1993 Goshen, Indiana

1993  Goshen, Indiana.  Moving to Goshen, Indiana, a long-distance marriage, Gloria, Hannah, Elizabeth on moving, a sleepless night, comparing northern Indiana and southwestern Pennsylvania; Ruth Ann and John D. Roth, Nora M. Wingard (1913-1997) and 482 descendents, James A. Miller (December 24, 1951- July 21, 1993), a return to  Christianity, James and the Kratzers, last months on earth; my returning to Scottdale. 

My work with the Historical Committee of the Mennonite Church from 1990 through 1994 might be divided into two segments, two years of trying to move our family to Goshen, Indiana, and two years of trying to move myself back to Scottdale, to rejoin the family. For the first several decades of living in Scottdale, I thought of myself as a temporary resident, in the biblical lexicon, a stranger and a pilgrim, hence in the mid-seventies to go to Bowling Green for graduate school, or the early eighties to go to Venezuela for a mission assignment seemed in keeping with that philosophy. However, by the 90s our settledness in Scottdale had reached another level which I was to learn in due time. The children were well settled in school and the community, and Gloria in her sixth year of teaching Spanish at Connellsville High School, and there were things like school friends and retirement funds to consider. When I accepted the Historical Committee appointment in 1989, it was with the understanding by the family and the committee that eventually we would move to Goshen, Indiana, where the offices were located. We did not put a time frame on it and everyone seemed satisfied. I would go out to Goshen once a month, spend a week or two in the office, and do the rest of the work and travel from my office at home in Scottdale.   

So in the summer of 1990, I went to Goshen for the first month on the job, but I discovered that I was emotionally distraught, I felt I had abandoned my family even if Jakob had gone along and was working at Goshen that summer. I found a plaintive letter in my memo book which I never sent to the Gloria one Sunday afternoon in June saying  “I’ve deserted you” and “it simply has not felt right. Perhaps it will with time.” But it did not get better or ever feel quite right. Although I enjoyed my work, I never looked forward to those monthly leaving for Goshen by myself and always looked forward to returning to Scottdale. Theoretically, it should have worked because long-distance marriages were a media phenomenon and increasingly common. But I was never comfortable with the arrangement. I was feeling like the forlorn Western mustang stallion who was no longer with his herd. While I was gone, Gloria had to go on with life in making decisions and doing activities, so when I came home things seemed to be going too well without me. I was feeling displaced, maybe even ghosts of my father Andrew’s mid-life displacement in my head. We often had exchange students or temporary internationals or trainees at our home (Venezuelans and Spanish students), and a Japanese graduate student needed temporary residence for a few weeks, and Gloria quite innocently took him in. When I found out, I immediately drove home and made it clear another housing arrangement must be found, immediately. 

In the meantime, Hannah was now in her final years of high school and declared that she was staying in Scottdale even if it meant staying with another family and graduating from Southmoreland High School. By 1992, she and her classmate Anson Miedel had become good friends, and that was another reason she wanted to stay in Scottdale until they both left for college. Elizabeth was still in primary school, and was open to whatever Gloria and I worked out. If she was not as direct and declarative as Hannah, her preferences were also clear; she later told us she had been praying the Goshen night Gloria and I could not sleep—but I’m getting ahead of my story. By the summer of 1993, Hannah and her friend Anson Miedel had graduated, were leaving for Eastern Mennonite University and Westminster College in the fall, and Gloria was offered a Spanish teaching position at the East Noble School District, a little southeast of Goshen.

I remember it well because Gloria, Elizabeth and I had taken an August vacation at the Atlantic shore when the call came noting the job opening. The next week we drove to Indiana, Gloria interviewed, and the superintendent immediately handed her a contract to sign or to let him know within days. We had looked for houses which were available in Goshen and Elizabeth’s enrollment at Bethany, the Mennonite academy nearby. But all that night I could not sleep, and at dawn when we both got up, I asked Gloria if she had slept that night, she said no. We decided that this sleepless night for both of us was a united negatory -- on her taking the job, our moving to Indiana, and my employment as director of the Mennonite Historical Committee and Archives. 

There were many variables such as Gloria’s contentment with Connellsville High School Spanish teaching and finally as to whether we wanted to live the last third of our careers in the Goshen Elkhart community. On one level, it was no contest. Religiously, the northern Indiana community was rich in its Amish and Mennonite churches and institutions; Scottdale was a declining Mennonite population with one fragile institution—Mennonite Publishing House. Elkhart Lagrange counties were a robust small business entrepreneurial society with new Hispanic immigrants, and a thriving economic setting. Westmoreland Fayette was an industrial labor legacy society with few recent immigrants and trying to recreate itself with growing medical, educational, and service sectors. 

Still, we liked southwestern Pennsylvania; for one thing there was Pittsburgh; we enjoyed the cultural and educational elements of this small city which somehow was able to maintain a very livable environment. Second, we enjoyed the small town ethos of Scottdale where our children had grown up and where we had many good neighbors and church friends; we loved the trees, rivers and wildness of the Laurel Highlands. Third we were near family; this may seem strange to say regarding our Holmes County relatives who seldom visited us. Still, they came at crucial times of graduation, baptism, licensing, or a holiday and I always felt them nearby, even though in many ways culturally Holmes County and Westmoreland County were worlds apart. Maybe, I especially became aware of my love of Scottdale, in the course of two years around Goshen in which everyone I met seemed to take it for granted that one would want to move to Goshen, Indiana. Many of my Mennonite publishing colleagues and retirees already had made the move. The Hoosiers would say it so good naturedly with their mid-western heartland optimism, and I could only agree. But deep inside northern Indiana was also Hamlet’s Norway, a prison of long winters with grey skies and flat farmlands, dotted with recreational vehicle and duck factories, near a good little Mennonite college. I was homesick for my family.

Not that family was absent in Goshen; there were my sister Ruth Ann and John D. Roth and their girls. I totally enjoyed getting to know my sister Ruth better and John was an ideal mate at the college and historical library. When I left home at age 20, Ruth was only six years old, so we had only a short time together at Holmesville, and Ruth was now a young mother herself carrying on the tradition of her own mother of loving her work, church, and family in a busy way. She and John loved to entertain at their large table whether it was one of John’s college classes, small group friends, or extended family members when they were in town or students at Goshen College. Ruth was also active at church, whether at the Assembly, at that time a left-wing house church on the Goshen College campus or later at Berkey Avenue where they still worship today. Ruth was most like my mother Mattie of any of the three sisters; she and Mattie seemed to instinctively communicate, and for about three decades Ruth organized an annual Millersburg to Goshen trek of my Mother for Fall apple canning fests and Spring Bethany School benefit auction events. Ruth was also on the Bethany board for many years.

John had sent me a note already back in 1987, saying that the Historical Committee may be a good fit for me when the committee was looking to go in what it called New Directions. By the early nineties, John was hitting his stride as an Anabaptist Mennonite scholar having been named editor of the journal Mennonite Quarterly Review  at the same time he ran the Mennonite Historical Library with his old Goshen classmate Joseph Springer. An outstanding teacher, John was also a preacher and was becoming the go-to Mennonite speaker for commemorative events, inter-church dialogue, and scholarly conferences.  John was bilingual in German and English and by the late nineties when John and Ruth took the family to Costa Rica for a study service year; he also became fluent in Spanish. John had an amazing work ethic and in 1992 I noticed he was up at four o’clock and within a few months had translated the Letters of the Amish Division: A Sourcebook (1993) for the 300^th anniversary of Amish beginnings among the Swiss Brethren.

After the Amish conferences and commemorations, by the summer of 1994 John was a keynoter at Don Kraybill’s Elizabethtown College conference in Pennsylvania, commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the Harold S. Bender’s The Anabaptist Vision publication (1944). Out of that conference John published six papers which were given under the title Refocusing a Vision: Shaping Anabaptist Character in the 21^st Century. I considered it a pastoral and churchly appropriation of The Anabaptist Vision, perhaps in contrast to an earlier generation (the Concern group) using the vision more as an idealistic and theoretical construct. John offered the manuscript to Mennonite Publishing, and I regret we did not pick it up. I think I was self-conscious regarding self-promotion because John was my brother-in-law, and I had contributed a chapter “A Reconstruction of Evangelical Anabaptism.” But it merited the distribution the denominational publisher could have given it; John’s Mennonite Historical Society then published it. Anyway, John pulled these many projects together with great alacrity. If my sister Ruth and their girls (already a Suzuki string quartet) made my Goshen years enjoyable for family purposes, John equally did so for professional and vocational reasons.

One additional family connection during these years was my father’s sister Nora M. Wingard (1913-1997).  During my four years of monthly treks to Goshen, I often visited Aunt Nora the matriarch of a large clan in LaGrange County, Indiana, on weekends. When she died on October 8, 1997, she left behind about 500 living descendents, all of whom she used to tell me with modest gratefulness, lived within buggy-driving distance of her home near Shipshewana, Indiana. There were actually 482 grandchildren and great grand-children. She had 10 children from two husbands and inherited a slew of step-children from Joe Wingard, her second husband.  

