1975 Bowling Green, Ohio

1975  Bowling Green, Ohio. Daughter Hannah’s birth January 24, visiting James, a Geauga County Amish Sunday, Geoffrey Chaucer, John A. Yoder braucher-chiropractor, John A. Hostetler, Amish English, Henry David Thoreau, final MA Exam, Mennonite seminary courses, Guy F. Hershberger, buying property at 903 Arthur, Scottdale, Ralph and Elizabeth Hernley. 

"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." – Henry David Thoreau

Hannah Elaine is born on Friday, January 24, 1975, on a cold day and night at Bowling Green, Ohio’s Wood Memorial Hospital. We anticipated the day because Gloria’s labor would be induced, and her sister Bonnie was at the hospital, in case she needed extra blood. Gloria had a rare blood type (TJA Factor), and when we got to the hospital, everyone was ready for Gloria, deferentially calling her out of lines by name, as though she were the hospital’s guest of honor. Gloria with her usual goodwill and nature took it all in good stride, soon doing her breathing rhythms and focusing exercises, in the Lamaze style. Her doctor, family name Householder, was a competent and fairly practical personality and sometime during the day he and I got into a long somewhat contentious discussion on everything from Vietnam to health care. I remember Gloria asking me, when he stepped out, whether her birthing was the setting for such a discussion.

All afternoon Gloria was in labor and by evening the contractions were more intense and frequent with Hannah arriving that evening. Hannah was in fine shape, but later I went back to Gloria, and she had a hematoma following the birth, had lost blood and was totally weak; I thought near death. The contrast was especially frightening because Gloria was a strong young woman. Gloria soon recovered, and Hannah was an easy baby, contented by the simple pleasures of eating, sleeping and being held. I would sometimes mention on her birthdays that even the animals seemed happy for her arrival, some black squirrels cavorting and jumping around all day on bare trees outside the hospital’s third floor windows. By evening and the next day, they did extra summersaults and ever higher twirls, as though announcing that someone special had arrived on earth. Gloria’s mother Berdella and Bonnie stayed with Jacob that weekend, and then my mother Mattie came out for a week.

Aside from Hannah, the year had not begun on a happy note. On January 5, 1975, I wrote: “I have just come from the apartment of James in Cleveland and find myself utterly drained and distressed. That one can live in such a state of unreality or simply servitude is more than I can comprehend or perhaps tolerate. The most frightening thing is that except for the grace of God, Gloria, Jacob, and maybe a little half-witted effort, I could be in his shoes. His cockroach infested apartment is certainly not bad in itself, but its musty smell represents a way of life which I find extremely slothful and disdainful…”

I had visited James all day on the first Saturday of the new year; we went to the Cleveland Art Museum; and I gave him some money as I left.  James was a good conversation partner because we shared so much in common in discussing and debating current events and culture. And we were both aspiring writers. But James seemed to feel the world and certainly his family should support him financially and emotionally, and he seemed at a loss to know why we did not. I left him feeling (perhaps it was survivor’s guilt) sad and depressed at how the world had become such a prison to my brother.

That Sunday I got up early and drove from James’ apartment out to Geauga County to attend church at the Albert L. and Martha Miller home about a mile north of Mesopotamia, Ohio. It was a cold morning with some snow on the ground; my feet got cold in standing around by the barn and visiting with the men before the service, but when we got inside the house it was comfortable. After the Lob Lied, I fell asleep during the opening sermon and again slept through most of the main sermon. It was not that the sermons were bad or uninteresting, but that I had slept little the night before in a motel, what with thinking of James and my own hopes for the future, Jacob and now another little one coming. I saw the young fathers with little boys and girls beside them and leaning on them and sleeping or doing puzzles. I had learned that Albert was a butcher who earned his living with his hands, and he and Martha had ten children; they were of modest means but took care of their children, worked hard, and seemed at home in the universe. It was as if I had stepped into a real medieval Chaucerian England I was studying at Bowling Green. I felt so comfortable I slept until the final prayers and hymn and then joined with the others for lunch.

The background of this Geauga County visit was that I had been thinking for several years that with a young family, we should move back to Holmes County, and I might teach in an East Holmes public school with Amish students. I had gotten a letter from Laurence Martin at the Publishing House that they had a position for me when I would return. Martin had replaced Paul Lederach as director of the curriculum division. But I still was not sure I would return. I remember visiting Scottdale that winter with its bleak streets and bare trees and pasty-looking street walkers. A good-natured but sad little man people called Duffy (I don’t recall his formal name) who lived at the New Central Hotel was out walking Pittsburgh Street that day.

Meanwhile, when Gloria’s father Roy R. Miller left teaching at Hiland High School, he ran for East Holmes school board and was board president. He hinted that we were well-positioned to take teaching positions in the district. When the opportunity came that spring, however, we were hesitant, much as we loved our families and I, at least, idealized the community. In the end Gloria was never that keen on moving back, and I also knew my limitations as a teacher. I might get tired of teaching in a year or two.

