2001 Recreational Relief

2001   Recreational Relief. Tennis and friends, skiing, running, The Great Race, Elizabeth at Goshen College, Sony Corporation, South Side Chicago, South Texas, Hannah and Anson, Philadelphia medical schools and friends, visiting Peru, the normal ones; Mennonite Publishing House financial crisis, leadership changes, Dennis Good and Paul Silcox, job searching, book publishing, the Lancaster Mennonite history, John L. Ruth, Where was God on Sept. 11?

About this time my Mennonite Publishing House work life became increasingly difficult, so having stress relievers was important. If I have written much in these memoirs about Gloria, our children, and my siblings, especially Paul, Roy and David, it is because they always stood by, always, and I sure needed them in the next few years. But recreation was also a reliever which as a family we did together. In the summer we played tennis. Gloria played in the Scottdale women’s tennis league, and I played in the Tuesday men’s group at Loucks Park. We were fortunate to have good friends who played in these groups, and over the years I got to know many memorable players. The pharmacist George Hoffman had his own private court where we sometimes played, and he would give elaborate hand signals to his doubles mate. The Southmoreland teacher and coach Paul Barclay could beat any of us, but always the gracious gentleman, he played even with the competition, winning only at the end. People who had moved out of town and came back to visit family often showed up at the courts. 

A memorable tennis mate to appear about this time was David Olinzock from Perryopolis (Star Junction, he could correct us) who regaled us with his international travels, Polish phrases, polka dancing and family history. Back in the sixties, Olinzock signed on for teaching with the Department of Defense schools, hence had lived in many European and Asian countries. During his teaching in the Philippines, he also fathered a daughter whom he raised. I finally met Remy in person when David and I went to see her play for the Pittsburgh Passion football team, but I felt I knew her high school volleyball and later professional football exploits from her loyal father’s many stories.

Gloria and I often played in the Scottdale Tennis Tournament and for several years were finalists in the mixed doubles. One year we met, that’s right Hannah and Anson who happened to be in town for several weeks between medical school terms. Jerry Firestone ran the tournament for many years under the Scottdale Borough’s Parks and Recreation department; A number of us (Gloria and I), the Eutseys (John and his mother) , and the Walches (David and Nathan) also took our turns directing the annual tournament. Then there was the U.S. Open in New York. On Labor Day weekend of 2001, Gloria and I got up early, took the first flight to New York; we watched tennis all day, and returned that same evening about midnight. It was our wedding anniversary, and we did this tennis trek for many Labor Days weekends afterwards, sometimes with the rest of the family.   

About once a winter we went skiing at the nearby Appalachian (Laurel Highlands) slopes. Because we lived so close we could choose a day or evening when there was good snow and weather was comfortable. I was never a big fan of riding up the lifts in single digit temperatures and fierce winds. During the 90s extended family, especially the brothers Paul, Roy and David (often with their children) came over for skiing, and we would join them for a day or two. In the Fall we would run (5-K for most of us) in the Great Race at Pittsburgh. Anson and Elizabeth were veritable runners, but the rest of us would run for pleasure and a health check from Oakland down to the Point (Three Rivers) with about 10,000 regional runners, Mayor Richard Caliguiri, and a few Kenyans. I imagined we were Pittsburgh’s answer to the running of Pamplona’s bulls, only this herd lumbering down Boulevard of the Allies was a lot safer and a lot healthier. In September Elizabeth, Gloria and I also ran in the Scottdale Festival 5-K when we were in town as a recreational event. Scottdale has a great running tradition set by the legendary sub-four –minute-miler Sam Bair Jr. , (Scottdale High 1964), and the Southmoreland’s cross-country and track teams have continued that tradition.

Elizabeth was our best tennis player, playing number one singles for Southmoreland and Goshen College. She actually had a modest tennis scholarship (thank you, Title Nine) and got a good first-year start at Goshen with the coach our old Holmes County roots Leonard Beechy. (His father John and my father Andrew had been good school friends). Beechy was a high school English teacher but also had a degree from Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary. I signed him on as an Adult Bible Study writer, and he and Sue Clemmer Steiner of Waterloo, Ontario, were among the most successful writers we had for several decades.

Meanwhile Elizabeth returned from her Barcelona year in 2000 and went to work that summer at the nearby Sony Corporation in New Stanton. They were hiring temp workers, and now she got a taste of assembly line intrigue and blue-collar resentments toward salaried overseers, in short, an appreciation for how many of the people in our community lived. We would listen to her stories in the evening, and I had the feeling that her Sony culture shock was as jolting as had been her Santo Domingo, Barcelona and Southside Chicago sojourns. Maybe culture shock of sorts was all the more because Elizabeth had grown up here and was not expecting it.