Toward the end of her life Nora lived as comfortably and humbly as any Amish grandee could with this large extended family, perhaps especially in relief because her married life began so tragically (1944). By the time I was seeing Nora in the 90s, she was holding court in her little house with a big living room surrounded by children of several generations who seemed to come and go during all waking hours with food, errands, messages or simply visits. Across the road from Nora, were Betty and Joe Junior on the family farm, and next door were Ruth Ann and Jay who had just been called as a deacon in 1992 in the local church district. Just up the road were daughter Mary Miller and her family of 11, most of them married offspring. Nora’s twins Freeman (now a minister) and Ferman (both of whom I had recalled as adventuresome teenagers), had settled down nearby and both had families of 10 children each with successful farming and business operations.

Nora enjoyed singing and when family members gathered, we would often sing from hymnals and also mimeographed English lyrics. This Amish matron with her offspring sang from the Ausbund on Sunday mornings, and by afternoon also sang my father’s English gospel songs, such as “All the Way My Savior Leads Me.” In a Miller family which had more than its share of poets, eccentrics, hypochondriacs and pessimists, Nora ended up as a pragmatic optimist. While still living, Andrew would regularly stop in to see her when he was driving people with his van, and Nora said he walked just like their father Martin. She had seen sufficient tragedy as a young woman and later suffered the waywardness of children and grandchildren during their experimental Rumspringa stages. But her Christian faith, a pious belief in the grace of God and her faith in the church as a supporting community seemed to sustain her—as it did her children. She simply outlived her troubles, the children came around, and a strong family and church network nurtured them.

When Nora died in the Fall of 1997, my mother called me when I was in California, and I tried to change my ticket to come back right away even at a high cost, but mom told me the family would understood. Mom in her practical sense about these things, assured me that she, Ruth and John Roth at a minimum would go. Still, I regretted not being there to say goodbye to this somewhat out-sized personality of an aunt. Not that I had special family claims on her; I had far fewer than many of her other relatives, but she was an inspiration and a living reminder of my father’s side of the family which I never knew very well. She seemed to represent so much of the family’s artistic, cultural and church reality. The Martin and Martha Miller children were bright, high-achieving and poetic young people who were raised in modest rural poverty, but they married well and generally raised healthy and expansive Amish families.

During 1992 and 1993, I often made a stop at Cleveland as I traveled from Pennsylvania to Indiana. I stopped in to see my brother James who was now dying of cancer. James and Lynn Pelikan lived in a comfortable house in Shaker Heights, and James was what might be called a vocational student. His house was filled with books and discs of classical music, and we would walk down the street to the Arabica coffee shop to visit. He loved to make copies of music selections and send them to his nieces and nephews for Christmas or birthdays. James was a poet and continued to write poetry until his death. James also wrote a Christmas musical drama for the church he had joined near Cleveland with the British pastor Alistair Beggs. James sent me many a sermon cassette of Pastor Beggs, and I think I listened to one or two of them; he seemed like C.S. Lewis lite with a slight tone of arrogance. James had reconnected with Christianity by reading Francis Schaeffer, the fundamentalist Christian apologist and cultural arbiter. James considered Schaeffer an outstanding guide on all things Christian and cultural. I was grateful that Schaeffer and Beggs gave Christian meaning to James’ life and thought, but I never thought their evangelical sub-culture was any more compelling than my own Amish Mennonite variety. And I thought most of the Anabaptist church varieties may have had the virtue of humility.

But another side of James emerged when Miriam stopped in one evening that year on the way to Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania, for a Recovery of Hope Marriage Week.  Miriam was discouraged and I knew her husband Veryl was too. But a week later, they stopped in on the way home and were truly changed people having some sense of the origins of their troubles and a common commitment to make their marriage work. We knew that given the nature of Miriam and Veryl’s personalities, their marriage would always have many ups and downs, but I had never seen anything quite like this change. I considered it a miracle; the marriage and family held, and they raised a wonderful and talented family of five Kratzers. And here is where James came in; when he heard of Miriam and Veryl needing this recovery period, he moved down into the Kratzer house and picked up the parenting duties with the gracious aplomb and humor of an old uncle. None of this is to subtract from the neighbors Corrine and Bill Helmuth coming over for the milking, the extended Kratzer family, and I think sister Ruth came in from Indiana too. But it always put James in a new light.

Still, James’ health continued to decline, and his death seemed almost 19^th century in how a poet was supposed to die, gradually and with ethereal thoughts. During his last weeks he did a few activities such as visiting Israel and the Cleveland Zoo which had to be stressful to his long-suffering wife Lynn Pelican. Ever writing until the end, one of his best writings appeared in the First Things magazine, under his full name as James Andrew Miller. During the last week when he was weak but still able to visit, the family brought him down to spend his last days in our Holmesville farmhouse. He died peacefully in his sleep, and on July 21, 1993, was buried near his father Andrew in the Martins Creek Mennonite cemetery. Both son and father had similar Christian beliefs regarding their eternal rest with Christ, what the evangelical Amish would have called assurance of salvation. But for James the physical death seemed almost kind while for my father the final weeks were cruel. Our cousin David Schlabach who became quite close friends with James in his last years, once wrote a paper saying how James showed him how to die. 

At the fall 1993 Historical Committee meeting met near Metamora, Illinois, and during the executive session discussed my associate Dennis Stoesz’ lengthy complaint that I did not spend sufficient time at the Goshen office, hence was not giving him sufficient emotional support, especially in his relationships with the former archivist Leonard Gross. He was probably right, and I knew it was time to go home. Several days later, J. Robert Ramer, the Mennonite publisher, called me early one morning and asked if I would consider coming back to Scottdale and Mennonite Publishing House. Laurence Martin of the Congregational Literature division was returning to Ontario. Not only would I have considered this position; I would have come back to sweep the floors. But it took another year to wind down my work at Goshen; as I said it was two years in going and two years in returning.   

Most of this comes from memory, journal “Notes on Life,” personal files, and my date book of 1993. The plaintive unsent letter to Gloria was a June 17, 1990, entry of my 1990 memo book, also entitled “Trip to Spain.” The John D. Roth book referenced is Refocusing a Vision: Shaping Anabaptist Character in the 21^st Century, Mennonite Historical Society (Goshen, Indiana, 1995). The section on Nora Wingard came largely from an unpublished reflection I wrote on her life soon after she died in 1997. James’ article “Other Plans: Journal of an Illness,” appeared in First Things (March 1993). Published poems and other articles can be googled under James Andrew Miller; his papers are at Cleveland State University.   

1992 Alte Menist and Gulf War

1992  Alte Menist and Gulf War. Mowing Alte Menist cemetery, Iraq War and pacifism, Hannah and Elizabeth softball, three volunteer coaches, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ben’s Wayne sequel, a trip to Newton, Kansas; Berdella Miller, Meeting the Venezuelans again, a folk opera;  Andrew A. Miller (January 8, 1918 – December 5, 1992),  fiftieth wedding anniversary;  Andrew’s music career, Walnut Hills, Homestyle cassettes, a non-profit ministry, Andrew’s last days and funeral.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This stanza was one of my father Andrew’s favorite quotes from his American literature education at the Wise School near Charm, Ohio. So let’s talk about burial grounds, death and  life. In 1990, the two Mennonite congregations of Scottdale joined together to take ownership of the old Pennsville Mennonite (German name Alte Menist) Cemetery near Everson. By 1992, we placed a marker at the front and had a picnic and ceremony. About that same time a regular summer activity for our family was mowing the Alte Menist grass. I volunteered us to do this project because my schedule was irregular given my travels and an office in Indiana. This seemed a volunteer project we could do as a family, and Jakob, Hannah, Elizabeth and Gloria (until the poison ivy became too invasive) helped throughout the nineties until the kids left for college.

By 1993, I got a personalized Father’s Day card from Elizabeth and Hannah: “Levi, Even though you make us feed the comets [backyard poultry hens] and mow the cemetery, we love you.“ This burial ground was isolated and historic with the stones taking one to early 19^th century German script “gestorben” and Victorian English “consort” and “departed this earth.” Meanwhile, an earthly appeal for me was the annual appearance of the Yellow-billed Cuckoo flying along the pasture, Eastern Bluebirds sitting on the old stones, and a Baltimore Oriole pair weaving a hanging nest high up in the wild cherry trees.  I rarely saw these birds in the Scottdale borough.

