2013 Mattie Schlabach Miller (1918-2013)

2013   Mattie Schlabach Miller (1918-2013). National and international events, Barach Obama; Anabaptist Mennonite and Amish church growth and contribution, Anabaptist abberations; Next generation take their turns; Helen Alderfer (1919 -2013), health and Mattie Schlabach Miller (1918-2013), 95^th birthday, funeral, burial, legacy.

By 2013 Barach Obama was elected to a second term as the USA President, and the American economy was recovering after the 2008 George W. Bush era debacle. Unemployment was still around seven percent, but the stock market had returned. Our Mennonite Retirement Fund which had dipped by about one third in 2009 had regained its value. President Obama at home passed health care legislation and abroad tried to wind down the wars by reducing troops and increasing drone warfare. His Arab Spring intervention which we hoped would bring more democratic societies instead turned into an Arab turmoil of tribal wars, deaths and refugees. Iran appeared closer to the nuclear bomb, and the Israeli Palestinian conflict continued.

In Latin America, countries such as Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Brazil seemed to be making progress with both their economies and democratic values while Venezuela and Honduras slid into greater poverty and chaos. Over the Christmas New Year holidays we planned to visit the southern cone countries.

Our Christian Anabaptist denominations generally responded to the world with generosity, goodwill, evangelism, service and relief  through mission agencies and charities such as Mennonite Mission Agency, Eastern Mennonite Missions, Mennonite Disaster Service, Christian Aid Ministries, MEDA (an economic development agency), and Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). I had tried to support these efforts whether in book publishing or in helping our local Tri-State Relief Sale where our local congregation helped in providing sale items; for several years we took Little Cottages from Berlin, Ohio. 

A few agencies such as the liberal Mennonites’ Washington lobby and an organization called CPT (Christian Peacemaker Teams) continued to give de facto support to violent resistance against the state of Israel (see 1996) and the government of Colombia. But, as I post this, in spite of such efforts, the Colombian guerillas were laying down their guns in a peace agreement. I took comfort in the fact that these ideological organizations did not represent the majority of Mennonites and Amish.

Dear reader, I hope making these international and national references gives you some sense of time and place, and for the rest I’ll keep this short. Over the years I heard and read so many statements on prophetic justice which have often amounted to little more than half-baked political opinions with a religious veneer. Increasingly, I took comfort in the wisdom of the larger Anabaptist family of Amish and Mennonites; the traditional groups were representing the heritage with their congregations in growing faster and larger than their liberal counterparts; also their charities and aid ministries which were also going strong.  These groups gave most of their attention to the local congregation, at the same time that they followed national and international developments, trying to influence the world to more peaceful, free and just arrangements. 

The Anabaptist descendent groups certainly had their individual aberrations. The Mennonite theologian John H. Yoder (1927-1997) was being retried in the court of public opinion for allegations of having sexually assaulted more than fifty women during his lifetime. My own publisher Herald Press had now started putting warning labels on his publications—as though Yoder were a brand of Amish Mennonite tobacco, good tasting but also dangerous.

Meanwhile, the Sugarcreek, Ohio, financier Monroe Beachy was given a five to seven year federal prison sentence for mail fraud, running a Ponzi scheme among his Amish neighbors. In 2011, an Amish splinter group from Bergholz, Ohio, led by bishop Sam Mullet began attacking some of this co-religionists with whom he disagreed by cutting their beards. He along with some of his disciples, alas, one named Levi Miller were sent to prison. Still, the Amish and Mennonite brand remained strong; the Amish continued to grow and spread to many states. Many Mennonite congregations continued to teach the Christian faith in the Anabaptist tradition, and individuals such as my brother in law and friend John D. Roth did strong historical work and promoted the Anabaptist groups around the world.  

Closer to home, Laurelville Mennonite Church Center had excellent summer children’s camps to which our grandchildren and their cousins would come in the summer along with our local Allegheny kids. The young generation took their turns of service. I could name the Nofzigers of Archbold, the Millers of Walnut Creek, or the Savanicks of Scottdale as examples. But I'll mention those I knew best: Hannah with the Laurelville board, and Anson on the Oak Grove Mennonite council near Wooster; they also took their turns in teaching Sunday school or leading the MYF (Mennonite Youth Fellowship). Elizabeth took her turn on the Servant Board (council) of the Pittsburgh Mennonite Church, as well as the board of PULSE, a young adult internship program in Pittsburgh.

