1958 Pop and Choral Music

1958  Pop and Choral Music. An end of my Amish friends; swimming in the Salt Creek; beginning Waynedale High School, top forty music on Lloyd Dye’s bus; the Chuck Wagon Gang,  Miller brothers quartet, Maple Grove Mission music; Pleasant View Mennonite midweek service and chorus; high school chorus; Future Farmers of America and Terry Burkhalter; radio and milking; the Cuban Revolution and the Castros; Ruth Ann born on November 29 and enlarging the house.

During the summer of 1958 was a transition of ending relationships with most of my Amish neighbors and friends. I was leaving the Holmesville School where we all attended and heading for Waynedale High School where no Amish students attended. Some of my best friends from school were people such as Melvin Miller (minister and farmer living west of Holmesville), Ben Miller (may he rest in peace), and Eli Y. Hostetler (bishop and patriarch of a large family near Apple Creek). Larry Stallman, a rural farm boy and nephew of our principal, often ran with us too, and I remember that summer we had a summer afternoon picnic and swimming at Salt Creek near where it enters into the Killbuck. I don’t think I realized that it would be the end of an era, but it was. After that year, I had little contact with my Amish friends unless it was an incidental meeting at a store or an auction. We all had our own families, churches and vocations to tend to, and of course by the 70s I ended up over here in Pennsylvania.  

Swimming in Salt Creek was actually a good part of summer recreation. Salt Creek was a shallow creek, hence it only had certain spots where a decent swimming hole could be found, and these spots might wash out from one year to the next. Each summer we would find a place where the water was deep enough for swimming. Salt Creek flowed at the edge of our farm land, and one summer the best hole was up near the Arthur E. Parrot farm where the road heads up the hill where the Pierces used to live; their sons our age Harold and Charles (better known as Fuzz and Chuck) were friends. Another year the hole was at the railroad and traffic bridges at the end of the Rudy Coblentz lane (and some of the brave ones would jump off the bridge). Finally, one summer we swam all the way down near the Route 76 (now 83) bridge. My brothers and I were regulars in these swimming areas in the afternoons and evenings, often meeting some of the town boys and a few of the adventuresome girls who swam there too. It was cool and clear water, and you could see crayfish, minnows, chubs and even an occasional smallmouth bass as you swam under the water.  

The next four years I would get on the bus every morning at Holmesville and Lloyd Dye drove us to Waynedale High School which was located near Apple Creek, a full 40-minute drive away. The whole bus riding was new to me because we had always lived near town and walked to school. The bus ride provided about an hour a day of socializing, and I learned what others ate for breakfast. Most envied was the colorfully wrapped breakfast menu of Twinkies or Hostess cup cakes and a bottle of Coke. I meanwhile had to eat my mother’s fare at home: eggs, bacon, toast or sometimes a week of fried corn mush and applesauce, or other times plain old hot rolled oats with raisins.  

Lloyd Dye had a big radio speaker hanging like a spider web from the bus ceiling in front and I think in back too, and it blasted out the top forty tunes of Canton’s WHLO. This sound was another world for me and totally new music which I had never heard at home. The station throbbed with fast news and weather but mostly a hip disk jockey playing songs such as Connie Francis “Everyone is somebody’s Fool,” Elvis Presley “It’s Now or Never,” and a startling “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”

Lloyd was young, about thirty, I think, and maybe simply liked this music, and his passengers certainly did; if he changed the station there were howls and groans from the back, and he would switch to it immediately. Anyway, it was good crowd control too; you could not hear anything else except visiting with someone nearby. Actually, we were quite a well behaved bunch of students and the only time I remember problems was one couple who would enter into long, sustained and deep kisses, which I thought might end in fainting. After several minutes Lloyd would see them in the mirror, slam the brakes, and break up the embrace. After all that embarrassment, at least to the rest of us, a day or two later the lovers at it again with fervor. Then Lloyd would slam the brakes; the show was over, and life returned to normal. Probably for most of my cohorts to hear these oldies or classic rock, they remember Ed Sullivan shows, Waynedale sock hops or dances, but for me it all goes to Lloyd Dye’s Waynedale bus.

Although we had a radio in our house, we very seldom had it on, nor do I remember much listening to the radio—except in the barn. Maybe it was that we were a family of talkers, and everyone had something to say, and you needed all the volume or drama possible to get listeners. Paul was a good storyteller, and over meals we enjoyed listening to him describe personalities and happenings, whether two Ott brothers’ exploits in industrial arts class at Waynedale High School or a Bob’s eccentricities on Jacob Miller’s carpentry crew. I never met these people in person, but they might as well have been vivid oversized members of our family table stories.