 

During these times of mowing the Alte Menist cemetery, I sometimes thought of the Iraq War which had been fought in 1990-91. For one thing, unlike most of the cemeteries in our area, the two-century year old Alte Menist had only few veterans’ flags; most of the graves had simple and plain markers without flags and national symbols, hence the non-resistant Mennonite tradition it represented. The Iraq War actually marked another stage in my thinking regarding a Christian pacifist approach to war. I had grown up on two-kingdom non-resistance to war which was the belief of the Holmes County Amish and Mennonites and their ancestors. By the mid-sixties and seventies I had moved to joining this pacifism with a Politics of Jesus anti-war position, and had made common cause with the anti-war movement against the Vietnam War. By the eighties and the Central American Wars this position however had morphed into a pro-liberationist justice movement which gave tacit support to violent often Marxist guerilla groups or socialist oriented political parties (1987). By the nineties, the sympathy went to the various Middle Eastern Muslim belligerents.  

I, however, considered the Western democratic tradition led by the USA as basically a force for good in the world. It was not clear to me that pacifists had any unique insight on this war except to confess that they could not fight. I had returned to chastened two-kingdom pacifism similar to my Holmes County ancestors. Meanwhile, these political lefties turned on me and blamed me for the deaths in the Gulf war, even my friend Donald Kraybill who should have known better--given his Amish and Mennonite studies. I suppose I deserved some blame (my non-resistant ancestors can also be blamed for not stopping all the earlier wars since 1527!), but I felt the left-wing activists could as well have blamed themselves for not warning the Iraqis that there were consequences to invading a neighboring country. Some of my friends had signed up as citizen diplomats traveling to Iraq, assuring the Iraqis how friendly the Americans were and telling the Americans how liberal the Iraqis were. My Mennonite friends reported seeing some nudes in an art museum. But enough of these pacifist debates; they are probably mainly tedious to the outsider and probably should be to us insiders too.

Aside from mowing the cemetery, the other spring and summer activity of Hannah and Elizabeth during these years was softball; they played on the Southmoreland High School team. But I remember them best for the Barry’s Market team of the Scottdale Girls Softball League which was a program beginning with elementary school-age girls up through high school years. Hannah and her friend Beth Lehman were on the same team and they won their share of league and tournament championships; when Elizabeth came along she was also a good player, especially as a pitcher and fielder. The older girls drafted her onto their team, even though she belonged with a younger set. The coaches of those Barry’s Market teams were Pat Prewett, Dee Hardik, and Clyntell Black, three amazingly gentle souls who gave time, wins and goodwill to many girls for 36 years until they retired in 2010.

Prewett, a large stately woman, coached first base and would say to each batter: "Want to see you down here!" Many an evening Gloria and I joined our neighbors in the stands and cheered for our teams. About this time, I read Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America and developed a new appreciation for the role of voluntary associations in our society, in other words, civil society. The free churches, which de Tocqueville in the 1830s called the sects, were obviously such groups, but when I would think of volunteerism, three softball coaches would appear in my brain. I could spend the rest of this chapter naming the many other coaches and volunteers who made our community work (Michael Lashinsky daily manicuring the Loucks Park infield).

Ben’s Wayne sold well and continued to give me a number of public occasions for several years after publication.  In March of 1992, I was the featured speaker at a Bluffton College English and Speech Festival, especially for visiting high school students. The poet Jeff Gundy had organized the event, and several students did a dramatic interpretation of a chapter. By the Fall Good Books came out in a paperback edition and on November 7, 1992, I was again signing at Wooster’s Buckeye Book Fair. In March of the following year 1993 I appeared at the Bellaire (Ohio) Public Library and public school students; the town was right across the Ohio River from Wheeling. The Goods and the public response also got me working on a second novel of a young family in western Pennsylvania during the seventies. I called it “Duane’s Dream” and wrote several chapters, plotted out some of the story and main characters, but then I put it away. I’m not sure if I was simply too busy with other things, tired of the Ben’s Wayne controversy, or simply thought, to put it crassly, been there, done that. Many things, I did only once in my life.       

That fall I took a long road trip (November 12 - 15) to Newton, Kansas, where the Western District Conference Mennonite Historical Committee had invited me to give some talks on the Amish (as in Swiss) and the Mennonites and 1492. One of the meetings was an annual banquet of the Swiss Mennonite Historical Society where the members claimed to have Amish roots. I thought this was simply a post-“Witness” movie phenomenon where everyone wanted to claim the Amish. But these folks largely from Moundridge, Kansas, had a Swiss Volhynian background before Ukraine and then Kansas. They were quite interested in their Amish cousins, especially for the Swiss origins. This was all a new revelation to me because I had associated all these non-Pennsylvania or Kansas German Mennonites as having Dutch north German Polish background. We called them Russian Mennonites because they had lived in the Ukraine and part of the Russian Empire. Although I had been in Kansas quite often on publishing and historical business, this visit gave me an opportunity to travel to the small prairie towns of Goessel and Hillsboro where a sod house had been re-constructed, as it may have been in 1874 when the first Russian Mennonite immigrants arrived to the mid-western Plains.

The weekend ended with a 1492 address at the Kaufman Museum near Bethel College. The entire visit with these plains or prairie Mennonites gave me a new appreciation of how they saw themselves at the center of the Mennonite world, what with them also tying together with the many Russian Mennonites of Canada, especially the General Conference and Mennonite Brethren. And they had three little colleges within a few miles of each other: Bethel, Hesston, and Tabor.  The Kansas Mennonites were friendly, faithful and authentic to their understanding of Anabaptism. After two decades of working with them on many publishing and historical projects, I wanted to appreciate their ecumenical and I suppose liberal vision of all the Mennonites joining together. However, the Holdermans, Old Orders and conservatives out west were having none of this unity, and I probably gave more credibility to a more sectarian view east of the Mississippi which had emerged from a Pennsylvania German America. Both visions had some legitimacy, of course, and history would ultimately sort them out. As I post this in 2015, the sorting out is still going on.  

Our son Jakob had lived with Gloria’s mother Berdella during his last year of high school (90-91), but now by the next summer and fall, Berdella was distributing her husband Roy’s legacy of antiques and collections with earnest. Berdella was generous in giving things to the children, and then with the things she had left, she had the Dave Kaufman Auction folks sell at a Saturday sale. Daughter Carla and Maurice Stutzman were in the process of buying the Berdella and Roy R. home property at Bunker Hill, building an addition to the remodeled house where Berdella could live in a kind of dawdy-haus arrangement. Bonnie was nearby and came over to Berdella for dinner every afternoon. Berdella came down to Scottdale quite regularly too during these years, always generous to the grandchildren, and gamey for concerts or whatever was going on. One evening we went to hear the Spanish pianist Maria de la Rocha in Pittsburgh, and on Thanksgiving weekend, November 28, she joined us for an evening of the folk singer Joan Baez. Because we were not sure where we were going to live, we did not collect many of Roy’s antiques and things during those years, except for some old books and the clocks which Roy had already given us before he died.

Venezuelan people entered our lives that Fall when Marcella Sarmiento got married to Duane Mellinger of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; this event brought us in contact with her parents Luis and Patricia, as well as our old friends Ricardo Ochoa and Alexis Rivera. Ricardo stayed with us for a few weeks and was contemplating attending the University of Notre Dame. I remember I took him over to the campus and the only person I knew was John Howard Yoder. We dropped in on him at his office, and Yoder tried to be helpful even though he was in theology and Ricardo wanted economics. That Fall I was finishing up with Laurelville a folk opera project begun several years earlier and commissioned to be a part of the 1994 fiftieth anniversary celebration. We wanted to commission an original folk opera, somewhat in the spirit of the earlier Martyr’s Mirror Oratorio which was done by John Ruth and Alice Parker. Arnold Cressman helped along with Freeman Lehman of Kidron, Ohio, and we’d get together with Jay Martin and Glen Lehman of Pennsylvania. Eventually we selected Stephanie Martin of Ontario to compose the music and Phil Johnson Ruth to write the libretto, a fictional account of a Walton Hackman type character. On October 16 1993, it was performed at Laurelville’s annual meeting, but I had a historical meeting that same weekend in Metamora, Illinois, so I never saw it performed live. I tried to get it staged at one of the denominational assemblies during the nineties, but never succeeded. I think it only had one performance.    

During the summer of 1991, we had two extended Miller family events; we all got together at Sister Miriam and Veryl Kratzers for Jakob and his cousin Kent’s graduation from Central Christian High School on May 26. The next month we eight children and families (actually Roy and Ruby were unable to attend) did a fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration for our parents on June 29-30 at the Cow Palace near Shreve. It would be one of our last times together as a family although Andrew was not around much. It reminded me of his father Martin Miller skipping his son’s wedding revisited (chapter 1947) as he said he needed to sleep at Lookout Camp where the air was pure. During these years of Andrew slept up at Lookout during the summer, sometimes outside. Andrew said outdoor sleeping was a part of his Native American heritage from his grandmother Mary Schrock (chapter 1947). About this same time, my mother Mattie put in a private telephone line for herself.

