2008 Leaving Mennonite Publishing

2008  Leaving Mennonite Publishing. Leadership Retreats. Frederick Arnold, Protestant Church Owned Publishers (PCPA), Mattie’s 90^th birthday, Billy Graham, political melodrama, visiting Puerto Rico, Rodriguez family.

At the beginning of each year, our executive director Ron Rempel led a Mennonite Publishing Network (MPN) leadership retreat to plan for the coming year.  In 2008, January 15-18, I traveled to Niagara on the Lake, Ontario, with Frederick Arnold (pseudonym); I think we picked up Terry Graber from Kansas at the Buffalo Airport. I hoped I would never have to spend several hours in the same car with Arnold, and when I returned I wrote that one of my annual goals was to get along with Arnold. To no avail; the next year 2009 I got sick of the idea of needing to travel with Arnold and did not attend at all, so you can see where this narrative is heading.

But let’s start with the positive attributes Frederick Arnold brought to Scottdale and Mennonite Publishing when he arrived in 2007 as our director of finance and operations. He and his wife brought our church a large family of six children mainly college-age. They were Anabaptists by conviction, Arnold having grown up in a military family in the Pittsburgh area. The Arnolds joined the Bruderhof with whom they had lived for a number of years and then expelled overnight.

Arnold was high tech savvy and good on software programs and soon was able to arrange our financial figures in many categories; he wanted to bring us totally into the digital age. At the same time he brought a more-with-less alternative and sustainable approach. He biked to work and was collecting barrels of old oil and trying to recycle it in the basement of the Publishing House. There were plastic tubes and barrels all around, and I remember the staff around the coffee table speculating that he may blow up the place.

In truth, I think he did want to blow up the place in a manner of speaking, and I did not want to be around when it happened. My 2008 journal is filled with notes that I hoped to leave MPN, mainly because of the personality of Frederick Arnold. He may have left the Bruderhof, but the Bruderhof’s cultish mentality did not leave him. He reminded me of hearing Christoph Arnold on the KDKA radio in the late 90s when he raved at America (as in Amerika) and gave an enthusiastic endorsement of Mumia Abu-Jamal in a nearby Greene County prison, convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer.

I knew enough of exiled Bruderhof families that I should not have held that against someone, but his publishing learnings were largely from the Bruderhof and the Plough label.  He brought Bruderhof aesthetics, secrecy, and a balding head, often giving me the creepy feeling of an Anabaptist Vladimir Lenin. Even his dexterity with numbers could be used in assigning whatever overhead figures to whatever project, a long established art among Scottdale publishing financiers. His family set up a church co-op which seemed out of a playbook from several decades ago, as though we were not living in an age of Fresh Foods, Trader Joes, community supported agriculture (CSA), and Farm Markets.

But a pause, dear reader, I’m going off the memoir guidebook which should mainly be about me. Maybe the problem was closer to home, not Arnold but Miller. If he was a the son of the Bruderhof maybe I was still a wannabe Amish bishop. We both needed more space. In an earlier life, I would have tried harder to get along with an Arnold, but I was also tired of Mennonite publishing. Many of the projects, I had worked on for the past decade were completed, and the new project of doing a 21^st century living sustainable book in the spirit of Living More with Less was not going well. The main commissioned author Mark Beach had moved to Switzerland and the co-author Mary Beth Lind seemed to have West Virginia localism on her mind. The Yoder-themed Polyglossia books were moving along, but could be carried out without me. The awareness of Yoder's personal failings were still a few years distant. 

Our publisher Ron Rempel wanted to consolidate trade books and congregational publishing into one unit, and that would work better with a new editorial director. He had a good successor in the wings with Amy Gingerich. The digital revolution had changed much of publishing, and although I worked along with it, my default inclination was paper and book. I remember when the Christian publishers at ECPA used to speculate that book lovers and buyers would become specialty or niche markets on a level with antiquarians, bluegrass or opera lovers. I also felt that my leaving would make it easier for the company to move away from Scottdale which it needed to do. And who would come along and move Mennonite publishing’s 616 Walnut Avenue address to Harrisonburg, Virginia in 2011?  That’s right, Fredrick Arnold, so he did a lot of things right and necessary, even if I did not recognize it at the time.

