1966 Malone College

1966  Malone College (now University). Yearly goals, Tom Morgan, a charmed basketball seasonl; student journalism, becoming the Aviso editor; University of Minnesota and Minneapolis, meeting Gloria Miller, her family, Berlin sesquicentennial (1816-1966), Carol Stevens of Pittsburgh; the Aviso staff and editorial policy, the All-American award; Sunday afternoon movies; dormitory rules; two Quaker friends and prayer.

In 1966, I started making annual goals of what I hoped to achieve that school year, a practice which carried over into my journal writing later in life. At Malone, I also typed on a 3 x 5 index card and fastened it on my bulletin board by my desk. Here is a verbatim copy of my card for the 1966-67 school year.

• 
  
• ·         Win an All-American paper rating
• ·         Work as a partner with Jesus Christ
• ·         Maintain a 3.3 GPA [grade point average]
• ·         Reach a solid decision for next summer and fall
• ·         Help revitalize VA [Varsity Ambassadors]
• ·         “Sleep in” only one morning per week
• ·         “Play ball” with the administration
• ·         Cultivate good friendships
•           Read one book weeky…improve speed reading 

The paper was the Malone student paper called Aviso to which I had been named editor. I always thought I arrived at the position via basketball. I played on the Malone basketball team during the 1965-66 season, and it was a charmed year for me. I made the varsity team as an unknown walk-on, and I always suspected partly because of the generosity of the coach Tom Morgan. We got on well as team members and had productive players such as the scoring guard David Fross, an old Waynedale product; the outstanding  rebounder John Flad of Canton, and a short hard-nosed forward Don Andres of Niles, Ohio. I note as I write this in 2011 that Flad is still the all-time rebounding leader at the school and all three are in the top 30 all-time scorers. We won the Grace (Indiana) tournament, Canton Mayor’s Cup (Walsh College), and our own Malone Invitational, ending with a winning season of 15 wins and 11 losses. Morgan occasionally inserted me to defend and rebound, or perhaps for the comic relief. In reviewing my record, I discover an average of one offensive point and one rebound per game.

Actually, I greatly respected Morgan’s character and experience, and especially enjoyed hearing of his earlier international experience. He had played with Venture for Victory, an international Christian basketball program which provided fraternal exhibition games with pick-up teams in various Asian and Latin American countries and included the opportunity to give Christian witness. I also enjoyed the friendship of the devout back-up center, Roger Herman of Northwestern, a school nearby in Wayne County. Herman stood apart from the team for his religious devotion and scruples, much as I did for my cultural distinction. I would read books or visited with Morgan about non-basketball things (so non-threatening to my teammates) rather than join in with the card games and banter as we travelled by bus. But for all that, I enjoyed the sweating, back and butt slapping, and the general physicality of the team project which seemed to draw us all together, winning Malone basketball games. Perhaps, the fact that this was the first winning season in Malone’s short history may have had something to do with our good spirit.

But I suppose a good part of the special meaning for me was simply the newness of it all and the fact that basketball had a special place in my sports universe. Even as a elementary school child in the fifties, I followed the Holmes County teams in the newspapers, especially the Berlin and Walnut Creek teams whose rosters had Amish Mennonite family names, and when the 1962 Hiland team went to the state tournament, I totally identified with it. But I had never played organized basketball before, and this year was a kind of redemption. During my high school years, I had been the brunt of our basketball coach’s sarcastic comments. He first appealed to me to go out for the team, and then when that did not work, tried to shame me for my family’s traditional culture and faith. When he saw an Amish buggy going past Route 250 outside of our school, he said to me loud enough so that other student’s could hear to the effect of Oh, look, Levi, there go some of your relatives. So you can imagine my satisfaction when I heard my name mentioned respectfully and supportingly by coach and fellow players. 

About mid-term through the season, The Aviso staff asked me if I would serve as a sports writer until the end of the school year. I accepted and my writing and reporting got some attention, not least from the players and the coaches, and the idea emerged I may have as more future in writing than in basketball. After the season ended, I continued to write for the paper; I loved the atmosphere of the office. At the end of the school year, the Aviso editorship came open for the next year, and I applied and was named the editor. It is a truism that college athletes are told to get on with life because college athletics last for a only four years at best.  For most athletes that is true, but for me it was true after only one season, and an enchanting season it was; it nudged me to a career.