I was writing these memoirs and read several chapters to the monthly men’s breakfast at Scottdale Mennonite. Then I read “1962” at the Literary Arts Festival Mennonite/s Writing IV at Eastern Mennonite University on March 29. But my oral sources were disappearing. Our long-departed Scottdale friend and poet Helen Alderfer died on September 5, 2013. Each year she would send a greeting card with a note of her life, and I sometimes stopped in to see her and Lawrence Burkholder, both of whom lived their last years at the same retirement apartments in Goshen Indiana. In October 2012, I got the last issue of the Mennonite Historical Bulletin which I used to edit and publish back in the early nineties; a photo of my father Andrew A. Miller was on the back cover. Andrew had died almost two decades ago, and now my mother Mattie was dying.

I sometimes thought Mattie could hold death off for another decade, and she talked about becoming 100 years old, taking great pride in her physical abilities. I still have a copy of a newsprint page on vinegar which Mom sent me October of 2009; she said it was her prescription for good health.  Her yearly birthday cards often spoke of health, as did our weekly telephone conversations on Sunday mornings. Mother was grateful for health and wished it for everyone. In 2010 she wrote to Sherrod Brown, a United States Senator from Ohio, encouraging his support of President Obama’s health care legislation: “I am 91 years old and healthy and I have good insurance as I was a bus driver for one of our schools. I have so much to be thankful for. But I know so many people don’t have insurance. I am praying for President Obama.”  

But her heart was weakening and her strength was failing. In the Spring of 2013, we would visit her and she would show us her attempts at doing regular exercises with her hands to get her strength back. She remained optimistic, but now it seemed more like the last act of a Shakespeare role: “That ends this strange eventful history.” We knew her months and days were limited with us.

By the time of her 95^th birthday, all the children and grandchildren gathered on June 24, a Monday evening for pizza. It was a beautiful summer evening, and Mom could sit on the macadam driveway, holding court in front of her son Paul and Carol’s residential and office spread. Mother said little but thank you, thank you, for her children, grandchildren, and all that God had given to her. Some Amish relatives and neighbors came and sang songs and hymns.

The next few days we brothers and sisters and spouses had a get together at the Inn at Brandywine Falls near Northfield, Ohio. Mom could not be with us, and after that birthday gathering, she seemed resigned that her earthly life was coming to an end. The last six weeks were some of the best times for us together as a family in terms of harmony and goodwill. In a sensitive and direct way, my brother Roy took overall charge of her care in everything from finances to health care arrangements.

Rhoda, Paul and Carol were right there in caring for her immediate needs, all working together as a team; Ruth came in from Indiana for the last week and stayed with Mom until the end. The grandchildren such as Martha Coleman and our Hannah with medical training regularly stopped in, and I know the other grandchildren did too. Hospice personnel regularly assisted, and Mattie’s sister Mary stayed with her for overnight care.

Mother died on Sunday morning, August 18, 2013. I went to the Scottdale Mennonite worship and at sharing time told about my mother’s life. That evening the brothers and sisters gathered in Ohio to plan the arrangements and funeral, but I did not attend. I’m not sure if something was going on, or whether I was thinking there were already plenty of planners on hand. I had earlier gotten soundings from various family members regarding the merits of traditional funerals and a memorial service, the one mainly a Christian worship service, the other more of a eulogy in honor of the dead person. Finally, there was an increasingly popular celebration of life or death denial liturgy which wasn’t even a part of the discussion. As it turned out, my brothers and sisters planned a memorable funeral which would have pleased Mom, and I believe honored the Mennonite and Christian tradition.