A trip to the Protestant Church-owned Publishers (PCPA) Annual meeting at Nashville reminded me of how far denominational publishing had moved since my beginnings. In 1971, my first PCPA meeting was at the Greenbrier Hotel with Mervin Miller and Ben Cutrell, both now gone, in the leadership. Cutrell brought in Norman Cousins of Saturday Review as a speaker, the ultimate middle-brow voice of humane letters. This was during the Cold War and we did not know that the Greenbrier Hotel had a bunker for the United States’ House and Senate members in case of a nuclear attack. Almost four decades later, out numbers greatly reduced by denominational demise, we met in Nashville for a lean day and a half meeting hosted at the United Methodist Publishing House and staying at an economy chain hotel.

In June we had a 90^th birthday celebration for my mother Mattie; there was a lot of music, food, grandkids, great-grandkids, relatives and scrap books. All of Mom’s living brothers and sisters attended: Clara, Melvin, Abe, Katie and Mary. The music was memorable, especially the grandchildren singing Andrew’s compositions; I especially remember those renditions done by the Roth and Kratzer girls. Oddly enough, I remember as much about the tedious planning as the event itself. It exposed our social fault lines or loyalties with Paul and Miriam in one corner and Rhoda and Ruth on the other, and the rest trying to find our way in between. A cluster of cultural, political, and religious commitments would reveal itself in debates of program, invite list, length, and venue.

At its best we had diversity and strong commitments which generally resolved themselves, mainly because our mother Mattie was at the center. As an old debater, I should have enjoyed this, but it was tedious, and usually we avoided these planning debates by simply assigning one brother or sister family on a rotating basis to be in charge of an event such as Christmas. If you didn’t like something, you could wait your turn and then institute the change.

After the 90^th birthday event, Mattie, Rhoda, and Ruth headed out for North Carolina and the sites of the Billy Graham enterprise. Mom was about the same age as the evangelist Graham and his wife Ruth and considered herself a friend and a peer. She watched his programs weekly on TV, read books by or about the family, talking about the Grahams as if they were next of kin. Her love made it easy to buy birthday and Christmas gifts for Mattie; I would give her a Graham book or biography, always appreciated.

I’m not sure when my mother got this fixation with Graham, but I remember when it came to an abrupt end. Mattie became politicized in 2008 when the presidential candidate Barack Obama and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin ran for office on opposing sides. Graham’s son Franklin supported Palin, and that move ended my mother’s support of the Grahams; she was literally crying real tears over Barack Obama. I was totally flummoxed by my mother’s late-in-life political melodrama. Earlier she had shown no interest in national politics. I suspect Mattie’s conversion was largely the influence of Roy, Ruth and Rhoda who had enthusiastically taken up various left-wing political causes with Barach Obama the political messiah. Our mother did not want to be left behind.  

During the summer of 2008 we did our own version of a 40^th anniversary vacation pilgrimage to Puerto Rico. We visited Puerto Rico a number of times since that first time in 1968, but this time seemed to have some closure. Marjorie Schantz Martin, our old nurse friend had died, the Colons (Amalio and Elba) were long since gone, and on November 10, 2007, I attended the funeral of Lester T. Hershey, longtime missionary to Puerto Rico, now living in Pinto, Maryland. Gloria and I stayed at the Melia Hotel on the northern shore near Luquillo beach, getting exercise and sunshine. I read Michael Ignatieff”s A Life of Isaiah Berlin, whose Tolstoy-based essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” influenced me since the early seventies.

On Sunday we got up early and drove out to the middle of the island to the La Plata church where we heard an inspiring sermon by Samuel Lassus on being carried on eagle’s wings. Who should we meet but Marjorie Schantz’s old friends Fidel and Patricia Santiago and their son Rolando, now the Mennonite Central Committee USA director. Also we met Axia (I don’t recall her last name) but she was a good friend to our daughter Elizabeth when she helped out at the Betania School one summer.

In the afternoon we went to Botijas and visited our old schools at Orocovis and Bauta Arriba. The Rodriguez (Alicia and Gamaliel) extended family entertained us for lunch; Alicia had a good husband and family, as well as a good business of selling birthday and anniversary cakes all over the barrio, a legacy of Gloria’s voluntary service days when she was the community cake baker. Aside from the cake business, and more important, the Rodriguez family also gave our voluntary service unit the credit for bringing the Christian gospel and health to the barrio.

Actually, the barrio did look good with brightly painted buildings, new houses, good roads and small-scale agriculture. There was a recreation building where the ball field used to be and an attractive little Mennonite church building. Still, I had the feeling that the spiritual as well as material progress may have been as much in spite of us as because of us. They were all very sympathetic upon hearing of Jakob’s death, and Gamaliel sent us a two-page letter afterwards giving a biblical explanation of why we might meet the Hebrew King Saul in heaven not in hell. Que Dios bendiga.  

Most of this chapter comes from memory and from my journal and files of the year 2008.