as many other younger ones did. My friend, the poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf even had him announcing Marilyn Monroe’s death on the same day Bender gave the final sermon at the international Mennonite gathering.

Anyway, the long and short is that I never seriously considered going to any college or university right away. For one thing, we were still a part of the Amish and conservative Mennonite cultural environment where one was expected to learn a trade, craft or business and work for the family’s well-being until age twenty. I don’t recall anyone ever saying this exactly, but with my father still on an emotional and financial leave and my oldest brother Paul leaving that fall for Eastern Mennonite College, it seemed the thing to do. At the same time, everyone including my parents and family did expect all my brothers and sisters to eventually go to college. 

    

Graduation was the end of Waynedale, and the main thing that I remember is never seeing these people again. Bob Hartman was an Apple Creek minister’s son and a good student with whom I shared many classes during the day and at night passed his car parked in front of his girlfriend’s house at Holmesville. I never saw him again. Earl Hunt was another. He showed up at Waynedale his last year or two; we were good friends. For a teenager, he was quite explicit in his Christian beliefs and also a pilot, but he disappeared, and I never saw him again. Ron Myers (may he rest in peace) and Robert Baker were good farming (vocational agriculture class) friends whom I missed, and later at a reunion Baker told me he went into the car business.

Herb Amstutz walked Ruth Clark to each of her classes for four years, married her and then made a career at Lehman’s Hardware which became famous for selling survival equipment especially around the turn of the millennium, and I would see him there. Phil Williams also married his classmate Carol Finley and then made a life of keeping the College of Wooster’s grounds in fine order. One more comes to mind but his photo is not in the 1962 yearbook; I later discovered that he did not finish at Waynedale. Jacob Mast was very bright and virtuous, and as of this writing in 2012, I had not seen him personally since school days. Still, it seemed as if I did meet him, for I enjoyed his son Gerald’s friendship when Gerald did his graduate studies here at the University of Pittsburgh and now is teaching at Bluffton University.

Among the young women, Peggy Hodge stood out as the school hottie who seemed to excel in everything from winning Betty Crocker Homemakers awards to being the football queen. She went on to a career with the American Express Company in New York, and we were sent regular updates on her achievements. Peggy, Marvin Edwards, Phil and Carol Williams, Beth Bricker, Glenda Robert Farver and a number of the Holmesville gals pulled us together every five years for reunions. Judy Eberly was a handsome Mennonite gal who made a career in nursing and eventually met a Holmes County pilot Andy Miller with whom she had a good life and family in Edmonton, Alberta.

Finally, there were the Holmesville students with whom I had studied for twelve years and will always consider friends even though we seldom saw each other again: Malinda Bokel, Jackie Burkhart, Patty Dilworth, Nancy McCluggage, Susan Miller, Joyce Paulosak, Alice Ramseyer, Emily Shaw, Roy Snyder, and Larry Stallman.  Alice Wolfe and Emily Smith married good Holmes County men and settled in Missouri and Alaska, respectively. Malinda Bokel Gales became a key player in having Holmesville reunions, and for many years worked in the Holmes County Public Health complex where our daughter Hannah now works (2011).   

The graduation week was memorable for hanging around; we spent the mornings at school walking in step to Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” march, and going through the standing and sitting motions, it seemed endlessly. Then in the afternoon, we decorated the gym in the blue and white class colors with the theme was “hitch your wagon to a star” vividly displayed. Or we just hung around somehow feeling this was the end of something.  At noon some of the boys paraded in front of the high school in hot cars (even a convertible with the top down) displaying to underclassmen what perks graduation week could afford. Then we would go out for lunch at the Apple Creek and Guerne dairy isles (ice cream and sandwich shops) and more hanging around. On commencement evening, we took a photo in front of our house, with my parents Andrew and Mattie standing on either side of me, both wearing flowers on their lapels and looking contented. They look so young; they were only forty-four years old.

There were the usual speeches, and my role in the ceremony was to present the class gift which I don’t recall, and I helped in singing which I do recall quite vividly. For the benediction, our high school choir sang the anthem “The Lord Bless You and Keep You” which I loved for the bass and soprano runs but also for the lyrics which I have never forgotten. Now that I check the program, I see that this song was actually in the baccalaureate service. After the commencement ceremony, our family went out for dessert at one of the ice cream places along US Route Thirty east of Wooster. Then it was over; I seldom saw any of these people again. During the following weeks of summer it all seemed surreal, later I sometimes scorned the whole experience (especially in college), but finally Waynedale High School just kind of faded away, like remembering a life in another country.    

There was plenty going on that summer, mainly in work. That summer I began working with my brothers full-time for the Jacob Miller and Clarence Sommers construction groups. We spent most of the summer building the United Methodist church building at Justice along Route 62 near Navarre. The construction site was about an hour drive from home morning and evening, and with the farming and evenings of softball and Pleasant View Mennonite socials, it was a busy summer. We would drive through Waynedale territory of Fredricksburg and Mt. Eaton on the way, but I never saw any of my classmates.

There was one other major activity that summer on Sunday mornings. My father had begun a radio broadcast, called the Gospel Broadcast, on the local radio station WWST. I’m not sure why my father felt a need to do this because the station already had various Mennonite and other Christian programs available, but he did it for several years. Our employer Jacob and Elizabeth Miller paid for the air time of fifteen minutes which came early, seven forty-five each Sunday morning. This was a live broadcast of the Miller brothers quartet (1958) singing and our father Andrew giving a meditation. We would get up early in the morning, settle into the large studio room with what seemed like egg carton type of walls and ceiling and was down in a pit at the station.

Meanwhile our father and the engineer, usually Ted Evans, sat in little cubicles up on the top floor behind glass windows where we could see each other. Evans would point and a light would go on when the mike was live in our studio. It would probably have made more sense to record the program at home, and we tried it several times but these sessions ended mainly in arguments. The immediacy of having to do it in the studio seemed to go better. We would open and close with live music, and my father presented meditations intended to be of Christian inspiration. Our opening song was always “Then sings my soul,” or “How Great Thou Art,” which may already tell you that this program was a Mennonite family doing its own stichk of the Billy Graham program, however strange that may sound.   

But it was not strange to me at the time. In the summer of 1962, I thought the world’s skies were wide open and for the taking. In activities with my brothers Paul, Roy and now David, we seemed to do about everything together whether it was working during the day, playing sports in the evenings, dating pretty and interesting young women, or helping with various Maple Grove Mission projects. Even in our circumscribed and quite provincial world, I felt that we could do about anything we set out to do-- whether in manual labor, studies, sports, social life, or religious endeavors. It is a part of youthful optimism and hope and I suppose the human condition that we find our successes in our worlds, however small or large that universe may be. The star to which I was hitching my wagon may have been the Miller family and Holmes County, but it seemed to me the wagon was well equipped to go beyond that.    

That summer we built a good sized-concrete court in the lawn behind our house. We brought up gravel and sand from Salt Creek behind the house, and brought in a cement mixer and put up a nice backboard with the name of our  team—the Falcons, perhaps not unrelated to our plain little cars. I remember we stayed up all night building the court, putting chicken fence for re-enforcement in the concrete, smoothing it with trowels, and the next day going to work early for Miller construction. The basketball team was really our four brothers and a few friends and I don’t recall that we played many games outside the immediate family, but it provided a lot of good energy and good will. We even put up lights to play at night.  Because my brother Paul left that Fall to study at Eastern Mennonite College, and David would soon take up interscholastic ball at Waynedale, it was the last summer of our playing together in this way. A few years later when we were all gone from home, my father used the concrete base of the court to place on it an office for this various businesses which finally led to a Miller music store.

