1979 Steeler Football

1979   Steeler Football. Pittsburgh Steelers, Pirates and championships, Russ Grimm, Family Cluster, Edmonton, Alberta, three-week Bible School, David and Annie Donaldson; Miriam and Veryl Kratzer communalism,  Art and Peggy Gish, a Good Friday anti-war demonstration,  Elizabeth’s birth, July 25, Gloria’s aerobics; Mennonite assembly at Waterloo, Ontario; Roy R. Miller and Wilbur Yoder; funeral of Levi L. Schlabach, Abe Hostetler’s America, Scottdale reading groups, children’s literature and movies.

In November of 1978, Gloria and I led a Mennonite youth leadership retreat at Camp Harmony near Davidsville; it was a lively weekend with lots of singing, talent and leadership. But it was scheduled to end with a Sunday afternoon session, and I soon discovered that everyone was mad about ending Sunday afternoon. The Pittsburgh Steelers were playing that afternoon. I should have known better; during the seventies, the Pittsburgh Steelers became a cultural phenomenon for winning Super Bowls and evoking unusual loyalty. It began with that Immaculate Reception catch by Franco Harris in 1972 when the Steelers beat the Oakland Raiders in the American Conference playoffs. I had grown up with some awareness of Wayne County League high school football (the Waynedale Golden Bears) and the Cleveland Browns, but the attachment of the western Pennsylvanians to their Steeler football team during the seventies was organic, enthusiastic, and all-encompassing.

All the games were sold out, church meetings were scheduled around the Steeler games, and during Super Bowl week our students wore black and gold like some parochial school uniforms. When the Steelers opened pre-season camp at the nearby St. Vincent College, large crowds gathered on the hillside to see their favorite players. By the end of the decade, Steeler fans were all over the United States, and one could legitimately talk of a Steeler nation. Much has been written about the Steeler phenomenon and the love between Pittsburgh and its team, how it emerged during the region’s industrial and manufacturing decline. Pittsburgh expatriates were now living in the South and West, and I will not add to this literature.

Mennonites traditionally were not strong football partisans, but we eventually made contact with linebacker Loren Toews (of Mennonite background) and brought him in as an inspirational speaker to the Allegheny Mennonite youth. I think it was Mike Cressman who did this. Interestingly, our closest family relationship to professional football was my brother Roy, then a Medina, Ohio, physician whose patients included Cleveland Browns families, one being Jeri Sipe, wife of the Browns’ quarterback Brian Sipe. I recall a Sunday we had lunch at Roy and Ruby’s when the two teams played each other later in the afternoon. At the lunch prayer, Roy prayed for a Browns’ victory, which scandalized our children and then evolved into a long-time family joke—probably Roy’s purpose with the prayer anyway. I don’t recall which team won that Sunday. But by Christmas the Jeri and Brian Sipe family were back in Southern California, while in January of 1979 the Steelers were winning their fourth Super Bowl championship beating the Dallas Cowboys 35-31. I remember flying home from a meeting on the West Coast, and the stewardess gave us regular updates—which she got from the cockpit.

And if the Steelers were not sufficient entertainment, that Fall the baseball Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series behind great hitting of the good-natured Willie Stargell. A home-town favorite, Stargell would walk up to the home plate and twirl his bat as though it were a baton—then he would hit a home run. It was an unusual sports decade and in Scottdale, we even got into the spirit when our Southmoreland High School football team won the conference title (here called a section) in 1976. Our locals were led by Russ Grimm who went on the play for the University of Pittsburgh and then a Hall of Fame career with the Washington Redskins. However, the football gods must have decided that one championship was enough for Southmoreland High School because it was the last championship we won even as I write this, often during the four decades losing by huge unmerciful margins.

In February we were heading to Edmonton, Alberta, for three weeks of a winter Bible school. This western Canada experience emerged out of our participating in a week-long training event during the 1978 summer called Family Cluster which was a program to provide community in congregations. The idea was that as families were becoming more diverse, isolated and fragmented, hence congregations should attempt to provide more family-like settings for community. The idea of course was noble, the activities enjoyable, and we tried to add some Christian elements to it, even if the theory was self-indulgently seventies. The background reading was Virginia Satir’s book called Peoplemaking. Satir had turned narcissism into a virtue with the corollary that all evil and uncooperative attitudes of families were by caused low self-esteem.

I may have become too old (even a scold) during these years, reacting to the excesses of the sexual revolution. Already in the early seventies, when I became aware of John W. Miller’s manuscript which became A Christian Approach to Sexuality, I sponsored its publication, and I began to write a number of articles on monogamy, at the same time that my own Mennonite publisher was releasing a whole spate of divorce friendly books. Our Scottdale Kingview congregation suffered through a divorce and remarriage soap opera (although I think it was tragic for the innocent children). I stoically adopted what might be called the Samuel Johnson position which I wrote in my journal: “It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure.”  Palliate is to abate or reduce the violence of disease.

Other memorable Family Cluster participants were David and Anne Donaldson from Alberta, back-to-nature folks, what might today be called crunchy conservatives. David, who had little knowledge of the Mennonites or Amish before meeting Annie of Pennsylvania, enthusiastically taught us Pennsylvania German folk tunes and dances.  The one I especially remember was: Hack die Katz sei Schwanz op./Hack ihn doch net ganz op./Los und bissele schtumbe stehe,/No kann es zu Saame gehe. (Chop the cat’s tail off,/But don’t cut it all off./If a little stump can show/That allows seed to grow.) 

Our Family Cluster expertise led to an invitation to Alberta for three weeks of visiting the churches regarding Family Cluster and participating in the Bible school. This was a three-week revival of what a generation earlier had been an agrarian based winter Bible school. I taught a class on Jeremiah (based on a study guide Mennonite Publishing House had released by Ernest Martin) and Clarence J. (better known as C.J.) Ramer taught a class on Old Testament prophesies which were fulfilled in the New Testament. David and Annie Donaldson were the spirit behind much of this experiment, and David also led a music class in which he took us through the paces of shaped notes music, and we sang in a chorus. David’s favorite hymn with which we would begin every session was “O That I Had a Thousand Voices.” Johann Mentzer wrote the lyrics three hundred years earlier during the afternoon after his house had burned down in the morning. The stanzas includes praise to God “who all things wisely does and well!/ My grateful heart would then be free/ To tell what God has done for me.”

We stayed near Salem, at the home of the Tofield congregation’s pastor Harold and his wife Viola Stalter Boettger, and on weekends discovered other parts of Alberta. One weekend David and Annie took us up north to a frozen and wild village called Smith where there was a small Mennonite church with an unusually opinionated but good-hearted pastor and hog farmer; I think his name was Willis Yoder. David and Anne and their young son were homesteading nearby, living in a small cabin he had built and they had a horse and buggy and a few other animals. David in fairly inhospitable territory was trying to go Amish. We passed a moose along the highway on the way, and it was National Geographic beautiful countryside.

I was fascinated by the sincere and warm faith of these rural people who lived in a cold and long winter. Most of the three weeks we were there, it was a dry cold of thirty to forty degrees below zero. Another weekend we traveled to Edmonton where we visited museums, went skiing, and spoke at the Holyrood church on Sunday morning. There we met J. Robert Ramer who was the son of Clarence (my senior teacher at the Bible school) and who would later come south to serve as the Mennonite publisher at Scottdale.  In many settings, our family would sing the traditional canon Dona Nobis Pacem (Grant us peace) which seemed to be a crowd favorite with little Hannah and Jacob leading out. We had sung it at Gloria’s sister Carla and Maurice Stutzman’s wedding, and also the next summer (July 5, 1979) when sister Ruth and John Roth got married at Martin Creek Mennonite fellowship hall.

I think I was especially fascinated by the Donaldsons, because they reminded me of my sister Miriam and her husband Veryl with whom we were discussing buying land and beginning a little communal farm. One day, we drove all over East Huntington and Mt. Pleasant Township  looking at some farms, but eventually Miriam and Veryl could not wait any longer and tried out a commune with the authors and activists Art and Peggy Gish near Athens, Ohio. I helped move them down with a big dog riding on top of the truck load. Occasionally we got reports from them that not all was well, what with Art Gish’s stubborn and individualistic personality hardly lending to community living. During the summer, my brother Paul and mother Mattie made a fraternal visit and helped in the garden, only to discover that the best strawberries were sold and the over-ripe seconds served to our little relatives (the Kratzer children) at the communal table. My mother viewed this as an egregious slight of her grandchildren. In her telling, Art Gish’s idea of a good meal was what could be found in the dumpster of the Athens supermarkets.

The Kratzers and their little children Amos and Esther became good friends with a Brethren family Cordell and Marlene Bowman who later ended up in the nearby commune at Farmington, the Bruderhof. Miriam and Veryl did not, for which we as a family were all thankful. After about a year of Gish community, I went down and helped move the Kratzers back to Wayne County where they eventually settled into dairy farming and worship with the extended Kratzer clan and the Sonnenberg Mennonites. On the return trip, the Kratzer dog was on top of the truck load again, plus some little puppies, a few goats and chickens. I remember the trip well because as we slowly drove through the small Ohio towns, children waved and smiled as they heard friendly bleating, barking and cackling coming from the top of our vehicle.