Sister Rhoda organized the all-grandchildren music with a chamber orchestra and lots of singing, including the gentle hymn “It Is Well with my Soul” and the rousing Taizé anthem “I Am the Bread of Life.” But perhaps it was the strong participation of the grandchildren which would have been Mom’s greatest legacy. In many ways, their presence and participation were Mom’s last witness to her relatives, friends and neighbors of who she was and why she lived on this earthly life.

At the burial, we sang some more, and the cemetery people started up a motor, and little grandson Aaron and his cousins were fascinated by the mechanics and machinery of lowering the casket and closing the heavy rough box. All of us took a hand at shoveling the earth; the physicality of it all was very Mattie and Schlabach and I suppose very Resurrection and the Life.  

By December we were singing again Handel’s “Messiah” with the children at Oak Grove Mennonite and then on Christmas Eve, Gloria, Elizabeth and I sang with the Catholics at Viña de la Mar in Chile. But Chile stretched into the New Year 2014, and that story can wait the next and final year of this writing.

Most of this comes from memory, my date book, and personal files, such as a copy of Mattie’s letter to US Senator Sherrod Brown. For background on the Colombia government’s peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC see http://mennoworld.org/2016/02/29/opinion/opinion-whom-to-thank-for-hope/  Among the Mennonite and Amish aberrations, the John Howard Yoder story appeared in http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/12/us/john-howard-yoders-dark-past-and-influence-lives-on-for-mennonites.html?_r=0     The Monroe Beachy story also appeared http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/business/in-amish-country-accusations-of-a-ponzi-scheme.html?pagewanted=all    The Bergholz Amish story is told by Donald Kraybill in Renegade Amish: Beard Cutting, Hate Crimes, and the Trial of the Bergholz Barbers (2014).
The line from Shakespeare’s seven ages is from “As You Like It,” Act II, Scene VII.  Regarding Mattie’s life granddaughter Sarah Kehrberg and son-in-law John D. Roth gave beautiful tributes which can be read at http://www.mennoworld.org/archived/2013/9/16/what-grandma-left/?print=1 and http://www.themennonite.org/issues/16-10/articles/A_model_of_daily_faithful_service

2012 School Affairs

2012  School Affairs. Paul A Miller, Hiland High School basketball, Mark Schlabach, Perry Reese, Malone University, Alumnus of the Year, Holmes County, Public schools, Holmesville Elementary, Southmoreland School Board, Catherine Fike, The Tea Party, Southmoreland achievements, state and national recognition, John Halfhill, John Molnar,  Poultry farming, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Carlos and Sophia, Handel’s “Messiah.”

During my life I have played and followed sports with schoolboy basketball among my favorites. When my first among equals brother Paul’s daughter Amy married Mark Schlabach and his basketball family, my interests were re-ignited. In 2012, we followed the Hiland Hawks boys’ basketball run for the state championship, going to games at Meadowbrook near Cambridge, Ohio, then on to the Canton Fieldhouse and from there the finals in Columbus. Elizabeth kept me company to some of the games, and on a Saturday morning of March 24, Hannah, Gloria, Sadie and Aaron and I went to the final. By half-time it was over; Hiland beat an undefeated team from southwestern Ohio by a lop-sided score of 68-36. Hiland had won back to back state championships. Afterward we watched Mark Schlabach and his three star players at an NBA-styled press conference, and then headed for a Turkish lunch Hannah had picked out at the Café Istanbul.   

If the Hiland boys were Mark Schlabach’s team, which they were, we were following my brother Paul’s team. Each morning my e-mail brought Paul’s running commentary on the team, the front row MYF (Mennonite Youth Fellowship)-bench on which the star Dylan Kaufman sat on Sundays in church, the ancestral modesty of the post player Neil Gingerich, or the game-winning shot of the team’s import Seger Bonifant. It all began when Mark Schlabach was named first the girls’ then the boys’ basketball coach at Loudenville High School in the 90s. Soon we were getting regular clippings of Loudonville’s basketball success, and for several years we went to the Canton Fieldhouse to see his teams in the regionals. Several of the Loudenville teams even went to the state finals. By the time Mark got to Hiland where his brother was coaching very successful girls’ teams, we were well accustomed to following his (err Paul’s) teams.