In the 2000 Fall Elizabeth returned to finish her senior year at Goshen College; she lived with friends in a separate house, among them her four-year tennis mate and Spanish student Laura Litwiller. In May of 2001 Elizabeth graduated with a degree in Spanish, education, and teaching English as a second language. My sister Ruth and John Roth hosted us with weekend events that that included niece Rachel Mast, Jon and Rhoda’s daughter, who also graduated that weekend. On that same Sunday evening we flew to Philadelphia where Hannah graduated from the Temple Medical School the next day, a Monday; Grandma Mattie went along. 

I remember at the South Bend, Indiana, airport, there had been a ticketing snafu, and the airlines had given up Mattie’s seat for the last flight of the evening to Philadelphia. The fault was the airlines, and Mattie simply stood there in the ticket line: I shall not be moved. My mother explained that she had just attended one graduation and another granddaughter was graduating tomorrow in Philadelphia, and she was not moving until a seat was found. The flustered attendant made some fast calls, a seat was found, and the four of us Elizabeth, Gloria, Mattie, and I all joined Hannah and Anson later that evening.

That summer Elizabeth headed down to Harlingen, Texas, along the Mexican border where she worked in advocacy for the Hispanic immigrants who were coming to the USA. The center provided legal counsel helping get documentation and also opportunities for adults to finish their high school education or learn English as a second language. She was sponsored by the Mennonite Service Inquiry Program, and in August Gloria and I went down to visit her and then vacationed at the South Padre Island in Texas. On Sunday morning we attended one of the Mennonite churches near Brownsville. Elizabeth’s summer in south Texas was the beginning of a pattern of her life, using her bilingualism, goodwill, common sense, and service ethic to work in many cross-cultural projects which she continues today. 

Although Elizabeth had gone through Goshen College graduation exercises, in September she and a few other Goshen students went to the South Side of Chicago to do their student teaching. She then stayed on, teaching Spanish at a nearby school. We moved her into an apartment not far from the school, and she was very courageous as a single woman to be living and working in a high crime district. But in the Spring of 2002, she was looking for another school nearer to family, and she checked with some of Pittsburgh area schools; she was hired to teach Spanish at Mt. Lebanon High School and began in the Fall of 2002.

Both Hannah and Anson graduated from Philadelphia medical schools that Spring, Hannah from Temple and Anson from Thomas Jefferson. During their medical school years, Hannah and Anson also did a number of international education, service and travel terms. Their medical education schedules did not have as much flexibility as Elizabeth’s educational ones, but in the summer of 1998 they worked in rural medical clinics in Honduras near San Pedro Sula, and in 2001 they spent several months working at a hospital in Moyobamba in Peru. The latter term was sponsored by the Mennonite Medical Association. This was an enjoyable year for us because Gloria and I joined them for a week of travels to Cusco, Machu Picchu, Puno and Lake Titicaca. We arrived at Machu Picchu, already about 8,000 feet above sea level, early in the morning and then hiked up another higher mountain beside it, Huayna Picchu. When we reached the top we could see down on the ancient Inca city.

I remember reading a Saturday Review article on the Incas back in the sixties, never thinking that one day I might visit this fascinating site. Hannah and Anson had our Peru travels well planned, and I especially enjoyed our travels by bus and train, meeting local people and visiting the markets, seeing guinea pigs as edibles. One day the bus broke down and during the wait, I bought a kilo of grapes, sharing them with a friendly peasant woman. No one else seemed interested in eating these unwashed fruits, and they were probably the wiser. By the time we got to Puno, I missed out on most of the activities and missed Lake Titicaca altogether; I was in bed with a upset stomach and fever.      

For residency, Anson entered the Wills Eye Hospital to become an ophthalmologist or eye surgeon, and Hannah chose the Thomas Jefferson Hospital to train as a family doctor. We were happy they could find good fits for their professions in the same city, and they had good friends in Philadelphia, especially in Derek and Rene’ Warnick. The Warnicks were Lancaster people (Rene’ had Holmes County Elmer and Esther Yoder roots), and they also went to the same church, the West Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship. Hannah and Anson also were in a small group with our old Puerto Rico voluntary service friend Fred Kauffman who was now the pastor of their church. Other small group members were Ross Bender and Sylvia Horst. I knew of Ross Bender because he regularly posted his eccentric wisdom on an early website called Mennolink, and one time called our publishing company the Enron of the Mennonites. I read a copy of his unpublished memoirs which fascinated me and were probably an inspiration for this writing.

In the meantime, Hannah and Anson were moving regularly. Along with Tom and Margaret Miedel, we helped them in their various moves. They first lived in a small apartment at 253 South 7^th Street in the center city when they arrived in 1997. Then after two years, we helped them move out to a house with lawn and trees in Mt. Airy where they lived for another two years. We always seemed to meet devout Jehovah’s Witness people at their train stop. After selecting their residency program, they moved back downtown to 615 South 10^th Street which was near both of their hospitals. All of their Philadelphia places had tennis courts nearby. I especially remember one Saturday morning when we played in a park near Mt. Airy, and all morning long a bag piper walked through the park, blowing his singular and haunting tunes, his most frequent song being “Amazing Grace.”  