In many ways, the Kratzers were living out my own hopes for the viability of small scale agrarian communalism. I was reading publications like E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and his  catholic primer called A Guide to the Perplexed, as well as Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, especially her regular journal entries from the Tivoli farm in upstate New York. About this same time Arnold Cressman of Laurelville led what he called Grebel (as in Conrad) Company fireside theology retreats, and Gloria and I joined a December 8 discussion group with Richard and Joyce Thomas and a Weber couple of Lancaster on Walter Bruggeman’s monograph The Land. I think the latter, especially helped me to think of the land and farming as a biblical metaphor for blessing. The Beautitudes would have the meek, the humble ones, inheriting the earth. In any case, for the rest of my life farming was more of an image than a reality.

If pacifist rural communalism attracted us, we were equally intrigued by urban anti-war efforts. During Passion Week, Vincent Scotti (later took on the name Eirene), Kathy Jennings, and some other anti-war people organized various activities. On Good Friday, April 13, 1979, our family was in Pittsburgh, along with our neighbors Ivan and Naomi Moon, and here are my journal notes: “This morning we went to Pittsburgh to spend a Good Friday Prayer Vigil with some Christian peacemakers in front of the Rockwell International headquarters. We found the group standing behind a banner on the 800 Grant Street block with the Passion Week message that Rockwell was Judas and dealt in blood money. The distinct banner, I discovered, had been made by a WQED FM (the Pittsburgh classical music station) art director.

“Rockwell was the site of the prayer and mourning because yesterday it built three bombs and owned the plant at Rocky Flats, Colorado, which builds components for nuclear weapons. I was aware that Rockwell was a major supplier of nuclear armaments and whether they built two or three a day does not strike me as extremely crucial to my concern.

“The participants consisted of 23 healthy young people, most under the age of 30. Among them was Ladon Sheats who had the day before participated in an ‘action’ for which he was arrested, along with five others. They had chained themselves to the doors up on the fiftieth floor and had asked that they not be removed. Ladon sent greetings to his friends at Scottdale, and mentioned that he was on parole after having served six months in jail for pouring blood on the White House.

“The three hours of silence gave me time to think, such as I had not recently done. I thought of death. I thought of the trident submarine which was launched to eventually kill people. I thought of the plans made by well-intentioned people at Rockwell to build weapons and preserve security, as they understand it. I thought of Hiroshima and the death that weapons cause. I thought of Christ’s death and how my presence with these people put it into a different perspective. Passers-by stared at us and surely thought we were mad.

“I thought of standing as my legs became tired. I thought of standing with my father at farm sales and machinery auctions. I thought of standing in line at the military induction center at Columbus, Ohio, back in 1968. I thought of standing and watching Sandy Koufax throw a one-hitter for three hours at the old Busch Stadium. I thought of standing at revival meetings. I swayed back and forth as Hannah slept in my arms and on my shoulders; I appreciated my legs. At least I still had my legs. I could stand.

“At about three o’clock, a young woman read from Isaiah 60 in which the dream is expressed of a nation without war and living in health and peace. Another young man spent most of the afternoon reading silently in his New Testament. An article by Jim Wallis of Sojourners on the power of prayer is passed around for us to read. Christ is my hope and peace.”

We headed to a nearby restaurant for coffee and visiting. People were especially impressed by our children and by Gloria’s bump; Gloria was pregnant.  Elizabeth was born after a long day at just before midnight, 11:45 p.m. on July 25, 1979. I wrote in my journal:

“There was the early joy of knowing that a new life was coming. Next there were the worries, will the child be normal, not a mongoloid [like my uncle Levi]? Will the baby not be sensitized by the TJA factor in Gloria’s blood? Finally, one thinks of the delivery and that it will be difficult for Gloria. In the morning you get up early and go to the hospital where you are nervous under the outward calm for you want Gloria to be relaxed. You wonder if the doctor will go with a natural delivery or will go for a Cesarean birth.  You see the other two babies that day and they are healthy and you think the averages are against you. If the two would not have been healthy, you would have used that as evidence against you.

“Overall, it has been a pessimistic day, because you do not want to get your hopes too high. Then comes the actual delivery and the cry of the little one. Elizabeth is well and Gloria is feeling and looking good. You ask yourself, how could you ask all those questions. You knew everything would be alright. You are happy in holding the baby and watching her drink. You go home and eat.”  

Elizabeth was a healthy baby but jaundiced, as were all Gloria’s babies. So for a few days, Elizabeth stayed under a purple light in the nursery. Jacob, Hannah and I went to the window of the Mt. Pleasant Frick Hospital and they brought her for us to see before she came home. In celebration before she came home, we bought a new large (at least to us) queen-sized bed so we’d have more room for our expanding family. Our neighbors and friends, the Hawks (Steve), Hieberts (James), Savanicks (Nathan), Schwabs (Maggie), Scotts (Debby), and Shenks (Jill), all had babies about that same time.  

Within two weeks, we were traveling to the Mennonite Church denominational assembly meeting (August 11-16) at the University of Waterloo campus in Ontario, on the way stopping at Niagara Falls overnight. It seemed early to be traveling four hundred miles, but both Gloria and Elizabeth were healthy, and I don’t recall anything untoward happening during the trip. We even took the Lady of the Mist boat trip in hats and rain coats under the Falls. At the assembly, Elizabeth became something of a celebrity mainly because Merle and Phyllis Good were also there with their newborn Rebecca and both little ones made the newspaper. When people met us, the first line was, is this Rebecca or Elizabeth?

Gloria was unusually fit, giving aerobics classes before her pregnancy, and by the Fall she was again at the YMCA giving classes. Elizabeth often went along to these sessions, watching or sleeping in an infant seat much to the amazement of the other participants. And that Fall our neighbor Charles Fausold, the principal at the Connellsville High School, invited Gloria as a guest instructor of aerobics to the girls physical education students. We have the photo which appeared in the in Connellsville Courier of Gloria high stepping in what it called the “new form of physical fitness.” The following year (1980) Gloria learning a new program called JOY, and  she continued to teach JOY aerobics until it interfered too much with her high school Spanish teaching in the mid-eighties. 

One event we did not get to that summer was on the very week Elizabeth was born, the honoring of Berlin, Ohio’s favorite sons Roy R. Miller and Wilbur Yoder. During the Berlin Pioneer Days on the weekend of July 27-29, the Berlin community surprised Gloria’s father and neighbor Wilbur Yoder with a “This is your life” pageant. Both men had parallel four-decade careers with the East Homes schools. Roy graduated from Berlin High School in 1924 and Wilbur in 1925, and both studied at Kent Normal (now Kent State University). Both taught at one room schools in the late 1920s, Roy at Troyer Ridge (where one of his students was my mother Mattie Schlabach), and Wilbur taught at North Bunker Hill. Eventually, both were teaching and coaching at Berlin High School, and, Roy became the executive head of Berlin and East Holmes after Berlin and Walnut Creek consolidated into Hiland. Wilbur in addition to his teaching became a legendary basketball and baseball coach.  

Roy and Berdella and Wilbur and Laura raised their families living side by side at Bunker Hill as good neighbors and friends and sharing a pond. In many ways, as efficient, wise, and modest Pennsylvania Germans, the two men personified the ideals of the community, the one a Mennonite and the other a Lutheran. The program even included verses by the local poet Delbert Harman who gave them the penultimate honor in his “Ballad of Wilbur and Roy.” “If tonight I were at the White House,/and Carter would ask, ‘What is it boy?’/I’d say, ‘Fire the Cabinet again,/ And replace them with Wilbur and Roy.’” Harman then ended his verse with the ultimate honor--Wilbur and Roy teaching in heaven. 

Many past teachers, students, administrators, and athletes who had studied with Roy and Wilbur attended, and all their children attended—except, of course, Gloria about to give birth to Elizabeth. Roy and Berdella’s family was increasing as Carla, now a nurse and recently graduated from Goshen College, had married Maurice Stutzman, a medical student at Ohio State University on April 20.  

On November 11, my grandfather Levi (L.L.) Schlabach died and I went up the funeral. I got up early in the morning and Gloria took me to Interstate Route 70 at Smithton. I hitch-hiked to Cambridge, Ohio, and then north on Interstate 77 until New Philadelphia or Dover where my father picked me up. My father quite proudly introduced me to everyone at the funeral as just having hitch-hiked in from Scottdale, as though I had just flown in from London. 

The Pleasant View Mennonite meetinghouse was filled with family and Amish and Mennonite neighbors and friends, and what I remember especially was L.L.’s old Amish neighbor and minister Abe Hostetler and his sermon. Abe spoke of God’s comfort to the family, of mercy of the Christian hope of the resurrection through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And then he talked about God’s providence of caring for his people, and he wandered into American history, at least the meaning of history. He said he had been thinking of why Columbus discovered America. He said that he believed that God knew there were suffering and persecuted people in Europe and that God would provide a place for them to live. In typically modest tones, Abe said he could not give this for fact, but he had been thinking of it for a long time, and he was grateful to God for this place to live.