At Hiland, Paul immediately appointed himself as team photographer, hence had courtside and press privileges of sorts. Paul also had an unerring sense of hospitality and became a kind of one-person office of Holmes County tourism. One of my best memories of an early trip to the Canton Fieldhouse was seeing Paul carry armloads of Baby Swiss Cheese and Der Dutchman pies in through the staff doors of the old cavernous building. Paul handed us our tickets and explained that the tournament officials and the referees were often insufficiently recognized for their hard work. None of Paul’s largesse is to subtract from Hiland’s long-standing tradition of winning basketball which Mark Schlabach attributed to Perry Reese. The African American coach Perry Reese regularly took his teams to Columbus. Reese died in the year 2000, and his life was honored with an article in Sports Illustrated and a new Hiland fieldhouse named after him.   

Paul’s ambassadorship for Holmes County continued when he was named the 2012 Alumnus of the Year by Malone University. That same weekend, Paul also represented the Alumni at the David King Malone University presidential installation ceremony. He was well deserving of the award for his community and church service and his success as an attorney. He had served on the Malone board of trustees for a decade, including a number of years on the executive committee. He and his wife Carol and their three daughters were alumni, as were six of us Miller brothers and sisters.

I knew all these things well, because I had nominated Paul for the award, although brothers Roy and David were in on it too. We all attended the Alumni Banquet, and Paul gave a gracious acceptance speech noting the value and challenges of Christian liberal arts education. It was Paul at his best on both abstract ideas and concrete actions. At the end of his speech, he had his grandkids handing out blocks of Baby Swiss Cheese, noting that the world is large (and  small) and that US State Route 62 takes one from Canton, Ohio, to Berlin, Ohio. My brother who as an undergraduate had Socrates’ “The unexamined life is not worth living” printed on his checks, had apparently examined life sufficiently to decide where it was worth living.

I tried to be loyal to Malone (1965-1968) too for getting our family started in Christian higher education and all gaining successful professional careers. I joined the Alumni Executive committee this year, especially attracted to the school after meeting David A. King at a 200^th anniversary conference of the Ohio Yearly Meeting (now called Evangelical Friends) near Mt. Pleasant, Ohio on July 19. I thought the evangelical Quaker heritage was good for Malone and had some affinity with our Mennonite emphasis on discipleship, community and nonresistance.

But my greatest educational commitment went to our local public schools, going back to my old Holmesville school days where our large family all got a start, Amish and English, rich and poor, and everything in between. That summer Gloria and I attended a Holmesville reunion with my old school friend Melvin S. Miller, now a minister with a large extended family west of town. I also attended the Waynedale High school class of 1962, our 50th year reunion at Wooster; it was a beautiful dinner, planned by Phil Williams, Peggy Hodge, my old Holmesville mates and lots of other now graying Golden Bears.

But my biggest involvement was with the Southmoreland schools; in the summer and fall of 2009, I was elected along with Catherine Fike, Josie Kauffman, and Gail Rhodes. I remember meeting them that summer; they brought fresh energy and commitment, and invited me to join them with an advertisement in the local paper expressing gratitude to the voters for kindness and support and promising to do our duties with honesty, dignity, and integrity. It was about the last time we were that united, as I would soon discover.

The context was that on the national level a limited government and low to no-tax movement emerged, often called the Tea Party. I thought the movement had some value especially as a moderating response to the government expansion and spending impulses of the Barach Obama presidency. Then, alas, I met the local representatives. They were a loose affiliation sometimes called The Scottdale Patriots who appeared at our school board meetings with theatrical stunts and loud protests. One night they brought long scrolls of signatures against taxes which they rolled out on the floor. They brought people from outside the district who would appear at meetings, often comparing the worst in public education with the best of their own options such as home schooling.

They were apparently attracted by our one board member Catherine Fike, a bright (PhD) but highly contentious personality, who made regular and lengthy allegations of imminent bankruptcy and rampant corruption. I was president during some of these polarized board meetings and tried to view the vigorous dissent as a tribute to American democracy where at its best various points of view were tested.

