1964 Coming of Age

1964   Coming of age. Alvin Ruess, Millersburg guild of elders; my brothers and sisters Paul, Roy, David, James, Rhoda, Miriam, Ruth Ann; first movie “How the West Was Won,” Bob Dylan at Newport, Mississippi’s Freedom Summer and brother Paul; William Moore McCulloch,  the 1964 Civil Rights act; Barry Goldwater Lyndon B. Johnson presidential election; Rex Humbard’s New Year’s Eve broadcast. 

During the year of my twentieth birthday, I came of age and was on my own, at least in the economy of our Amish Mennonite culture. This age varied from eighteen to twenty-one with each family and even within our immediate family it varied, but at least for the three oldest in our family, it seemed to fit at twenty. I continued working at Miller Cabinet and studies at Kent State Orrville, now late at night in a rented room in Orrville with a little black and white television where I watched the winter Olympics at Innsbruck and listened to the clipped announcements of Don McKay. Actually, I only studied a half course load so that I could work full-time during the day. It was the end of the communal family purse, and I now kept my own pay check and had to buy a car. I looked at several used cars on the lot of Steimel Village Motors and then went to see our banker Alvin Ruess who I remember better than the car.

I told the bank staff I was interested in a car loan and was sent to a desk with the tall man with a white shirt and dark tie. I mentioned the several cars I was looking at, one a sporty fairly new car which would have cost accordingly and a cheaper one. He then asked me what I was doing and planned to do in the next few years, and I told him of my work and study. Well, he said, we’ll help you with whatever you need, but I’ll tell you if you were my son, it would be more school than car. An education is a much better investment than a car; you don’t need anything fancy. With that advice, I took an old car which I soon paid off.

My brother Paul had a similar experience of going to buy a car from the bank. The elder Ruess asked him to sign a bank note which had a space for the parent or guardian to sign for a dependent child. When Paul asked whether he should take it home for his parents to sign, Ruess responded that this was not necessary: “I knew your grandfather and I knew your father; you will repay.” 

I mention these encounters, because I always thought we had a friendly guild of Millersburg elders looking over us; whether this was in part imagined (imbibed from our parents) or simply a part of growing up in small-town America, I think it had the same effect. We had supportive elders. My mother considered the Millersburg physician, Luther High who delivered her eight babies, her personal friend quoting him freely (we sometimes thought too freely) on any number of health and cultural issues.

My older brothers both briefly worked for Ullie and Dick Steimel, father and son owners of Village Moters, the Ford dealer. But I had the feeling the elder Steimels never wanted Paul and Roy to stay in their shop but to continue their schooling. Dick Steimel and his father Ullie had ponies and during my high school years, I regularly would take one home to break for riding and handling. The physician Charles and his wife Dorothy Hart had a large family of younger children, but Dorothy and Charles sent us small checks when we were in college. I think this was simply their affirmation for us to keep on studying. The year of 1964 was my last full year at home and marked the end of my full-time living at home and the end of our large family as we knew it, so I’ll mention our children as I remember them during these years.  

Paul now 22 studied at Eastern Mennonite College in Virginia, and I went down to visit him one weekend; I remember traveling through Wheeling, West Virginia, seeing a place called Lover’s Leap, traveling past the Society of Brothers (Bruderhof) along the National Road Route 40 near Uniontown. On Saturday, we climbed the Massanhutten Mountain and in the evening attended a choral concert. I was impressed by the formal dining style of the Eastern Mennonite students; they seemed so polite and I suppose Southern. Paul returned that summer to Ohio and had his checks printed with the quote from Greek philosopher Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” However much Paul was philosophical, he was also practical, often telling the story of a classmate who studied philosophy and then visited one of the local merchants. The business leader noted that this study was all good, but his company had not been hiring many philosophers recently. That fall Paul transferred to Malone College in Canton, Ohio.