Perhaps because I was quite critical of America, especially with the Vietnam War and a disgraced President Nixon as background, that I remember it so well. Abe Hostetler was making a confessional statement of what the American empire had provided for religious minorities. If America took a liking to the Amish in the last several decades, the Amish have had an appreciation for America, a place where sectarian religious groups can associate to worship, set rules for membership, operate family farms and businesses, and educate their children. I thought of America’s diversity and generosity by the generous rides I was given to and from Holmes County, Ohio, in huge Mack diesels and painted VW buses: truck drivers and hippies.  

In the meantime, I enjoyed reading and discussing literature, and soon after I returned from graduate school I started a literature reading group in which we would gather in the winter at various houses and read a work. The emphasis was on simply enjoying the oral reading of plays, poetry, and or a short story, without much comment except for an introduction. Among the works we read at a setting were: “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” “Candide,” “The Seagull,” “Death of a Salesman,” and “King Lear.” The latter was introduced by an elderly Paul Erb who claimed that Lear was better read than staged. After these winter readings ended in several years, a theology discussion group emerged which was headed by Richard Kauffman and David E. Hostetler. In 1979, we spent a good number of monthly evenings on Hans Küng’s book On Being a Christian, including some correspondence with the author.

On a family level our literature and theater tastes changed as the children came. When we first moved to Scottdale, we’d go to the old Nixon Theater (since torn down) where we saw traveling Broadway shows such as “Hair” and “Godspell.” By the end of the decade our theater habits changed, and now we would often go to the Lovelace Theater which did marionette plays featuring a Toby the Dog, and classic tales such as “Jack and the Beanstock” and “Little Red Riding Hood.”  A transition to these children’s shows may have been when we were in Ontario for the Mennonite assembly and went out to nearby Stratford one afternoon. We took a sleeping three-week old Elizabeth along to “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” and the usher of the Festival Stage seemed ambivalent at best about our protocol. Elizabeth woke up sometime during the third act, and Gloria quietly breast-fed her. As a little girl, Jacob and I often called her Elizabethan—although I don’t think the nickname’s origins were in this theater.

Aside from Elsie Egermeier’s Bible stories, we read Richard Adam’s heroic rabbit tale Watership Down (1972), and later saw the movie when it came out–actually we saw it in February 1979 in Edmonton, Alberta.  Another memorable movie I saw with Jacob and Hannah was Francis Ford Cappola’s The Black Stallion at Monroeville; I’ll never forget the beautiful Black running free along the African (I believe Morocco) sea shore, but I remember it also because Roy R. went along with us to see it. I think it was the only time Roy went with us to a movie. Elizabeth, Gloria and Berdella stayed at home, the latter two still playing the word game Scrabble when we returned home late that evening.   

Most of this chapter comes from my personal files and journal entries of this year and the memories of family members. “O That I Had a Thousand Voices,” is number 10 in the The Mennonite Hymnal (Scottdale: Mennonite Publishing House, 1967). Gloria’s aerobics program “Joy at the YMCA” was described in The Independent-Observer (September 10, 1980). A full page of the Roy R. Miller and Wilbur Yoder “This Is Your Life” honor is found in the Holmes County Farmer Hub, (August 2, 1979, 11).  

1978 Anabaptist Prophets

1978   Anabaptist Prophets. Pittsburgh Opera, Le Prophète (The Prophet) at the Met, Candide; Associated Church Press, William H. Masters, Wesley Pippert, Evangelicals, Sojourners visit MPH, Doug Hostetter, Ben and Dorothy Cutrell, Privileging Youth Culture, Lorne Peachey, Two peace sermons at Scottdale Mennonite.

I’m not sure when I first heard of prophets or opera, but as in so much of my education, my first interest may have come with a book. Let’s start with opera. When Rodolf Bing left the Metropolitan Opera in New York after 22 years as general manager, he wrote his memoirs in 5000 Nights at the Opera (1972).  I read a review, got a copy and totally enjoyed his story of managing musicians, theater and this larger than life art form. The climax of his story, as I remember it, was his bringing to the Met the temperamental soprano Maria Callas, probably the greatest high soprano singer of mid-century. The anti-climax was how he finally had to leave her go. In his telling, the Met as an institution was greater than the individual artist. He felt that given Callas’ unusual needs and character, he would have needed to sacrifice the institution for his greatest singer.

Actually, I heard some opera when a company or two stopped by Malone College, and during Spring of 1968, Gloria and I with friends Wayne Yoder and Linda Ulm heard the Met bass Jerome Hines sing at our senior banquet. As a child when I heard operatic voices, I also heard the comment: Geb da Bulli Millich. (Give the little bull some milk.) I suppose Hines also had interest to me because he was a member of the Salvation Army and was as likely to be seen in a soup kitchen as a concert hall. I later heard him as an Anabaptist prophet (below) and in 1979 as the Pittsburgh Opera’s Don Quichotte. But Bing’s memoir fascinated me for the music and drama on and off stage, and when we moved to Scottdale, we began to attend the Pittsburgh Opera, then in the refurbished Heinz Hall. The opera was under the direction of the Richard Karp who had begun the opera in the forties and was now an elderly man, soon to be replaced by his daughter Barbara.

I remember our first Pittsburgh Opera of the “The Flying Dutchman” by Wagner; we attended with Mervin and Arlene Miller. The orchestral music was thunderous and the lonely voice of the doomed sailor in the open night sky and seascape.  It was a total unreality of music with huge voices thundering out the songs, often with great melodies, tenors and basses going even higher and lower than the Southern male quartets who had earlier charmed me. They wore bright costumes and often died to beautiful strains of the violins. Local connections also gave some interest such as when the Mezzo-soprano Mildred Miller sang in the Mozart operas; I especially remember her in “Così fan tutte.” I had earlier heard her sing an evening of German Lieder when we were at Bowling Green. Aside from the music, there were the stories, even if folkloric and stereotypical. We had enjoyable performances of Bizet’s “Carmen,” with the singable melodies of jealous lovers, evoking a long-gone Spanish life and death.     

The story I knew best and rediscovered in the seventies was of the sixteenth century Anabaptists, and sure enough in the Spring of 1977, I heard Jerome Hines again, this time singing as one of three foreboding low-voiced Anabaptists. Le Prophète (The Prophet) was Giacomo Meyerbeer’s grand opera of the rise and fall of the Anabaptists’ peasant uprising when they tried to set up an Old Testament Davidic Kingdom in the city of Münster. I had a publishing meeting in New Jersey, so I took a train in to New York and the Met. Besides Jerome Hines, the performance had other notable singers such as Marilyn Horne, Renata Scoto and James McCracken, the latter singing the title role of John of Leyden. Horne was the tragic Leyden’s mother whose low soprano brought authentic compassion and sorrow as the story of her son unfolded.

I bought the recording and would still play it at times if I had a 33 record player. Meyerbeer’s grand style of opera however has fallen out of favor and probably will not appear on many stages again. I later ordered a CD set on Amazon, only to receive blank copies so I’ll live with the memory. I saw probably the only major staging of this opera during my life time, and may have written the only Met opera review for our church publication the Gospel Herald. Anyway, after a decade of opera going in the seventies, by the eighties we went less. Why, dear reader, I’m not sure. One might think of our little children for whom opera had little interest. But even after the children left home, we were no longer the regulars. It may also have been my practical-minded Gloria who one time suggested that I might sleep more comfortably at home. I generally slept through most of the second act, not unlike my response to a good sermon.  One might as well hear recordings, Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts, or watch Live from the Met on TV—where it’s more comfortable for sleeping. For the most part, that is what I have done.  

The Broadway musical is a twentieth-century American popular adaption of the nineteenth-century European opera. So a coda on this opera phase would be my fascination with all Anabaptists who showed up in the classical literature (outside the Martyr’s Mirror) such as the Anabaptist Jacques in Voltaire’s short novella Candide. The youthful Candide is an innocent discovering the world and his guide Pangloss believes everything is for the best. They meet an Anabaptist Jacques who knows better and turns out to be Voltaire’s version of a tragic but virtuous Dirk Willems. Anyway, in the late nineties when Hannah’s boyfriend Anson Miedel and I traveled to New York, I took him to a Broadway production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide—thinking this musical would be a friendly introduction to Anabaptism. To my disappointment the Anabaptist scenes did not make it into Bernstein’s Broadway Candide, nor did Anson seem that impressed with the rest of the show. On the way back to our room, we had better fellowship at a sports bar where we caught a basketball game.

In the meantime, religiously the Evangelicals were on the rise. There was President Jimmy Carter, of course, but I think the first time I realized that the Evangelicals had become the main players in the  American Christian world was at the Associated Church Press meetings in St. Louis, Missouri in April.  Although the organization was largely editors of publications from of the traditional Protestant denominations, one could see several groupings emerging. The old line liberals at this meeting were the majority, quite professional about their theological and journalistic categories, trying to meet the approval of the secular press' standards. They were concerned about world conditions and raised important questions about structures, politics and organizational arrangements. Their cultural success seemed in direct proportion with their financial demise, a loss of readership. Often we awarded a magazine awards one year, and the following year it ceased publication.