In the meantime through the elections of 2011, 2013 (I won re-election), and 2015 a solid governing pro-public education majority emerged, supporting our schools in doing outstanding student achievement. This emerged out of an unusually strong and young teaching staff our superintendent John Halfhill had hired, adopting a collaborative learning approach (their gurus were Richard and Rebecca Dufour). By the time I joined the board, the effort was headed up by our superintendent John Molnar and his assistant Timothy Scott and the building principals, gaining regional, state-wide and national attention. I’ll never forget sitting in a Hershey Lodge room full of Pennsylvania superintendents and school board members listening to the Southmoreland success story, a “Professional Learning Community.” A few months later, I witnessed a repeat performance in Washington D.C. with school principals from across the nation listening to the Southmoreland story.  

By 1913, the Southmoreland Elementary School was honored as a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence, the Southmoreland Middle School won a MetLife Breakthrough School Award by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), and in 2014, the Southmoreland High School won a Best High Schools Bronze Award. At the same time that the Pittsburgh Business Times named Southmoreland School District as the Most Overachieving District in the Region (from over 100 districts) and the 4th Most Overachieving District in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I greatly enjoyed working with my colleagues on the board and our superintendent John Molnar who I had known over the years as a sound educator. As superintendent, Molnar also turned out to be a savvy administrator and a great Christian friend (a good Lutheran choir singer).    

Aside from tending to our schools, I also tried to tend to our poultry and dogs during these years since we moved out of the borough in 2005. We had up to 50 Barred Rock hens selling the eggs at the County Market, the local supermarket. Every Friday, the dogs and I would deliver boxes of Miller Free Range Eggs to the store, unloading in back with the large delivery trucks. I enjoyed hearing from neighbors who bought them (Buy Fresh Buy Local) and a weekly check paid for the feed. We joined Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) of which our friend Kim Miller was president, and on February 4-6, 2010 went to their annual meeting at State College where I slept through most of the poultry sessions. The weekend highlight turned out to be visiting with the poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf who entertained us as house guests and then spending a day driving home through a deep snow; even the Pennsylvania toll road was closed. 

Julia Spicher Kasdorf was the best poet our region produced during my life, gaining national recognition when her poems began appearing in The New Yorker magazine and later on Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac” radio. Although she joined the Episcopalians and accused us of harboring sexual predators, it seemed to me she was mainly kind to her Amish and Mennonite relatives and our Westmoreland County neighborhoods where she grew up. The last several years she has been working on poetry of the shale industry in our region and would visit Gloria and me when she came by for research and meetings. One of my last projects at Herald Press was to work with her and her student Joshua R. Brown in re-issuing Rosanna of the Amish: The Restored Text by Joseph W. Yoder (2008).   

As backyard farmers we had dogs, getting Carlos as a puppy in 2005. By 2011, we bought Carlos a young Sofia in the spirit of Hebrew King David having the beautiful young Abishag to keep him warm in his old age. They were Golden Retrievers; their full names same as Spain’s royal family: Juan Carlos and Sophia de Grecia. Carlos was a great friend, protecting the hens, killing the woodchucks (about 10 a year), and (like King David) mating regularly. Sophia was an equally good friend and every year gave us large litters of healthy golden puppies.

By year end, we joined Hannah and Anson for a weekend at the Oak Grove Mennonite Church (near Wooster, Ohio) in singing the “Messiah.” During our time it was led by Brian Wiebe and later Andrea Gerber, both of whom we had known as musical directors at the Central Christian High School. The Oak Grove church has been mounting Handel’s oratorio for over 75 years. “I Know that My Redeemer Lives.”     

Most of this comes from my files and memory. Background on Hiland boys basketball and Perry Reese can be found in  http://si.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1021912/1/index.htm  A recent source for Southmoreland’s academic achievements can be found in “Western Pennsylvania Schools,” Pittsburgh Business Times (April 11, 2014, 4,5,8,45). Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s poetry titles are with the University of Pittsburgh Press: an early one Sleeping Preacher (1992) and recently Poetry in America (2011). The Handel “Messiah” Redeemer lyrics are based on Job 19:25.