1973 Editor of Miscellaneous Curriculum

1973   Editor of Miscellaneous Curriculum. Mission education, 1972 Mennonite Yearbook, John A. Hostetler and Amish writings, Lancaster Mennonite Conference, Builder and Ivan Illich, Visiting the Bruderhof, Scottdale residences, Ben and Rosie Charles, Gloria’s pregnancy and birth of Jacob, Mennonite Youth Fellowship (MYF) and leaving the youth culture, public school and parents.

When I came to Mennonite Publishing House, my title was editor of miscellaneous curriculum. This designation meant I did about anything which our director Paul M. Lederach assigned me to do. Among these projects were editing mission education materials, revising the junior club materials Wayfarers and Torchbearers, and editing a Sunday evening program guide which was later called Issues to Discuss. Many of these curriculum items were tied to a specific Mennonite church setting or activity for which curriculum was needed. Most of these were involved with sponsoring program groups which gave counsel for the curriculum so my work involved considerable travel of meetings in Chicago and other sites where agency and conference people would gather. Much of our work was cooperative with the General Conference Mennonite church with headquarters in Newton, Kansas. I especially enjoyed the mission studies which were regional by continent or country and often times gave considerable back ground to the country and the missionary and service projects.

The mission studies lost sales as Mennonites lost interest in evangelizing and starting Mennonite churches in other countries. During my time in the seventies, one could see a trend in these studies from earlier telling stories of Christian conversion and beginning (the word was planting) churches to becoming more culturally sensitive and less sure that Christ is unique among world religions. This gradual change is understandable, but the unintended consequence was less interest in the world. I learned that conservative Christians who evangelize often have a greater degree of an international sense because of their missionary ties to specific countries. I would sometimes attend the mission education meetings of the National Council of Church where mission education had basically become kind of global studies 101 or introductory cultural anthropology. Even the elderly Methodist women eventually decided that they can get that mission education from public television, the National Geographic, and the resources of the local university. For the Mennonites, as settings such as special mission studies, Sunday evening and mid-week meetings, and junior club programs diminished so did the need for curriculum. Small groups emerged, but they created their own curriculum.   

By 1971 Ellrose Zook retired, and I (editor of miscellaneous) picked up editorial responsibilities the 1972 Mennonite Yearbook which Paul Lederach had me arrange by the congregations into the five projected regions of the Mennonites instead of seventeen district conferences. I remember the new denominational executive Paul N. Kraybill came to visit us for a day at Scottdale explaining how it was all to be re-organized. There was great energy on how we wanted the local churches and conferences to behave in a more streamlined and efficient organization. Lederach would mention to me that the five regions were roughly parallel to the United States district conferences of the General Conference Mennonite Church which he assumed we would eventually join.

This new arrangement, however, got a strong negative response from pastors, the main buyers, mainly because of ease of use; reference material is based on accessibility, and the pastors thought of themselves by conferences rather than the new regions. The denominational leaders of course wanted the publication to lead and educate the members. But letters of complaint came in and sales went down that year; it was the last year that marketing people lovingly remembered how at the Spring Lancaster Conference meeting, pastors left the meetinghouse with a stack of yearbooks under their arms. With time we returned the congregations to their conferences and eventually the region idea was dropped altogether by the church bureaucrats. But it was a first learning that what energized a denominational official did not necessarily have the same stimulus effect at a local level. I felt bad for the loss in sales and credibility and also knew I (although a miscellaneous editor) was uniquely unfitted for this job which had a high statistical component. My colleague James Horsch picked it up the following year and did it quite successfully until his retirement.

I was better at combining my writing and editing experience with history, and that summer I was voted on as a member of the Historical Committee of the Mennonite Church. I probably became best known when I wrote an early Amish introduction in the ecumenical magazine The Christian Century called “The Amish Word for Today.” The word turned out to be regarding education, life style, evangelism and ecology. It got me in contact with our old Holmesville childhood family visitor (1951) John A. Hostetler who had since become the leading authority on the Amish; his standard work of the Amish Society (1963) would go through four editions. He wrote me an affirming note and generally visited our family whenever he came to Scottdale to check on his tourist books: Amish, Mennonite and Hutterite Life. He was very helpful to me at the same time that he was quite negative of the Mennonite Publishing House where he and his wife Beulah had worked and left. The article brought me numerous contacts from Mennonite scholars and leaders and readers of the Century who asked for counsel and books. 