     

As a youth, my father was Mart Andy (son of Martin) and he ended his life as Music Andy. In between he had been Andrew A. Miller (sometimes written A. A. Miller), and that is how I remember him best and have called him throughout this memoir. Although Andrew sang all his life, during the eighties he became a musician. He sang for the old and the young, for the sick and the mad. He had always been a soloist and a loner, but now he gave full vent to these passions, even if my mother sang along him in a quixotic musical career. As a conservative Mennonite minister back in the fifties, he had cried when I accidentally dropped a cement block on his mandolin one afternoon at Maple Grove Mission. It was one of the few times I remember my father crying. In those years, he had only one mandolin; now he could have a whole store full.

His main venue for singing was a weekly appearance at the Walnut Hills Retirement Community where Levi and Lillis Troyer were owners and our brother David was administrator. Often he and Mattie took the grandchildren along when they were in the area. But by May of 1989 my brother David decided to discontinue these performances, and Andrew responded by “happily resigning” at both the Nursing Home and Retirement Center. In a letter to his son, Andrew noted that he and Mattie would miss their many Walnut Hills supporters during the past ten years, but “we have thousands more, over a wide area, who give witness to our Spirit that we will all meet again in that Celestial City of Love and Light!” 

The biggest form of making his music available was with cassettes which he called Homestyle County Gospel. First was a 1987 cassette album 1-A, homestyle good news, called Sunny Side Up, vocal duet with guitar and accordion and featuring “Keep on the Sunny Side,” his theme song. A 1988 cassette album 2-A followed, called homestyle memories featured “Holmes County, Ohio,” an original song. The 1989 cassette album 4-H had homestyle songs or ballads featuring “Thank God for Mom and Dad,” a tribute to his parents, and a bird song called “Hello Robin.” Another memorable song “The Quakersville Party” had lyrics of a duck quacking and a fox squirrel making clucking and chucking sounds which went right back to his naturalist teacher Clarence Zuercher. Finally, the 1990 cassette album 5-H, had more songs and ballads and a photo of homestyle grandchildren with pets. Our daughters and our nieces used to remind us of their unusual pedigree as “Indian maidens” and “homestyle grandchildren.”   

On September 8, 1991, Andrew sent a “Homestyle Country Gospel Update” to “share-a-song” friends and sponsors noting that he had been selling the cassettes by mail order and through stores with a slight mark-up of 33 percent. But, he said, this was defeating the purpose of a non-profit charity because hundreds of cassettes had gone out--with notes of appreciation coming back and no negative feedback. Missionaries and church workers had taken free tapes as far as “Mexico, India, Africa, Norway, Australia, and Argentina.” Andrew was now ready to simply send them out for contributions (although suggesting $5 per cassette and perhaps $3, for handling and postage). In addition he appealed for free-will offerings and contributions because he was “experiencing an unanticipated demand for Homestyle Gospel cassettes from the poor, the blind, the handicapped, and the very old and from children.” He was also hearing from “radiant saints in wheel chairs and in beds of affliction.” When Andrew’s original compositions dealt with Lookout animals and birds, they seemed authentic and sometimes humorous. His universal themes of love and home seemed sentimental, but it was probably this very aesthetic which made them so meaningful to Andrew and his listeners.

This period also saw a re-establishment of Andrew’s relations with his 1940 and 50s Amish and Mennonite past. The local Amish church district lifted the ban on him, and he spent a considerable amount of time visiting with childhood friends and relatives. He often drove Amish people to various parts of the United States and Canada. To his grandchildren, he was generous with his feelings and refreshments (especially at Dairy Queens). Mattie was now retired from bus driving and they spent many hours together. But more than anything, when we visited, he loved discussions and meaning. He loved a discussion on God’s universalism of human redemption (which ne now favored, no doubt influenced by wanting to meet his Indian doctor in heaven) and the particularity of Christian salvation. He lamented the decline of the Mennonite periodical Gospel Herald from the time of Daniel Kauffman in his youth (whom he also favored) to what he saw as the church’s public preoccupation with sexual sins, now called misconduct. Whether we agreed or disagreed was not that important, he wanted to matter, to have meaning, and specifically Christian meaning.

By the end of the eighties, his heart gave out, and he became sick and weakened. During his sickness, he regaled us with his memories of his parents and ancestors and his sublime hope of meeting his Creator and his childhood friends in Paradise. He sought forgiveness from any he may have ever hurt whether his family members or neighbors. My brother Roy called me one day and said that you can know that Dad is in better mental health when you come into his room and he’s reading Ben’s Wayne. But his physical, mental and emotional health continued to go downhill. He would see visions of angels at one moment and a little later he was sure that the doctors were trying to poison him. He called me one night from his hospital bed in Canton, Ohio, and wanted all the children to gather around to give us a blessing. He said he could not sleep. I told him he had blessed us many times, but I felt no need for a ceremony. His last weeks on earth were not easy, but that is a story for those who were close at hand, my mother, Aunt Clara, and brothers and sisters nearby, to tell. Death is always cruel and fearsome and perhaps to Andrew it was especially so.

  

Andrew died on December 6, 1992. During an afternoon and evening of visitation about one thousand people, as near as I could tell all from the Wayne Holmes County area, came to the Millersburg Mennonite meetinghouse to say good bye and visit with our large extended family. At the funeral on December 9, at the Martins Creek Meetinghouse, his son James spoke on “In memory of our father” which was seven pages of Scripture quotations, “God’s revealed truth concerning the largest destiny of man: life, and signally for us today—death.” The grandchildren sang “Comfort Ye, My People,” and “All the Way My Savior Leads me,” the latter my father’s favorite song. Joe Hershberger-Kirk sang Andrew’s song “God Is Love.”

The Millersburg pastors Bob and Enid Schloneger led the service and members of Andrew’s small group served as ushers: Doran Hershberger, Sturges Miller, Paul Roth, Lee Steiner, Paul Thomas and Elmer Yoder. Sister Ruth organized a page of grandchildren remembrances, and the grandsons carried his coffin.  Andrew was buried in the Martins Creek Mennonite Cemetery a few miles from the place where he was born.  At the end of the day, we went home with Mattie, and my brother Roy (who had led singing that day) drove into the Holmesville drive-way, and I went out to meet him. I can still see him opening the car door and greeting me with “Boy, am I glad that’s over.” But the specter of sickness and death continued in our family; that summer brother James was diagnosed as having a cancerous growth in his colon.

Most of this comes from memory, personal files, my 1992 date book, and journals of the period. The Henry Wadsworth Longfellow stanza which my father Andrew Miller often quoted is from “The Psalm of Life.” The section on pacifism and Iraq comes from “Why I Sat Out the Gulf War,” Gospel Herald (May 5, 1992, 1-3). Donald Kraybill (and Leo Driedger) blaming non-resistant pacifists and specifically me for the Iraq War deaths come from Mennonite Peacemaking: from Quietism to Activism (1994, 271). Regarding girls’ softball coaches, on January 15, 2013, Elizabeth and Hannah e-mailed me and Dee Hardik gave telephone information. Much of the last year of Andrew comes from “Andrew A. Miller 1918-1992” I wrote the week before Andrew’s death and sent to my brothers and sisters on the first anniversary of his death. Andrew’s departure from Walnut Hills was recorded in a letter from my brother David on May 24, 1989. Roy’s call concerning Andrew reading Ben’s Wayne was in a letter to my publishers, Merle Good, April 15, 1991. A copy of my brother James’ “In memory of our father” is in my Andrew A. Miller funeral December 9, 1992, file.  

1991 Southmoreland and White Water Rafting

1991 Southmoreland and White Water Rafting. School board, a culture of conflict, a difficult vote, Bill Porter, John F. Kenney; biennial Mennonite Assemblies, Eugene, Oregon, San Francisco vacation, Berkley People’s Park, white water rafting, Miller family exceptionalism, Kenneth Reed, Roy L. Schlabach (1915-1991).

My first term on the Board of Directors of the Southmoreland School District was from 1989 to 1993. When I did my study of the nineteenth-century Mennonites, I discovered that the first trustees of a common school in East Huntington Township in the 1830s were two Overholts and a Stauffer. I considered myself a spiritual descendent of these people, and when I joined the board in 1989, I thought I was in a long line of honorable people. After our first meeting, the Scottdale weekly The Independent Observer covered our meeting on the front page. On the inside was an editorial which began by the editor (Charles Brittain) saying that his parents always told him that if you can’t say anything nice about people, don’t say anything. Then there was a big blank space on the page. Welcome to the world of Southmoreland school politics--not all of which was honorable.

That first meeting was what my parents would have called an eye-opener; I called it a culture of conflict. I was no stranger to debate and opposing views, but here I thought I was visiting Northern Ireland on the first and second Thursday of each month. If you said yes, I’ll say no. If you nominate her; I’ll nominate him. And we’ll remember each grievance from five months to five years ago. You hired or sacked the football coach; you can fill in the blanks here of a Popp, Thompson or Schrecengost, not to mention the coaches you passed over, and now we’ll get even. Citizens would regularly show up for our meetings for the theater of it; others were appalled and tried to ignore what was going on.   