To prepare for the editorship, especially because at that point Malone did not offer many journalism courses, I was sent to a student journalism class at the University of Minnesota that summer. The college paid for my tuition; I well recall my going into the business manager Samuel Kvasnica’s office where he handed me a check which I took along to Minneapolis. I flew from Canton-Akron to Chicago in a small prop plane, and it was my first flight, and it was so momentous that I lit up a cigar, since I was sitting in a smoking section of the plane. The stewardess, however, came to me and mentioned that she was sorry but only cigarette smoking was allowed, not cigars. 

From Chicago to Minneapolis I took a train which had a skylight upper deck and I had a visual delight of sightseeing and reading on my travel to Minnesota.  I enjoyed the journalism class which was almost entirely of other student editors from all over the country, including Stuart Showalter of Eastern Mennonite College in Virginia.  I interviewed Showalter and wrote an article about him and his college for one of my class assignments. Other aspects of Minneapolis which stood out were going to the Met Stadium for a Twins baseball game and seeing Tony Oliva and Harmon Killebrew (1936-2011); another night hearing the New Christy Minstrels on campus for a concert, and finally going to the movie, “Oklahoma” which opened that summer. When I think back, these three venues often were parts of later visits to any city: a sports event, concert or a movie.

When I returned that summer, my brother Paul was dating a young woman who had lived in Washington D.C, and most recently Pittsburgh, Carol Stevens. She was now a Malone student, I knew Carol quite well from Paul’s associations. An urban Presbyterian, she had also gone to a Christian elementary school in eastern Pennsylvania with Mennonites. Anyway, one evening in July I joined Paul and Carol in going to the Hilltop Speedway car races south of Millersburg, probably the only car races any of  us ever attended then or since. But it became a memorable evening because on the way home we stopped at an ice-cream stand called “The Spot,” just as it was closing for the evening.

It was a warm evening, we were feeling silly from the races and the Spot staff seemed in a good mood during the closing hour. Working at The Spot that night was a cheerful young waitress named Gloria Miller and the owner of establishment was Iva Miller. We started chatting among other things noting a “for sale” on the front of the business. One of us asked Iva how much she wanted for the business, and I made an attempt at a joke saying I would rather buy the waitress than the business. On that innocuous note but gentle moon-lit evening at The Spot, I met Gloria. I learned she was from Bunker Hill near Berlin, a Hiland High School graduate heading for Goshen College that fall. And about a week later her photo was in all the local papers and in Cleveland Plain Dealer, no less; she had been named as Berlin’s sesquicentennial queen.

Gloria and I dated several times that month, and one time I especially remember was when I went to see her at Bunker Hill. The Millers had a large privet hedge around their house and lawn, and I drove up the front by the road and stopped the car. I heard a plaintive young voice and a guitar under the tree inside the yard, and I heard Spanish song clearly in Gloria’s voice: “Aye, Aye, Aye, Aye, canta y no llores,” (Aye, Aye, Aye, Aye, sing and do not cry). She did not hear me arrive, and I listened to another song before announcing myself.  It was the most beautiful music I had ever heard, and I was totally enraptured; I could not believe that I had discovered a beautiful Spanish señorita right in the heart of eastern Holmes County, and that, well, maybe, she loved me.

I got to know Gloria during the summer that little Berlin Township was doing it big for its sesquicentennial celebration, 1816-1966.  There was a historical pageant in which her little sister Carla and Bonnie and Brother Doyle participated and was directed by her brother Leslie. Her Mother Berdella helped organize a display of crafts and art. Her father was involved in writing the history, and I’m only naming the most obvious of the family involvements. There was a parade, buggy rides, a talent program, beard contest, displays, and a replica of a log cabin. For her father Roy, although a rather solitary man, this was all natural because he lived the history of the community, being a collector and having a large museum in the back of the house. Roy was bi-lingual and we often talked in Pennsylvania German as well as in English. But at that point my interest was not in German but in this Spanish señorita, who had also captured the Berlin’s queen judges by singing to them her Spanish love songs. I discovered that her junior year she had spent the summer in Cali, Colombia.