But we had one other final recreational fling that summer that we were all together at home. It was a camping trip together to upper Michigan, well a trip of sorts, as I will explain. Camping was a strong part of our boyhood experiences, and we camped in our father’s woods in the summer and into the Fall. A regular Fall season ritual was to camp out on Thanksgiving eve, sometimes with snow on the ground and on our faces in the morning, and Roy was the master camper in equipment and making the food; Billy Hites, a neighborhood friend, often joined us too. I was totally along for the friendship, a poor camper having never improved much since childhood years when I got scared as darkness came, began whistling, and headed home for my bed. Anyway, on our last summer together the Falcons (that would be three Miller brothers) were going to do a week-long camping trip to Upper Michigan.

We spent evenings and many road hours (to and from work) planning the trip, buying equipment and plotting the route, the campgrounds, lakes, forests and parks where we would stay. I remember thinking we might see some bobcats or a lynx which were reported in that territory. We even got the Lorie Gooding to write us a poem for the occasion which had some lines about the fearless falcons. We invited the Yoder brothers (Verton and Marion) and perhaps Ervin Stutzman (from Shreve) to join us, although I’m not sure these friends ever took our plans very seriously. The planning went beautifully and long until all at once mid-August came, and Paul had to leave for school in Virginia. We never made it to Upper Michigan’s woods except in our imaginations. Since then, we’ve all done our share of traveling, but occasionally I hear Paul quote Emily Dickinson in the poem which begins:   

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,

And then I remember our fearless falcons’ 1962 summer travels to the Upper Michigan wilds:  

There were no trips, no camps to boot

But planning them was such a hoot.

Peter Christian Lutkin (1858-1931) wrote the lyrics and music to our Waynedale Baccalaureate hymn “The Lord Bless You and Keep You” which is based on Numbers 6:24-26. Below the text:

The Lord bless you and keep you,

The Lord lift His countenance upon you,

And give you peace, and give you peace,

The Lord make His face to shine upon you,

And be gracious unto you, be gracious,

The Lord be gracious, gracious unto you.

Amen.

Harold S. Bender’s participation at the 1962 Mennonite World Conference in Kitchener, Ontario, and the reference to Marilyn Monroe is from Julia Kasdorf: “Marilyn, H.S. Bender and Me” in The Body and the Book (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, 120-142). 

1961 Debating and Its Limits

1961  Debating and its Limits. John F. Kennedy elected president; Eisenhower’s farewell address; Maple Grove Mission church bus, Amish Mennonite to a community evangelical mission transition; Maple Grove softball team, Valentine Popeye Miller; Waynedale senior year, class officer, beginnings of Central Christian High School; the Waynedale Debate Club, Robert Kinkaid, jazz, and the limits of debating.

In September of 1960, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon debated on national television. The next year 1961 began with the inauguration of a new president John F. Kennedy. He gave the Waynedale High School students the feeling of a new frontier which he announced. Physical education and math teachers emphasized physical and mental fitness, beating the Russians to the moon, referencing the president; we responded to Kennedy’s youth and vigor. Magazines were filled with photos of the large Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy family, and the new president and his French-looking wife Jackie and the cute little children Caroline and John. Our own family members were not partisans of the Kennedy presidency.  Although my father and mother mainly ignored national politics, my brother Paul had taken sufficient interest in the presidential campaign to have a Nixon Lodge sticker placed on the bumper of our little Ford Falcon.

Our Amish Mennonite community was concerned mainly about Kennedy’s religion; he was a member of the Roman Catholic Church which had persecuted our ancestors. I remember over- hearing a Sunday lunch conversation of our bishop Harry Stutzman and some ministers; a few of whom were suggesting that this may be one time for us all to vote so that a Catholic government under Rome would not be established in Washington. They referred to the European Reformation days, hoping never again to suffer persecution under Catholic rule. My girlfriend Fanny Mae had read a paperback on the Catholic Church’s designs on controlling American society, and a whole evening on a date was given to telling me about the dangers of a Catholic president.

Three days before Kennedy took office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), now an old man in his seventh decade gave a January 17 farewell address to the nation. It was a note of appreciation to his countrymen for the opportunity serving them in war and peace and to his cooperative relationship to Congress in leadership. He gave counsel of not expecting quick solutions for a utopian world during the Cold War, warnings of a military industrial complex, misgivings of spending the next generation’s wealth, and exhortation to pursue the enlargement of freedom with a modest use of power and the hopes for prosperity and peace. Amish and Mennonites had an interesting identification with Eisenhower because although we rejected military service, we felt a kinship to his basic Christian decency and growing up in a River Brethren family. I did not hear or see the speech on TV, but for most of the rest of my life I heard references to Ike’s warning of too much influence of a military-industrial complex.

In 1961 I was more interested in the family, school and church complex. At the mature age of seventeen, I along with my brothers Paul and Roy became drivers of the Maple Grove Mission church bus. My father purchased a school bus which he painted black and white and it was on the road on Sunday mornings, evenings and Thursday evenings. The purchase of the bus was a part of the transition of Maple Gove from an Amish Mennonite mission to a community evangelical mission.  I drove the bus to Holmesville picking up Ted Guysinger, Edward Martin and Ross McVay in early stops and ending up with the Cline sisters, Florence, Nancy, Becky and Mary, who lived near Paint Valley west of Millersburg.  In between, the route went through Millersburg, Killbuck, and Welcome.  Most of these youths were a few years younger than my brothers and came to Maple Grove without their parents, and we were good friends. Often, they would go home with us for Sunday noon lunch and stay for the afternoon until time for the evening service. Most were eventually baptized into the Christian faith at the Maple Grove Mission.

A number of others also started coming to the mission from the western Holmes County area. Children and youth came to attend Sunday school classes from families with names such as Philips, Lowe, Russel, Boyle, Edinger, Garns, Christopher, and Jones. I suppose in mission terms, it was the indigenization of the Maple Grove Mission which Andrew now called a community gospel church. The most likely to attend were of course not the settled families of western Holmes County, but people in transition, recent arrivals from southern Ohio and West Virginia who had moved into the area seeking employment. This gave a certain theological flavor to the mission because many brought a Baptist and Pentecostal background which fit the impulses of my father at that time.

The result was that the Amish Mennonite families gradually all dropped out and quietly started attending the more settled or traditional congregations. By the time Maple Grove ended several years later, the only one family of Amish Mennonite origins remained--- Andrew and Mattie’s family. I suppose some of this was also in my father’s personality. Although Andrew had legally incorporated the mission as non-for-profit church by 1958 with a board, it was Andrew who ran it. The board consisted of family members and at times absentee supporters such as Lewis Beech, the grocer at Holmesville and Alvin Yoder, a Shreve farmer whose son Verton came to the mission and ran around with us. Maple Grove Mission was always the personal project of my father Andrew. 