For the old line, the outstanding speaker was William H. Masters of the Masters and Johnson human sexuality research team from St. Louis. Masters had sharp eyes and looked straight ahead or into our eyes with nary a sign of emotion. He personified objectivity while telling us of persons unable to copulate correctly in the fifties and sixties.  Masters said the present generation in the seventies has learned to copulate better and on an equal gender basis. He talked about homosexuality too which was emerging as a topic, but I had the impression that many of the editors enjoyed him especially because he was unsympathetic to religious orthodoxy which presumably inhibited casual breeding. He positioned traditional Christian morality against his clinical sexuality. 

On the other hand, there were the young evangelicals who had zeal for personal piety and sound morals and perhaps less optimistic about government, especially its centralized forms. At this meeting, their speaker was Wesley Pippert, the United Press International reporter assigned to the White House. Pippert spoke of growing up in rural Iowa when business, dairy, and clothing stores were small and independent. In the meantime, store chains have become large, and they can give a bribe to the Nixon for Presidency campaign. Pippert was short and stocky with a wide mouth and a powerful jaw. He did not speak easily but seemed to look deeply for words deep inside himself. But his strength and energy were contagious, and I was impressed by his concern for truth and for justice. He was also the husband of the author Rebecca Manley Pippert who was active with the Intervarsity program and evangelism. Pippert seemed to me the future of Christians in journalism.

If this kind of decentralized and local community oriented evangelicalism had an appeal to many Mennonites, probably to most heartland Mennonites, another smaller group of young evangelicals were closer to us at Mennonite Publishing House. Our publication version was the Sojourners community in Washington D.C. and their journal, also called Sojourners.  Our editors at Mennonite Publishing House considered them to be colleagues and soul mates in the Anabaptist Christian cause. Our book publishing editor Paul Schrock’s daughter Carmen was an assistant to the editor Jim Wallis, and Sojourners openly cited the Anabaptist story and theology as a part of its spiritual heritage. Among of their contributing editors were the Mennonite theologians John Howard Yoder and Ron Sider.

I was a member of a committee which would plan occasional leadership meetings of the management, editorial and marketing people for all-day discussions. We invited in members of the Sojourners’ editorial team, and two people came, one being Wes Michaelson, who had earlier been an aide to Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield (1968). One was impressed by their advocacy approach to journalism, their Christian call of the importance of serving the poor and needy, and how optimistic they were regarding government programs to respond to these needs.

Regarding their publication, they had a strong public relations and fundraising division as a part of the magazine. It struck me at the time that they had a similar agenda to some of our editors but had a fund-raising arm to meet their budget, but we were trying to do a similar project among the most politically conservative religious group in the USA and Canada. Most of our readers may have privileged meaningful work, local efforts, and church communities as a response to the poor and the needy. And we had no fundraising arm to our publishing; it is perhaps understandable why our year-end reports were increasingly having negative figures.

Sojourners was also publishing Mennonite authors, and one was Doug Hostetter who wrote an article on visiting Cuba “After the Debris Is Cleared.” Hostetter distinguishes between charity and rights for a church and government as a kind of division of labor. He takes Vietnam and Cuba before and after their revolutions, with appreciation for the new communist regimes. Hostetter’s hope was dialogue to "learn more of the God who calls his people both to liberation during a time of oppression and to faithfulness during the sojourn in the new land.”  

The Hostetter article stayed with me for a long time, mostly for its honesty in describing the degree to which a Mennonite had come to associate the new land of revolutionary socialism and communism with the Kingdom of God. For Hostetter and his cohorts, the Vietnam War was the defining experience of their politics, theology and worldview. In this reading America was the apocalyptic beast, the main vehicle of oppression in the world and all other countries were morally equivalent or mostly better, depending of course on the degree to which they had achieved a socialist or communist ideal of justice.

I was especially fascinated how in one generation the son and daughter of the best known Mennonite radio preacher B. Charles Hostetter (The Mennonite Hour) who had taught an evangelical Mennonite understanding of the gospel would have traded this gospel for a bowl of socialist political porridge, what was called prophetic religion. Hostetter’s sister Pat Hostetter Martin had also become a vocal left-wing political evangelist during these years; her husband Earl Martin having gained some fame for staying in Vietnam for a period of time after the American troops pulled out. By this time the Vietnamese refugees and what were called the boat people were arriving in our Mennonite communities in good numbers, and their stories of re-education camps and Ho Chi Minh’s Marxist nationalism were hardly re-assuring that the Kingdom of God had arrived in Southeast Asia.      

This variety of prophetic religion was being embraced at the Mennonite Publishing House. We had day-long leadership discussions to gather the thought life of the institution which at that point still had about one hundred employees at Scottdale. First there was the predictable; there would be a debate between a theoretical Anabaptism headed by Jan Gleysteen and an evangelical Mennonitism headed by Maynard Shetler, both traveling over well worn-territory. Many of us mainly identified with Gleysteen, even if he was considered somewhat of a high maintenance free-loader. Our publisher Ben Cutrell came to the defense of the practical-minded Shetler and his Baptist wife Alice.

Ben came from the George and Frances Nissley Cutrell family, who arrived at Scottdale in 1908, hence knew printing well, but was also a financial manager (studied at Carnegie Mellon). He had been brought to Mennonite Publishing House as an organizational leader, replacing the traditional preacher businessperson Abraham Jacob (A.J.) Metzler. Cutrell fit the bureaucratic image of steady temperament, allowing his managers do their work, evoking their loyalty, and understanding delegation and division of labor. He was complimented by his wife Dorothy Stutzman, of Louisville, Ohio, who was a passionate idealist and ran the Scottdale Provident Bookstore for a while and also was editor of the book review service called the Provident Book Finder. Ben and Dorothy late in their careers took a New Guinea sabbatical helping a Christian publisher and bringing back a charming idealization of native non-Western cultures and enlightened about the flaws in American society. This third world idealization, basic to prophetic religion, was now combined with an earlier fascination with youth culture and what we called futurism. 

So back to 1978. Our committee asked Ben Cutrell to lead one-day discussions on publishing in the future. He had read books, somewhat in the Alvin Toffler (Future Shock) mode and related them to publishing, most of which escapes me thirty years later. What I do remember is that he talked of how we should learn from our children; they are the future and he was hopeful about their international and caring character. His son was now living among the peasants in Haiti with no vocation one could see, and his daughter was a social worker and supporting government politics which would fund more social workers. Clearly, the social services were a growth industry for young people, but whether the project should be given such a church preference became questionable to me.

I think I had my first awakening of some misjudgment when I was teaching a junior high age Sunday school class at the Kingview Mennonite Church near Scottdale. We were studying the book of Acts in the New Testament and looking at contemporary examples of this kind of communal and equalitarian Christianity. I innocently told the youths to look at their older now twenty-something hippy brothers and sisters for such models of prophetic religion. Their response was one of concerned disbelief and some embarrassment of my naiveté. I had the clear impression that these youngsters would as likely have labeled their older siblings as models of individualistic and selfish Christianity. I am of course here unfairly picking out certain families for examples, but I do believe that the Scottdale Mennonite community had a heightened love affair with what Newsweek used to call the youth culture, a kind of on-going religious appropriation of The Greening of America and The Making of a Counter Culture. In fact, I know of few religious groups which embraced the word counter culture as we did as Mennonites; our Scottdale Mennonite publications leading the way. 

Exhibit number one was the Mennonite Publishing House’s With magazine which was begun in 1968 and edited by Lorne Peachey. This was the monthly youth magazine replacing the weekly Youth Christian Companion begun by my old antiquated tennis friend Clayton F. Yake. Peachey was the anti-Yake of another generation who now projected an independent and anti-establishment posture. Yake had grown old with his readership and knew who was buying his subscriptions, and Peachey was ready to cut loose from these oldsters and appeal directly to the high school youth. Whatever merit Peachey’s approach had regarding readership, it also made sense in terms of what was called a generation gap and don’t trust anyone over thirty zeitgeist. He gave a new focus to the content and style. He made the magazine slick and hip and addressed formerly taboo subjects such as petting, masturbation, and draft dodging.

Peachey was bright, responded quickly, and reflective like a mirror. No one would accuse Peachey of over-appreciating the complexity and dilemmas of the biblical and Mennonite tradition. My hunch is that whatever offense With brought to some congregational leaders had less to do with the actual content than with this editorial tone and style; the prophetic style was to provoke. In any case, the church elders who paid the bills soon tightened the purse strings, and the kids themselves had other priorities for their money. Very quickly the subscriptions dropped sharply from the earlier Youth Christian Companion as the traditionals and evangelicals dropped out. This selectivity seemed to enhance Peachey’s reputation even further as a prophet; financially, the youth paper turned from a net revenue generator in the 1950s to a highly subsidized publication by 1970s.