But that year of graduate school classes re-kindled my ties to the Amish; especially the first class I took at Bowling Green had a pre-modern feeling in Geoffrey Chaucer (ca 1343-1400). I suppose part of the newness was because I had never read much Chaucer before, having gone directly from Beowulf to Shakespeare in high school and college. I loved the Canterbury Tales, memorized the Prologue, and took special interest in the characters and their pilgrimage. Their stories were sometimes religious, often earthly and sometimes comical. Perhaps it was also the degree to which Chaucer was such a good-natured story teller, wise but never heavy-handed, as if he were lightly tripping along with the pilgrims, telling us their stories. The old English of Chaucer has Germanic roots, or so it sounded, and after Chaucer I tied in a number of my courses to my re-awakened Amish heritage.

Carlos Drake’s course in folklore was a natural and I did a study of a Holmes County braucher chiropractor near Becks Mills called John A. Yoder (1922-2001). Yoder known in the Holmes area as Brauch John was of some interest to me because our Holmesville neighbor was Rudy Coblentz, often called Shittle Jake’s Rudy. Both Rudy Coblentz and his father were well known braucher or sympathy healers in our community. My parents and people with strong Enlightenment beliefs sometimes called them pow-wow doctors and had misgivings about brauchers, considering some of their practices as witchcraft. But I never found any of Yoder’s practices to be evil or hexing, such as to cast an evil spell on someone. He simply practiced a pre-modern folk medicine which generally did no harm and sometimes may have done some good. It seemed to me Yoder with his “electric hands” was especially effective with chronic ailments such as sore backs, rheumatism, nerve troubles, sleepy feet and arthritis.  Yoder was a charismatic and empathetic person and my study was published in the April 1981 Mennonite Quarterly Review.  

My consultant during these Amish projects was John A. Hostetler at Temple University. I would see him at Historical Committee meetings twice a year, and he seemed to take a special interest because he knew our family and background. He sent me copies of his own studies on the Amish, and then gave Gloria and me a Myers Briggs personality test. I turned out to be an EIFJ: extravert with intuitive, feeling and judging and Gloria was an ISTJ: an introvert with introvert, sensing, thinking and judging. Hostetler noted that he and Gloria were close to the typical Amish personality profile (ISFJ), I was not. I took the profile later several times (it seemed the thing to do during the next decade), and I learned that I enjoyed relationships with other people, could work well in an office environment, alas, might even be able to work in sales. Perhaps given my literary interests, I had a shadow identity of myself as a hermit who should be living out on the back forty, perhaps in a hut by the water—perhaps near Walden. Still, I enjoyed being around people.    

Finally, a linguistics course on social and regional dialects sent me on a small study on Amish English or how English is spoken among the Amish of Holmes County. This was at a time when educators and linguistic scholars had interest and also controversy about dialects such as Black English. The Berlin and Wises elementary schools in the East Holmes school district gave me access to their students as informants. One could locate Germanic pronunciations, syntax, and word choices which reflected Pennsylvania German interference. James Mast, the principal at Berlin, granted me individual student interviews and class time to test usage of word choices such as bag, sack and polk, and cheit, right and properly. For example, regarding word order, one young informant told me that “my father works away.” This was a direct translation of “Mei vater schaft fat.” The meaning is that my father is an employee and not on the family farm or home shop. A surprising element was the degree to which the Amish English approximates Standard English given its status as a second language within the Amish community. I would have needed to spend much more time to prepare a publishable study, but my fellow class members were quite fascinated, reminding me of the world’s fascination with Amish culture.

The MA English terminal degree at Bowling Green was a good fit, designed for persons with professional plans in an English related field but with considerable latitude in choosing the required fifty graduate credit hours. Given my professional goals of denominational editorial work, the English department chair Richard Carpenter accepted two courses from the Mennonite seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. For the one-day oral and written examination, one needed to chose an author, so I chose the nineteenth century American Henry David Thoreau. His writings of simplicity, anti-war, and appreciation of nature were of long standing interest since I had first read Walden and Civil Disobedience in college. The Yankee individualist nay sayer never considered himself a victim; rather he made a virtue of necessity—as Chaucer would have said. In America’s long-standing conversation with unfettered optimism or human progress, especially material and scientific progress on one side, Thoreau firmly said no. A critic of progress, democracy  and manifest destiny (the 1848 war with Mexico), he still shared with most Americans an optimism. But Thoreau’s optimism lay in the possibilities of the human spirit and nature, not in material advancement.

The plan was to meet with the committee in the morning and write for two hours in the afternoon. An English major might do about anything and was promised nothing vocationally, and the economy was now heading toward double digit inflation and high unemployment, very unlike my Malone graduation in the late sixties. About mid-way through our morning session, my committee members became aware that I had a job awaiting me in religious publishing, and I noticed their mood immediately became upbeat; they asked questions about the Mennonites, cut short the time, and congratulated me on a job well done! I had the feeling that short of my calling Thoreau a French entrepreneur who started the Walden bookstore chain, they were quite eager to declare me MA competent.  