In the summer Maple Grove Mission had a softball team consisting of my brothers Paul, Roy, David, and me and a collection of pick-ups which my father would sometimes call mission projects and at other times riffraff.  Paul and Roy were the leaders and scheduled games with some other churches although we were not in a in a league (I doubt that our team could have been accepted). Our team members attended church (especially during the summer) or had friendships with Maple Grove girls. One such was Valentine Miller, a Berlin resident who everyone called Popeye and was a notable umpire for the Berlin slow-pitch league. A boy friend to one of the Killbuck girls, Popeye soon was one of our most memorable players, shouting  obscenities in several languages, providing great drama running the bases, and gathering scratches and wounds all over his arms and legs.

Our players would arrive with their girlfriends in cars and pickups which seemed bigger, older and louder than anything our opposing teams could drive.   They smoked and chewed tobacco on and off the field and swore vociferously at disputed calls. We won our share of games, but I recall some puzzled looks by our more moderate church competition. On the way to the bench, one of our players loudly noted that he had chains in the car trunk which could be taken out after the game. Another time, an umpire was threatened with a softball bat for an unusually bad call against our Maple Grove team. We finally made it a requirement that players needed to attend church the Sunday before a game, if they wished to play that week. 

A summer of church softball, construction and farm work, and youth socials, soon gave way to my senior year of high school. I had joined the college preparatory guild and joined the Future Teachers of America club. I took greater interest in high school culture, and my classmates elected me senior class vice-president at the end of my junior year. The president was Bob Riebe, and I recall his father and a teacher Mel Riebe coming to me after the election and asking whether I was sure I would be around in the fall. I asked why and he asked whether I was going to the Mennonite’s new school called Central Christian High School in Kidron. I remember it well, because at the time the question seemed so strange to me.

Until then it had never occurred to me that I would or should attend Central Christian High School although in retrospect I can understand why as a Mennonite the teachers would have thought of me as a possibility. I think Connie Gerber and Dorcas Steffen transferred to the Central Christian High School for their senior year, as did a number of other Mennonite students. But my parents would not have even considered the time and expense of going to a private parochial school. Later, all my younger siblings, James and the girls, attended Central Christian.     

That fall I joined Waynedale’s Debate Club which led to a lifetime of argumentation. From the club a varsity team (that was the actual term) was selected by the speech and English teacher Robert Kincaid, and this team prepared for the county tournament with invitationals leading up to it. We debated in Saturday invitationals at Canton McKinley High School and at the College of Wooster, as well as a few others. The year-long topic was, Resolved: Federal aid should be increased to public education. Two bright fellow-Holmesville students were the negative team members, Connie Schlegel and Richard Seaman, and a diligent young woman a class or two behind me Carol Grossenbacher joined me on the affirmative.  We soon discovered after some study, practice and invitationals that we were capable debaters. At the invitational tournaments, the judges would give their evaluations on written cards, and these were encouraging.

We had index cards in a box which had factual information on the amounts of federal and state and local aid and quotes by important people about the advantages and problems associated with increased federal aid to public schools. Debate helped me in awareness of the importance of factual evidence, analyzing faulty reasoning, persuasive speech and rebuttal of the opposing side’s presentation. Both teams had an opportunity to present their case and then could do short rebuttals of the opponent’s argument. Debate also appealed to my competitive side because we were given points for categories such as oral presentation, use of evidence, logic, and persuasion and rebuttal. In the end a winner was named, and from the invitational tournaments we gained a sense for winning.

We won the Wayne County championship and would go on to the state tournament in Columbus as a photo story in the Wooster Daily Record announced. What I remember about the state tournament was more than debating. This overnight trip away from home included a comfortable hotel stay and sitting around at dinner with our worldly coach Robert Kincaid and teacher Stella McCleary, both of whom had a wine at dinner and smoked afterwards. But here was Mister Kincaid’s surprise to me; he took us to an Italian menu restaurant and there was a lounge that played American jazz. I had never heard music which seemed more unusual in the way it focused on flats and dissonance.

All my life, music had been melody and harmony but jazz seemed so wanting in resolution; it seemed to me that it always ended without coming together, slightly out of kilter. Our Columbus debate tournament had enough strangeness, but the jazz music was the dissonant stand-out. After our debate season was over in the spring, Kincaid invited us to his apartment in Wooster one evening as a kind of end-of-the-year celebration dinner. All evening his stereo was playing music, you guessed it, jazz and some kind of atonal rain symphony. He might as well have been playing Pierre Boulez’s serial music; it was the memorable part of the evening.

I was now interested in debate and when an Oxford team came to the College of Wooster, I attended with the topic, Resolved: Better to be Red than Dead. The debate was a live and controversial topic at the time of the Cold War, and the auditorium was filled with people. I loved the debate, the arguments on both sides of how best to control the expansion of Soviet Communism, even though as a pacifist I probably tilted toward the affirmative team. I also loved the freedom of this level of debate. One of the British debaters mentioned that the American debater’s argument reminded him of a Texas Longhorn: “a point here and a point there, and a lot of bull in between.” How I wished we had that freedom to also attack the opponent in our high school debates; we did have that freedom in debates at home.

Although I never was on a debate team after that one year at Waynedale, in a sense to debate was simply to participate in the family enterprise. My brothers and sisters enjoyed debate and often we would discuss and disagree vigorously around the dinner table whether it was the cover story of Newsweek, regarding if or how Kennedy should have supported the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, whether Paul Samuelson or Milton Friedman were closer to accurately describing economics, or the merits of the Volkswagen Bug, the French Renault, or the Ford Falcon. Often the discussions were much closer to home, regarding the merits or flaws of a teacher, the looks, intelligence or personality of a girl, and what was said by a preacher, including our own father.

We did not spare each other’s feelings, and after the meal it was considered a good meal if there had been a good discussion, meaning a good disagreement of looking at the person or issue from several points of view. My father sometimes transcended the discussion or at least tried to appeal to divine authority or Scripture to end the discussion but with limited success. It was a family joke that our father loved to pray at the table because it was the one time when he could get all of us to be quiet and possibly even listen to him. I got the impression that our girl friends and later spouses were alternatively mostly appalled and sometimes attracted to these dinner-time debates.

The issues of that Waynedale High School debate experience remained with me for the rest of my life. I had finished twelve years of public education as a student, sent our children to public schools, and gave two decades to the local Southmoreland school board where the issue of funding and control the schools (local, state, federal level) and how to make education available to all our children was as relevant at the beginning of a new century as it was 50 years ago. And I have spent most of my life arguing. In fact my debating experience served me very well during university years and in a critical stance during my twenties. It seemed so rewarding from family and college that it became my default contribution to about any conversation.

However, as a middle-aged adult on committees and in church, community, school and management meetings, a good thing could lose value. My inclination to debate often did not serve me well in leadership. Much of a group’s life and discussion does not consist in debate, demolishing someone else’s argument and proving that my point of view is best or at least better. Much of leadership I discovered is listening to seek consensus, areas of agreement and attempting unity and encouraging all to move together. My debating style has embarrassed many a family member and friends when I became so enthusiastic or dogmatic about my words. Friends who were my natural allies and agreed with me at the beginning were on the other side or neutral at best at the end of a too strident rebuttal.