Somehow, through all these many geographic moves, Hannah and Anson and Elizabeth seemed to navigate with some amazing grace the educational, social, spiritual and vocational decisions they faced in their twenties. I realize that they faced their own difficulties and demons, but given the joys, madness and roller coaster life of Jakob, their lives seemed almost idyllic. 

I read a book about this time, The Normal One: Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling by Jeanne Safer (2003), a part memoir of an adult sister coming to terms with having lived with a brother who provided some of the same theater which Jakob brought to our lives. She felt that her parents had given her no option other than to be sane and successful, and the parents had poured all their energies into that project. She needed to be the super-child, she seemed to be saying. She did not have the option of entering the youthful forays of deviance and lostness given their family situation. 

All families are happy and unhappy in their own way, to re-interpret Tolstoy, but I sometimes wondered if our girls did not feel some of these same expectations. At the same time, I often felt we could not give them much support; they seemed to be out there by themselves (with good friends, the church and divine grace, of course). And now aside from Jakob’s life, I myself was in a vocational quandary; I needed to find a new job; our company the Mennonite Publishing House was becoming financially insolvent, going bankrupt.  

Vacationing in at South Padre Island with Elizabeth reminded me of our vacation with her in Atlantic City in 1993; in back of our mind then was whether to move Goshen or remain in Scottdale. This time I had in back of my mind the fate or our publishing company in Scottdale, the Mennonite Publishing House (MPH). In August, I attended the Christian Booksellers Association in Atlanta with marketing manager Patricia Weaver. At hotel check-out, we discovered that our MPH credit cards were not honored; MPH had not paid the monthly balance. I called the Credit Union and discovered that MPH had used up its line of credit. So I used my personal credit card and went home. 

Right after Atlanta, I was booked to represent MPH at the Canadian Mennonite conference out in British Columbia. I cancelled, flew back to Pittsburgh, holed up at Scottdale, and took a week of vacation. I was devastated; we had allowed the company to run out of money, and I remember I told of my troubles to sympatric back yard neighbors David and Rose Hostetler.  Merle and Phyllis Good were visiting the Pellman family out at Laurelville and stopped in one evening. They were also sympathetic friends, having gone through a financial crisis in the mid-nineties. But what a change of fortune they had. The Goods were now back on their feet and the charm in the publishing industry with a small press hitting it big in the sales of Phyllis’ slowing cooking Fix it and Forget It books.

Sometime, that Fall I did what I had never done before as a mid-level manager; I meddled in board affairs. I called publication board member Ron Sawatsky who was in eastern Pennsylvania and told him I believed it was time for change in staff leadership, beginning at the top. I viewed Dennis Good as Bob Ramer’s hand-picked successor as publisher, and the emphasis was same as Ramer on continuity. Good was an accountant and about as good-natured a personality and pastor as one could find. I was surprised when one of his early acts was the unusual step of not signing the MPH promissory notes when they came up for renewal which certainly helped to create the borrowing and cash crisis. Still, if he was going to take this step, he would also need to take the big steps in re-organizing the company to secure the confidence of our lenders. His personality was pastoral and consensus building rather than decisive; he was not a good fit for an institution in crisis. By February of 2002, Dennis Good was given a leave of absence and then released. I have no illusions that my call to Sawatsky was decisive, but it probably did not hurt regarding successive events.

Meanwhile, in November, the board brought in the Canadian down-sizing specialist Paul Silcox who spent about a month roaming around our Scottdale building, studying our records, and observing our culture until the week before Christmas. He called an assembly of the workers and told us of our financial failings and our unhealthy culture. He told us we had too many micro-wave ovens in each office and mentioned financial reports which told of the number of paper clips in inventory but missed the significance of the large deficit number at the bottom of the page. He shut off the 7:30 and 4:00 o’clock bells and told us to come and go as adults, and even ended the coffee break one-minute prayer bell. Now, we knew we needed prayer, and he told us to expect some big changes in the New Year. He as much as told us that we should be looking for new jobs. I still have a file called “Job Options 2001.” 

I was going to explore religion editor with the Post Gazette (already had one), Tribune Review (actually interviewed), farming (investing our retirement savings), Westmorland Community College teaching (also interviewed), Pittsburgh City Schools (an elderly “To Sir with Love”), congregational pastor (totally unfitted), Home Depot (my construction background) and a number of other options. It was a blue Christmas for most of us MPH people that year, and we knew we were in for major changes in the New Year.  By February of the 2002, the Mennonite general boards sacked the publication board members, and replaced them with their own three-person junta of Sawatsky, James Harder and Ervin Stutzman. They were charged to reorganize MPH to become financially viable.