Our family did have a few phonograph records for music, and the main time we listened to them was at bed time. The ones which I remember during the fifties were the close harmony singers such as the Louvin Brothers and especially a mixed quartet called the Chuck Wagon Gang. Simply accompanied by a guitar, they would sing in an unadorned voice gospel hymns and songs out of the shaped note singing school tradition such as “We are Climbing [Jacob’s Golden Ladder]” and “After the Sunrise.” You could hear the four clear voices with an amazing plaintive alto singer, and at the same time you heard the total blended harmony. Many a night I went to sleep with the comforting harmonies of “Amazing Grace,” “Come Unto Me,” or “Angels Rock Me to Sleep” on the record player. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night with the player’s needle still grinding in the middle of the record.

I later read a book on close harmony southern gospel music and this group consisted of members of the Dave and Carrie Parker Carter family (not to be confused with the more famous A.P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter) which found its way out of poverty by singing for a large Ft. Worth, Texas, radio station. Already discovered by CBS in the thirties and singing up to the fifties, their records were readily available on little 45 records and later on 33 long plays, as they still are today on CDs.  Originally, they also sang western ballads and folk songs, but it was their gospel songs which drew the most popular response. 

Although their Chuck Wagon Gang name (inherited from their flour and biscuit company sponsor) sounded Western cowboy, their music was clearly out of the shaped note singing school tradition. I know a lot of Mennonite families had recordings of choral music by church and college groups and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but somehow this kind of European formal music did not register as strongly with our family. As Dave Carter said the secret to his family’s musical success was its simplicity and that with some practice, you could emulate it.  

Well, emulate we did and about this time we began singing as the Miller brothers quartet. Male quartets were popular for hymn singings at our local Mennonite churches, and southern gospel men’s quartets would occasionally visit our area. I think the first one I heard was called the Rebels Quartet which sang their harmonies at a Foursquare Gospel Church in Wooster. Our family went and I had never heard a tenor so high and a bass so low, each with his own microphone. The thin tall bass singer London Parris led out on a song about the three Hebrews in Babylon: “They wouldn’t bend, they wouldn’t bow, they wouldn’t burn.” His low voice went so far down I thought I was hearing gravel stones at the bottom of a well, but he appeared so earnest and kind, my mother Mattie even forgave him when we spotted him puffing cigarettes behind the quartet’s big bus after the concert. 

Our Miller brothers quartet was somehow discovered by a local promoter Harry Weaver of Fredricksburg who was sponsoring Sunday afternoon gospel singings in the  area. Weaver would rent a school auditorium such as Mt. Eaton or Winesburg and headline the program with the Slabach Sisters of Dalton, Ohio. It turned out that the Slabach Sisters were actually second cousins (Andy Jake our Grandfather Martin Miller freundschaft, they were daughters of Roman and Annie Yoder Slabach). I later discovered Bonnie had married my Waynedale classmate Norman Lowe. They had records, and I believe sang on a radio program, in other words had some claims to fame. 

Our quartet branding may have been that we were brothers and had good harmony. My voice had just changed, and I could sing the melody, Roy sang a tenor baritone, Paul  bass, and David first tenor, or at least a first tenor equivalent. David still had his octive-high child’s voice and sang the alto women’s notes.

Paul would do the public talking and Roy handled the music, and we got a number of invitations to sing at churches, clubs, and banquets. It was all worship and small-time entertainment and went on for several years until Paul and Roy left home for college and voluntary service—and David’s voice changed. Our signature song was “How Great Thou Art,” which was relatively popular among Christians during those years. We also sang a novelty number called the “Hornet Song” with musical stories of unwilling subjects such as Cannanites and Jonah getting divine urges, hence becoming “willing to go.” My own favorite was the seafaring ballad called “Jesus Savior Pilot Me.”    

Maple Grove Mission which my father was now promoting as “your friendly church” had eclectic music selections tending toward an increasing flavor of American revivalist songs such as those written by the blind hymn writer Francis (Fanny) Crosby (“Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine” and “To God be the Glory”). And sometimes the music even left the religious fields altogether. An eccentric Holmesville hermit and poet Amos Olinger often played the piano during offerings, and Olinger was as likely to play “She’ll be coming round the mountain” as “Shall we gather at the river.”   