During the summer I took courses at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries at Elkhart, Indiana. One was an Anabaptist workshop called historical Issues in the light of 450 years.  Cornelius (C.J.) Dyck, coordinated the course and had visiting lecturers such as Myron Augsburger, J. Denny Weaver, and Ray Gingerich, the latter two newly minted PhDs. I would meet many of these people later in life as an editor, but it was an old professor who was memorable-- Guy F. Hershberger. I had known Hershberger from his 1940s book, War, Peace and Non-resistance, but I had obviously not kept up with him moving into regarding himself as a late-blooming prophet and a left-wing political analyst. Hershberger made a long and fierce denunciation of Richard Nixon (not hard to do in those days, of course) and American imperialism. 

I suppose his strident political critique all seemed natural given the polarized times, and I obviously had not followed Hershberger's career since his nonresistant years. But somehow, it all seemed disappointing to me, a rather plain Mennonite mouthing the then-popular students at the barricades slogans. I had expected a more nuanced church first and theological approach at the seminary, but it was a good introduction to what I would often discover later as an editor. Another course was called Discipleship by David Schroeder of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I wrote a paper on Anabaptist hermeneutics and editorial principles in preparing curriculum materials for the Mennonite Church.

But whatever my studies at Bowling Green and whether I could continue as an editor among the Mennonites or a teacher among the Amish, I ultimately wanted to be a writer. This vocation would be in addition to whatever my profession as an editor, teacher, minister, publisher, carpenter or journalist. I also took some fiction writing courses from the MFA (Master in Fine Arts) program and started a file which I called “the Amish novel,” to complement my earlier file: “the Puerto Rican novel.”

Writing and fiction classes and workshops seemed to have a spirit of post-realism, fantasy and exhaustion. Narrative, meaning and plot of the traditional novel since the time of Cervantes and Fielding were banished; a writer who tells you everything, I discovered, may be  a fascist. Solipsism or only the self can be known, hence an extreme egocentrism was the norm, and I suppose there is an element of that in all writing. Still, signifying was a part of my own life, and I noticed that in spite of literary theory, many sequential stories were still being read and written. After two classes from the MFA offerings, I decided I had learned enough from them. I took another class of Shakespeare’s plays and would also spend hours in the Popular Culture library—reading their film reviews and Sports’ Illustrated.  

By late summer Gloria and I with Jacob and Hannah were ready to move back to Scottdale, after many moves. We had lived in the Mennonite Publishing House apartments, with Ben and Rosie Charles on Market Street, at Arnold and Rhoda Cressman’s farm (while they were in Europe and Canada), at the Cressmans’ fix-it-up rental on Homestead Avenue, and then at 300 Napoleon Bowling Green—five places in five years. When we returned, I visited Ralph Hernley and asked if he had any suggestions; he said yes, its’ time for you and Gloria to buy a house. He said it as matter of fact as if he were noting that it was going to rain on a cloudy day. I told him we only had a few thousand dollars for down payment, but Ralph would hear none of it. Don’t worry, he said, you can afford it. On hearing Hernley, this move now seemed totally natural and perhaps even pre-ordained by the stars. After that, Gloria and I checked with Ralph and Elizabeth Hernley for every major move our family was considering. They were like a eloquent uncle and aunt, never intrusive but nearby and available. I'm posting this during the week when we learn of Elizabeth's death, age 99, January 22, 2015, a wise and gentle Mennonite; may she rest in peace.    

About the same time Paul Lederach, my old publishing director who also enjoyed dabbling in real estate, had spotted a property on Arthur Avenue. He took us through it, inspected it and told us what to offer. On July 24, 1975, we signed for our first property, a red brick mid-50s two-story house at 903 Arthur Avenue, which we could occupy in October. Until then, we moved into Don and Ilse Reists’ house for a few weeks while they were abroad and then a month in a Laurelville Mennonite Church Center cabin called Friesland (they all had Anabaptist names). So, after now seven moves, we joined the stability of the Scottdale bourgeoisie; I called it nesting fever. Except for a few interludes, we lived on Arthur Avenue for the next thirty years.  And why, dear reader, did we move back to Scottdale? Patience, patience, amigo, for that we have the next three decades to answer, and as my mother used to quote her favorite verse from the Epistle of Romans: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” 

The Henry David Thoreau quote comes from the title page of Walden. The early section on visiting my brother James and going to the Geauga County Amish comes from my little brown address book in my personal files. In the early seventies, I started keeping a yearly journal in Composition Notebooks often called “Notes on Life.” The final quotation, one of my mother’s favorite Bible verses is Romans 8:28.