This writing came at about the very time that Herald Press, the book publishing division of Mennonite Publishing House and my employer, published a novel called Jonathan by Dan Neidermyer. The main protagonist was a young Amish man and the story brought a conservative protestant overlay to the Lancaster Amish experience. I was embarrassed and wrote to David Luthy that the novel was “crude in craft and a severe distortion” of the Amish. Its inaccurate descriptions set off the chair of the Historical Committee John A. Hostetler who orchestrated a letter writing campaign against the book, including the Amish. I wrote a long critique of it but never went public because I was in the same organization. In any case, Hostetler soon got the book banned. During this time my friend Ken Reed was writing about an Amish soldier and when Hostetler got a taste of it, he had Herald Press turn it into a Mennonite soldier. During the seventies and eighties, Hostetler ran a quite effective one-person screening agency on what was to be published regarding the Amish. 

Meanwhile, I was named office editor, or a kind of managing editor function of Builder and then editor, a role I carried for the next decade. Builder was a congregational education and leadership magazine. I wrote in my journal that the journalist Jack Anderson said he writes for the Kansas City milkman, and I edit for the Lancaster dairy farmer. If I romanticized the Lancaster Conference readers, it was in part because my colleagues seemed to have a special condescension toward them. Perhaps it was in coming out of a marginal Mennonite relationship, that I admired the largest conference in the Mennonite Church whose members had a certain traditional charm, steadfast ethics and humble piety. The publishing house leaders often criticized the Lancaster leaders for being gate keepers regarding which products to buy, especially its conservatives. We thought that what Lancaster Conference lacked was to become progressive and more liberal like the rest of us. Our special nemesis during the seventies was the chair of their Christian education board; a Pennsylvania German teacher named Noah Good whose name in Scottdale was regularly abbreviated as No Good. 

Builder’s bread and butter content was the youth and adult Bible teaching helps, but we also carried articles on education and congregational leadership. I was fascinated by Ivan Illich (1926-2002), the Deschooling Society (1971) guru of that period, and when I look at my journals from those years, I find numerous notes and clippings regarding Illich. When Illich came to Pittsburgh’s Carlow College to give a lecture one evening, Gloria and I attended. Gloria was at that time in a Spanish education program at Seton Hill, and Illich was steeped in Latin American background and a one-time priest. Much of his educational theory came from traveling throughout Latin American where he felt schools were unrealistic compared to apprenticeship. He had served as a dean of a Catholic school in Puerto Rico, and I was also fascinated because he had a language institute at Cuernavaca in Mexico.

If Illich was considered radical and progressive, in many ways he was a traditionalist who upheld mentoring and apprenticeship as ideals in education, claiming that a second language and dentistry, two difficult fields to learn, could be learned best by apprenticeship. I had of course learned Spanish without a class or school, and I thought Illich and the radical de-schoolers provided a provided a needed critique of public education and even church education such as Sunday school. John Holt with his romantic beliefs in the child learning was another critique of schools during these years. Still, in my life time, I have not seen a program emerge which can replace the schools whether public or private, today the major alternative being home schooling and the cyber schools.

If radical education ideas were in the air, so were some family and community ideas. On February 2-4, we visited the Bruderhof, the Society of Brothers in Farmington where we were hosted by a kindly Brit named John Hinde. We had visited at open house events earlier with the Alderfers, read some of their literature, and we had read The Joyful Community by Benjamin Zabolcki. For a weekend, we entered a world of unadorned full-voiced singing, low media with no television and radio, and good manual work where everyone was equal. A part of the equality and selflessness was that if you were especially interested in something, the chances were that you would not do that project. I expressed no special interesting in anything and enjoyed my day in the wood shop, sanding pieces which would eventually become a part of Community Playthings, their main source of income. Gloria inadvertently expressed interest in their school and educational program but was barely shown a classroom; she was assigned to the kitchen, peeling potatoes all day. Needless to say, after that visit, communal living, at least Bruderhof style, was never an active option for Gloria. Still, the communal meals were memorable with all sitting at long tables with a string quartet playing or a short story being read. One night, a person read Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” after dinner; I never forgot it.   