The English four-part a capella hymn singing most Mennonite congregations used from the Church Hymnal (1927) was somewhat marginal to my growing up. My father used to say these hymns were too depressing; who wants to sing “Before Jehovah’s Aweful Throne,” the emphasis on awful as terrible and bad. The exception about this time came when my brother Paul got a driver’s license, and we started going to the Pleasant View Mennonite Church’s monthly hymn sings on Sunday evenings and also the mid-week service. Paul and Roy sang in the Pleasant View chorus and soon took me along, and I think it was also encouraged by my parents in hopes that we would socialize with other Mennonite young people. 

This mid-week service would consist of brief opening, all singing together, a brief Scripture reading, then we would go to prayer groups based on age levels and gender. I would go into the boys groups which would be led by Albert Coblentz or Paul Yoder. Albert was about fifteen years older than the rest of us and a good role model, and Paul Yoder had the benefit of a year of study at Eastern Mennonite College. Albert was also my eighth grade summer Bible School teacher at Pleasant view and always a good friend.

Albert or Bert would solicit and mention prayer requests which included an alcoholic father whose poor wife and children came to church, Emmanuel Erb in PAX service in Paraguay (building the Trans-Chaco Highway), and then accidents, missionaries, and various sick people. Then Albert would look for volunteers who would pray for one specific request. We would kneel down and after our fairly short individual prayers, Albert would end with a long prayer, reviewing the requests and adding some items of his own, all in a fairly earnest fashion. 

But there were dissenters to these sessions where presumably everyone had his eyes closed in prayer. One would hear punctuations of loud flatulence, either by someone cupping his hand under his elbow, making kind of a bellow, or by the real deal of cutting cheese. By the smell or by peeking one could generally trace the origins to a minister’s son and his best friend. Meanwhile, Albert would go right on praying with sacred decorum, now amid some tittering of laughter. If Allen Miller or Aden Kauffman should read this, all forgiven, amigos; in retrospect your sounds and scents provided an earthly grounding to our heavenly pleading.

But as noted, Paul Yoder and his sister Anna, with a year or two of Eastern Mennonite College in Virginia, had picked up good choral music tastes, and also Paul was an outstanding first tenor. So our mid-week Pleasant View Church evenings ended with the young people going up to the balcony and singing choral songs, especially using the hymnal called Songs of the Church. These were slightly more challenging than our Mennonite Church Hymnal. We would stand or sit in parts such as the tenors or basses and it was good practice in sight reading the shaped notes. The chorus leader was generally a friendly young minister called Levi Hershberger; but we all called him Junior. 

Beyond these practice sessions, the Pleasant View chorus sometimes sang at hymn sings or at special occasions and only the best singers were selected; Paul and Roy would sing, but I generally did not make the cut. Still, I greatly benefitted from those singing sessions and learning to sight read the tenor and bass notes. When I got to Waynedale High School, I felt like some opera singer in my ability to sight read and harmonize compared to most of my peers, especially the boys, many of whom could barely sing the melody, let alone read sheet music.

One night our Waynedale High School chorus directed by Frank Sessions sang at the Parent Teacher Association meeting (this was actually in 1961), and a Grace Burkhalter (mother of Sheldon and Terry) got up to the podium and said she was going to introduce the pastor of her church which turned out to be Kidron Mennonite Church. So pastor Bill Detweiler, the speaker of a radio broadcast the Calvary Hour gave an inspirational little speech on teaching and learning with a sprinkling of biblical and American cultural wisdom. I mention this because it was the first that I saw Mennonites in public life in quite this way. Although I knew the Mennonites and Amish ran eastern Holmes County, up in Holmesville, we were pretty sectarian and kept to ourselves. 

I first met Terry Burkhalter when he was president of our Future Farmers of America (FFA) chapter. I enjoyed my vocational agriculture class which went for two periods, and was an excellent transition between my rural farm life and Waynedale’s more worldly high school culture. For those two periods we were together as farm boys discussing hogs, dairying, crops and parliamentary procedure. My parents allowed me to buy a blue and gold jacket with my name and the FFA logo on back, and I had a little sign put on the end of our lane: “A future farmer lives here.”  Our teacher William Boyer took us on field trips to the Ohio Agriculture Experiment station (now OARDC), and we visited each other’s farms to see our operations.