I sometimes had to squeeze myself that we were in the same district during the day and evenings. We had volatile board meetings in the evenings, and then in the mornings I would take daughter Elizabeth to school where there were civil teachers and bright faced little kids learning science, reading stories, solving math problems, and recycling. They were also planning an overnighter to Laurelville Mennonite Church Center. The discontinuity of conflict going on at meetings and our actual school life of study, music and play was disorienting but became the new normal. On the one side were the sons of Italy headed by Francis Zaffina and Anthony (Tony) Lizza and on the other were the township Germans headed by Alvin Stoker and Charles (Chuck) Moore. Whatever labels I’m giving here, ethnicity was a minor factor; it had more to do with power in making decisions. The composition of the sides would change and with time independent types were elected such as Thomas Seaman, Cheryl Shipley, and Michael Street  tended to diffuse the sides for a period of time. Joseph Eckman was an interesting case study for me because we both joined the board in 1989. For many years the popular mayor of Everson, Eckman was the ultimate local pol and whether we agreed or disagreed we remained friends over the years.

Personnel approvals were big issues. Some on the board members saw themselves as a kind of one-person placement agency looking for allies, what I used to call the wisdom of five votes, to see that relatives and friends get jobs. One board member openly said one of his main goals was on to see that each of his children (including an in-law) get jobs at the district. He was quite successful, and actually they turned out to be good hires. The difference between an operating and a policy board was often blurred and nepotism was assumed. I tried to make independent decisions, not choosing one of the sides when I ran for office, hence not allowing my name to be listed with others with whom I may have been natural allies. But it was never easy; parents had strong feelings about their children, neighbors and relatives; it was quite understandable.

On personnel, I generally followed the recommendations of the administrative staff who had interviewed the candidates. This process brought a level of objectivity which was needed if hiring is to be based on merit rather than family and other loyalties. But hiring is never an exact science and sometimes the choices were especially difficult. A young woman who grew up in our neighborhood was a candidate for a teaching position, but was not among the top candidates recommended by the administrators; I no longer recall the reasons. Our superintendent Kenney put considerable emphasis on the college g.p.a. (grade point average).

Some of the board members were lobbying for her and I wanted to vote for her too because I knew she was of good character from an outstanding Christian family. At the same time I wanted to honor the process, the educational and objective criteria, at least according to our staff evaluations. I ended up voting for the recommended candidate which turned out to be a close decision when we tested our views in an executive session. Irrespective of what the public vote was (probably 9-0), word soon was out to the family on the discussion in the executive session and our good neighbors were in deep pain—the candidate, her parents and extended family. I was too.

I would see the family members, and one time I mentioned to the Father that I was sorry and tried to explain my vote. My neighbor had always reminded me of a person the British Victorians used to call a Gentleman and a Christian. Several months passed, and one evening as we met on the street, he came up over to me, took my hand and said something to the effect: It’s over, Levi. It’s over. He never brought it up again, and we resumed our neighborly relationships. I should probably not bring it up either but I do only as a regret. Later his daughter was hired and has been a good teacher for the district. I still believe I did the right thing in supporting the recommended candidates and honoring the nature of a meritocracy rather than family fiefdoms. Still, of the hundreds of board votes, if I had one to take back over the past several decades that is probably the one I would recall. The experience gave me an appreciation for the difficulty of these decisions on a personal basis, especially when there were a number of qualified local candidates, but only one can be chosen. Because I had fewer family and social ties in the community, I may not have felt these concerns as did some board members.

Personnel was tied to another major issue--budget because education is a labor intensive project, and three fourth of our budgets were made up of staff salaries. Over half of our budget, at that time about sixteen million, came from state aid which our district needed. But if we increased staff or gave raises, we also needed to raise local taxes. I learned that a favorite board action was to vote for increases to staff and spending during the year but not to vote for the budget or tax increases to balance the budget. I never forgot how that on the first year, I voted for the budget and also a modest tax increase, and one of the board members who had voted against both came over and shook my hand.

It was not clear to me if he was thanking me for making a difficult decision (balancing the budget) or if he was congratulating me my political naiveté. Still, I never paid much attention to this conventional political wisdom; Michael Street who was on the board during those years voted for about every staff recommendation and tax increase and was quite easily re-elected during the terms he served on the board.  During my life time, the state mandated much more education and support for the handicapped but often underfunded these mandates. Generally, I thought Southmoreland voters were pretty sharp and wise in sniffing out the real issues regarding school board affairs in spite of the political theater.

But on budget we had an advantage over many school districts because our business manager was Bill Porter. A Scottdale native, Porter had strong business acumen running our finance office and the district’s transportation, achieving a sterling record with local and state audits. Porter thought and planned strategically but was a tiger in protecting a several million fund balance. Porter was the opposite foil to our superintendent John F. Kenney, although both were young, bright and ambitious. Superintendent Kenney was on an upward career track and tried to bring us a measure of professionalism and worldly élan. He used to talk of Southmoreland as a world class school district and instituted Japanese language instruction (a Sony plant was nearby). All well and admirable, but to the locals he also too obviously presented himself as a world class superintendent, leaving the office early while accumulating vacation days. We knew he would eventually move on to a larger and wealthier district which he did by the late-nineties; many even welcomed his leaving. Still, we were fortunate to have him for a decade.  

Porter was with us for the long haul, arriving at the office at seven in the morning returning home late in the evening, scrupulously honest and direct of speech; his financial reports at board meetings often punctuated by cheerful profanities. When he saw corruption or shady practices he blew the whistle, and over the years also attracted a band of detractors. But by the mid-nineties he had hit his professional stride and by his retirement in 2012, Porter had seen the district through major renovations of the a new high school, football stadium, elementary and middle school and a maintenance building, plus a healthy six-million dollar fund balance. He somehow kept Southmoreland in the third lowest tier of local taxes in Westmoreland County, giving space while our superintendents and teachers kept the students among the third highest tier in the county’s academic achievement, not a bad record for a district which straddled the line into Fayette County. As of this posting in 2015, our Southmoreland schools were honored with many academic and “over-achieving” regional, state, and national awards, but that is a later story.

During those years I often chaired the curriculum committee and watched the steady increase in state mandated testing. Whatever value of this testing had as a point of reference; I was always ambivalent about it.  It seemed to me that at a minimum American education taught the basic reading, writing and mathematical skills and then allowed, even stimulated, students to follow their passions in whatever subject area and skills, vocations or professions that would lead. The best American schools have been generous in allowing non-traditional students to graduate whether handicapped, genius, morons, bored, or simply too large for the seat. If you had a work ethic and moral character, as far as I was concerned, too many tests be damned.

Southmoreland was fortunate in having teachers who taught in this way, and many of our students did well in life, coming from strong families with moral standards, humane values and Christian community. So whatever the faults of our school board members, and I was not without faults myself, I was always quite honored to be among my fellow school board directors. We provided personnel, policy and finances so a new generation, rich or poor, could pursue their educational and life dreams. And when our daughter Hannah was a senior (1992), she sat on the board with me as student representative; later Elizabeth would do the same (1996).

During alternate summers I often attended the biennial Mennonite conventions which were generally held in various university campuses of North America. Because I worked at Mennonite institutions, these summer events seemed to be the regular rhythms of getting a mood for the church, even for the ones which I did not attend. I missed a major youth convention at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, in the 60s and an adult meeting in Turner, Oregon (1969), and yet my friends Arnold Cressman and Art Smoker so often referred to these meetings and the radical youth that I felt I had attended. Apparently a new youth culture (our Mennonite version of the national counter culture) ran the Junaluska convention and some of these same youths confronted the traditional bishops at the Turner, Oregon, meeting.

By the time I attended my first youth convention in 19
73 on the Calvin College campus, Grand Rapids, Michigan, it seemed like a fairly tame affair. A guitar strumming band led songs such as Jerry Derstine’s yearning new spiritual “Jesus, Rock of Ages,” (1973). A young Franconia musical (and philosophical) pastor Richard A. Kauffman also had them singing acapella hymns and The Mennonite Hymnal’s 606, “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow,” at the early stages of becoming a denominational anthem. I was writing for a lot for the Mennonite journals during those years, and would occasionally report on these meetings or lead workshops. But the main thing was simply being there, meeting people, and worshipping God at places called Waterloo, Ontario (1979), Bowling Green, Ohio (1981), Ames, Iowa (1985), West Lafayette, Indiana (1987), and Normal, Illinois (1989). I missed the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, meeting in 1983 because we were in Venezuela, but my colleagues talked about it like the Second Coming (which I had missed). The General Conference Mennonites met with our group often called the old Mennonites or Mennonite Church, hence part of merging which culminated two decades later.

By the summer of 1991 this assembly, as the meeting was called, met at in Eugene, Oregon, and I tied my work with the Historical Committee and the Mennonite Church Historical Association onto the assembly with a dinner meeting at which the speaker was Sam Steiner on “confessions of a lapsed radical.” Steiner had been a draft resister who ended up in Canada but now was ensconced in the Mennonite institutions of Canada and the US; he was a member of the Historical Committee to which I was responsible. These dinner meetings were quite well attended with over one hundred people coming and helped nurture historical interest among the membership. Two years later we did the same when the assembly was in Philadelphia in 1993; we had the historian Albert N. Keim speaking on the evolution of the Anabaptist Vision. Keim was writing a biography of Harold S. Bender and also the Historical Committee chair.

