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.