1972 Howard and Edna Zehr

1972  Howard and Edna Zehr, Mennonite Church General Conference, Daniel Kauffman,  Mennonite Book and Tract Society, Mennonite Publishing House (MPH), Mennonite Historical Library,  Mennonite Central Committee, The Mennonite Commission for Christian Education, Mennonite Community Association, Tourmagination, Mennonite Federal Credit Union, Mennonite Business Associates, Mennonite Youth Fellowship (MYF), Laurelville Mennonite Church Center, Arnold W. Cressman, John Howard Yoder, primitive camping, acapella singing and church membership, political activism, Ladon Sheats, Merle and Phyllis Pellman Good and a Boston vacation.

On one of our first Sundays of worship at Scottdale Mennonite Church, Howard and Edna Zehr invited Gloria and me to their house for lunch.  Howard Zehr (1916-1977) had just returned from conference travels, and Edna had not expected lunch guests. She sent Howard and me to the neighboring town of Connellsville to get a Kentucky Fried Chicken lunch, and during the ride Zehr named all the Holmes County, Ohio, Mennonite bishops. When we returned, Edna lit candles on both sides of the bucket of Colonel Sanders’ chicken, rolls and cold slaw; she said she liked candles. I remember this friendly somewhat unusual welcome vividly because it was our first Sunday at Scottdale.

We learned that Howard Zehr was the executive secretary of the Mennonite Church General Conference with offices in the Mennonite Publishing House building. The parallel agency today (factoring in a merger) would be the Mennonite Church USA’s executive board with offices in Elkhart, Indiana. A year later, the Zehrs moved away because in 1971, the Mennonite Church re-organized itself, and the executive secretary’s office moved to Lombard, Illinois. In many ways, the Zehrs personified the Mennonite institutions I discovered at Scottdale in the early seventies, soon gone with the exception of publishing.

Although Scottdale was still a denominational hub in the early seventies, the pattern was marked.  Mennonite offices opened at Scottdale and then moved away during most of the 20^th century. I’ll note the organizations I found in Scottdale, and if you are not interested in Mennonite organizations, you may want to simply skip the next three pages.  

Daniel Kauffman was an institution. If one would have been looking for a mailing address and a name for Mennonite Church General Conference, it would still have been Scottdale, Pennsylvania, and the name Daniel Kauffman (1865 - 1944). He was the chief denominational organizer in 1898 and arrived at Scottdale in 1909 where Mennonite Publishing House provided him a base to continue the project. Kauffman was also editor of the influential weekly Gospel Herald from its 1908 beginning until his death in 1944.

The Mennonite Book and Tract Society preceded Kauffman, beginning in 1892 and publishing  tracts, books, children and adult Sunday school materials, and some periodicals such as Beams of Light. Its office was considered wherever the secretary-treasurer was located, and Scottdale’s Abram D. Martin (married to Ada Loucks) was the treasurer from 1905 to 1908 when it sold its assets to the Mennonite Publishing House. The big enchilada, of course, was Mennonite Publishing House (MPH), organized as a denominational agency in 1908. An organizing committee representing nine Mennonite conferences arranged a buy-out of the Gospel Witness Company (1905), the Mennonite Book and Tract Society (noted above) and John F. Funk’s troubled Mennonite Publishing Company of Elkhart, Indiana. Much of the rest of my life would intersect with MPH.

Mennonite Historical Library was a happy discovery for me at the MPH; during my years it was generally called “the workers’ library.” This institution’s beginnings can be traced to Mennonite historian and writer John Horsch’s (1867-1941) arrival at Scottdale in 1908. Soon after Horsch’s death, many of his titles were added to the Mennonite Historical Library of Goshen College, with the Scottdale contribution called The Horsch Collection, about 1,250 titles. But a very helpful Mennonite library remained at Scottdale.

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), I discovered, was here for fifteen years. After Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Mennonite groups in North American organized themselves as Mennonite Central Committee in 1920 to provide a famine relief program. Levi Mumaw (1879-1935), the treasurer of Mennonite Publishing House, was elected as the first executive secretary-treasurer of MCC, an office which he held until his death. The administration of all MCC work was through Mumaw’s office till 1935 when it moved to his successor Orie O. Miller’s office at Akron, Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County. Old-timers in Scottdale, however, were as likely to remembered Mumaw as an outstanding song leader as for his business acumen.  

The Mennonite Commission for Christian Education had an office at Mennonite Publishing House was on the third floor in a section across the hall from the Congregational Literature Division where I worked. Founded in 1937, it had been led by Arnold W. Cressman since 1959. The Commission staff worked closely with us curriculum editors of Mennonite Publishing House in the creation, marketing and servicing of Sunday school materials, curriculum and church supplies. This commission was dissolved in 1971 and replaced with a new agency called Mennonite Board of Congregational Ministries with offices in Goshen, Indiana. Of all the re-locations of church agencies away from Scottdale, I found little evidence of a negative response, except this one.    