But I think the reflection on the sixties was especially on my mind, and we then tied our trip to family vacation and headed for San Francisco. As a family we headed down the legendary US highway 101 which ran along the Pacific Ocean from Washington to Southern California for a week of vacation; I remembered this highway as a favorite of the flower-painted vans two decades earlier.  We made it a leisurely trip stopping for a day (August 5) to go white water rafting on the Rogue River near Grants Pass, Oregon. Compared to rafting on the Youghiogheny River near Ohiopyle, this stretch seemed rather peaceful, and we passed a beautiful day. We often saw an Osprey floating in the sky overhead and whistling at us.

Our sunny family white water rafting must have gone to my head because the next August (the 12th, a Wednesday, I remember it well), I decided that we would do an end of the summer rafting trip down the Youghiogheny with only Levi Miller as the guide. Within days, Jakob was leaving for Eastern Mennonite University; Hannah and Elizabeth were starting their twelfth and eighth grades at Southmoreland, and Gloria was back to Connellsville High School Spanish classes. But if the Rogue was sunny, slow and low, the Yough was cloudy, fast and high; it was fierce. It had rained most of the night before, but I knew we could handle it.

When we got to Ohiopyle, the park ranger said we could not get on the river for several hours because it was too high and fierce, so we headed off to the old brick restaurant store at the corner to eat and read the paper; Hannah stayed in the car and tried to sleep; she said she had bad vibrations of our adventure. Finally, sometime at mid-morning the park ranger reluctantly said we might go in but warned us to be very careful; there had been a drowning several days earlier. I told him I had guided our family on the Rogue River last year and had gone with several earlier guided tours on the Yough. We put in our raft right below Ohiopyle and met about a dozen rapids with large boulders and falls in the seven-mile Lower Yough to the Brunner Run take out.

Most of these rapids are in the class III and IV range, with names like Cucumber, Dimple, and Double Hydraulic.The water was high and fast and at the first loop, both Gloria and I were thrown out of the raft. We went under, and when I got up, Gloria was still under water and the children screaming for their mother. Gloria soon was back up, and we all got into the raft. At the next rapid and large rocks, again Gloria and I went overboard, and now it was more than adventure; it was raw fear. Jakob fell out too and screamed to me that we were dying and he was going no further; he headed for the shore. It was raining and dangerous, but I did not feel that we could leave the raft; furthermore we did not know where to go cross-country. We finally talked Jakob into getting back into the raft and thought we had passed the biggest and fiercest rapids.

After a few hour’s of fright and falls, we arrived at the Bruner Run take out where a bus took us back to Ohiopyle. We had not met anyone else on the river—and mid-summer is usually very busy rafting; no one else was that foolish. I had lost my glasses and we had black and blue marks on our hips and limbs from hitting large rocks. We were shivering and shaking from the chill but more from the nervous tension.  The next day August 13 entry in my journal said: “Yesterday was not one of my best days; I may have come close to killing members of the family. At least, that was the fear. Jacob seemed especially distraught, and I had to fear for our well-being. This is my last attempt at this kind of family outing.” I concluded that it was too dangerous, and that water rafting clearly is a sport best done with a professional guide. It was the last white water rafting trip we ever took.

But I ask myself why did I put our family at risk in this extreme adventure, believing we could do what even the seasoned summer river rats did not venture. Surely, I did not want Gloria and our children to perish. In retrospect, I believe one factor may have been some irrational belief in Miller exceptionalism, that what other mortal families could not do, we could. It began with a father and mother who improvised at Maple Grove Mission for ten years and then seemed to create projects of music, camps, mini-bikes and bus driving well beyond the age of their peers. Even in their failures, I thought they were special. It had to do with brothers who did not finish high school but graduated with some distinction from law school and medical college. It had to do with children who entered a Spanish Venezuelan school with only English but within a year  were at the head of their classes, speaking Spanish. It had to do with Gloria who seemed to have an unerring sense of decency and strength while focusing on meaningful work and leisure.

All healthy families probably embody an element of this belief that they are special, but it was only a decade later and amid great tragedy that I learned of our family’s common humanity. But for now, this adventure mainly re-inforced our ability to survive, even overcome. That evening with black and blue limbs and broken glasses, we went out to celebrate at the Mexican Cozumel Resturant in Greensburg, and a month later for my birthday, Gloria gave me a large Youghiogheny River guide poster which still hangs on our office wall as I write this. She and the children also gave me a book entitled Youghiogheny (pronounced Yock-a-GEN-ee) Appalachian River by Tim Palmer; inside is written “Birthday gift September 15, 1992, 48^th birthday on a commemorative ride down the Youghiogheny when we almost lost our rafts and possibly our lives.”       

But back to our trip to California. We passed a herd of elk and also passed along the giant Redwood trees, drove through one of them, in fact, and then on to northern San Francisco where we were welcomed, so it seemed, by a quilt fair at the Marin Center in San Rafael in the northern Bay Area. Here we saw a huge exhibit of Pennsylvania Amish and Mennonite quilts, and I would see my friend Merle Good and Rachel Thomas Pellman describe the Lancaster County quilt on a video. We had just seen Merle and Phyllis at Oregon and Rachel and her husband Ken and their boys happened to be at the Crater Lake the same time we visited there.   

But San Francisco was the destination where we spent a week at the Metro Hotel on 319 Divisadero Street. One night we ate at a restaurant on Pier 39 where we watched a herd of California Sea Lions who had made a home there. They had begun visiting since a year ago and had become a major tourist attraction. With comical looking faces, the seals flapped like ducks, barked like dogs and swam gracefully as they dove in the water.  On the way back to the hotel we stopped at the City Lights Bookstore which was founded by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beats. I bought Jakob a copy of Walt Whitman’s poems and bought a copy of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl which the poet had read here in 1956. I’ve visited San Francisco several times since then and the City Lights bookstore is generally a part of my visit. In 1998, I bought a copy of Karl Marx and Frederick Engel’s  The Communist Manifesto, 150 years after the first English publication in 1848.

But the highlight of San Francisco was visiting Berkley, the site of the student protests which made headlines in the sixties; specifically we visited the People’s Park off Telegraph Avenue where the University of California was building volleyball courts—amid protests. The park was filled with the homeless, the drug addicts, and the insane. Among this poor population were communists, students, and reformers who were trying to organize a parade. I wrote in my journal that it is tragic that the free speech movement, flowers-in-your-hair romanticism would have now ended with a small-time crime and homeless environment. Our daughters Hannah and Elizabeth were quite afraid. The panhandlers along Telegraph Avenue shouted obscenities and growled and barked like wild animals; one looked and sounded just like a wolf. It struck me that most of these people may have needed a hospital, a job or a family, more than a park. In any case, I decided that if I would be making a contribution to the cause, it would be to the university to claim its legitimacy as primarily an education center and not a social service agency.

I tried to understand the reasons for the homeless and the sick in Berkley, having come to the conclusion that society as government structures and agencies were often cruel and will not and could not take the place of families, churches and personal care. In any case Hannah was in tears of fright from the experience, and I finally came to view it all as a zoo, possibly a dangerous one, into which I should never even have led our family. Ironically, here the roles were reversed and our two-parent with children family must have appeared as mid-western exotics on display in the People’s Park zoo. I could not do anything constructive. I sometimes give panhandlers money, but here I felt it would only re-enforce their bad habits of howling like wolves at our frightened children.

I suppose the sixties have been a life-long fascination, some would claim a fetish, with the excesses of this period of my youth which has led to this choice of vacation. On Sunday morning we experienced another variation of this retrospective when we joined our old Scottdale friend Kenneth Reed worshipping at a Presbyterian church where he and his family were attending and then lunch at this suburban home in San Jose. Ken, Gloria and I had also traveled a long distance from the bohemian days when we had run around together in Scottdale in the early seventies. I remember one time, we took Ken along to visit my Amish uncle Roy L. Schlabach, and Roy asked Ken whether he wore a beard by Christian conviction or as a hippie fashion statement. Uncle Roy was my mother’s favorite relative; he died October 29, 1991.

Most of this comes from my memory, personal files and journals of the years around 1991. Elements of the section on the Southmoreland school board come from a written presentation I gave to Mennonite Publishing House employees on February 6, 1992, in Southmoreland school director file of 1992. Sam Steiner’s “Confessions of a Lapsed Radical,” appeared in the Mennonite Historical Bulletin (October, 1991, 6-10). California trip background comes largely from my journal entitled “Trip to Spain, June 5-14, 1990” and “Eugene Oregon to San Francisco, 1991.” People’s Park information appeared in “7 Arrested at People’s Park” in San Francisco Chronicle (August 12, 1991). 