Two of our children during high school served as student representatives when I was on the Southmoreland school board, and I’ll never forget the night one of them said on the way home, “Now Dad, do you think it was really that big an issue.” So I tried to remember that I once had a childhood nickname (not by my Mother) prior to my high school debating, the Pennsylvania Dutch lamm (lamb), and that listening, self-denial, consensus, affirmation and compromise were also Christian virtues.

But it has never been easy. During the seventies when the therapists were encouraging us to express our feelings and opinions, it never quite fit; I had already tried that or I must have grown up in a family which was ahead of the game. And then there was the traditional Swiss German American Mennonite male who said little and did so much, a kind of pacifist version of Hemmingway’s silent males who had courage under duress. Somehow those silent and somewhat repressed male genes must have missed our Miller and Schlabach family pool. But as a teenager one need not think of all these issues. During my senior year in high school, I learned that one could look at an issue from several points of view. I dressed up in a bow tie and coat and debated—and won. Now, ye gods, stand up for debaters.

The Wooster Daily Record of February 15, 1962, page 16 carried a head “Waynedale is County Debate Champ” with a photo of four young debaters and Coach Robert Kincaid clutching a trophy. When I visited Waynedale High School on March 9, 2011, the trophy was still on display in the library. I read this chapter to the monthly Men’s Prayer Breakfast of the Scottdale Mennonite Church on December 3, 2011, and at the Mennonite/s Writing VI: Solos and Harmonies Conference, March 29- April 1, 2012, at Eastern Mennonite University.  

1960 Waynedale and Pleasant View

1960   Waynedale and Pleasant View. Frequent absenteeism, continuing high school, changing to college bound courses; Roy and Ronald Fike, chemistry class; teachers: Ira Amstutz, Melvin Black, Stella McCleary, Harold Henderson, and Dorothy Drushal; a separate social life among Pleasant View Mennonites; socials and parlor games, girlfriends and cars; examples of international Christian service; winter skating and summer baseball and the 1960 World Series.

During my four years of high school, I was frequently absent. I look at my old report cards: grade nine, 15 days; grade ten,  22 days; grade eleven, 19 days and grade twelve 14 days absent. An average absenteeism of seventeen and one half days of school each year or I was away from classes each year for three and one half weeks. Those three and a half weeks were a busy time; I was the main farmer of our small 80-acre dairy, hogs and cropland. The small herd of about eight cows was morning and evening milking. Also, in the fall, I took off a week harvesting (picking) corn, and in the spring I often took off a week for planting. Often in the winter, I would take off a few days for hauling manure out of the cattle shed and spread it onto the frozen fields. 

Even though we now had purchased a new Massy Ferguson tractor, we still used our horse-drawn manure spreader powered by the back wheels, and the back wheels had much better traction on the frozen ground. When the ground was wet or slippery, the back wheels easily started slipping, hence no power on the web and tedders spreading the manure. In fact when we went Mennonite, we kept some of our horse drawn equipment such as manure spreaders and planters and simply now pulled them with the new tractor. 

I enjoyed farming, the animals especially, but also the crop and field work, and I also knew that I was contributing to our family welfare. My mother and older brothers helped as needed, and David and little James also helped although farm work seemed to have diminishing interest among the younger set. With my father on an emotional leave of absence, I somehow knew that I was at the end of the line for our small dairy and hog operation. Paul hinted about going on the college in the next year or two, and we knew Roy would be gone when he reached age 20. 

When I reflect on those years today, I think my on-going work on the farm as a teenager and Paul and Roy’s income from working on the construction crew eased my continuing in high school after age 16; our family of 10 was taken care of quite well. My father Andrew had finished off the mortgage before his paternal abdication, so we felt financially secure. I don’t recall any specific conversation with my parents and Paul or Roy about it. It simply was assumed by that summer of 1960, I would continue in high school. This decision was certainly not because I was the family academic or scholar; both Paul and Roy were stronger than I was in their study, memory and analytic skills when they were interested in a subject.   

Not that my older brothers were always interested. One of my most memorable days at Waynedale High School was as a freshman in study hall when the commercial teacher Ronald Fike threw my brother Roy out in the hall shouting at him: “You will never amount to anything!” Roy later told me that it was about a tiff he and Fike had in a General Business class, Fike losing it when Roy declared he was quitting high school and telling the teacher that “in twenty years I'll amount to more than you ever will." Fike hit Roy over the head with a magazine and sent him out in the in the hall, in hopes that the principal Edwin Thompson would pick him up for an office visit. Okay, that is the Miller version, and I’m sure the Mister Fike version would have more sympathy for a teacher unseemly provoked.

Although detention after school was mainly used as punishment, in 1960 errant high school students were still paddled by the principal Edwin Thompson. I recall one of my best friends telling me on the way home from school about his getting whacked in the principal’s office. I think he had been caught smoking in the toilet or something. He was terribly humiliated, and I was truly sorry for him. I am glad that corporal punishment in our schools has diminished during my lifetime although I’m not a purist on these issues. At the same time I wish the government had never entered into this question, and as a society we had simply allowed it to diminish by local cultural practice. Appropriate punishment and expulsion should be an administrative and educational decision for school personnel, not a legal one. Today, after serving about two decades on the local Southmoreland (Pennsylvania) school board, I refuse to sit through these tedious expulsion and legal hearings in protest to them being held at all.      

But back to entering my junior year of high school, I also decided that I would probably continue in college after high school, maybe become a teacher or a game warden (like Sidney Coral). I think that choice was influenced by the teachers I knew and liked close by. I switched to the academic courses which the college-bound students were taking for my last two years. My junior year I took chemistry and in my senior year physics, both two-session classes and now there was no time left for agriculture classes, so this decision was the end of Future Farmers of America. I also took some additional math class in geometry and senior English. Although I had enjoyed Schaffter’s biology, I did not take the science and math classes because I liked them or had any natural aptitude for them. I simply was told that a college-bound student needed them. They proved quite difficult, especially given my spotty attendance and meager preparation.

Working for me in this transition was my chemistry (junior year) and physics (senior year) teacher, a Kidron Swiss Mennonite named Ira Abraham Amstutz (1907-1976) although most of the students called him Doc Amstutz. I think he had some sense for my background and was considerate and kind, in spite of my chronic absenteeism. Chemistry especially assumed considerable math background for which I was badly prepared. Amstutz was bright but also personable with students, often chuckling with a laugh deep in his throat and his round belly bumping up and down. Then, he would say: “observe, students.” Connie Gerber and Dorcas Steffen of Kidron were also in the chemistry class and one day, Amstutz asked the two girls to bring shoofly pie to school for a treat which they did. I had never heard of shoofly pie, but it tasted sweet and thick. I later learned that it was the traditional sweet molasses pie associated with central and eastern Pennsylvania Dutch culture.

Amstutz also loved to philosophize on life, often giving local illustrations. In describing the speed of gravity (physics class), he told of some farm boys who shot guns up in the air trying to see how many of the bullets would land back down on the tin roof of a large straw shed. He said they were deadly foolish because the bullets after coming to a stop up in the air would regain the same speed on return as the velocity they had when they left the gun barrel. I never heard an accidental death happening from such shooting until at the very time of this writing a young woman from Mount Hope, Ohio, was killed by a bullet from a gun a man shot accidently into the air.