Somehow I missed seeing the infamous chart, but I heard numerous references to it. A graphic displayed locations such as Scottdale, Goshen, Elkhart, Philadelphia, Lancaster, and Chicago, as options where church offices should be located. They were rated by categories such as transportation (airport), Mennonite community and congregations, schools, and economy.  In all these categories, Scottdale came in dead last. Some locals were bemused and even amused; others such as Paul M. Lederach and Arnold W. Cressman, were deeply offended, feeling our institutions had been weakened and the community slighted.

Mennonite Community Association was personified by Ralph and Elizabeth Hernley’s farm in East Huntington Township. The Hernleys sold off several-acre parcels to relatives and publishing people such as the Savanicks, Conrads, Hertzlers, Schrocks, Yoders, and Cutrells. This rural-feeling community, complete with pond and sheep, was to support a movement organized in 1946 as Mennonite Community Association. Sociologist Grant Stoltzfus moved to Scottdale to serve as editor of the association’s monthly magazine called Mennonite Community beginning in January of 1947.  By the sixties many Mennonite leaders considered their rural heritage to be, well the term was baggage, presumably excess. In 1954 the Mennonite Community was absorbed into a new periodical, Christian Living. The organization disbanded.

Mennonite Federal Credit Union began in 1955 when Mennonite Publishing House employees and members of the Scottdale congregations organized with the first member Mervin Miller, the MPH personnel director. This credit union grew and by 1983 changed its charter to serve all Mennonite Church members in the state of Pennsylvania, and by 1998, the headquarters moved to Lancaster, with a branch remaining in Scottdale. More expansions throughout the United States and mergers eventually made this credit union the banking arm of the Mennonite Mutual Aid Association which in 2009 changed its name to Everence Financial Services. 

  

Tourmagination was an educational travel agency founded in 1970 by Jan and Barbara Gleysteen and Arnold W. and Rhoda Cressman to share the Anabaptist heritage story in Europe. I’ll say more about this agency and its energetic founders who by the 90s had a vigorous falling out and sold the company. Currently the program is owned by Wilmer and Janet Martin of Ontario, and they have led tours in over 50 countries.

Mennonite Business Associates (MBA) began in 1973 and was one of the organizations which merged into what is today known by the acronym MEDA.  The MBA organization was envisioned as a populist and family business organization led by persons such as Scottdale-based H. Ralph Hernley and Jonathan J. (J.J.) Hostetler.  The organizational meeting was held with some fanfare at Laurelville with Senator Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon as speaker. Within a few years MBA merged with the older (1969) Church Industry and Business Association (CIBA), and eventually both became part of the international business and development agency MEDA or Mennonite Economic Development Association.

The denominational youth office, led by Art Smoker, was best known for coordinating local Mennonite Youth Fellowship (MYF) groups and large biennial youth conventions. In the Fall of 1971, our small group helped Art and Nova Smoker load a U Haul truck and head for Goshen, Indiana. It was getting late in the evening, and we started throwing small things haphazardly into their van in order to get finished. The Smokers were eager to leave town in the morning. Nova, a newly minted teacher, found our schools quite traditional, and Art reminded us that our industrial cultural ethos was quite a comedown from his New England graduate school days. The youth office joined with the Mennonite Board of Congregational Ministries to Goshen, Indiana, in 1971. These organizations are all gone now, with Mennonite publishing leaving town this past summer (2011) when I am writing, but when we moved here in 1970, they all seemed quite near at hand.

Another institution which became quite important to us was the Laurelville Mennonite Church Center, largely because of its executive director Arnold Cressman. Also the head of several of the institutions named above, Cressman was an entrepreneur, a minister and an English major. He was always generous to Gloria and me, and in many ways mentored me into the Mennonite culture of the seventies. He was the leading spirit in upgrading the Laurelville campus in the sixties and also in giving Laurelville a distinctly Anabaptist focus. He secured a meeting of the Believers’ Church Conference at Laurelville in May of 1972, and told me to watch for John Howard Yoder. This conference was a meeting of mainly Brethren, Baptists, and Mennonites, and a few other related denominations but the key spirit of this meeting seemed to be John Howard Yoder. The new meetinghouse had just been completed at Laurelville, and Yoder seemed to fill it with his tall stature, huge intellect, and acerbic personality. I don’t recall his formal presentation, but I recall his actively challenging the assumptions in the discussions. The  young people my age tried to hang around him between sessions or to and from the dining hall.