Roy turned 21 and had left home for Meridian, Mississippi for voluntary service as an alternative to military service. Of all of us children, Roy seemed to be able to do about anything he set out to do; we were all musical, but Roy decided to play the piano and simply learned by ear, often sitting in the evenings and playing gospel tunes and songs for hours. In Mississippi Roy was assigned to be an orderly in the hospital, landing in the surgical ward, and soon decided that perhaps instead of being an orderly, he might as well become a doctor. Roy also met a young woman in Mississippi who lived at the same voluntary service unit, Ruby Burkholder. Ruby was known to us from having attended a Mennonite church, and also having lived for a while with the Alvin and Katie Yoder family near Shreve. Anyway, she and Roy had a torrid romance in Meridian and by the Spring of 1965, our family was heading to Mississippi for a wedding. I missed Paul and Roy tremendously when they left home.

David was 16 and started working for Miller Cabinets that summer; it was the only time I remember working together at the cabinet shop. David was a practical young man and a good worker. David was also a good athlete and could pick up any ball and throw, dribble or catch it with ease. Even as a young boy he always played on our church softball teams, half the age of most of the players. But David  especially excelled in basketball, and whatever resentments the Holmesville coach Henry Troyer and later the Waynedale coach Bill Stoner held against our family for emphasizing farming over basketball, David more than compensated for us all. He played outstanding basketball at Holmesville and later Waynedale, and my only regret is that I saw so few of his high school games because of being away at school. But one person saw each of his games because she was in David’s class and one of the cheerleaders for Waynedale. Brenda Bricker of Fredricksburg and David started dating during their last two years of school.

James age 13 like David, was athletic playing basketball in the winter and baseball in the summer, even organized his own team. But James was better known to us as a young intellectual and joined in discussions around the dinner table. James never had quite the aptitude for work, at least as we understood it.  He did well in school, but never paid much attention to grades, reading widely and following whatever interested him especially in the humanities. He was the first of us children to take piano lessons from a teacher and also played the guitar. Soon he and Rhoda and Miriam were singing the folk songs of Peter Paul and Mary, their signature being “Stewball” (was a race horse). James had a deep spiritual sense which at times was a universal deism and at other times during his later years a Christian orthodoxy. He was the last of our family to be baptized at Maple Grove Mission. At his second baptism at a Cleveland Church, he never mentioned the earlier baptism, probably a comment on how little he thought of it. 

Next came the girls, and I pause. Because they were so much younger, I would often think of them together, sometimes even as our second family. By the time my sisters were walking, my mother would frequently dress them all in matching outfits. But if they had similarities, the styles and personalities of each sister was quite different. My early memory is of Rhoda and Miriam building elaborate play houses in the back yard with blankets and sheets for walls and toys and dolls all around. We called their sites nests. The girls had some unique family experiences for soon after Ruth started school, my mother for the first time started to go to work outside of the home for Levi (Junior) Hershberger in an office cleaning service in Wooster. Also the girls were born into a Mennonite home and never had the Pennsylvania German and Amish experience in quite the same way we boys did. To paraphrase a colloquialism of our Holmes County neighbors, the girls never fit in an Amish diaper.  

Rhoda age 11 was an extrovert, a good speaker, musician, and leader, wise beyond her years.  She was a favorite of my father, and he often took her along on business and personal travel.  Rhoda quickly developed the ability to play the piano from her Millersburg music teacher but soon also added her own improvisations.  Rhoda was mature for her age, and I remember about this time going to a Moorhead Mennonite youth gathering, and there was my sister Rhoda right in the middle of the pack, one of the youngest, barely in her teens, but thoroughly enjoying center stage all evening.

Miriam at 8 was the middle daughter, much more private than Rhoda, with deep convictions, passionate emotions, and a strong will. Miriam played with little children and always liked to stick up for the underdog, instinctively defending the small and helpless one. Aside from her dolls and babies, Miriam also liked animals and soon had a dog following her. Miriam also was a hard worker as were her sisters in having Wooster Daily Record paper route each afternoon. My gender distinction here breaks down because Miriam’s best family friend was her brother James who was actually quite unlike her in many ways.

Ruth Ann was 6 and just beginning school, still with the same first grade teacher the rest of us had in Mrs. Eva Humrichouser. Ruth was our first child with a middle name (Ann), she also had the greatest number of diminutive nicknames which we older brothers affectionately called her: Quaile, Ruthie, Ruthfuss and Goosie. My mother apparently relaxed her no nicknames rule on her last one or maybe we simply ignored it. Still, as the youngest child, Ruth was a favorite of Mattie’s, and a best companion to Rhoda. Although a strong competitor, Ruth was about as easy-going as one could find in a child. She had the privilege of growing up mainly after Maple Grove Mission’s final travails and after my mother and father had returned to a complementary and healthy marriage relationship.  