By the mid-seventies the publishers, perhaps in an act of contrition, named Richard Kauffman, a former pastor and thoughtful soul, as editor of the magazine. But by that time the magazine’s radical identity was firmly established. Peachey meanwhile had moved on to editing the community magazine Christian Living, similarly managing to sharpen (as in reduce) its readership to family (the prophetic family, of course) and those who appreciated his polarizing style.

Dear reader, I know you are thinking that I’m being too critical, and I agree with you. It was another time and period and my colleagues were all doing the best they could. Furthermore, I was young too during those years, and I benefited from this privilege we gave to youth culture. I was given forums to write and speak precisely because of my youth, non-preacher demeanor and shaggy hair.  And I believed much of the popular counter culture peace and love and live simply so others can simply live credos. I still love the songs “Last night I had the strangest dream….  I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.”  

By the end of the year I was preparing two sermons which Scottdale Mennonite Church invited me to give. One was from the Gospels, Jesus and Peace, and the second was from the Epistles on the Gospel of Peace, noting also our church’s history on pacifism and nonresistance and the singer Graham Nash’s “Cathedral.” As I review the sermons, I see the Scriptures and history were the basis however, so I’ll end with one of those Scripture which I quoted of our Christian hope:

“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”     

Most of this chapter comes from my 1978 journal “Notes on Life” and my personal files. The Meyerbeyer Anabaptist prophets comes from “Münster Opera at the Met,” Gospel Herald (March 15, 1977, 226). Doug Hostetter’s article, “After the Debris Is Cleared” appeared in Sojourners (September, 1978, 20-23). The two Scottdale sermons are in my files and were given on January 14 and 21, 1979; final Scripture quotation is Revelation 21: 3-4, NRSV.

1977 Worship and Europe

1977  Worship and Europe. Sleeping in church, Edwin Alderfer, tennis partners, storge, Schnauzer Pinky, a tree house; trip to Europe, TourMagination, Jan and Barbara Gleysteen, Arnold Cressman, Willi Schweikard, communion at Anabaptist cave, J. Lawrence Burkholder, leadership, Argentine dirty war, Patricia Erb.

During the seventies, my favorite worship times were when I was sitting in church sleeping or dozing or writing in my journal with Gloria, Jacob, Hannah, and later Elizabeth beside me. Jacob drew pictures, and I have a page full of H’s which Hannah at age two filled in my journal. I developed an on-going love affair for Edwin Alderfer’s sermons because in the summer they were easy to sleep to while I heard birds outside the window, pre-air-conditioning. I felt that pastors had little new to say to me aside from what was already in the Scriptures and in Christian tradition, and that the best they could do for me was to accompany a good sleep. Perhaps I took this approach from my days of an Amish childhood when I would look up and see our farmer neighbors were mostly asleep after working all week, at peace with God.

I wrote in my journal during Kingview Mennonite worship on August 17, 1977: “This morning in church is one of those times when one wonders what is real and what is illusion. Am I really here? What is the minister saying? I only hear a tone; it is a pleasing tone and makes me sleepy and restful and terribly alert at the same time. Outside a warbling wren is singing and accompanies the voice of the minister. I have a strange feeling of being completely unaware and at the same time feeling a kind of euphoria that I am alright and am well taken care of. It is perhaps illusory but I have found these experiences to be some of the most religious times of my life. Am I having the same experience that the people at Einsiedeln, Switzerland, experienced? I do not know. Perhaps it is not that important as to the forms of our worship whether we hear a warbling wren, an Alderfer or a black madonna, but that we follow the counsel of the prophet to “do justly and have mercy.” 

The Einsiedeln reference was to a recent European trip where we visited the Catholic shrine, but here I was also developing the idea that much Christian education was in ritual and the morning service was as much a ritual as an intellectual or invigorating experience. I decided that the best ministers were what my parents called drones, gentle monotones and sleep inducers and Edwin Alderfer was always the measure; he set a high bar. I recall several years later at a church council meeting where Aderfer’s tenure as pastor was up for discussion, and I found that among the people sitting at the council, I was the only one who wanted to continue his pastorate. The others, to my disappointment, were looking for a more stimulating or invigorating message.

Aside from good church rest, I may also have been partial to Alderfer as a good tennis partner during the seventies. We would often get up at six-thirty seven and play tennis for an hour. Ed had a drop shot which seemed to cross the net and then come to a spinning slow-down, dropping down by the net. I was told that Ed had been an outstanding baseball player back in his school days at Souderton, Pennsylvania. Tennis is a sport of breaks between games and sets, but with Edwin there were more than I ever experienced before or since. Ed would perspire profusely, and even wearing a white sweat band on his head, the sweat would come into his eyes and face, steaming shut his glasses so he couldn’t see. At regular intervals, we would need to stop while Ed wiped the fog out of his glasses.

About this time Gloria gave me a book called The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey; this was pure nineteen seventies pop psychology applying thinking positively and mentally projecting where the ball should go. It was literally as Robert Frost once quipped of free verse, playing tennis with the net down. Basically it moved on the romantic theory that one should simply serve, swing, and run to one’s delight and passion; do what comes naturally and good things will happen on the court. I liked this approach and played in this manner the rest of my life, wearing lightly the formal mechanics and professional guides regarding how a forehand, backhand and overhead should be executed. Aside from Alderfer, other good tennis partners during those years were Alan Philips, George Huffman, Bob Clavarel, Charles (Chuck) Fausold, Walt Kiebler, and Paul Barclay. The latter would later become our daughters’ coach and was an especially good friend, and still plays as I write this in March of 2012.  

But my biggest tennis partner was Gloria who loved the game and we often played together from our dating years in the sixties. I learned that she would get mad if I threw her points. We competed against each other many a Sunday after church; often we took the children to the park and let them play on the swings while we played tennis, and soon of course they picked up rackets themselves. Gloria and I also played as doubles partners, often against two men. We organized a Mennonite Publishing House tennis group this summer (this was now post-Clayton F. Yake League 1971), and in 1978 easily winning both the singles and doubles championship. The tournament had recreation and friendship merit alone, but I still enjoy the certificate; done by no less than the Mennonite Publishing House staff artist Ivan Moon.       

My biggest literary success was an accidental one when the family study guide called Family in Today’s Society (1971) went into its fifth printing that year. I had collected essays which were published earlier, but family was of interest to me, however amateurish my qualifications. About this time, someone gave me a cassette tape recording of the lecture of C.S. Lewis had given on the four loves: storge: affection, family love; philos: friendship, platonic love; eros: sexual and erotic love; and finally agape: Christian love, the greatest love of all in Christ and as the apostle described it in 1 Corinthians 13. I believe it was Paul Erb who had given it to me; Erb as a former English literature professor had been an admirer of Lewis for his Christian apologetics. I took an immediate interest in storge, family love, perhaps it was because at that stage we were a young family; it is the love of hearing the footsteps of a child in the next room or a dog patting his tail in the kitchen.

At this time we had a small Schnauzer puppy which my brother Roy and Ruby had given us; we named her Ophelia, but we called her Pinky because pink was Jacob’s favorite color. Pinky was a friendly dog who got on well with the children and soon became a family member. Then on Thanksgiving weekend, she ran across Loucks Avenue and was instantly killed by a car. The children cried, and we took her to the vacant land behind what is now the Southmoreland Elementary School and buried her, in the spring planting a tree. Pinky was the first in a long line of pets which our household had, many of whom came to sad ends. I remember confessing to our pastor Ed Alderfer my shame in feeling so sad about the death of an animal. Alderfer, ever the good pastor, gave us absolution.   

Family themes also affected my reading choices; I became fascinated by the apocryphal book of Tobit which is a family story, and introduced it to the youth when we led the youth week at Laurelville. I often wrote in my journal the motto of Tobit 4:21 “Do not be afraid, my son, because we have become poor. You have great wealth if you fear God and refrain from every sin and do what is pleasing in his sight." Storge family love was a major component of Jane Austin and Tolstoy’s stories, and I think it was what drew me to John Updike, even if his families were dysfunctional. If it drew me to novelists, it also drew me to recreation choices. About this time yoga was becoming popular, and a book called Yoga for Children became our evening exercise guide, this was a good activity to relax and get the children ready for baths, stories, prayers, and sleeping.

Outside, I built a tree-house in the cherry tree in our back lawn; this was a good sized tree-house about twelve feet up in the air with rungs for climbing nailed to the tree trunk which would have to be declared unsafe. Our children got wounds and stitches from falls but survived. Hannah seemed especially fearless to falls; while still a toddler, I remember hearing her tumbling down our carpeted steps from the upstairs, running and catching her; but within minutes, she climbed right back up again. Not to be outdone, Elizabeth broke her wrist from a fall at the tree house. The children played in, fell from, and slept in the tree house during their childhood years. Finally, they outgrew it and abandoned it, so we turned it into a little chicken house, beginning several decades of backyard poultry. 