Although standoffish and not easily pegged by identity, Yoder’s disheveled hairy appearance and knapsack-on-his-back-look gave him easy entre to the youth culture of the time. Even his Germanic directness and lack of social skills had a certain aesthetic appeal, especially to the counter culture and academic crowd. I had read his Nevertheless, the Varieties of Christian Pacifism, and The Original Revolution as soon as they came off the press in 1971, and to this day find them among his defining publications, however complex and far ranging his thought became, he generally looped back to these themes of pacifism and the nature of the church.

This meeting was at a time when Yoder was still known mainly among the Mennonites; his The Politics of Jesus which thrust him onto the national and international theological stage would not be published until December of 1972. After the May Laurelville meeting, I wrote him a “dear brother John” letter, noting that he was the main reason I attended the conference, reflecting on his presentation, and concluding that he made me proud to be a part of the Mennonite brotherhood. Then came the clincher: “Perhaps you are the Mennonite phallus.” However, inappropriate, sexist, and even foolish it was to use this erotic metaphor, several decades later we sadly learned it was more than a figure of speech.

The other part of Laurelville Gloria and I did that summer was lead two weeks of what was called primitive camp; this was a kind of survival camp living in tents along a stream up in the Laurelville woods. I had taught junior high Sunday school class and some of the locals (Amy Alderfer, Dan Brilhart, Anthony Horsch and Emily Miller come to mind) attended along with my youngest sister Ruth Ann. We made our own food over an open fire and did lots of nature hikes, singing, and showers under a waterfall. Our assistant Barry King then a young man in his teens was the chief scout and adventurer for the camp, and I believe he later became a pilot and was killed in a plane accident. We did talent shows sang songs, raced crayfish, and played a game called rhythm of passing the shoes until late at night. If the first week of camping was memorably successful and enjoyable; the second week was memorably bad as it rained half of the week with flooding, several of the campers became wet and depressed.

Before and after that summer, Gloria and I did a lot of hiking on the Laurelville trails on weekends, sometimes joining the animals, or so we thought, going au naturel as we got up into the isolated parts of the woods and stream. Another time we came along Jacobs Creek and approached the dining hall; I have no idea what group was meeting there, but we heard a cappella singing. We stood there along Jacobs Creek for as long as they sang several songs. It was an epiphany, this sound as our music and our people. During the summer of 72, we joined the Kingview Mennonite Church, and the Sunday we joined, the congregation sang the hymn: “My Shepherd Will Supply Thy Need,” which is based on the Twenty-Third Psalm. The Kingview and Scottdale Mennonite Church became a stable religious base for us for the next four decades. I recall the old Kingview 1970s meetinghouse in the summer when it was warm and the windows were opened. I regularly slept through the sermon with a sleeping child on my lap, waking up to our pastor Edwin Alderfer droning on and a Song Sparrow singing outside the window. I thought I was in heaven.   

But if the church was my base that summer, my outside activity was to try to become a political activist. I remember an image of Faster Donkeys which had appeared in a graduate student paper Arena; the message was we should get involved before someone gets beat up along the highway from Jerusalem to Jericho. In other words Good Samaritans might structure the world so people do not get beat up and robbed. I had read Arthur Gish’s book on the The New Left and Christian Radicalism (Eerdmans, 1970), and it seemed clear on which side of the political map to enter. My brother James had read it and was deeply convicted and convinced. 

And I remember an Anabaptist seminar with Leonard Gross, Arnold Cressman and Jan Gleysteen at Laurelville in which I asked where this Anabaptist awakening was happening today. The answer was, look around you, friend, the peasants are in another uprising; check out the youth culture and Martin Luther King.

I became a letter writer, even becoming belligerent to the Pennsylvania senior senator Hugh Scott, assuring him: “I will do my best to see that you are defeated the next time you run for your U.S. Senate seat.” Signed by ”Discouraged, Levi Miller.” Senator Richard Schweicker had done better in his votes and got commendations. To the president Richard Nixon, I wrote on Vietnam and ended: “I urge you to stop the killing.” Signed by “An earthling brother, Levi Miller” And God bless you too, Kurt Vonnegut. Well, there were more letters to follow, but you get the spirit of it.  