Carol and Paul invited us brothers and girl friends to Carol’s house in Pittsburgh for an end of the summer outing.  Roy and Ruby went by themselves and David and Brenda and Gloria and I traveled together. The Stevens were great hosts, something right out of a 1950s Look magazine’s suburbia with the manicured lawn, pool, badmitten and barbeque, for us a great day of recreation. I suppose there must be some irony that I also used to sing of this neighborhood as Pete Seeger’s “little boxes on a hillside.” But the setting was little compared to the conversation with Carol’s parents Betty and Bill, a marketing executive with the Sealtest Company and a home economics teacher.

The Stevens were quite explicit in expressing their faith in an evangelical way whether in prayers or conversation, as though talking about the Christian faith were as natural as grilling hamburgers and serving lemonade.  Betty knew that we brothers could sing and requested that we sing a male quartet number for them after dinner which we did. The other memorable thing of the trip was that David and Brenda were hotly in love, having known each other for several years. During the trip, over the top of Beatles music, Gloria and I could hear amorous sounds in the back seat while we as relative newcomers did our best to nurture a normal conversation.    

By September it all ended as Gloria headed for Goshen College, and I returned to Malone and work on the Aviso.  What a project it was. I had a staff of about fifteen with a half dozen reporters, copyeditor, proofreader, photographers (including Terry Hanni, my roommate), layout editors, literary editor (that would be Carol Stevens), sports editor, and several people on the business side of things in circulation and advertising. Along side of it all was Mary Herron, an English professor who basically cared endearingly for the mechanics and usage of the English language. She served as a kind of unofficial copy editor. Given how much student control was an issue in college journalism during those years, I don’t recall much conflict with Miss Herron regarding the content of an article, but I really appreciated her re-writes toward standard English and journalism usage.     

We would weekly get together planning the next issue, making assignments and then after the issue was out we had a meeting to prepare for the next issue. I would pick up the galleys which were pasted up on the dummy pages and then transport the final proofs to the printer at the south end of the city. The next day, the Aviso copies were delivered to the campus, and part of the joys was seeing people reading the papers in various parts of the student lounges. Since we came out bi-weekly, we did stories of up-coming events, but also reviewed campus events and did feature stories and opinion pieces. 

We were talked about as we did issues which were of interest to Malone people, whether it was in campus racial attitudes, kissing and mononucleosis, survey results on required chapel, and of course lots of sports. I wrote most of the editorials which came out in favor of essay rather than objective tests, complained about the short hours of the library during exam weeks, and wondered if a Quaker school should have more explicit peace teaching during the Vietnam War. 

I was especially interested in having an international emphasis, and my friend John Maroa from Kenya wrote regular opinion pieces called “international perspective” which became a flashpoint for criticism what with his attacks on colonialism (he defended the Mau Mau), the missionary project, and current Western policies. To his critics, I defended him, considering that we benefited from getting a view of what a Kenyan nationalist felt and saw, even if we did not always agree with him.  Not surprisingly, we got some letters calling us to be more balanced and making the charge that our staff was too one-sidedly liberal for our generally conservative campus ethos.

One especially problematic letter to the editor was an unsigned grevience by one who was “lonely, friendless, mis-understood,” and far from being “Joe College.”  The writer concluded that he may start shooting people to get attention, noting some shootings on other campuses. I showed the letter to the dean and several other staffers, and I still have it. Today, I find it odd that it did not occur to me to show it to a law official or campus security, given the consequences if the threat were carried out. We, of course did not publish it, but I used the letter as the opportunity for an editorial: “Excuses Won’t Help.” My response was to the world’s unfairness: “Perhaps we need to face the fact that the world is cruel; we do get lonely, at time friends seem scarce. No one seems to be waiting to give anything to anybody.” I concluded by saying that “Rationalizing and waiting for the big break won’t change things; positive action just might.”  It was boilerplate Mattie Miller (my mother) and Levi L. Schlabach (my grandfather) arbeite und hoffnung (work and hope) philosophy showing up in a student newspaper.