But the big event for us that year was our three-week travel tour to Europe with our neighbors Jan and Barb Gleysteen. The Gleysteens had begun a travel company with Arnold and Rhoda Cressman, and had selected Gloria and me to go along to serve as devotional and music leaders and also to help with the financial accounting. We readily accepted for this travel opportunity and for our interest in Anabaptist and Mennonite history. One could hardly underestimate the Anabaptist Vision and historical renewal interest which was finding its way into Mennonite thinking with these tours and lectures. This interest was begun by Harold S. Bender in the generation earlier, and it was taken to a high intellectual level with the John Howard Yoder Concern group young radicals, but now an Anabaptist Vision interest was stimulating a generation among the rank and file membership, especially enhanced with Anabaptist tours. 

The TourMagination trips, often called TM, were closely tied to the charismatic personality of Jan Gleysteen whose tours always filled quickly. His self-description in the tour booklet was as “more than anyone in the Mennonite Church today a personification of Anabaptism. His slide show ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ has been shown in many meetinghouses throughout the U.S. and Canada. Born in Amsterdam, he developed a serious interest in art at an early age. His encyclopedic memory of both important and unimportant data makes him a source of many serious and light moments.” Gleysteen had met his future wife Barbara Detweiler while she was in voluntary service in the Netherlands after the Second World War, and by 1953 she had brought him to Pennsylvania where he began working for Mennonite Publishing House as an artist and illustrator. By the seventies, he also did some editorial works such as editing the church bulletins, and was a colleague of mine in the congregational literature division.

The Gleysteens were neighbors, and this trip became a family affair as Barbara went along with their junior high age son David. Also on the trip were my sister Rhoda and her husband Jon Mast and Gloria’s sister Bonnie, who had earlier taken some Jan Gleysteen tours. The tour groups of about 40 people had eleven couples, including one newly married couple from Ontario called James and Jenni Lichti. As a profile there was a grouping of twenty-something young singles often teachers or graduate students with summer travel time. Second was a grouping of older couples who were professionals or small business owners, having discretionary wealth and desire for a vacation which would help them understand their religious and cultural standing in the world. One academic with us was the Mennonite Brethren historian Paul Toews of Fresno, California. Here was a cultural and religious pilgrimage to Europe with a knowledgeable European guide, all worthy of Chaucer's tales.

On the tour we could have a kind of second-run at our Anabaptist martyr history as we sang hymns in dungeons, museums of torture, and cathedrals. And Gleysteen fit the mold well of being European worldly-wise in serving wine, art and eel which the provincial American Mennonites had apparently not tasted sufficiently in an earlier life.

One could go into considerable detail on the various sites of the trip and my learnings along the way as we traveled from Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and even the little kingdom of Liechtenstein. But dear reader, I will spare you  three weeks of Anabaptist sites, museums, concerts, more Anabaptist sites and bus riding around steep Alpine roads with hairpin curves. In fact, the bus riding took on a life of its own as the driver Willi Schweikard was a larger than life figure, the perfect counterpart for Gleysteen. He and Jan Gleysteen entertained each other in a kind of mutual admiration duo, often reflecting on each other’s outstanding traits whether in driving or in remembering some historical detail.

Much of the tour’s group life had an orchestrated encore feeling from earlier tours which included set photo opportunities, jokes, and a final gift to the tour leader and bus driver. The biggest build-up however was in regards to regular references to the communion experience which was to happen at a hidden cave of the Anabaptists near Zurich. The communion ware was a cup and chalice from Willi’s wife, a Reformed church member. Willi,  a Roman Catholic, gave an emotional speech  (translated by Jan) on how wonderful it was to all join together in  goodwill and friendship for communion, and celebrating the Lord’s Supper.

One can only celebrate friendship and goodwill, but still it all seemed contrived and superficial as a religious experience, as though a casual handshake were the equivalent of marriage vows. I was still reflecting on our overnight staying with a Dutch Friesland family who said they were also trying to put this all together of forty American Mennonites telling them about love (I had told the Dirk Willems story at the worship service) with an ex-Nazi bus driver. This family’s main memory of the Americans was of paratroopers falling out of the sky and landing in the farm fields, liberating them from Nazi rule during the Second World War. I have no idea whether Schweikard was a Nazi nor do I care, what I did believe was that he was mainly an German entrepreneurial opportunist who had made common cause with a Dutch Mennonite opportunist Jan Gleysteen. 

All of this was especially vexing to me because I was to give a meditation at the cave communion service, presumably to extol feel-good friendship and casual ecumenism, and I was not even sure I believed in open communion. Mennonites traditionally practiced what was called closed communion or among church members. This selectivity was not because other people were not Christians but because Mennonites took the Lord’s Supper to mean a level of membership accountability which would be inappropriate for casual acquaintances. Needless to say, what was supposed to the highlight of the tour was a low point for my three weeks.    

What strikes me in reviewing my journal is how much I looked forward to the times when we were off of the bus, and how much I wished we would be traveling half the distance so that one could see and meet the people and feel the country texture, rather than needing to spend so much time inside the bus. I tried to be accommodating because we were getting a free trip and it was great introduction to Europe and Anabaptism, but I promised, alas swore, never to travel on such a tour again, and my favorite times were the one free day in the Alps in Austria when Gloria and I climbed up until we reached the snow peaks. I also enjoyed the overnight stays with Mennonite families in Friesland (Berlikum in the Netherlands) and in the Alsace (Colmar in France). This complaint is not that the tour planners did not try to give authentic feeling to the tour; people could write papers or give a presentation on one part of the tour which fascinated them. We heard topics such as Conrad Grebel, the Black Plague (by the Charlottesville physician Kenneth Heatwole), the Rhine River, the concept of two kingdoms, the country Iceland, and the Anabaptist hymnal the Ausbund (my contribution).             

Whatever value one found in the recovery and idealization of sixteenth century Anabaptism by persons such as Gleysteen and Cressman, I had a second model of twentieth century Mennonitism in successful professionals and business leaders, perhaps best personified by the Goshen College president J. Lawrence Burkholder (1917-2010). Laurelville at that time under the leadership of Arnold Cressman was very interested in the past and the future of the Mennonites. And in 1977 Burkholder addressed the topic of Mennonite theology at a Spring weekend meeting of Laurelville members. He traced the 19^th century separatist and quietist period of more sociology than theology, and the 20^th century responses to the assent of American liberal Christianity.

Burkholder hoped Mennonites could retain their uniqueness with the recent emergence of Evangelicalism which by the seventies had emerged out of Fundamentalism as the dominant stream in American Christianity. Burkholder concluded with calling for a new leadership among the Mennonites based on (1) authenticity and (2) real ability. I think what made Burkholder the greatest interest to me at least was that he himself personified those traits in his having served as relief worker in China, pastor in Croghan, New York, professor at Harvard Divinity School, and  president of Goshen College.

I listened to Burkholder's philosophies for the next three decades, and when he died Gloria and I and Daniel and Mary Miller of Walnut Creek (their children attended Goshen College and Daniel served on the board of overseers) wrote a tribute to him: “Lawrence Burkholder was a wise and courageous Mennonites leader. In the post-World War II period, his realism and sense of tragedy gave him a unique role on a Mennonite stage often dominated by utopian voices.

“Especially impressive was his width of influence as a professor and Goshen College president who personally helped individual students make life-changing decisions. He could relate to our congregational constituency as well as others drawn to his global philosophy and international experience. As a church leader he cherished the uniqueness of the Mennonites, at the same time that he appreciated the larger Christian tradition.

“Professionally and educationally, he travelled far from his Pennsylvania Mennonite roots, but his longer view of history and love of the church, made him a trusted voice in the Mennonite community, its congregations and institutions. His counsel will be missed.”

Meanwhile, the Cold War continued to be played out throughout Latin America with internal leftist insurgencies against the various democratic and military regimes. In Argentina an anti-communist military junta had taken over the government and was involved in a dirty war of  broad sweeps against left-wing students, professors, revolutionaries and other dissidents. Many of these people were tortured and killed in a terrible story of the disappeared. Among those taken in one of the sweeps was a young university student Patricia Erb who was held for a few weeks and then released because she was an American citizen. Mennonite Central Committee put her on tour; I heard her speak of her horrible ordeal at the Mennonite Assembly in Champaign, Illinois, and later she came to speak here at Scottdale; she was the granddaughter of Paul and Alta Erb. She told about her torture and captivity, and what she heard while in captivity.

Patricia Erb also reported her experience to a number of American legislators in Washington D.C., who in turn applied pressure on the Argentine military to change its tactics. This lobbying effort was considered the highpoint by Mennonite Central Committee personnel in effectively witnessing to the government. Argentina’s neighbor Chile was also going through a difficult period where a democratically elected socialist government (headed by Salvador Allende, uncle of the writer Isabella Allende) was overthrown by strongman General Augusto Pinochet. During those repressive Pinochet years, many Chileans, including many evangelical Protestants, fled to Venezuela which had greater democratic freedoms and opportunities for employment. Some of these Chilean exiles eventually met Josian and Auria Santiago, Puerto Rican Mennonites we had known in while serving in voluntary service. The Santiagos were now serving with Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and beginning a Mennonite church in Venezuela. We would connect with these people, but that can await another decade (1983).   