Another memorable teacher was Melvin Black who taught English my junior year and lived in Fredericksburg, or at least had an apartment there--filled with books. I recall visiting him at Fredericksburg and hearing him talk about his books, loaning a few to my brothers and me. An elderly man, I believe he was only at Waynedale one year perhaps finishing out his career, having taught out towards Loudonville most of his life. But what caught my interest in his English class was writing and reading English and American literature, reading short stories by O. Henry and poetry by the American poets Emily Dickenson and Robert Frost. The same was true with senior English when we read Shakespeare and pondered over the brooding “Macbeth” lines of  “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.”

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

It was not that I agreed with the murderous Macbeth. It was rather that one could write so well and so wisely of queens, kings, shepherds and even witches. I still have my little paperback we used in class and see that I noted the birds and Scripture allusions in the play. Our teacher Stella McCleary was quite a fair and foul work herself, treating us like some unwashed Philistines polluting her sacred temple of first year college English. But that aside, this approach of literature and the student entering into another world of Elizabethan England or to a New England poet was quite a change from my freshman and sophomore English classes. Those sessions were mainly reading Reader’s Digest, silly jokes and the most mundane pabulum imaginable, all presumably under the encroaching educational doctrine of relevance.

I have since come to the conclusion that with few exceptions the more a teacher tried to be relevant, the worse the class. Conversely, the more the teachers were in love with their subjects (and of course liked us the students) and we entered the world of that subject, the better the class. Okay, I know Alden Schaffer’s song birds and waterfowl were nearby, but still it was his interest in seeing them and talking about them that sparked my interest.  Same with Stella McCleary. 

Two other memorable teachers were Harold Henderson and Dorothy Drushal who taught American history and American problems. Henderson, better known as Bugsy, gave us a basic tour of American history beyond the stories of Washington and Lincoln and got me interested in some of the unique elements of the American experiment. We learned the difference between a pure democracy Roman style and a republic with a constitution, independent courts, and the rule of law, the three branches of government. He was probably the definition of unimaginative regarding teaching method because he sat on his desk and lectured and asked questions, but somehow he got me interested in American history and government. Dressed formally with a bow tie, I think many students considered him slightly goofy, but I enjoyed his class and the subject. By the end of the school year in 1960-61 Mister Henderson selected me to take the Ohio State Department of Education district scholarship test in American History, and I came in third; I still have the certificate.

The other teacher who got my attention was Dorothy Drushal, who taught American Problems during my senior year. As I recall the class, it was early social studies and sociology type, a window on how American society functioned. But mostly I recall Drushal; she brought along to class Time and Newsweek which we could take home or read. These magazines, also available in the library, became an open facet to the world. We soon got Newsweek at home, but I think it was my brother Paul who subscribed to it, and our family has been a subscriber over the past 50 years. That may end, however, what with the easy access to the news electronically and current editor (2011) Tina Brown’s entertainment with news approach.  One other aspect of Ms. Drushal was that her husband taught at the College of Wooster (later becoming the college’s president) and was president of the Wooster City Council. So we got regular, perhaps too regular, updates of what was happening in Wooster, its college and her family’s considerable achievements.  

So I remember the teachers because for me the classroom was high school. I did not have any social life outside of the classroom. When I heard class mates carry on regarding football games, dances and plays, I was hearing of another world. Our family and church were sectarian and had our separate social life with the Pleasant View Mennonites near Berlin, colloquially called PVs. One day, I looked up from study hall and a conservative Mennonite couple was walking up the hallway of Waynedale High School. The man was dressed like a member of a plain-clothed holiness or Nazarene sect. The woman however had a white prayer covering on her head; they were conservative Mennonites. They were my parents, Andrew and Mattie.

Everyone looked up and stared at them as though some creatures from Mars had arrived at our school. It was not that the Amish and conservative Mennonites were not in our community; they were throughout our entire neighborhood from Holmesville to Mount Eaton; occasionally I’d look out the window and see a buggy go by State Route 250. But usually we were worlds apart. I simply looked at my parents, somewhat embarrassed and confused because two worlds, my school and my home life, had been brought together, and they did not fit. The Holmesville students of course knew my parents and understood it all, but for the rest, it was a zoo, or so it seemed to me. I don’t recall why my parents visited Waynedale that morning, but I do remember my confused feelings of loving mom and dad -- but wishing they were not at school.

My social life belonged with the conservative Mennonite young people. This year I began attending the Pleasant View Mennonite social gatherings with my older brothers Paul and Roy. These were gatherings on Saturday evenings and attended by twenty to thirty young people, mostly teenagers but youths could attend until they got married or left our community for college or voluntary service. My brother Paul was one of the leaders, and the socials were hosted by one of the Pleasant View families. Because almost all of our families were of Amish background, I suspect the Saturday evening socials were really an updating of Saturday evening Amish hoedowns and dating, what we used to call scouting in Pennsylvania Dutch, now under more churchly control and with the decorum of parlor games.   

At the gatherings, there was a short opening of singing and devotional, and then there were refreshments and games, social games. In a game called “Wink’em” all sat in a circle with one empty chair where the boy or girl behind the chair would wink to attract a person to the seat. It had the charm of attracting or being attracted by a girl, holding onto a girl’s shoulders or being held by a girl, and well simply a playful drama of boy and girl attractions. Then there was a game called “Do you love your neighbor?” Here again all were in a circle in chairs with one in the middle had to try to find a seat by asking “Do you love your neighbor?”

Again, it was controlled activity of sitting next to a girl with choices of retaining her or moving her. We would dash to another seat and there was human contact.  Sometimes, the games took on a trickery such as one called “Barber shop” where in innocent male was blind folded and kissed at the end of a haircut, presumably by a girl. Well, you could only play it once. I loved these parlor games because they were a part of meeting attractive young women my age. Later in life, I found them quite cross cultural and even played them at house parties whether in other countries such as Puerto Rico or Venezuela or among our neighbors on Arthur Avenue in Scottdale.

Finally, there was a game called “walk a mile” which may have been singular to these socials; this game was played after dark usually on summer evenings when we would go walking in boy girl pairs strung out along the road with one person on the move, ordering the boy or girl to go up three or back two. In any case, it brought a lot of small-talk and hand-holding with a variety of girls. The system worked and couples were formed in the course of these socials. Both Paul and Roy had girl friends whom they had met at these socials, and soon I developed a liking for Fannie Mae who was my age, even if emotionally and physically quite developed beyond my years. This pairing took my social life to another level where we would go on dates, sometimes double with one of my brothers, especially Roy because Fannie Mae and Roy’s girlfriend were best friends.

Our girlfriends sang in various ensembles, so often dates were to places such as Sunday evening hymn sings or other venues where our Miller brothers quartet sang. After the service we took the girls home in our cars, and if I knew the girl quite well, such as Fannie Mae, she would eventually invite me to come inside to her home, visit, and maybe have popcorn or refreshments with her parents and the rest of the family. The rest of the evening was visiting in the living room.

Aside from the erotic and spiritual love for Fannie Mae, I also benefitted from her musical tastes. She considered me a musical barbarian and exposed me to more formal musical tastes at her home, listening to European and English choral music. In fact, during Christmas she took me with her family to Columbus to hear a full rendition of Handel’s “Messiah” where her brother was at the Ohio State University medical school. Paul and Roy and I would compare notes on our dating developments during these few years.

