2002 Silcox Visits Scottdale

2002   Silcox Visits Scottdale. Paul Silcox. Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) downsizing, Reuben Savanick, Ferne and Myron Hostetlers' resignation, why I cooperated, MPH leadership styles, executive visitors: Norman Shenk, Kathy Kellogg, and Phil Bontrager; visiting Ontario, American Academy of Religion/Society for Biblical Literature and David Luthy; our institutional pariah.

   

Paul Silcox was tall and handsome, polite and proper, and spoke in a high-pitched voice. The voice stood out for its timbre, but also as his main form of communication; Silcox almost never wrote anything down and sent few e-mails or letters. We were told Paul Silcox had downsized, or sometimes called “right sized,” Conrad Grebel College in Waterloo, Ontario. I think at that point publishing board leader Ron Sawatsky brought him down to do the job for the Mennonite Publishing House (MPH). His approach seemed to be first to paint the worst possible situation regarding MPH both financially and culturally--which was not hard to do. Second, the solution involved reducing expenses or staff. In early 2002, the first one to go was Reuben Savanick, our treasurer and in many ways the one who kept the lights on and one hundred people employed for the past two decades.

I remember Reuben’s last day; I think it was in February. At the end of the day, I heard Reuben’s footsteps as he came to the post which had a box of light switches in the middle of the building. He turned off his office lights for the last time and stopped by my office by the southwest corner of the building and said goodbye. Reuben ever gracious made it short and proper. In retrospect, that day for me marked the end of an era. It was a sad day, and the beginning of many such days for the next few months. If we felt bad when Reuben had to go, I also understood why. When an organization goes south, someone has to be sacrificed, and in a financial crisis, the chief financial officer is an obvious choice. After Reuben left, Paul Silcox called the leadership group together on a regular basis and made plans on how to continue the employee reduction project, and some reduced themselves.

Among those who left on their own accord were Ferne and Myron Hostetler (pseudonyms) who had arrived in Scottdale in the mid-nineties. Myron Hostetler had some accounting background and was brought into a finance office in crisis, inheriting several non-communicating accounting systems for bookstores, publishing and printing. It would have been a difficult job for a seasoned professional and impossible for a newcomer. He soon resigned and found work in finance and accounting for a nearby international clothing factory. Ferne Hostetler came as an editor and was promoted to director of congregational publishing when I moved over to book publishing in 2000.  However, the publisher Bob Ramer asked that she report to me; it was probably partly financial and partly because Ramer, already half-way out the door to retirement, wanted fewer people reporting to him. To Ferne this arrangement all smacked of gender discrimination among her other grievances.  

And in the middle of our organizational and financial difficulties, a sad soap opera emerged which Ferne Hostetler heroically tried to fix. In traditional language there were allegations of adultery or some kind of affair between two of the staff. I will skip over the coffee table descriptions which, whatever their truthfulness, provided comic relief to the rest of our grim realities. In an earlier era, the romantics would probably have been summarily dismissed. But Silcox said he did not have sufficient evidence to take legal action on the employees; he said the church should do what it needs to do regarding the alleged infidelities

Ferne Hostetler resigned in protest. She and her husband were probably unprepared and ill-suited for Silcox’s administrative caldron, and her exodus at least had the appearance of high moral purpose. I remember the morning of Ferne’s resignation well, because several hours after the announcement that she was leaving, Silcox visited my office. We discussed the circumstances of Hostetler leaving, and then he wrote in long hand on a piece of paper that the congregational publishing staff and the book publishing staff will report to Levi Miller. I felt bad for this unhappy ending of the Hostetlers at Scottdale; they were good conscientious people who deserved a better ending. But one could probably say that for most of the other employees as well.

Silcox had his own style of reducing staff. About the only written communications I recall coming from him was a list of six guidelines on meeting with employees informing them that their employment was ending. I wish I would have kept that little paper but I found it so distasteful, I think I threw it away. One part of the procedure was that employees needed to clear out their desks and leave within one or two days during the Silcox tenure from November of 2001 to July of 2002. 

I don’t think this immediate leaving was because of the threat of theft or sabotage but simply the need to bring closure and that was the way Silcox did it. Later terminations would take more time. Two people were to be present at a dismissal, and I led one and was an observer in another one. I believe all the dismissals were handled by mid-level managers, many of whom would later find themselves with severance. Silcox tried to be upbeat about it all; we were turning the company to around. One time he even said isn’t this fun at the end of a meeting (it was an opinion of one). Another time he suggested having a pizza party one evening for the former employees in appreciation for their work. Nothing came of it because we felt no one would come anyway. But at his best, he (and we) believed we were saving our company. 