Much of this chapter is from memory, my personal files and the notebook I kept of the trip by the TourMagination travel company. The Miller letter of tribute to Lawrence Burkholder letter appears on the Goshen College Website: http://www.goshen.edu/news/pressarchive/06-24-10-jlb-death475.html

1976 More with Less

1976  More with Less.  Choosing my work at Mennonite Publishing House, Mennonites in Toledo; Doyle Miller injury, Jim and Florence Mitchell family,  Allegheny Mennonite Conference, John C. Wenger, Robert Bear, The Reformed Mennonites, Mennonite Central Committee, the Bicentennial; Rosmary and Harold Moyer, More-with-Less cookbook, Gloria’s food co-op, a vegetarian diet; Mattie Miller diet and exercise, dandelion.  

When we returned from Bowling Green to Scottdale, I approached my work at Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) with new vigor and focus. I had chosen to return to this work for the Mennonite church, and looking though my journal, I see many references to how this second period of working at publishing needed to be approached consciously. It was recognition that I was no longer a counter-cultural youth but now an integral employee of a denominational publishing company. I had been named editor of Builder, an educational and leadership magazine for church leaders and teachers. My four years of apprenticeship as a student editor were over. I especially wanted to curb my auto-response to mainly critique and attempt to exploit the positive in my co-workers and readers. I did not to push other people but to wait my turn with my colleagues.

The MPH chapel committee invited me to address my fellow employees on “thoughts on being away for a year,” and I was appreciative to be again in a first-name community of workers. Although Bowling Green was a small regional university of 15,000 students, one’s number (as in social security number) took the most meaning at the university business office and as a basic identity. But I commented on various readings of texts and the hope that we search and affirm our common Anabaptist and biblical theological understanding s as we explore the new and the tentative.

But the biggest insight for me was simply that I had developed a new appreciation of our audience and readers. 

During the year we attended the Mennonite congregation in Toledo, and these people gave me a new appreciation for churches which studied our curriculum, both children and adults, and read our books. One of the classes was studying of Art Gish’s Beyond the Rat Race; another used the traditional Mennonite Bible study based on the interdenominational Uniform Series outlines. Even though the congregation during the year had the unhappy task of letting go a well-meaning but ineffective pastor, it was an explicitly Anabaptist, growing and caring congregation. Members were a mix of people from the large Archibold Mennonite community, students from a nearby medical college, and young suburbanites from Toledo. They gave renewed meaning to my work as an editor. 

Then in mid-January (16^th), we got tragic news from Goshen College where Gloria’s brother Doyle was studying. Doyle was hurt badly from a fall from a college dormitory balcony, and was in a hospital at Fort Wayne with a vertebrae injury and the prognosis of long-term paralysis. I remember on the next weekend of January, we drove out to Fort Wayne and visited him in the hospital. He was stretched out on a bed and could not move, except to talk. I stood at the doorway and saw his immobile body with only the lips moving as he talked to his mother Berdella standing over him. The view was of an athletic young man who played vigorous tennis and drove a fast cycle now reduced to an immobile body; his father Roy sat slumped in a chair looking twenty-five years older than when I had last seen him. It was too much for me; I tried to walk into the room with Gloria, but I got dizzy and lost my balance. Berdella saw what was happening and walked me to the next room where I fainted, collapsing into a lounge chair. Eventually, I went back into the room but I could only say a few words; it seemed so devastating, final, and unfair.

Six months later Doyle was in physical therapy, adjusting to life in a wheel chair, having regained enough strength to stand and do some functions such as peck out sentences on a keyboard as well as having strength to eat by himself and eventually even driving a vehicle. He was planning to resume his education, wanting to study engineering at Indiana University Purdue in Fort Wayne. But the biggest change in his life was that during his hospital stay, he met a male nurse named Jim Mitchell who worked at the St. Luke’s Hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana. This encounter opened a whole new chapter in Doyle’s life and in our extended family life; to this day we are linked with the Jim and Florence Mitchell family. Jim was an English teacher turned nurse and a 1960s romantic and idealist.

His mother Florence was a mid-American save-the world do-gooder who ran her extended household as a benign monarchy with Jim as her prime minister. The Mitchell kingdom often included foster children and other young people who needed attention or had troubles, and somehow Doyle was swept up in the environs of this family project, later contributing to it in important ways himself. Two other vital members of the family were Jim’s sister Ann and a foster child Michelle whom Jim later adopted. This unusual and generous family with all of its gifts and handicaps (Ann was virtually blind and Michelle special education) enlivened many a Roy R. and Berdella Miller family gathering. Jim would tell us of their distinct personalities and family cultures: Jim loved theater and films; Doyle watched hours of TV sports; Jim was emotional and wore his feelings with honor; Doyle was, as Jim once said in a letter, stoic as an Indian; Jim liked to talk and gives opinions; Doyle said little and voiced an opinion only when absolutely necessary. They were and still are a great team.

At home I was active in the Allegheny Mennonite Conference leading Sunday school workshops and a program called TIP (Teacher Improvement Program) and helping Gloria in conference youth (MYF) events. That had taken me around to the various parts of the conference, and that summer the conference elected me as secretary of the Executive Committee. I enjoyed meeting the people and visiting some of the historic sites in Maryland, such as Grantsville and Greenwood and in Pennsylvania: Springs, Altoona, Belleville (Big Valley), Pittsburgh and of course Johnstown. 

That summer in August of 1976 was my first meeting of the Allegheny Mennonite Conference, and it was the 100-year anniversary of the conference, convening at the Blough meetinghouse in Johnstown. Here are my notes:

“The people of the Allegheny Conference seem amazing, in their own way. There is a strong sense of heritage and yet a certain outward thrust of mission as well. The people sing hymns which they have never sung before, as though they had sung them all their lives. A bass singer in front of me makes a somber face and sings a drumming sound which is in tune and also in the spirit of the song. The young people also sing with much vigor, and where they learned these songs I do not know for they are not in the Mennonite Hymnal and have not been sung for a generation.”  Nor were they in the scripture songs and choruses being mimeographed at that time; they were from the old Church and Sunday School Hymnal (1902) which I had sung as a child and Amish Mennonite youth. 

For three years, I served as secretary of the conference while John Kraybill, pastor of Springs and a Lancaster native, was the moderator. My editorial colleagues at Scottdale considered the Allegheny Conference a cultural backwater; I considered it a cultural treasure. 

The speaker for the conference’s anniversary meetings was John C. Wenger (often known as J.C.). I first met Wenger at Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) when we had assemblies on the total Anabaptist family such as the Amish, Mennonites, and the Hutterites, and Wenger came to describe these groups. I had heard of Wenger as an author and from my father who had listened to him when he made the conference rounds in the fifties; he was a contemporary of Harold S. Bender. His letters and memos were in several colors of ink, red, blue, green, and black, and he signed with a pen drawing of himself in a plain coat. He could tell fascinating and folksy stories, many of which were later gathered on video by MennoHof visitor center at Shipshewana, Indiana.

In order to get to know him better I went to pick him up at the airport, and he stayed at our home. Wenger gave MPH workers a good introduction to the Anabaptists, of course, in his own  pious way, but what I was not expecting was that he seemed by then a quite elderly man. Most of the time with me, we spoke in Pennsylvania German, and he introduced me to the Pennsylvania German poet Henry Harbaugh (1869-1943). Wenger would recite by memory Harbaugh hemweeh (homesickness) poems in dialect for a half hour at a time. I discovered at that point as I have many times since that in my being a kind of cultural throw-back in knowing the Pennsylvania German language and traditional Amish and Mennonite cultures, people would become sentimental around me or often telling me stories of their childhood.

One small group Wenger did not mention I learned to know quite well that year-- the Reformed Mennonites. Only a few hundred remained, but I had become acquainted with them when I read Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893). Tolstoy quoted extensively from the nineteenth century historian and writer Daniel Musser’s book Non-Resistance Asserted (1864), a book which influenced Tolstoy’s conversion to pacifism. The Reformed Mennonites were in the news because one of its members Robert Bear, a potato farmer near Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was excommunicated and placed in the ban. Bear then started a campaign against the church eventually hiring a public relations agency to assist him. With time, his distressed wife Gale sided with the church making it a terrible family tragedy as well. Bear sued the church elders claiming emotional damage and that avoidance hurt his potato business and asked for an injunction for the church to cease the ban.

At this point the constitutional lawyer William B. Ball of Harrisburg (who had defended the Amish in the 1972 Yoder vs. Wisconsin school case) became involved, defending the church’s right to practice its religion. I went to see some of the church leaders and wrote articles on the case for the church press, trying to interpret what was going on for the Mennonites. I talked to Bear on the phone and later tried to visit him, finding one of his farms late at night, but he was not at home, perhaps off on a speaking tour. The last I saw Bear was in the early nineties at Goshen College, when I got a call from the President’s office staff saying a man was in their office and refusing to leave until he could talk to the Mennonite bishop. The woman nervously wondered if she could send him over to me. I visited with him for a while, and learned that he wanted our type of Mennonites to repudiate the ban and shunning; he had an old rumpled copy of Menno Simons’ statement. Sadly, he appeared to be all alone, mentally and emotionally unhinged. He had given the last four decades of his life to this crusade against the Reformed Mennonites.

