1968 Peace and Love

1968  Peace and Love. Death of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, riots, the presidential campaign; Mark Hatfield at Malone College commencement; choosing pacifist alternatives; letter writing with Gloria Miller, bed courtship poetry, positive thoughts, sex and marriage, director of public relations, graduation, September 1 wedding

After the summer of love in San Francisco when we were singing with Scott McKenzie and the hippies to wear flowers in our hair, the year 1968 turned into a tumultuous year of divisions and death. My own reports from California were not all optimistic about the Age of Aquarius when my friend Phil DeVol went out to California where his brother Joe lived. His letters had the hipster tone of the beats and humorous reports of his venture into sales, but they also had the smell of death (of a salesman) among the homeowners and mid-western prodigals. The nation seemed to be coming apart with war and racial conflict. In April, I would return in the afternoon from student teaching, and Malone students were sitting around the lounge watching the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr.

A few nights later rioting broke out in the nation’s ghettos of Detroit, Washington and Cincinnati. By June John F. Kennedy’s brother Bobby was shot in California, and by July race riots had broken out in the Hough district of nearby Cleveland. The Ohio National Guard was called out to keep order, and I sent a letter to Carl Stokes, the first African American mayor of a major American city, assuring him of my support and prayers, and commending him for his calm and even handed leadership during these tense days. In retrospect, it was probably a pretentious letter, but he answered it courteously anyway. At the summer Olympics the two sprinters Tommy Smith and Juan Carlos’ Black Power salute was forever etched in the national consciousness.      

The outsider peace candidate was the senator and poet Eugene McCarthy (come clean for Gene), but the eventual Democratic candidate was Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. Humphrey came to Canton to give a stump speech at the airport and I went out to hear him; Malone students joined the crowd, some to cheer him (he was strong on labor) and some to jeer him (he was a Democrat). That summer the Republicans nominated Richard Nixon as their candidate who in turn chose an alliterative vice-president named Spiro Agnew, “nattering nabobs of negativism,” (the press). 

The Democrats with whom I identified were having a tumultuous time at their nominating convention in Chicago, “the way Mayor Daley man-handled that affair and clobbered those young people was brutal and horrible to see.” I wrote to my friend Phil DeVol. Still, I was not an activist nor took to the streets during these elections. My sympathies were more with an issue which was the ending of the war in Vietnam, but it had more to do with the ideas of the period, perhaps personified by the young Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon who gave the commencement address at Malone in June. Hatfield was an intriguing character, a little above the partisan fray in providing a thoughtful rationale for his decisions and views.

I found his eleven-page speech in my 1968 files, and he spoke of Christian character and our ability to make nuanced decisions moving beyond the many simplistic and polarizing slogans. Religiously, these were the formulas of what he called the spiritual life fundamentalist versus the liberal social “gospelaire.” and politically the formula was law and order versus poverty and discrimination. Hatfield called for modest government and limited military adventures and made a strong case for bringing the American troops home from Vietnam for economic and moral reasons. I especially found it of interest how he framed this specific proposal in Christian philosophy and teaching to the Malone audience.

By June, I had begun as director of public relations for Malone and was invited to go along with the airport entourage to pick up the Senator and his aide who, as I recall, was Wes Michaelson (later Wesley Granberg-Michaelson). If Hatfield was slightly against the current in his thinking, he was the courteous smooth and handsome politician in his appearance and personal behavior. A life-long Baptist who had married a Roman Catholic, Hatfield died during August of this year 2011 when I am writing this chapter. Given the scruffy countercultural nature of much of the peace movement during the sixties and the hardened political lines during much of my lifetime, Hatfield remained a kind of museum piece that a nuanced but principled thought could emerge from many quarters, including from middle-class America and the Evangelical bourgeoisie.  

I would not have needed to go that far for my examples, of course. Because I was thinking of war peace issues in a personal way that Spring with my leaving college, and almost all deferments for graduate school were ending. I needed to decide on alternative service, and in many ways it was a decision already made by my church and Amish Mennonite family—even though during my college years I did not attend a Mennonite church, the identification was still there. At Malone, I would attend about once or twice a month at the Calvin United Presbyterian Church with the pastor Milton Vereide. The son of the Washington International Christian Leadership Abraham Vereide, Milton Vereide was eminently decent, articulate and appropriate with his well-crafted English sermons. The worship had a certain formality and decorum, below the Catholic’s high mass, but quite a step above my father’s informal evangelical mission and my earlier Amish Swiss German traditionalism.  A grand and high-volume organ would lead the music and Vereide (notwithstanding growing up in a Norwegian Methodist family) would remind me of the British authors I was studying, such as the John Henry Newman of “Lead kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom.” 