Why did I work along with Paul Silcox and other interim publishers which the three-person junta (Ervin Stutzman, Ron Sawatsky and James Harder) would give to us every several months? Simply put, let’s say in Rook playing card terms, I felt I needed to play the hand I was dealt, and it was a tragic hand. I worked along because I agreed with the general assessment that our situation financially was no longer tenable, that we were headed for a chapter 7 (liquidation) or chapter 11 (re-organization) bankruptcy. Hence, some radical restructuring was needed.

Second, I thought it was better to go into receivership with the church, however painful, than to go into receivership with the courts. I had seen the price of the courts’ approach with Good Books. As it turned out, I believe every employee let go was paid about six months of severance salary, and all our creditors were paid. I also felt that I was as vulnerable as anyone in regards to my continued employment or severance.

In other words, I was a willing participant with the unhappy down-sizing project. In addition, I had a strong sense that a command rather than a consultative leadership approach from the board and the executive was needed. A command leadership was the norm during this period. This general attitude put me at odds with many of my fellow employees, our retirees, and even the Scottdale Mennonite community. Some in equally good faith felt that bankruptcy could have been avoided and that the workers, especially the hourly employees, had not been listened to regarding how to save MPH; there were many employee grievances against our leadership team under Robert Ramer.

Now, there were also complaints against Paul Silcox: that he was an Anglican, not Mennonite, and surely that he was overpaid. An evil wizard legend grew up around Paul Silcox’ short tenure, that no one knew where he came from or where he went and that he ran away with one of the company cars which was abandoned near the Virginia Beach. 

But a confession; I rather liked Paul Silcox and considered him an honest administrator. I thought he did about the best which could be done given the circumstances. I suppose I viewed Silcox through my two-kingdom lens; he was the Anglican county sheriff who came and did what we Mennonites would not or could not do.

Given the inherently coercive nature of the downsizing specialist, I thought Silcox did his work honorably which the Mennonite general boards (USA and Canada) had asked him to do. I enjoyed visiting with him about his family and his religious and cultural views, and if our paths would ever cross again, I would welcome having a lunch with him.

   

The general assumption was that the MPH was run along factory hierarchical lines while the rest of society had moved to a consultative style of leadership. This assessment may have been true, but it’s actually more complicated than such a generalization would indicate. The assumption in such a narrative has the publisher and division heads with the power to make changes, and the rank and file relatively powerless. What needs to be factored in is that the longevity of many MPH employees gave them considerable power and freedom to assent or withhold compliance with decisions of job definitions, changing electronic systems, or work assignments.

Not only was there considerable accumulated authority which tenure brings, but if the employee was Mennonite there may be a divine mandate. I well recall an employee reminding me that he was not working for me but for God. While this motivation was commendable and over the years drove many employees to give long hours and tremendous dedication, it was somewhat dysfunctional during our crisis period. It was my learning during this period that the non-Mennonite employees fared better both emotionally and functionally because they tended to be more practical regarding our situation and appropriate expectations; some had relatives, and we all had neighbors who had worked in shuttered steel plants and factories. 

We had many good visitors during those two crisis and transformative years of 2002 and 2003. From February through the summer, the trusted Eastern Mennonite Missions treasurer Norman Shenk was sent to Scottdale to determine if there is anything salvageable in the organization. Shenk was a generation older than most of us but was a savant with electronic programs, financially astute, and soon was giving accurate numbers to the three-person junta and overseeing boards. He worked long hours, said little, but was always positive and evenly good natured. He stayed at our house, slept on his back with a vaporizer or some breathing enhancing fixture planted on his nose each night, looking like an electronic mummy and a saint. In the end, he declared that there was a financial possibility in MPH.

Meantime, we had a temporary chief financial officer in Kathy Kellogg from Cranberry who came for about six months; she was outstanding in competence and good-natured in spirit. By summer Phil Bontrager, an international business leader, came as our interim publisher; he shut down the printing division and sold the equipment. Then in the spring of 2003, Ben Sprunger from the MEDA organization came and helped those who survived feel good about what remained; he brought some healing. Finally, Kurt Horst from Johnstown came for a while and brought significant ties to our local Allegheny Conference, including an appreciation dinner for the former employees at Laurelville. All these executive visitors made a tremendous contribution, but Phil Bontrager was clearly the most distinguished and influential. He stayed on to serve as chair of a re-constituted publication board for about a decade. 