Overall, the student response to our Aviso was positive; staff remained loyal and with good morale throughout the year, and I got numerous notes from faculty and student readers commending my leadership. During the summer, we got an announcement that the paper won the coveted all-American rating by the Associated Collegiate Press. The plaque still hangs in my office and has been kind of lodestar for my 40 years of professional life in writing, editing and publishing.

During these college years, a Sunday afternoon ritual was going to the movie matinees which at that point still showed two movies at the price of one. Here I saw such memorable (to me at least) movies as ”Georgy Girl,” “Blow-Up,” “Klute” and the early James Bond movies “Thunderball” and “You Live Only Twice.”  My Kenyan friend John Maroa often went with me, and the one downtown theater played the national hymn before the feature movie. Maroa remained seated. At other times a group of us dorm fellows would go to the late night movie around 10 o’clock at the theater across the four-lane highway (Route 62) behind campus and our dorm. We would climb across the chain link fence by the road, run across the four-lane highway, and then afterwards knock on the window of a friend to let us in after midnight.

Actually, even though the campus rules were quite strict en loco parentis compared to a state university, there was also some leniency. One night when my brother Paul was the dorm counselor (called a proctor), we decided to light up cigars after a long night of study. We put towels under the door, opened the windows and all was going well until we hear loud knocking and laughing in the hallway outside our door. We turned off our lights, went under our covers and shouted that we were in bed and to leave us alone. But the knocking continued. Finally, we opened the door and there stood a dozen young men laughing raucously and wondering if we were okay, what with all the smoke and smells coming from our room. Paul replied that we were fine, but tired and simply trying the get a good night’s sleep. With a mock sternness, he ordered them to be quiet and get back to their rooms.

Another time, when Gloria was visiting, she came to my room one afternoon which was strictly verboten. Our fairly strait-laced director of men’s residence life Bruce Hann soon knocked on our door. He seemed as relieved as we were when we said that, yes, Gloria was in the room, and yes she was on her way out. Not all campus violations had happy endings, however; a bright young student (may even have been a Quaker) came back to the dorm drunk one night, made a scene, was discovered by the proctor, and immediately dismissed. And my associate editor on the Aviso who succeeded me as editor was also abruptly expelled for a social violation. 

Two memorable Malone friends were Phil DeVol and Carol Coleman, both having grown up as missionary children from India. Perhaps it was our Quaker and Mennonite relationship that we felt like somewhat outsiders--even at a nominally Friends school. After a year Phil was expelled; his bohemian behavior had become an embarrassment to his uncle, the Malone president Everett Cattell, but we remained good friends. I would get letters from the Peoples Republic of Alum Creek which turned out be a little north of Columbus, Ohio. Phil also ran around with and eventually married Gloria’s old high school friend Peg Mullet. DeVol was a generous agnostic at that time, one of the few open ones I met at Malone, and we would sometimes have long discussions of religion and God late into the night. He has since become an authority on poverty, giving lectures all over the world, and co-authoring several books on that subject.

Carol Coleman (later Lansing) was a fellow-English major and became like a younger sister during those years, running around with Phil, and helping at the newspaper or with International Club. She often seemed slightly lost, probably owing both to her temperament and to her India upbringing. I still have some India art pieces which she gave to me. She ended up in California with a good son and a career in teaching, but after a severe auto accident and memory loss, she died in 2007. I cherish the memory of both Phil and Carol.

At that time, my greatest devotional influence was the Episcopalian hip-priest Malcolm Boyd and his book of prayers called “Are You Running with Me Jesus?” I wrote my own prayer which I would sing in the evenings and which owed considerable to Boyd.

Help me o God to be at one with you,

So by that strength my prayers I’ll do.

Help me o God to work with thee,

So I can share your harmony.

Most of this chapter comes from my memory and Malone era personal files and journal. Information on Phil DeVol and Carol Coleman comes their letters in my files and from a visit to Phil and Susan DeVol near Marengo, Ohio, on March 22, 2012, as well as e-mail from Deb Robinson, alumni director of Malone University.