1990 William Shakespeare

1990  William Shakespeare. Jakob, Shakespeare plays, films, Hartwood Acres summers,  small groups, Maynard and Jan Brubaker, Kim and Diane Miller, Luciano Pavarotti, driving and sleeping, Pittsburgh Pirates, Jakob at Central Christian, Miriam and Veryl Kratzer family, Scottdale Mennonites 1790-1990; Gloria’ Spain trip; Canadian Mennonite writers.

In 1990, our son Jakob wrote a paper on his father while a student at Central Christian High School in Kidron, Ohio. This paper is the first time I saw Jakob writing his name with a k rather than Jacob, so I will honor his change of spelling; he used the k the rest of his life. He wrote: “My father was a frugal man with the possible exceptions of his spending on books, cultural events, and traveling.” I’ve mentioned books already, but here I’ll mention some of the cultural events. In theater aside from high school plays, such as “Bye, Bye Birdie,” I think one of the first plays I enjoyed was Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” at Wooster’s Arena Fair, a summer stock company (pre-Ohio Light Opera). I never quite forgot it, the tragedy of two sons and a failed father Willy Loman. It was Willy’s brother Ben whose line stayed with me: "When I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich." It was so refreshingly crass and carried so much of the false hopes of the Lomans and what I thought was wrong with the world. I, of course, had a fling with the Broadway musical which I described in 1967.

By the time I got to Malone College, I had read and seen Shakespeare, including Chris Halverson and Malone’s in the round tent staging of “Taming of the Shrew.” I never left Shakespeare which was not hard to do; the plays remain quite accessible. In the eighties to mid-nineties, one of the summer events we enjoyed as a family was going the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival which staged three productions at the Stephen Foster Memorial Theater in Oakland. Aside from Shakespeare, some were more recent shows such as the crazy “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” in 1989. Among the Pittsburgh actors, especially in comedies such as “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” we often looked for a large and ingratiating actor Tim Hartman. He was like cotton candy at a carnival, enjoyable even while annoying. We later found out that he is a confessing Christian and as of this writing in 2012, still acting, regionally and on Broadway. Shakespeare was everywhere, and when we were in San Francisco in the summer of 1991, we took in the California Shakespeare Festival’s “Mid-Summer Night’s Dream,” mainly memorable, however, for being in an open amphitheater on a Sunday afternoon with warm sunshine (think of a happy Gloria in a tank top). As I write this chapter, we did a 2011 excursion to New York city and Shakespeare’s King Lear (with Derek Jacobi) at the BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) theater. 

.

Then there were the many Shakespeare films, and one that stands out in this period was Henry V which came to Pittsburgh in 1990. I pulled Elizabeth and Hannah out of school one afternoon and we saw it in the old Fulton Theater in downtown Pittsburgh; this was while they still showed movies in the downtown theaters. It starred a young British director and actor Kenneth Branagh backed up by what would have made any short list of some of best contemporary British actors: Paul Scofield, Derek Jacobi, Alec McCowen, Judi Dench, and a young Emma Thompson and Christian Bale. It is also a coming of age drama in the context of a medieval holy war. I wrote in my journal that although one should never glorify war, and this movie does not, war still reveals the nobility and tragedy of people. We bought the CD, and I never forgot the haunting “Non Nobis, Domine" at the end of the Battle of Agincourt. The kids were generally, and I should say generously, open to going along on these cultural expeditions--whether music, drama or lecture. On September 28, 1989, Hannah (at the mature age of 14) went with me to a lecture of the feminist biblical scholar Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza at Seton Hill College.

Another enjoyable summer event was to take in one or two events at the Hartwood Acres summer outdoor concerts on Sunday evenings. We would drive up on Sunday afternoon, have a picnic dinner, then hear a concert often a Pittsburgh group such as the symphony, opera or Tamburitzans, and also traveling groups such as the Preservation Jazz Band from New Orleans, the same group I had heard one night in their hole-in-the-wall venue on Bourbon Street. During the mid-eighties while Laurelville friends Doug and Rita Berg lived near there, they would invite us to their house for refreshment or drink before we would go home. Rita died later during these years. Sometimes we would go with church friends or small group; I remember one time when we went with the Brubakers (Jan and Maynard) and Millers (Diane and Kim) and James Lederach joined us on his way home from a visit to his sister in Boston. He brought along some live lobsters which we boiled in a big make-shift cooker. Ever ready with equipment and tools, Maynard Brubaker had some kind of blow torch to provide the heat, and the operation attracted some attention. I remember an elderly man bemusedly saying he had seen a lot of unusual picnic spreads at Hartwood Acres, but this fresh lobster was a first.

The big musical event of the year 1990 was on Gloria’s birthday gift to me on September 15 at the Civic Arena, a concert by the tenor Luciano Pavarotti. By this time Pavarotti was a packaged act of set songs, white waving handkerchiefs, outstretched arms and high Cs. But he was still singing well with plaintive come hither clear tenor sounds. The big concert came about because he was going to sing in “Tosca” the year before with the Pittsburgh Opera but fell ill. So he promised to return to sing a special concert for everybody. At the end he sang his signature “Nessum Dorma,” from “Turandot;” we all waved our white handkerchiefs, and then they opened the Civic Arena ceiling to the night sky and gave us a fireworks show. It was the only time, I had seen the Civic Arena open its top from about 20 years earlier when we had seen a show there (I don’t recall the program) but I do recall they opened the half ceiling at the end into the night sky.   

If already in my mid-twenties I was forgetful and sleepy (which I was) by these years in my mid-forties I was worse, sometimes forgetting the dates and events. I remember Gloria and Elizabeth and I one time we drove up to Hartwood Acres and it was totally empty so we had our picnic and went back home. Another time we were going to see the baseball Pirates and were heading down the parkway near downtown with the pre-game show on KDKA, but we thought there should be more traffic on a game night, and about that time the announcer said “Welcome to Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium where the Pirates are finishing their warm-ups and ready to take on the Braves.” I forget what we did the rest of the evening, but Gloria and Elizabeth were forgiving. I think Hannah and Jakob were away that summer.

I was now doing a lot of driving with the car between Pennsylvania and Indiana, and there were numerous journal entries of driving off the road and hitting the guard rails from sleep. One snowy day in Indiana, I fell asleep on the toll road, drove it off of the road with my eyes closed and back on the road again although turned the other way with the eyes open. Another night in the early hours of the morning when I was returning from Illinois to Goshen, Indiana, and was just driving into the town when I skidded off Route 33 into a rail near Goshen’s Dunkin Donuts where minutes later I found out a police officer was having a coffee. The friendly Midwestern officer came out and asked if I had been drinking. I said no I had a sleeping problem; I was trying to get back to see my son Jakob who was then a student at Goshen College. This was in the Fall of 1991; the officer told me to drink coffee, stay alive and go see my son.  I realized that the biggest issue with sleeping and driving was like drinking and driving; I might cause an accident or death to someone else on the road. So often when I got sleepy I would simply drive off at a rest stop or even along the side of the road and take a nap. Several times, a state police would knock on my window and wonder if I was okay. I also tried to take the train, bus or plane when this could be justified, and when going with groups I fortunately had family members, especially Gloria, who had great staying awake abilities.     

Another cultural event was an annual summer Pittsburgh Pirate game, and I remember especially going to the Three Rivers Stadium which was large and oversized. Often times we took binoculars along to see the players and also to catch sight of the nearest fans. Sometimes there were only eight or ten thousand fans in the cavernous stadium.  Although the really lean years were to come in the 90s, it seemed to me Pittsburgh’s Pirates baseball team was always a second cousin to the Steelers. We would sit in the outfield where Gloria could get plenty of sun and the children and I could roam if the game got boring. One night when the old tennis players came out to Monroeville, Gloria (it was her birthday) and I went to see the old stars of the seventies such as Evonne Goolagong, Virginia Wade, Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors; I think maybe even Bjorn Borg was with them.

But back to family cultural events; Jakob was away at Central Christian High School during his last two years of school from the Fall of 1989 until his graduation in the Spring of 1991. During that time, he was having a cultural flowering in music and stage, playing the lead role of Atticus Finch in the play “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Jakob also played violin in the orchestra, and sang in the choir, and sang with his cousin Kent in a select group called the Varsity Singers. Those two years were some of the best and most fruitful of Jakob’s life. I remember when we drove him out to Kidron in the Fall of 1989, I was getting more depressed with each mile as we approached the Veryl and Miriam Kratzer homestead. On the other hand, I noticed that Jakob was becoming more animated and even cheerful-- which for Jakob was saying quite a bit. On the surface, one might not have expected this response, given Miriam’s discipline and strictness. But my sister Miriam was also a loving back-to-nature type who believed that she and Veryl could recreate a Laura Ingalls Wilder childhood for their five young ones. They made a few concessions to the twentieth century such as greater access to books and reading and stringed instruments. When her children needed a strings teacher she went out and recruited Brian Wiebe from Kansas who could also begin a symphony for the Central Christian High School where they attended.