We moved many times during those first years at Scottdale, most of it somewhat communal during those years. Our first six months we lived in the MPH apartments on the third floor, and we would smell the aromas of garlic spices from the Haddads who lived down the hall. Across the hall, lived Chris Keiser who knew where all the best blackberry and elderberry bushes were in East Huntington Township and would occasionally take us along. From the apartments, we moved to Ben and Rosie Charles house a block down on 823 Market Street. This was an inexpensive efficiency apartment with a common entrance and shared bathroom which allowed us to save money for Gloria’s schooling and also save toward eventually buying a property ourselves. Both Charles were employed at Mennonite Publishing House, and in off-hours Ben and Rosie although childless befriended neighborhood children and youth, often playing with them and taking some along to Sunday school. Rosie was also an outstanding Scrabble player, several times being the MPH champion.

But what I especially remember about the Charles is their devout Christian life. Every night at ten o’clock, we would hear Ben and Rosie read a devotional and pray earnestly for co-workers, neighbors, friends (and renters). Then Ben would come click, click, click with a cane up the stairs for his evening bath. Although Gloria and I could not match nor I suppose believe in all of the Charles’ devotion, we did respect their scruples and goodwill. For some reason, we left our washing go till Sunday evenings when we wanted to go to the Laundromat. Not wanting to offend the Charles, we put our dirty wash into pillows which one of us threw from the upstairs window, and the other one caught them and put them into the car. Then we went to the Laundromat and a movie, and returned late at night after the Charles had retired.

There were plenty of movies to see that summer with the release of movies such as “American Graffiti” which I earlier described as my old high school movie (1960) and the O’Neal family father and daughter “Paper Moon.” But the movie I was waiting for opened on June 15, 1973, Friday: “Happy as the Grass is Green” at the Fulton Theater in Lancaster. My friends Merle and Phyllis Good had raised money and formed a company to make a movie of Merle’s novel by that name. It was a story of a New York hippy who comes to Lancaster and finds some spiritual awakening among the Mennonites in that setting. I wrote a cheeky review of it for Christian Living, making a big issue of the fact that the traditional Lancaster Mennonite would not go see the movie. In retrospect, this obvious fact seems gratuitous; the movie is a complement to the traditional Lancaster Mennonite community. The movie was quite well done; they later changed the name to Hazel’s People.

By the spring of 1973, Gloria was pregnant, and Jacob was born on August 1, at McGee Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. It was a life changing experience for me. I wrote for one of my yearly goals of 1973 to help participate in childbirth with dignity and to be a good father. Much of the spring and summer was spent in anticipation of this birth, especially since we planned a Lamaze birth which also involved the father. Gloria carried her pregnancy well, and one Sunday our pastor Ed Alderfer came to her and told her she was especially attractive as a pregnant woman. Dear reader, I know, I know, to mention this compliment probably evokes barefoot and pregnant images but that was not Alderfer’s intent; she simply radiated health and vigor, hence an attractive young woman. She kept on in her regular activities in swimming, studies and gardening, and throughout this entire time Gloria was taking classes at Seton Hill University. She graduated in 1973 cum laude in Spanish, after doing her student teaching at Mt. Pleasant High School in the Fall of 1972. I went to birthing classes with Gloria, read books, and even with my general biology and farm background learning much about the human birth.

A part of birth by dignity was the assumption that child birth is natural and that one should do as much of it oneself as possible with lots of father involvement. Some of this was natural and understandable but some was also ludicrous, especially when it took a turn of making natural childbirth an enemy of the attending doctor. I’ll never forget the testimonials we had at the end of the classes when a father and mother and newborn appeared, and the father did most of the talking. He told how he had fought off the attending physician and in his telling delivered the baby himself, naturally, of course.  