In June of 1964, the Brunk Tent Campaign returned to Holmes Wayne County area, near Mt. Eaton, but its religious and theatrical meaning diminished for me, and I was no longer a regular attendee. I don’t think this was a repudiation of Brunk’s call for Christian conversion and commitment; it was simply having developed other interests. One evening during the campaign I went to the Wooster theater to see “How the West Was Won.” At age 20, it was the first feature film I saw at a movie theater, an epic Western film which followed four families on their 19^th century westward trek from New York to California. The movie was loaded with major stars such as James Stewart, Debbie Reynolds, Carroll Baker and Henry Fonda and in retrospect was one of last of these traditional epic Western films. It lasted almost three hours and had an intermission. Later in the 60s America’s westward expansion could no longer be so innocently described, but for me the picture was stories of adventure, romance and history and I loved it. For better or for worse, I became a regular movie buff at the theaters for the rest of my life. 

Several states away in New Jersey at the Newport Folk Festival a young poet and singer was making an appearance for the second year, this time doing some solo pieces such as “Mister Tambourine Man, “ “It Ain’t me Babe,” and “With God on our Side.” In 1963 Bob Dylan had already appeared by singing mainly with the passionate Joan Baez, already well established on the folk circuit.  Dylan, Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and the Freedom Singers sang the haunting anthem “Blow’n in the Wind” which became one of the songs of civil rights movement and the sixties youth movement. I was not at Newport and was not even aware of Dylan that summer, but by the next summer I would be singing his songs all summer and my brother James and my sisters would soon be singing him too.

Unlike Dylan’s raspy voice, I knew better a raw bass voice, a young Johnny Cash who sang Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”  at the 1964 Folk Festival. I knew of Cash thanks to my father’s long-standing singing and playing country music. At this same festival the following year, Bob Dylan would plug in electrical guitars, and disappoint some of his pure acoustic folk fans as he did his social justice political  fans who expected him to sing mainly for their causes. If some of this is quite vivid to me it is because I write this in May of 2011 when I saw Murray Lerner’s documentary of Bob Dylan at the 1963, 64 and 65 appearances at the Newport Folk Festival.

My brother Paul sang the civil rights songs too that summer. In the spring when he came back from Eastern Mennonite College, he announced that he and another student Walt Hackman were heading to Mississippi to help in what later became known as the Freedom Summer. They were part of over one thousand northern college students who headed South to join African Americans, mainly in Mississippi, to help with voter registration and setting up freedom schools. Fewer than ten percent of Mississippi’s Negros were registered at this time, often denied by literacy tests, poll taxes and intimidation by local officials who were members of White Citizens Councils. At Eastern Mennonite some of the students especially through the influence of history professor John A. Lapp became committed to helping in this movement as an expression of Christian discipleship.

I recall my brother explaining it to our community, saying that people had gone to bat for him and now he was going to go to bat for others. Paul and Walt stopped in at our house overnight and then headed to Western College for Women, now part of Miami University near Dayton, Ohio, for a week of training in nonviolent resistance and strategies for increasing black voter registration.  As a family, we knew this was a difficult assignment, (our Brother Roy was in Meridian, Mississippi at this time), but we had no idea of the danger. Attending this same week of orientation were a Meridian, Mississippian, James E. Chaney, and two New Yorkers, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. Speakers included the US Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and the Mennonite minister and historian Vincent Harding.

Soon after arriving in Mississippi, Paul opted out of a Negro school program under the umbrella of the Mississippi Summer Project and joined the Mennonite voluntary service unit at Meridian, with Titus and Anne Bender and my brother Roy working at a hospital. The day after making the decision, Paul wrote to his college friend James D. Sensenig that he still believes that “we must stand for our principles, yet I want to be diplomatic about it all. I want to live here in the South and learn what I can about the area and its problems.” The voluntary service program was in agreement with the civil rights goals of the Freedom Summer Project, but worked at it through more churchly relationships and programs. There may also have been some culture dissonance about the way political and sexual freedom seemed to go hand in hand in this movement. I recall Paul describing day-time nonviolence training classes and evenings of seemingly random sexual coupling. 