But why, dear reader, was I spending so much time on this small fringe group and a practice which makes no sense to democratic ideas of tolerance and inclusiveness? I suppose I ask myself the same question forty years later, and certainly it does look different now that Bear had become mentally deranged. I realize that high accountability churches are subject to abuse same as are high tolerance churches, and I could not live within such church perimeters; it is not my calling. Still, I respect, even admire, groups which maintain a high level of church accountability and unity, such as the various Anabaptist groups who understand this church order as a basic part of their Christian and biblical identity.

In any case, in March I took the Bear shunning case to the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Peace Section thinking they may want to file a friend of the court brief on behalf of the church. Or perhaps even as a related group, MCC may be able to mediate; the unseemliness of using the secular courts to resolve a church dispute seemed obvious. The committee members listened patiently but were not optimistic about helping out, and I had the clear impression that it had bigger agenda. 

We had just finished a larger meeting, an annual MCC Peace Assembly in Washington DC, This year 1976 was the American bicentennial year, and the Mennonites were worried about what we called civil religion. Several hundred people gathered for the meetings which included worship of spirited hymn singing (“God of Grace and God of Glory”) and speakers from various points of view, among them Christianity Today editor Harold Linsell, Our Star- Spangled Faith author Don Kraybill, Sojourners editor Jim Wallis, The Mennonite editor Lois Barrett, African American scholar Vincent Harding, feminist scholar Rosemary Radford Reuther and the U.S. Senate chaplain Edward L.R. Elson.

The intent was to reaffirm the Mennonite churches historic peace position, and in this case to make some distinction between church and the state, especially the American state. The patron saints of these meetings were nineteen sixties activists such as Peter Ediger, Dennis Koehn, and Doug Hostetler for whom the American state and its military were basically a force of evil in the world. Jim Wallis presented this point of view questioning whether Christians should be upholding the West. Perhaps, he said, we should be about encouraging the fall of the West. By the West, he was referring to the major clash of civilizations between the Western democracies led by the United States and the Marxist-led countries led by the Soviet Union. A James Hess of the Lancaster Conference and Sanford Shetler of the Allegheny Conference would show up at these meetings challenging the degree to which the American empire was properly characterized as evil and suggesting that the leftist critics may have been unwitting supporters of equally military—and much worse totalitarian regimes.  Whatever their differences in their view of the American empire, both shared a commitment to Christian pacifism and nonresistance as the church’s teaching.      

But the national climate seemed to be looking better during this year, as the disgraced President Richard Nixon was banished to exile in California. Gerald Ford had taken over the presidency and his mid-western family (including outspoken wife Betty) and football athleticism (Chevy Chase’ notwithstanding) seemed to bring a normalcy to the nation’s psyche. I remember being in Winnipeg for Builder meetings when I watched the TV one evening and saw that Ford had pardoned Nixon; I was glad it was over. And then it got even better. The Democrats nominated a Georgia governor and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter in the summer, and he was elected as President in November. He was a born again Baptist, squeaky clean in ethics and even wanted to carry his own bags. Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter seemed to further signal an end of a very turbulent time for the country and world; little did I know that high inflation, Iran embassy hostages, Central American wars, and gas lines were just around the corner.

A memorable visit that summer came from Harold and Rosemary Moyer from North Newton Kansas, who were traveling from Kansas to the eastern Pennsylvania and then going to Waterloo, Ontario, before returning home, all the way staying at Mennonite homes. We were delighted to host the Moyers and of course they wanted to visit Mennonite Publishing House. Moyer composed and wrote harmonization for over a dozen hymn texts which found their way into the Mennonite repertoire, at least two of which were favorites of mine “I Sought the Lord,” and “My Shepherd will Supply My Need.”  This hosting of overnight guests during our first year in our 903 Arthur Avenue house became a pattern for Gloria and our family, actually a continuation of a common practice among traditional Mennonites. And this same year it was institutionalized by Leon and Nancy Stauffer of Lancaster in a travel booklet called Mennonite Your Way. our house was listed in every edition up to the present one of 2012.

Food became a significant issue during this year, and the big event at Mennonite publishing was Herald Press’ release of the More-with-Less cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre. I met her husband Paul at mission education meetings in which he represented Mennonite Central Committee, and he often talked his wife’s project. When the first printing was ready to come off the press, Doris came out to Scottdale to see the first copies. The book had an intuitive feel for the traditional food and Mennonite experience of Emma Showalter (Mennonite Community Cookbook), but now turned this tradition into the next generation of Mennonite post-World War II expertise and experience—international service. Janzen Longacre embodied an authentic response to world food needs and good eating. More-with-Less was a run-away best seller and by the time I came on as director of Herald Press in 2001, we did a 25^th anniversary edition; over 800,000 copies were in print worldwide.

Gloria’s response was to start a More-with-Less oriented food co-op, and within a few years our basement was filled with monthly shipments of all kinds of whole wheat pastas and varieties of lentils, tofu, and carob. At this stage many of these products were not available from our area supermarkets. The co-op was quite participatory, and members would come and weigh out their orders and take what they needed. We also had Holmes County Baby Swiss and Jarlsberg Cheese; I’m not sure how the latter made the list, except that one member and our friend Mervin Miller liked it. There were annual co-op dinners featuring the More-with-Less dishes and reports on the organization (that would be Gloria). My main contribution to the co-op was in helping unload the deliveries, memorable for being so early in the mornings. The big truck would often arrive at our place sometime after midnight and about five o’clock in the morning when I got up, I would find the driver asleep in the front seat. I helped unload many a shipment in the dark by our house. The co-op grew to about 100 members and eventually moved to the Scottdale Mennonite meetinghouse. Gloria managed it until we left for Venezuela in 1982.

About this same time Gloria went vegetarian; it was high fiber and low calories in her eating and cooking. She simply stopped eating red meat, and it may have already started when we ate her pet pig back in Puerto Rico (1969). In any case, there was little public announcement, much like the rest of her life, she simply did it, and continues to this day. I liked her vegetarian dishes and have thrived on them for four decades, although I readily eat meat when it is served at other tables. One change the vegetarian diet brought was that we were no longer invited out much and when we were there were nervous inquiries regarding the menu. Still, this drop-off in invites may have had less to do with vegetarianism than simply that we were no longer the newest young family in town. Meantime, I regularly roasted a turkey (often on an open spit) on holidays or special occasions, and enjoy doing breakfast dishes. Otherwise, I’m a total klutz at cooking, and when some of my male friends developed mid-life bread-baking and cooking enthusiasms, the urges totally eluded me. 

My mother Mattie probably made the biggest change in diet and eating in the mid-seventies. She grew up with a Swiss Germanic farm family where they eat big meals of meats, vegetables, starches and desserts. She continued that same diet with us when we were a farm family in the forties to the sixties. Then in the seventies my mother changed to a lean diet, and all at once at the big family gatherings, the meats remained, but there was a big increase in vegetables and salads, green leafy ones of various kinds, and a much smaller table of desserts and starches. To compliment her new diet, Mattie bought a bicycle, actually an adult Schwinn tricycle with a large wire cage in back in which the grandchildren could ride. She drove it up the Holmesville Fredricksburg road regularly for exercise. I still have Mother’s letters recounting her daily routines; now including references to having just completed her daily bicycle ride of a mile with daughter Ruth and the dogs Reno and Teddy running along beside.

Four foods or dishes however survived Mattie’s leaner diet and exercise changes in the seventies and are still featured at family gatherings much to the delight of her grandchildren and great-grand children (I’m writing in 2012). That would be apple sauce, date pudding, noodles, and bread (all home-made, of course). Andrew seemed to take Mattie’s food and diet changes in good spirits, as long as he had his two daily basics for breakfast—fresh eggs (from his own hens) and coffee. One other dish which Andrew requested (demanded might be equally appropriate) was an annual spring serving of dandelion, a green leafy weed readily available in any lawn, served with vinegar, milk, bacon and hardboiled eggs. In Andrew’s telling, dandelion was a royal dish and a cure-all tonic which his mother Martha served every Spring, keeping all the Millers healthy. I still eat it every year.  

Most of the sources come from my 1976 journals and personal files. For the section on Robert Bear, Steven Nolt sent me an e-mail (March 6, 2012) updating Bear’s on-going difficulties, including Elizabethtown College (site of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies) needing to get a restraining order in 2007 to keep Bear off campus. Gloria told the food co-op story in “Living More with Less: A Food Co-op” by Gloria Miller, Women’s Missionary and Service Commission (WMSC) Voice (November 1980, 8). Mattie Miller’s recipe for dandelion salad appears in the Scottdale Community Cookbook (Scottdale Fall Festival Committee, 1999, 49-50).