Our birth was so different because Gloria had a TJA factor in her blood which gave the physicians some concern that there not be complications, or that her blood and the fetus mix during the pregnancy. They selected a day for the delivery, induced labor in the morning and it was late that evening before Jacob was born. After 16 hours in labor, all romantic thoughts of focusing on a seashore, rhythmic breathing, and an easy delivery were far gone, at least from me. I was simply thankful for a strong Gloria and a good doctor (Richard Depp) who could use episiotomies, forceps, epidurals, all those things which an ideal natural birth assumed unnecessary.

I was mainly thankful Gloria and Jacob were alive, even though both seemed exhausted, Gloria from long labor and Jacob jaundiced. They took him to the preemie section and put him under a light where he looked like a yellow giant among the little three-pounders. But I hesitate to say too much about the birth. I felt that I had done nothing, and that childbirth was ultimately a woman’s story, a difficult, painful, and heroic project. Jacob was great gift from a woman I loved and a generous God. Sometime after midnight, I left the McGee Women’s Hospital and slowly wound my way back to Scottdale on Route 51. I opened the windows, sang loudly, and smoked a cigar--in celebration and also to stay awake.     

Soon after Jacob’s birth, I attended the Mennonite Youth Convention (MYF) in August 1973 at Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan. But my heart was not in it. I had already looked at an offer to edit the youth magazine With but had walked away from it, in part because of the suggestion that we might move to Newton, Kansas, but mainly because I was tired of being identified with youth. As my good secretary Joyce Millslagle told me in 2011: you and Gloria were considered the token hippies and youth. One of the effects of being a new father was that I wanted to separate myself from the sixties youth culture. I was now almost thirty, and I did not care if the kids trusted me or not. I wanted to think of myself as an old young father. The next year 1974, I wrote in my journal: “How glad I am that this is the last year of baby-sitting with the MYF. I’d rather sit at home and have Jacob lick my face and read the Kreutzer Sonata or sing a song than try to help (if indeed that is possible) some kids come to terms with acne, orgasms, and grades. I don’t deny the importance of the role; it is only that for a certain time there is a mission, and the youth bag is not my mission now. I look forward to resigning after Gloria goes on the beach party in June.”

Gloria was now pregnant with Hannah, and the MYFers years later remembered how she dug a hole in the sand for her pregnant belly. Gloria and I were part of the counselor team for the local MYF, the ultimate sixties youth group.  At this point in time the Scottdale MYF was quite large with some bohemian-type school friends joining them for the ride; they were considered to be the avant-garde of the future of society and certainly of the Mennonite world. They were bright, intelligent, and rebellious. The youth were totally running MYF and voted in their own sponsors; I remember well when my friend Kim Miller called me and said the MYF had voted for us. I had the clear impression that he believed we should feel so lucky to meet with such a select group.

On the contrary, I felt burdened and embarrassed by their arrogance, and believed we were chosen simply as the youngest available couple with the longest hair. At this point the MYF students scorned their high school teachers, and especially the principal who apparently had been an officer in the United States military. The MYF students had regular confrontations over curriculum, hair length, flag salute, American foreign policy and dress codes, but it seemed to me these conflicts had more to do with youthful arrogance than Christian conscience. Although I admired them on one level; I also saw them as being out in the cold without any coats on. Their parents worked at MPH, were very busy, and quite isolated from western Pennsylvania cultural, political, and educational life, hence with little influence.

During the end of 1973, the Scottdale borough was gearing up to celebrate its centennial in 1974; committees planned a huge parade, a pageant, time capsule, Scottdale 100 Years book, and a centennial ball. Of over one hundred people serving on the Scottdale centennial committees; there was one Mennonite, H. Ralph Hernley. I had to think of the Berlin centennial where Gloria was queen. I had grown up in a community where Mennonite parents were a mediating agency between their children and school officials by virtue of also being teachers, business people, major land owners and school board members. Here the parents seemed just as confrontational, isolated and innocent as their children. I decided at that point that if I would become a parent of a student, I would develop credible relationships with the schools and community. 

Most of this chapter comes from my journal, Notes on Life,” personal files and memory of the times.