In the meantime, Ladon Sheats, a one-time IBM executive who had become a devout convert to left-wing political Christianity, visited us at Scottdale for several days. Sheats was at Koinonia Partners in Americus, Georgia, at that time, a gentle soul who looked you deep in the eyes and shared of his search for God and his quest for peace. And how’s it going on your journey?, he would ask. One of our local youth Jan Yoder heard the call and went to Koinonia. For my part I told Sheats I hoped to have him meet with my brothers Paul and Roy, thinking they were bigger fish than I. Sheats spoke about the Mennonite and Brethren Lamb’s War camp meeting in August; it was actually at my father’s old Indiana Amish friend Elam Hochstetler’s farm. His son Walter had become an Anabaptist radical and changed his name to Michael Friedmann for a while. The conversion fever of a revival meeting (getting your conscience raised) was quite appropriate

I was seeing a part of my editorial position as an advocacy mission. If my brothers Paul and Roy could be saved from their professional law and medical careers into active peacemaking, presumably becoming full-time religious and political agitators, this would be a conversion indeed, commensurate to Sheats’ IBM conversion. The meeting with Paul and Roy, however, never took place, and I lost track of Sheats except to meet him various times later at peace demonstrations. I never doubted his sincerity, and by the eighties he had joined a Catholic Worker group called Jonah House, living in and out of jail until he died in 2002. One of his friends remembered him as a “beloved child with whom God was well-pleased.”     

Of a more social relationship to peacemaking was a young couple Peter and Leslie Knapp who Gloria and I got to know and did things together. The Knapps were from Rochester New York, and Peter was doing alternative voluntary service in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, we had a presidential peace candidate for whom to advocate, the South Dakota Senator George McGovern. I followed a group called Evangelicals for McGovern and tried to do my part locally, even going to a Democratic party  meeting at the Scottdale Sons of Italy. Among the speakers were the Pennsylvania legislator James J. Manderino, Congressman John Dent and some local officials. There was applause and considerable interest in the local and state elections but when someone mentioned McGovern, there was no applause and some mumbling hostility. It was my first introduction to Western Pennsylvania’s Democrats, generally liberal on FDR-type economic and labor laws but conservative on cultural issues and foreign policy.

I tried to do my own part by having the Mennonite Publishing House organize a candidate’s forum one afternoon in an end-of-day chapel from 3:30 to 4:00. One of those who attended was the local music teacher and Scottdale mayor Fredrick Eberharter, better known as Plute. The candidates passed out their little cards at the back door as the workers left, and someone mentioned that they were missing some of the employees who were going out the front entrance. Doesn’t matter, said Eberharter, loud enough so everyone could hear, these people don’t vote anyway. 

But I was not deterred, and I remember telling my father-in-law Roy R. Miller about my activities, and Scottdale’s advanced (as in left-wing) positions one weekend when we were visiting Gloria’s home. Roy went back in his museum and pulled out a book entitled Lewis Wetzel, Indian Fighter: The Life and Times of a Frontier Hero, by C.B. Allmand. Roy kind of chuckled and showed me the title page. Scottdale, Pa., Copyright 1932. Press of Mennonite Publishing House.

But a late summer activity probably had more influence on my life when we took a fast vacation to Boston from August 9-15, 1972. On the way we visited Lancaster County, where we saw one of Merle and Phyllis Goods’ plays and met the Goods; Paul Erb of Scottdale was there too. I think our Scottdale friend Ken Reed directed the play, “These People Mine,” and it was later performed at the Mennonite World Conference in Brazil. This was our first meeting of the Goods who were then in graduate studies in New York and also running a summer theater called Dutch Family Festival. I admired Merle and Phyllis for their tremendous talent and energy, modesty and persistent commitment to the church. We became life-long friends. 

Then we went on to Boston overnight and arrived in the morning where we camped out and slept during the day at the beach. Sunshine on the beach, I had discovered, was Gloria’s idea of paradise. Later we visited some of the historic sites of Boston such as the North Church and went out to Concord and Walden Pond. On Saturday evening we went down to Newport, Rhode Island for a concert in one of the old mansions; it was called The Breakers.  We loved Boston for its mix of American literary history and museums and stayed as long as possible, driving back with Richard And Mary Jane Crockett, and taking turns driving all night. By morning we arrived back in Scottdale, and I went to the office that same morning. Such is the energy of youth.

Most of these institutional dates and names are available from GAMEO, the on-line Mennonite Encyclopedia. On Sunday September 25, 2011, Lorne Peachey told me about the 1971 comparative chart regarding various locations for Mennonite institutions. The reasons for Mennonite Publishing House originally being in Scottdale comes from John A Hostetler God Uses Ink (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1958, pages 89-93). The “Faster Donkeys” image was by William Janzen in the Arena magazine (March 1969). For many years, I have incorrectly attributed it to Arena’s editor John Rempel . The appreciation for Ladon Sheats by Ched Meyers appears on his  blog of www.ChedMyers.org. Joseph Springer of Goshen College’s Mennonite Historical Library helped me to locate the date of the 1932 Lewis Wetzel book printed at Scottdale; my father-in-law Roy R. Miller gave me his copy, but I have not been able to locate it recently.