Ironically, 2001 was actually a good year for Herald Press in book publishing. When I took over the department a year earlier, I pushed to get out some of the books for which we were committed, the big one being the Lancaster Mennonite Conference history by John L. Ruth. David Garber did an outstanding job of editing it and Gwen Stamm in designing it, working with Ruth and Carolyn Charles of the Lancaster Mennonite historical society. In September 2001, we had a good introduction to it in the large Weaverland meetinghouse of the Lancaster Conference Fall meetings. 

Later we had a big book signing at the Lancaster Conference offices. The moderator Keith Weaver seemed relieved to have something non-controversial on the agenda, given that the conference was struggling about its relationship with the new denominational body, Mennonite Church USA. It was the biggest book we had ever published (1,392 pages), even bigger than the Martyr’s Mirror. Against the conventional MPH wisdom, I felt that people will pay for good-quality cloth-bound books, and we soon sold out the first printing; Herald Press' life sales were about 3,500 copies. The Lancaster people walked out with two or three copies under each arm to give to their children and grand children. As I post this, I note that they are still available from Amazon, price $399.

John L. Ruth was an unusual friend and mentor during my years of work for the Mennonites. He was the last of a generation of Pennsylvania Mennonites who still spoke Pennsylvania German and appreciated the Anabaptist heritage in its many forms from the traditional Amish to modern Mennonites. At home among the fast-assimilating Franconia Mennonites and schooled with a PhD among the American elites at Harvard University, he was never condescending toward Anabaptists who eschewed higher education and nurtured their unique practices. In fact, he tended to priviledge his Dunkard, Old Order Mennonite and Amish neighbors as the Christian standard regarding traits such as community, easthetics and humility, habits for which the rest of us might aspire rather than flee. So, when he wrote the Lancaster Mennonites' history, it was accepted as one of their own. As I write this, a decade later he has published his life story entitled "Branch: A Memoir with Pictures" (2013).,     

So with Ruth’s The Earth is the Lord’s, 2001 was a good sales year for Herald Press books, and the same would be true for 2002. It had to do with the September 11, 2001, when Muslim extremists had flown two airplanes into the New York’s World Trade Center and hijacked two other planes, crashing the one in a field not far from us near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I remember the day well, working in the MPH office with the classical music station WQED playing. All at once a news bulletin came on regarding a terrorist attack, and the rest of the day was all news, bad news of the death of thousands in the burning and crumbling New York City buildings and a crashed airliner. I remember President Bush saying we should stay at our work places and not yield to the terrorists’ attempt to bring America to a standstill. I left the office that evening around six o’clock, and Gloria told me about the Connellsville High School students’ responses. We had the news on the rest of the evening. I will not try to describe that day and the successive days; all Americans, especially religious ones, were trying to make sense out of these events.

In October, I was at Hershey for meetings of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, so I arranged for a meeting with Donald Kraybill and Linda Gehman Peachey regarding a book on Anabaptist and Mennonite responses to what was soon called 9-11. We put their manuscript on a fast-track and by January 2002, we had a new book called Where was God on Sept. 11?  The book was one of the first 9-11 books on the market and sold well. It presented the many views of peacemakers in a time of terror, violence and fear. It was a good example of what I had learned in working with institutions over the years; one need not personally agree with everything, and a book may still make an important publishing contribution and be good seller. This learning became especially apparent as MPH executives needed to make difficult and painful decisions during the next year.

In regards to the 9-11, I wrote my own personal response to the war on terrorism in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after reading the Catholic E.J. Dionne’s column entitled “Give Pacifists a Chance.” Dionne told of why as a youth he finally could not choose pacifism, although he respected principled pacifists. I wrote that “Unlike Dionne… I believed that because of my Christian beliefs and church commitments, I could never serve in the armed forces and that lethal violence could never be justified—even in defense of freedom.” I told of Puerto Rico voluntary service and gratefulness for the American government providing alternative service. 

I concluded: “Pacifists always have some conflict with their nation, especially during a time of war, and I at least see little in our history to suggest that this war will be an exception. But most of us have not wanted to be disloyal to our nation and recognize and respect that our neighbors have reached other religious and political conclusions at considerable sacrifice—even to the extent of their own lives. It is a measure of the greatness of American democracy, that both views are tolerated and protected. I pray that we all work for peace at home and abroad.”

Most of this chapter comes from memory and my personal files. Rich Preheim wrote a good summary of the Mennonite Publishing House crisis in “The MPH Story,” The Mennonite (September 3, 2002, 8-13). My response to the war on terror was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (October 11, 2001, editorial page).