Otherwise, Miriam and Veryl ran a fairly austere household where the Bible stories, books, singing and recordings were welcomed but other worldly influences such as radio and television were not. I remember Jakob had a subscription to Rolling Stone magazine, which he told me Miriam allowed on the front porch but not inside the house. Yet Jakob seemed to thrive under this regime and conditions, and one of his favorite stories was when Miriam showed home movies one night renting an old reel film projector from the Wayne County Library and showed black and white Laurel and Hardy films. He even claimed the morning and evening farm chores could be enjoyable. He loved the table conversations; the Kratzers were story tellers. At Christmas when he came home we often sang together as a family, Jakob’s favorite selection at that time was Mendelssohn’s “Cast Thy Burden Upon the Lord” which they were singing in one of his Central Christian ensembles. We sang it, and it became one of my favorite hymns, especially when Jakob later had many sad and melancholy days.    

In a communal sense of culture, our small group was important to us over the years. The idea of small groups emerged in the seventies when the Mennonites were emphasizing a greater degree of Anabaptist accountability and Christian fraternal relations. The small groups were somewhat fluid from year to year and based on church teaching that we should all be part of one. I remember we were in groups with Joe and Rene Brenneman, Rodney (Jerry) and Jean Cavanaugh, Terry and Sandy Burkhalter, and Susie Bontrager. After we came back from Venezuela in the mid-eighties, we were in a small group with Kim and Diane Miller and Maynard and Jan Brubaker for at least a decade, and I consider this group still going, although mainly in my imagination. Kim and Diane had just married in the summer of 1984, and we knew his parents well, Mervin and Arlene.

One regular event for the small group was to cut a Christmas tree in early December and we would go up on top of Three Mile Hill near Freeman Falls east of Mt. Pleasant and cut a tree and bring it down until those trees got too big. As late as last year I was still getting my trees up there but now they were 30-40 feet tall, and I would cut them down and only use the top part. Others would occasionally join this small group because they were friends such as James Lederach while he was still single in the eighties. Also, Mark and Gina Peachey, Beth and Kenneth Newcomer and Dennis Hertzler honored us with occasional visits. By far the longest members and constants were the Brubakers and the Millers. I remember when I was considering taking the job at the Historical Committee and moving to Goshen, Indiana, we had them all at our place for consultation. We tried to give the positives and negatives of moving, and when we were finished we all agreed that it would be better not to move. But still by the summer of 1990, I had taken the job, and we thought the family would move eventually. But this is a story for another year.

Three other major cultural events would occur in 1990 which I will simply mention. The one was in Scottdale, the second in Spain and the third in Canada. The year 1990 marked the 200^th year since the arrival of the Mennonites to Scottdale in 1790. A committee consisting of Jennifer Hiebert, Ruth Horsch, Rosanna Hostetler, James M. Lederach, Winifred Paul, John Sharp, Rita Yoder, and Virgil Yoder worked on appropriate celebrations well in advance of the occasion. Winifred Paul chaired the committee and compiled a 135-page genealogy of the Mennonite community called Along the Banks of Jacobs Creek. During the anniversary, articles on the family history appeared in local newspaper Independent Observer, tours were given, historical displays were placed in the merchants’ windows along main street, a weekend symposium was held (October 27-29 with guest scholar Beulah Stauffer Hostetler), and a large stone marker was placed at the Alte Menist Cemetery in Pennsville (this actually happened on June 7, 1992).

My main contribution was writing an article on nineteenth century rise and fall of the Mennonites in the area and to plan a symposium. I think my original contribution was giving more of the social and cultural ethos which appeared in the Karl Overholt diary and to revisit the Edward Yoder interpretation that the Mennonites were insufficiently modern (adopting English language and Sunday schools) to attract their own young people. My own reading of the period was that the modernizing impulse (personified by Abraham Overholt) may in fact have sped up the demise of the Mennonites. None of this interpretation is to subtract from the original work which Yoder did, and his study still stands as the basic reference of the period. I suppose the longest term personal consequence which came out of the year was a self-appointment of our family as the sextons of the Alte Menist Cemetery, which after two decades and this writing we are still doing.    

During the first two weeks of June, Gloria took a group of her Connellsville High School Spanish students to Spain, and she took our family along as well. We spent about half the time in Madrid visiting the museums and historical sites. In visiting the cathedrals and royal palace during the Spanish Hapsburg Empire, one was especially aware of Spain’s once mighty and now diminished role in the world. For me, this was all the more evident because during the trip I  read David Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (1987). While there the Spanish daily, El Pais (June 13, 1990, 18), had an opinion column by Kennedy noting the clear decline of the Soviet Union or Russia. In Kennedy’s telling the USA was in the balance and could eventually go in the same direction if one considers its center cities, foreign cars, unstable families, and poor public schools.  For the second week, we spent time at Málaga on the Costa del Sol catching some rest and plenty of sun. Jakob and I rented a motor scooter one day and visited the Alhambra, the fine Moorish architectural remnant of Arab Spain. 

We also took some drama of Normalville (a region of Connellsville’s school district) along on the Spanish trip when a youthful romance went sour. On one of the last nights at Málaga, one of the girls drowned her sorrows but not her anger in drink, and issued torrid accusations about her boyfriend, now a former boyfriend who had taken up with another girl. She went out on the hotel balcony and threatened to jump off; everyone was frightened and Gloria helped keep watch, hence got no sleep that whole night. Meantime early in that same morning, I heard a knock on the door and her ex-boyfriend, and now the villain, said he could not sleep either and wanted counsel. His complaint which I’m summarizing here was that his former girlfriend, however beautiful she was, had sexual appetites which he could not satisfy. He wondered if that was not sufficient reason to end a romance, setting himself up as a victim. I had no idea what counsel to give, much less what the truth was in any of these confessions—physically and sexually, he seemed quite capable as a muscular wrestler. Gloria's main hope at this point was to get everyone back to Normalville alive, if not totally well. I noted in my journal that “All in all, it [the trip] has been a good experience” but perhaps I should also note that this was my last trip as one of Gloria’s chaperones. 

Finally, Canada. Canadian Mennonite literature had been flourishing for several decades, but I discovered it full force at Winnipeg, Manitoba, where I was invited to read from Ben’s Wayne at Mennonite World Conference July 24-29. 1990. Here were the likes of Di Brandt, David Waltner-Toews, Sarah Klassen, Rudy Wiebe, and Al Reimer. There were also galleries with Mennonite art, paintings and sculpture. These writers and painters, especially the poets, were enthusiastic and impassioned, and leading the pack was the young poet Di Brandt; she wrote well, and the fact that she was beautiful, brilliant and strong probably did not hurt. And beyond the poetry and fiction, there was an audience. Whenever the readings were scheduled, there was a roomful of people in full expectation to hear something earthy, sublime and fierce. I had never seen anything quite like this of how the Canadian Mennonites had developed both a literature and perhaps even more importantly an audience: a buying, reading and listening audience. I suppose because it was of a church meeting, I read from the chapter of the Amish church service with the Lob Lied (Praise Hymn) sung slowly, the ministers droning, and Wayne getting drowsy. My reading had humble and modest tones compared to Di Brandt’s lovely and eloquent ferocity. But the moderator Al Reimer was enthusiastic, saying in a world of noise, watch for understatement and the audience responded warmly to my reading. 

I was back to another reality as we were leaving the Winnipeg airport and an elevator door opened with a wheel chair pushed speedily to the gate by Paul N. Kraybill, the mastermind behind the conference. It turned out that in the chair was Mennonite World Conference president Ross T. Bender with his wife Ruth alongside; Bender was sick. Not long afterwards I would visit not Bender but Paul N. Kraybill himself at a nursing home in Goshen, Indiana. He was dying of cancer and had a scene of the Kraybill Lancaster, Pennsylvania, farmstead behind his bed. I had attended many a meeting with both of these elders when they were energetic and strong, but now death and human mortality were calling. Still Winnipeg with its fiery and talented prairie writers (and enthusiastic audiences) reminded me that while we live on this earth, life is to be fully experienced, even its art. If the literature is good, it may even last like Shakespeare’s King Lear or the questions Di Brandt asked her mother. 

Most of this chapter comes from memory and from my date book, personal files and journal from the period, especially the year 1990; I have a journal of the Spain trip and also of Mennonite World Conference. The 1989 “Henry V” movie is in “A Film ‘Henry’ to Rival Olivier’s,” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (February 6, 1990, 23).  The Pavarotti concert is described in “Pavarotti Scores with ‘Consolation’ concert at Civic Arena,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (September 17, 1990, 11).  The article on the 19^th century Mennonites was published as “The Growth and Decline of the Mennonites near Scottdale, Pennsylvania: 1790-1890” in Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage (October 1990, 2-15). The story on the placement of the stone appears in John E. Sharp’s “In Retrospect: The Setting of a Stone,” Allegheny Conference News (September 1992, 7).