We followed the Mississippi freedom summer both by our brothers’ reports and by the Wooster Daily Record. By the end of June, the pages covered the events, especially making headlines when the three young men Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman were brutally killed shortly after midnight on the night of June 21. But much of the year, civil rights was also discussed in the halls of Washington, and by the end of the year, the US Congress passed the landmark 1964 civil rights bill.

A key leader in the passage of this bill was the Holmesville native William Moore McCulloch (1901-1990). As the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, William McCulloch took a leading role on the legislative part of the civil rights movement. He introduced Civil Rights legislation months before Kennedy presented his act to Congress. McCulloch, a conservative Republican, may have seemed an unlikely champion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but he saw it as a path to justice for a nation that had allowed injustice for too long. He kept his committee in line, and President John F. Kennedy declared that “Without him it can’t be done.” After the bill passed, President Lyndon B. Johnson recognized him as “the most important and powerful political force” in passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

William M. McCulloch attended Holmesville schools, the College of Wooster, and finally the law school at Ohio State University, graduating in 1925. He practiced law in Piqua, Ohio, west of Columbus, and won elections to serve in the Ohio House of Representatives from 1933 to 1944. In 1947, McCulloch was elected as a Republican to a U.S. House Seat where he served until 1973. The solidly Republican and rural district northwest of Columbus had only a few African American citizens, but McCulloch championed this equal opportunity legislation much as he voted against many of the social programs which became a part of Johnson’s Great Society programs. I did not know of McCulloch during my growing up years; in fact, I only discovered of him while attending a Holmesville reunion in about 2007.

But I did know of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its importance and also of the 1964 elections which pitted the Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson against the Republican Barry Goldwater. I followed my brothers who had switched parties and supported the Johnson Humphrey ticket. I remember one evening at the Millersburg Dairy Isle (what was long-time Birdies and now I believe Mexican) meeting Wayne Schlabach from Berlin who had bumper sticker for Goldwater and vice-president Miller. Schlabach was a mild-mannered soul, but I managed to get into an argument with him, and I recall he showed me a little paperback about Goldwater called The Conscience of a Conservative which he pulled from the back seat of his car. His final comment was the Republican mantra: “In your heart, you know he is right.” My final comment was on a slightly lower level with the Democratic rejoinder: “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”   

We ended the year with what became a practice for several years in the mid-sixties: watching Rex Humbard’s all-night New Year’s Eve telecast from his Cathedral of Tomorrow. I went down to Leppley’s Radio and TV in Millersburg and rented a television on which we watched and listened to the singing of Stuart Hamblen , “It is no secret what God Can Do;” Ethel Waters, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow;” and the Cathedral Quartet, “This Old House,” another Hamblen song. The quartet had the lead singer Glen Payne and bass George Younce who I heard at all-night Akron quartet singings with brother Roy and can still hear and see on West Virginia’s Public Broadcasting System weekly TV show of the Gaither Homecoming. Two days later, we watched the National Football League Championship game of the Green Bay Packers with Bart Starr, Paul Hornung and Fred Taylor against our Cleveland Browns. The Packers won 23-12, and it was the great running back Jim Brown’s last football game. The next day I returned the TV to Leppley’s.

Most of this comes from memory, family conversations and personal files. Much of the Bob Dylan material comes from seeing “The Other Side of the Mirror” film by Murray Lerner, I saw at the Film Forum in New York City on May 20, 2011. The documentary is of Dylan in 1963, 64 and 65, and Murray Lerner himself made a guest appearance at this showing.  1964 Mississippi Summer Project was sponsored by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). A copy of my brother Paul’s June 29, 1964 communication to James Sensenig was sent by e-mail on October 20, 2006, paper copy in my personal files. Some background on the Mississippi Freedom Summer came from Paul’s e-mail (June 7, 2013) to Mary Rittenhouse regarding Meridian, Mississippi, and Walt Hackman in the 1960s. Background on Congressman William M. McCulloch comes from Wikopedia, the on-line Encyclopedia.