Another element of these social and courting rituals was the car. We’re talking of the souped-up car, the car with fender skirts, and little cotton balls hanging from the mirror, with glass pack mufflers which could roar, hiccup or rumble. The car was a common element with the larger culture whether it was driving to school at Waynedale and circling in front for all to see or circling the Dairy Isle or ice cream stand at Berlin to see who else had stopped for treats or mainly simply to be seen.

We Millers of course thought this whole emphasis on chrome and leather was quite below our dignity and propriety and drove around in plain totally uncool cars such as Ford Falcons. Years later when I saw the George Lucas’ coming-of-age movie American Graffiti in 1973, I thought I was back in my Waynedale and Pleasant View days of car culture, with all the car characters of my early sixties in rural Ohio. The setting of the movie was in southern California.  

The other thing the southern California end of high school had in common with my Waynedale Pleasant View years was the question of what next: college, international service, or working? During my Pleasant View days, I became aware of an older youth Emmanuel Erb who left for Paraguay in PAX service to help build the Trans Chaco Highway to where the Mennonite colonies were located. Emmanuel sent back photos of the project and when he returned told us all about it. An older friend Marion Yoder went to Costa Rica in a voluntary service project and a Katie Yoder (Schnella Crist family) also went to Central America in mission service; I think she was a nurse. The service question came up for me in a peculiar way because Mennonites were Christian conscientious objectors to war and during the military draft needed to do some form of alternate service, hence a Christian calling.

But I think it also had an appeal for its sheer adventure and exploration. I remember during August of 1961 the Conservative Mennonite Conference met for annual meetings in Hartville, Ohio, and my girlfriend Fannie Mae and I attended. What I remember distinctly was Wayne Yoder of Hartville speaking of his PAX service in Germany, helping rebuild after the destruction of the Second World War. I respected Wayne who seemed so dedicated as a Christian and also worldy-wise and a friend of my brother Paul. It planted an idea in my mind that maybe some day I too could do international voluntary service.

Finally, there was an outdoor winter social activity of the Pleasant View youth—ice skating on Roy R. and David Millers’ ponds. The one pond was west of Berlin and the other east at Bunker Hill. In the evenings and on Sunday afternoons we would go skating as a social and recreational activity. This was not your sticks and pucks outdoor hockey of roughhousing boys.  This skating was a social recreation of both girls and boys: singly, in pairs or in groups. Sometimes we formed crack the whip skating games circling around the pond.

The accomplished skaters were really graceful dancers, going backwards and sideways and able to do modest swirls. And then there were always a few boys who did show-off jumps, dangerous twirls and abrupt stops sending the ice chips flying. In January and February our ice skating numbers were increased by students of the Conservative Mennonite Bible School which was also held at the Pleasant View Church building. At Roy R. and Berdella Miller’s pond, they often built a fire at one end of the pond where we could stand around and warm our hands and feet. The Miller children also skated, and Gloria, still in her elementary school years, became an accomplished and graceful ice skater.

In the summer we Amish and Mennonites played softball, while the rest of the world played baseball, both Little League and various youth leagues and also the major league baseball of the Cleveland Indians. I never attended a game, but I listened to many a Cleveland Indians game on the radio and read the box scores in the Wooster Daily Record.  My favorite players were first baseman Vic Power, left fielder Tito Francona, the mercurial center fielder Jimmy Piersall, and the pitcher Jim Mudcat Grant. By 1960 the Cleveland management unwisely traded the popular home-run hitting Rocky Colavito to Detroit for the base hitting champion Harvey Kuenn, and by October the team finished fourth in the American League.

The New York Yankees represented the American League in the World Series playing the Pittsburgh Pirates. Waynedale High School coach and teacher Mel Riebe turned on the World Series broadcast in our physical education class, and I heard the bat crack when Bill Mazeroski hit the home run which won the series and the world championship for the Pittsburgh Pirates. I did not much think of it at the time, but later in life when I lived in southwestern Pennsylvania, I would hear of that famous Mazeroski homerun every Fall.   

Waynedale teacher Ira Amstutz’s physics illustration I referenced was the Associated Press story of December 20, 2011, with a Fredericksburg, Ohio, dateline: “Sheriff: Ohio man cleaning gun killed Amish girl.”  Shakespeare’s lines in Macbeth are from Act V, scene v, lines 24-28. The Pleasant View girlfriend’s name Fanny Mae is a pseudonym. Information on the Conservative Conference meeting August 15-17, 1961, at a Nazarene campground near Hartville, Ohio, from David I. Miller, telephone conversation, March 2, 2011.  

1959 Brunks, Beeches and Birds

1959  Brunks, Beeches, and Birds. George R. Brunk family; responding to invitation and Roman J. Mullet; revivalists Rex Humbard, Oral Roberts, and Billy Graham; Holmesville renewal families: Howard and Sally Hovatter, Lewis and Ruth Beech, Sidney and Lois Corl;  bird watching, Waynedale biology teacher Alden Schaffter, considering new vocations; crow hunting. 

 The summer of 1959 brought revivals to Holmes County. The Brunk Tent Revival gave its mix of religious theater and Christian devotion and commitment to our community for about a month. The meetings were scheduled for three weeks in June, but were so well received and attended that a week was added to extend through the first week in July. The headliner George R. Brunk was a tall larger-than-life figure who had a deep bass voice, wide biblical knowledge, and entertaining stories. He spoke in a way which was especially suited to his popular audience of builders, entrepreneurs, farmers, craftsmen, housewives, teachers, and merchants. Twenty years later when I heard Brunk tell some of these same stereotypical jokes at an Allegheny Mennonite Conference meeting, I was embarrassed and cringed, but today I remembered that earlier time and place and Brunk’s main purpose. He reminded the Mennonites and Amish of Holmes County that we were sinners in the hands of a forgiving God.  

George R. Brunk was also interesting as a family character; his father George the first, I learned later, had been an outstanding conservative minister and bishop among the Virginia Mennonites. Brunk had a younger brother Lawrence who had financed the initial tent purchases with a successful poultry operation and then served as the campaign’s song leader and business manager. Called the Brunk Brothers, my parents had attended their meetings in 1951 in Orrville while my parents were still Amish. My father’s bookstore had a book called Revival Fires (1952) with photos of the two brothers, their families and the campaigns, including a full page photo of Lawrence’s flock of 5,000 chickens which had financed the launching of their project.

Then the two brothers had a falling-out, each going his own way. By 1959 the evangelist George R. Brunk brought his wife Margaret and family along with large semi-trucks, house trailers and the tents. It was almost circus-like including the sex appeal of four handsome unmarried sons helping in song leading, announcements, and other parts of the operation. By the end of the four weeks, we knew them by name: Gerald, George Rowland, Paul, and Conrad. There was also a daughter Barbara.