We cut out a lot of travel. In June, I was scheduled to go to John Rempel’s Pilgram Marpeck conference in New York City to respond (presumably sectarian) to my friend Scott Holland’s public theology. Daughter Hannah was coming up from Philadelphia, as was her old Eastern Mennonite University friend Susan Gascho, now a graduate student in theology. I had even bought tickets for the show “Mamma Mia!” for the three of us. But in the end, I chose not to go in solidarity with my suffering fellow workers. The young women reported good ABBA music and that my brother-in-law John Roth stood or sat in for me at Broadway show--in good Miller family Buster style.  

I did travel to Ontario that Fall for the meetings of the Believers Church Bible Commentary editorial board, the Evangelical Theological Society, and the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature. The latter meetings were good international meetings to sell our academic titles; students and professors were big readers and a good book market. This meeting was also good to meet other publishers, especially the Wipf and Stock people who had some similar theological leanings. The Mennonites had their own reception and working sessions at these meetings so were well attended by our writers and buyers.

While in Ontario, on November 18, I stopped in at David Luthy’s home at Alymer where he had a historical library and ran Pathway Publishers. Luthy was always a good friend and host when one visited, but on this occasion, he asked me why we don’t go around and meet some of his fellow editors, relatives (his wife is a Stoll) and ministers. So we did, and David humbly introduced me as his friend from Herald Press and Mennonite Publishing House, sometimes calling me Mart Andy’s Levi. He actually had a file on my father Andrew in the Historical Library.

Oh, and by the way Luthy noted that MPH was over five million in debt, had reduced staff by half, discontinued Christian Living magazine, and quoted a denominational leader on how things had gone bad at Scottdale. David Luthy with his photographic memory had read a recent article in the Mennonite press and so gave exact figures and quotations. A little later in the conversation David would slip in the sales growth of Pathway Publishers and the thousands of dollars which the company had set aside in savings. He noted the circulation numbers of the Amish Family Life and the Mennonite Christian Living from 1975 to the present. I now realized that Luthy’s friendly gesture of visiting the neighbors was also his making me exhibit number one of the Mennonites as a failed denomination who did not even know how to run their own publishing house.

It probably did not help that my predecessors Maynard Shetler and Paul Schrock had one time visited him and lectured him, at least in Luthy’s telling condescendingly, on publishing. If MPH was a pariah in our own denomination, to Luthy we were, well, a valuable exhibit. Actually, Luthy was always a loyal friend, and even when he could have produced and sold Martyrs Mirror at a lower cost, he continued to distribute our Herald Press edition. 

In our own denomination, however we were a burden and a problem; we were sometimes called the Enron of the Mennonites. The parallel did not really apply because MPH leaders did not falsify the figures; these were matters of judgment on which people of goodwill could disagree. I did feel that Ramer’s oft-repeated distinction between the MPH non-profit charter in Pennsylvania signed by staff as protecting the denomination from liability was a legal fiction. For example, if the company would have defaulted on its line of credit loan with Farmers Bank in Lancaster and other similar loans, I believed that the denomination would have had some law suits on its hands. 

As a member of the denomination I sympathized with the dilemma which the denomination inherited with the MPH financial insolvency, especially at the very time, our leaders were forming a new alignment as distinct USA and Canadian conferences. Both bodies took out loans and made considerable sacrifice to save MPH. Our staffer Jack Scott headed up a major fund-raising drive called “barn raising” which helped tide over the struggling publishing enterprise. But I never found that Mennonites translated this organizational opprobrium toward MPH into a personal vendetta. I don’t recall a single word from a Mennonite official or member against me as an employee of an institution which had failed them. Mennonites were and are a quite generous people, and Amish are too, even if one evening I had to serve as David Luthy’s exhibit for Amish superiority.

During these crisis months, it seemed to me my main responsibility was to carry through on policies and directions set by our board and executives. But by the end of the year, I discovered that some of our former employees felt that the way I had worked with them was abusive and autocratic. They sent the publication board a long letter of accusations, and I was in hot water and needing to account for the manner of my leadership. But that can wait another year and another chapter.   

Most of this chapter comes from memory and my personal files. Ferne and Myron Hostetler are pseudonyms for Mennonite publishing staffers. As I noted in the last chapter, Rich Preheim wrote a good summary of the Mennonite Publishing House crisis in “The MPH Story,” The Mennonite (September 3, 2002, 8-13).