What got my attention one Sunday worship was when an armed forces commander from the congregation shared of Vietnam; he said in essence that the armed services were doing their part on the field of battle and wondered if we were doing our part in supporting them on the home front. I was jolted by this presentation; I had never heard such comments in church, and all at once the flag and the soft-core patriotism of the congregation became disturbing to me. This was not Christian teaching, as I understood it. I had to think what if I had grown up in this church, and if I would ever have children, would they become Christian pacifists in such a church? I did a paper on biblical non-resistance based on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and the Mennonite Guy F. Hershberger’s War Peace and Nonresistance. When the Mennonite Board of Missions voluntary service counselor (a Kidron Nussbaum, I believe) came to the Malone campus that spring of my senior year, I went to visit him regarding an alternate service assignment.    

But if 1968 was a time of war and a time of peace, it was also a time for love, and I was in love which cast a soft amber tone on everything I saw and experienced. Between January and May while Gloria was finishing her term at Goshen College, we exchanged letters on almost a daily basis telling about our busy lives. In January to March aside from student teaching at Hoover High School with Suzanne Burnett and doing some independent study of the American author Herman Melville, I had a lead role (Orgon) in the college’s Spring play “Tartuffe” by Moliere. Then on Fridays and Saturdays from nine o’clock till four in the morning I was downtown at the Canton Repository, getting out the Saturday and Sunday editions. I told Gloria about this and eagerly awaited her letters which were filled with what was going on her floor or at Goshen College; I learned of the habits of her roommate Marianne Mellinger and people from the hall such as Judy Beechy, Lucy Yoder, and Phyllis Weaver. To this day, Gloria still gets together with her college friends.

I must have been writing about my usual hopes and fears (alas, fears) because many of her letters have a kind of affirmative tone about them: “you can do it, Levi.” I still have many of Gloria’s letters and what strikes me is how much we wrote to each other in German because we were both taking classes in German. Most of these letters were written at the end of the day, around midnight to one o’clock, and so the activities of the day were recounted, the busy and long hours of a sleep-hungry college student, and the good thoughts of going to bed. I might have called it our literary bed courtship.

Ich bin sehr müde und muss zu Bett gehen,

Kommen Sie mit?  Willst du kommen?

Aber du bist in Canton und ich bin hier.

Es werde schwer sein, zusammen ins Bett zu gehen,

Ich weiss nicht was ist letz mit mir.

Vielleicht bin ich sehr, sehr müde.

Ich liebe dich auch sehr viel. Gloria  

I am very tired and must go to bed.

Are you coming with me? Will you come?

Ah, but you are in Canton, and I am here.

It would be difficult to go to bed together.

I don’t know what is wrong with me.

Maybe it’s that I am very, very, tired,

But I love you very much. Gloria

I imagined my Juliet bidding the sweet sorrow of good night from an Indiana balcony which by any other name would also be called the top bunk of a Goshen College dorm room. Gloria told me she was beginning to take the pill in about April of that year, and contraceptives were just coming in mainstream use with our generation. Because sex and bed courtship were big issues in our youthful testosterone and hormonal energy, and a topic of some discussion in my Amish and Mennonite background and I’ll comment more on it. At some point during those Spring months together, we discussed having sex and both agreed to marry as virgins.

The romantic social context of the sixties was actually a good time to talk about sex. That Spring we saw the Franco Zeferelli movie “Romeo and Juliet,” the innocently sensuous young Juliet (Olivia Hussey) and her Romeo (Leonard Whiting). I also remember us seeing Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as the gangster couple in Bonnie and Clyde when we were together during spring break. And then there was John Updike looking out from the cover of Time magazine having just come out with the novel Couples. I had never read any book quite this explicit in chronicling the sex lives of young couples in Updike’s small town of Tarbox, Massachusetts. Whether in the media or among family and friends, sex was right up with politics and religion in discussion topics.

Meanwhile, we wrote letters. Letters were anticipated for their poetic thoughts of sleeping (with me, of course) and funny observations of the Goshen College Leaf Raker customers. There were notes on apartments and summer job opportunities, all unusually wise and practical I thought. Whatever the subject, the dark one (that would be the tanned one) now had profound and courageous thoughts which I had never heard from a young woman before. I had read these thoughts from the writer of the Hebrew Song of Songs, of course, but now I experienced them. 