The meetings had wide appeal, even to the young. That summer my little brother James held daily revival meetings on the tree stump in our front lawn, preaching in as deep a Brunk voice as a seven-year-old could have. Attending were James’ two obedient little sisters Rhoda and Miriam (barely out of diapers) coming forward to his invitations, and escaping as soon as possible. The Brunk meetings brought together tremendous collection of churches, across the full spectrum of Mennonites and some Amish. The meetings were sponsored by 17 Mennonite churches in Holmes County, and Maple Grove Mission strongly supported them. We attended regularly, and by the end of the meetings, 27 pledge cards were sent to my father as pastor, noting decisions made for Christ with associations to Maple Grove Mission.

My card dated June 18, 1959, and signed by Roman J. Mullet was among them, and I remember the evening very well. Brunk preached and then an invitation was given softly singing “Just As I am without One Plea.” After several verses, Brunk asked those who had peace with God to raise our hands. I could not and I thought everyone around me was looking longingly over at me. We sat in the back quarter of the full tent, and I walked the long sawdust path to the large curtain strung in front. Behind the curtain, they assigned me to a young Amish counselor from Sugarcreek, Roman J. Mullet (1920-2004). We sat down on chairs facing each other with Roman counseling me and then praying with me. Roman checked on the card afterwards that my reason for coming was “confession of sin” and “backslider in heart.”

Throughout much of my adult life, I met Mennonites who spoke in regret or even anger for having responded to Brunk’s invitations. They remembered the psychological coercion at the meetings or that the meetings removed the Christian confession and commitment from a local church as was typical of our Mennonite churches. Or some associated Brunk with the restrictive norms of the 50s such as banning TVs and immodest clothing. All true of course.

Still, I never had many of those negative feelings. I was baptized as a Christian two years earlier, but I needed to confess my sins many times before that night and have backslid many times since. Furthermore, I felt better that night and the following weeks, and I may have lived a little better. My consultant Roman Mullet summarized it well on the back of my pledge card: “Thank the Lord for bringing him back to fellowship.”

I liked my one-night counselor Roman J. Mullet and it must have been mutual. He made it a summer relationship by even coming out to Maple Grove Mission for two weeks in July and taught my Summer Bible School class. Then I lost track of him entirely. I learned later that he was actually a minister in the Bethel Fellowship Amish Mennonite or Beachy church and during the sixties would go to El Salvador for a few years of mission service.

I don’t recall that I ever responded to other evangelistic invitations, but it was not for lack of opportunity. My father Andrew was what might be called a junkie for revival, healing, holiness, evangelistic and camp meetings; you name the renewal meeting of this type, I have probably attended. As children we would go with our father and aside from often hearing an unusual speaker, Andrew always treated us to ice cream on the way home.

A coda on the Brunk brothers was several years after the George R. Brunk’s Holmes County revival, his brother Lawrence again showed up in our community and my father attended, of course. My recall was that the tent was near Wilmot, and Lawrence Brunk had moved to a holiness theme with respondents praying all night until they received a second blessing or were sanctified. Not many people attended, but it may have paved the way for John Schrock’s homegrown Pentecostal revival at Berlin several years later.   

Aside from the Mennonite standard bearers already mentioned (1956), there were others who became nationally and internationally known. I remember in the 50s going to a meeting of the Rex Humbard family, using a tent on the fairgrounds at Wooster. The family sang beautifully; I think even Humbard’s parents were traveling with him at the time. Then two decades later in the seventies, I went to hear Humbard at the Civic Arena at Pittsburgh; that was actually a part of writing an article on Humbard’s ministry and enterprises. In between those two dates, Rex and his wife Maude Aimee had built the large round building Cathedral of Tomorrow in Akron, Ohio, and we would watch their New Year’s Eve concert on TV. By the 70s Rex Humbard was in financial trouble from having over expanded into businesses such as a girdle factory in Brooklyn and an office tower in Akron. The Mennonite editor said the Canadian Mennonites were sending money to Humbard and wanted some investigation; it was not a pretty picture, at least financially.  

In the early 60s I went with my father to hear Oral Roberts while he still traveling around the country with a tent near Youngstown. Roberts was a faith healer and a long healing line formed at the end of the preaching service. I can still hear Roberts, after hearing the person’s ailment, placing his two hands around the head of the person, and saying “in the naaame of Jeeeesus, be healed.” Assistants nearby would catch the supplicants as they fell backward or collapsed or sometimes they jumped about in ecstatic frenzy.

On the way home my father asked what I thought of it all, and I said probably those people who went as believers saw miracles and those people who went as skeptics did not see any miracles that evening. I was among the latter, but I knew my father was among the former and hoped for his back to get better. Later in life during the 1980s my father often watched the Oral Roberts weekly TV broadcast and got his mailings on abundant living and expecting a miracle. 

I somehow missed the most exotic faith healer in our northern Ohio region Ernest Angley, but my mother reminded me that Andrew took the family to an Angley service one time. By my mother’s telling,  Angley’s “all things are possible to him that believeth” was too much, even for Andrew’s tastes and they never returned. I suppose I could still catch Angley myself, and in this miracle business, extremism seems to have its virtues for success and longevity. I notice that the Angley ministry is still going strong (2011) at age 89. He bought Humbard’s old Cathedral of Tomorrow campus for his headquarters and has moved into healing people with HIV Aids.   

Of a more mainstream evangelistic nature, my parents became involved with the Billy Graham meetings when he was at the stadium in Columbus, Ohio, in 1964. My father and others from the Holmesville Federated Church attended training classes as counselors, and I think a few sang in the chorus. Which brings on a second revival which was occurring about this time that affected our family; it was in the Holmesville Federated Church. This came about because the pastor was Howard Hovatter and his wife Sally who soon became friends of our family.

Hovatter came out of the Wesleyan tradition, was a good singer and a charismatic leader; we might have called him a fly-by-night or schouft in Pennsylvania German. But whatever his reliability for long-term relationships, during his short tenure at Holmesville several families had a Christian spiritual renewal.

The main Holmesville people involved in this revival were the Holmesville grocers Lewis and Ruth Beech, and the Holmes County game warden family Sidney and Lois Corl. The Corl family lived in Holmesville, and often visited us during the summer. Lois and my mother became friends, joining us for meals, and Sidney (Sid) and their little children even helping in the garden. Sid occasionally stayed around and joined our family circle on the back porch blicking peas (as in shelling) or tipping the ends off of green beans. Any man capable of such humble communal work, even if occasional or for ceremonial purposes, was highly regarded by my mother; a gesture which seemed never to occur to her husband. 

We boys took special interest in Sid, a veritable wild game protector and a good natured naturalist. A tall lean man, he was an open shirt friend to us boys, but he always had a clip neck tie hanging from the mirror of his dark green state car. When he had official duties, he would clip on his tie. One time when I was driving with him, I opened the glove compartment, and I saw a revolver. But mainly Sid was a friendly neighbor who took us along as we explored nature. My biology teacher Alden Schaffter had gotten me started in bird watching and Sid was not only a bird protector but a bird watcher, and being generous with us boys, would take us along on his bird watching.

In the Spring we spent evenings at dusk watching a Woodcock do his ritual mating dance near the swamp area on the west end of town. Sid might point out a Coot diving in the water, a little Green Heron doing a wobbly flight, and hear the pumping sound of the American Bittern, but what we were waiting for was the nasal beezp of the Woodcock. It was a distinct sound at intervals coming from a little brown bird about the size of a softball with a long bill. We listened to the beezps from the unseen bird until we heard a twittering whirring sound and then you could see the Woodcock making a circular flight up into the evening sky until he was so high you could only see him with the binoculars. Then at the climax of his flight the sound became thick warbling; next down he came, dropping to earth in a zigzag pattern, where he started the nasal beezps all over again. One time while the Woodcock was up in the air we moved closer to where we thought his mating dance began, and he dropped down only a few feet from us. He discreetly flew a short distance away and started his beezps dance right on schedule.

Whether we have lived in Holmes County or Bowling Green, Ohio; within the borough or on the outskirts of Scottdale, each year in March and April, I go out at dusk to a swampy area with a grassy clearing or even an upland meadow along a woodlot and listen for the Woodcock mating calls. Most years, I was rewarded, but the Woodcock dance shows have recently been harder to find; they are no longer as prevalent. According to the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the population has been declining about five percent a year since 1968 due to loss of habitat.

Sidney Corl also took us along doing his work during the day. In the spring we followed Sid down the trail behind the Holmes Sportsmen’s Clubs west of town and checked the colorful Wood Ducks and their nesting houses. Another time, we watched the Great Blue Heron nesting area in the Killbuck bottom half way between Holmesville and Millersburg, behind the Wengred farm, now a bike and buggy trail. 

Sid even took us out to Mohican State Forest near Loudonville explaining how that many large hemlocks grew on the north side of the small mountains of Mohican. Sid said the main habitat of the hemlocks was further north, but that the seeds had come along down with the glacier thousands of years ago. These remainders of the glacier thrived here on the north side of the hills where it was cooler all summer.  And we identified some spring warblers some of which I still see most years such as the Yellow Warbler and some of which I do not such as the bright orange and black and white stripped Blackburnian.

I was only vaguely aware of the creationism and evolution debates, but Sidney’s Christian conversion and now regular reading of the Bible did not seem to influence his views of God as creator and a long evolutionary process. But his Christian commitment did influence his vocational choice; he felt a calling to the Christian ministry, and soon was on his way to Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, to become a United Methodist pastor. Our brief years of nature wanderings, bird watching, and family friendships ended quickly, when Sidney and Lois had a large trailer built of plywood, kind of a homemade project. We helped them load the trailer; they hitched it to the back of a station wagon, and headed west. We missed them very much.

Aside from the spiritual connection to the Beeches, they also provided us some new recreation—water skiing. The Beech family lived along Odell Lake near Big Prairie Lakeville in Western Holmes County, and Lewis was an avid water skier. On Sunday afternoons he would pull us on his boat in flying over the water and jumping across the waves. The last I saw of the Hovatters was in 1963, when Howard stopped in to see me at the Miller Cabinet shop in Orrville; he wanted something to be fixed on his trailer.  The reason I remember it is because it was on November 22, the day President John F. Kennedy was shot. My mother told me she liked Sally Hovatter better than Howard, and the last she heard, the Hovatter marriage had ended in separation.  

Sidney Corl served 30 years as a pastor in the Oregon Idaho Conference of the United Methodist Church, dying relatively young at age 63 in 1994 at Rainier, Oregon, where his widow Lois Corl still lives (in 2011). However large and honorable Sid Corl’s life change was in becoming a pastor, it was his love of nature and vocation as a game warden that got me to thinking of other vocations for me as well, other than farming.

The other person who nudged me in this direction was Alden Schaffter, our biology teacher at Waynedale High School. Not intentionally, of course. Schaffter simply taught general science and biology in the most mundane way. Alden Schaffter would assign several pages or a chapter to read in the biology text each day and then by going down the rows, he asked each of us a question from the science or biology text. We had lab experiments such as dissecting a frog and seeing its beating heart and other organs, but mainly he asked us questions and gave us a daily mark. But we could also get extra credit by extra activities such as identifying birds. Schaffter even though utterly uncreative about teaching method did have some redeeming qualities; the most important one was that he loved his subject material, basic science and biology. I knew very little about either, but I did like the living creation and biology, and Schaffter got us to identify birds; I liked Mister Schaffter.

He, like Sidney Corl, enjoyed identifying birds and gave me a life-long enjoyment of seeing birds, even taking me along on a Christmas bird hike one year. On Saturdays Alden Schaffter would take us students for bird hikes; we would meet up at his house on Fredericksburg Road near US Route 250 at Guerne. We would look for birds in his lawn and at his feeder and then we would go in his car out to the Lakeville and also to a lake near Shreve. He had a big tripod and here I saw my first Common Loon, the Redhead and Canvasback ducks, Black ducks, and any number of other waterfowl. It was here that the idea was planted that I could become a biology teacher or maybe a game protector. I bought a book by Roger Tory Peterson Field Guide to Birds and a pair of binoculars. My sophomore year was my last year of vocational agriculture and Future Farmers of America.  

One other kind of bird watching occurred this summer, looking for crows. But this was hunting, of which I have never done much except as a child some small game when Grandfather Levi L. Schlabach came to our farm to hunt for rabbits and pheasants. Later, when my brother Roy took up fox hunting for a winter I joined him and his friends and listened to the music of the fox hounds. But this summer I tried crows, I suppose wanting to have shot at least one wild game animal, maybe even to mount one. I watched the crow flocks where they roosted, where they often gathered at various parts of the day, and how they moved around. I watched as they sent a lone sentinel crow ahead to check out a field or tree as to whether it was safe before the flock approached.

I learned that crows were quite intelligent in discovering if I was carrying a stick or armed with a gun. After numerous attempts and sitting in wait for a shot, one day after freshly mowing one of our hay fields in the forenoon, I brought the gun. I placed myself in a thicket near a dead tree which was near our hayfield at the bottom of the woods. I knew crows like to look for grubs and insects in freshly mowed hay fields, and thought in all likelihood, a sentinel would come ahead checking out the safety of the field before signaling for the rest to come, all of which they communicated by calls.

Sure enough, before long I heard a flock calling from behind me near the woods, and then a lone black crow flew above me onto the dead tree limb. I immediately put up the 20-gauge shot gun, aimed along the barrel, and pulled the trigger. The crow fell to the ground, and I picked it up. It was still warm but dead. I took it home and felt sad about the beautiful large black bird. That was the end of my hunting; I never had a desire to shoot another bird. I spent the rest of my life in bird watching.    

Brunk Revivals background comes from a Katie Florence Shank booklet Revival Fires (self published in Broadway, Virginia: 1952).  The 27 pledge cards of Maple Grove Mission related people who responded at the Brunk meetings are in the Andrew A. Miller collection at the Archives of the Mennonite Church, Goshen, Indiana. “Rex Humbard: North America’s TV Pastor” appeared in The Mennonite (September 18, 1973, pages  526-27); it was reprinted in the Mennonite Brethren Herald (October 5, 1973, pages 12-13). Roman J. Mullet information came from a Leroy Beachy of Berlin, Ohio, telephone conversation on February 10, 2011. Woodcock background is found on the website of the Pennsylvania Game Commission, “Woodcock,” Wildlife Note # 21 by Chuck Fergus. Sidney Corl information was provided through e-mail February 15, 2011, by Becky Delurey, administrative assistant to Bishop Hoshibatain of the Oregon Idaho Conference of the United Methodist Church.