One other theme which emerged from these letters was Gloria’s optimistic outlook on life. She seemed to be able to see mainly the positive whether she was studying for a biology exam or working in the Goshen College snack shop. Apparently, we had made a pact in our New Years Eve destiny discussion that we were optimistic about life, but Gloria could do it with greater authenticity than I could. I was the complainer, the nay-sayer, and the anxious one. I fretted on how I would do on an exam, whether I would get a graduate school assistantship, or even whether our romantic relationship would last. That winter my favorite authors were the American romantics of the nineteenth century, but I gravitated toward the darker ones such as Melville and Thoreau. Emerson and Whitman were too optimistic. But in the Spring of 1968, I had an optimistic partner named Gloria who seemed to take each change and challenge with considerable even handedness; this is simply the way the world works and we must adapt and work things out; optimism became her--naturally.

Among the questions to sort out was our relationship and what I would do after graduation and Gloria’s further schooling. During Goshen’s spring break the last weekend in March when Gloria came home to visit, we decided to get married that Fall. I remember visiting about it and later talking to her father Roy R. to see if it was okay; Roy was in his museum and seemed to take it all in stride as though he had assumed this development all along, and without losing a beat kept on showing me another one of his arrow head and shell collections. When I got back to Malone, Seiske Kohno my Japanese roommate bought a bottle of sake from the state store and we drank it that night in our room. Gloria wrote me that her hall mates threw her into the fountain pool which seemingly was the practice at that point at Goshen College. 

So marriage was agreed upon, but another question hanging out there was the draft and completing my alternative service to the military obligations. I had applied for a graduate school English teaching assistantship and Gloria would complete her undergraduate school wherever that would be. I also checked for teaching jobs in the Goshen, Indiana, area schools and Gloria would have continued in school for the last two years.  Both options had possibilities, but then in April a new offer came to my attention. When the director of public relations resigned at Malone, several administrators suggested that I apply and on May 15, I signed a contract to take the position, even before I graduated. It was a natural with my journalistic background and my first supervisor was the vice-president of development Bill Stevens. If my old friend Jacob S. Miller was a good employer, Bill Stevens was of the same guild; he had long executive background with the Sealtest marketing division. He was also Carol Stevens’ father, hence my brother Paul’s father-in-law.

Stevens also had good connections with the evangelical Christian community from his time at the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington DC. His pastor was Richard Halverson, the eventual Senate chaplain for many years, and he was a friend of Abraham Vereide and Doug Coe of the influential International Christian Leadership which had started the annual national prayer breakfasts. He told me something about work that summer which I never forget—the importance of the person and institutions. When I told him I was leaving for voluntary service that Fall; he wished me well and said he’s discovered that people leave, institutions keep on going and you want to do what makes sense for yourself and your family. I have since left many an institution after a few years and Stevens left Malone the following year. Malone president Everett Cattell tried to get a deferment for me in working for a church non-profit college, but by August, we learned that it was rejected. I knew that within the next few months my next step was looking at various alternative service options such as IW service (often at a hospital) or voluntary service under one of the Mennonite service agencies.

On September 1, Gloria and I were married at the Berlin Mennonite Church with the pastor Paul Hummel officiating. He attached three required counseling sessions to the deal, which I  did not think we needed. To my surprise, however, I remember two themes which he repeated in these sessions: two sources of joy and conflict in a marriage are sex and money. On money, he suggested setting aside ten percent of our incomes for the church tithe and ten percent for own savings. Although we never followed this counsel very well, it seemed to me good advice; I don’t recall what he said about sex.

But perhaps the greater thing which Hummel and the church reminded me later in life was that we were not alone, but supported by the creator God who in Christian teaching had blessed marriage. And we were supported by the church community and by our families and friends. Gloria’s Goshen College mates came to support her as did my Malone friends and our extended families all showed up. On the rainy morning of the wedding, my brothers Paul, Roy and David, took me out for breakfast in Wooster, and later in the day we discovered extra money in our gas cap for our honeymoon to Ocean City, New Jersey.     

Several weeks later, I came home to our apartment in Canton, Ohio, and found Gloria crying. I was devastated because she had almost never cried before (or since). She told me that she had sent all the thank you notes for our gifts and had arranged and re-arranged the apartment several times. She could not stand it cooped up in the house with nothing to do. Fortunately, her distress soon ended. By the beginning of October we were on the Greyhound bus to Elkhart, Indiana, for orientation to the Mennonite Board of Mission’s voluntary service program. We were assigned to spend the next two years at Botijas Numero Uno, Puerto Rico. And that description, dear reader, will await you in the next chapter.  

The German verse and much of the early part of this chapter is based on 28 surviving letters which Gloria wrote to me in the first five months of 1968; I also have a number of 1967-68 letters from my friend Phil DeVol.