One of my first FFA trips was to a convention in Columbus where we saw our own Terry Burkhalter up on the podium being named state farmer of the year. Terry also had one of the largest yields of corn of our area, about 150 bushels per acre, and the DeKalb folks gave him a nice award. The Burkhalters had a farm not far from Kidron, and Terry seemed to excel in everything FFA. In addition, Terry’s father Lester was once named an Ohio Farmer of the Year but what really made him a small-town legend was for having chased an agricultural agent off of his farm with a pitch fork. Forty years later, Terry explained to me that the Burkhalter farm was well within its legal wheat or corn allotment, but on principle his father was not going to have the government regulator tromp around on his land. 

At home both Roy and Paul were now working away from home, and I was the farmer, doing the morning and evening milking. We had bought Surge milkers for our small herd, and we milked with the sucking sounds of the cups on the cow teats while the radio was on Wooster’s WWST which in the mornings was strong in the farm market reports, the news on the hour, and one gospel song, often by the baritone bass Tennessee Ernie Ford. We still sold hogs, and I listened for the hog and cattle prices for the various farm auctions which were given from the preceding day. And there was the national and international news, which I was just beginning to take an interest in about this time.

We also were beginning to get the Wooster Daily Record which carried UPI reports on an island in the Caribbean Sea having a change of government led by young guerilla commanders named Fidel and Raul Castro. The Castro brothers and an Argentine doctor turned revolutionary Che Guevara had led two years of fighting in the Sierra Madre Mountains to gain popular support with promises to do away with the dictatorship, corruption and to set up representative government. 

By the summer of 1958 they were gaining increasing support and winning battles town by town so that by year-end the dictator Fulgencio Batista was fleeing the island, and eight days later the Castro armies entered the capital city of Havana in triumph. The American government recognized a new provisional government within days, and newspaper reports had the crowds welcoming the new leaders with jubilation in the streets and auto horns honking. However, corrupt the Batista regime, most of those crowds probably did not expect that over fifty years later as I write this the Castro brothers would still be ruling the island with few freedoms and  much equality of poverty. 

I of course did not follow all the details of these changes in Cuba, but I became aware of Castro soon when it became apparent that he was introducing a one-party government led by the Communist Party and heavily supported by the Soviet Union. The other thing about Fidel Castro was his familiar photo in the Wooster Daily Record; he had a beard and mustache and looked like a young Holderman Mennonite bishop.

Meanwhile, closer to home our family was growing, and by November 29 Mattie gave birth to her eighth child and youngest daughter Ruth Ann. Mother and daughter went to live with grandparents Levi L. and Susan Schlabachs for a few weeks because we had whooping cough. We had spent the summer and fall building an addition to our house, both in a big full basement room where we boys could take showers and our mother could do laundry. 

On the main floor we added an ample living room with a big double-pane picture window toward the front lawn and road and a master bedroom. We had earlier turned the little parental bedroom into a bathroom, our first one indoors. Our employer Jacob Miller helped with the plans and some of the work, and my uncle Melvin on leave from one of his military tours, came up and helped too. My father Andrew was still on the mend from his broken vertebrae. Most of the work was done by brothers Roy and Paul.   

Most of this chapter comes from memory and conversations with the immediate family. Background on the Chuck Wagon Gang comes from James R. Goff, Jr., Close Harmony, a history of Southern Gospel (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002, pages 131-135).  My brother David found a 1960-62 live recording of our Miller Brothers Quartet singing at one of  Harry Weaver’s Sunday afternoon singings with the songs: “How Great Thou Art,” “New Name in Glory” and “Jesus Savior Pilot Me.”  Some of the Burkhalter information comes from a February 2, 2011, telephone conversation with Terry Burkhalter of Harrisonburg, Virginia. 

1957 Baptism and Murder

1957  Baptism and Murder. Paul begins construction work at 15, Andrew falls, fractures vertebra, diminished parental role; Jacob. S. and Elizabeth Miller; the murder of Paul Coblentz May 20;  instruction class and baptism by Harry Stutzman; Grandma Martha Miller’s death in April; Grade 8 teacher Henry Troyer; Principal Roy Stallman, the English language.

Our family friend, the poet Lorie Gooding wrote a prayer poem for the new year 1957 which ended with the stanza:

Give to us, Lord, true courage

To serve thee without any fear;

To honor and love and adore Thee

All the days of this glad New Year.

The glad year had its share of courage and fear. We’ll begin with the courage it took for my oldest brother Paul at age 15 to start working for Jacob S. Miller in carpentry and home building. On one level Paul was simply honoring cultural expectations of a growing Amish Mennonite family with seven children now needing extra cash and income. In addition, our community expected that a youth apprentice and work at a useful trade as soon as possible. But even in this context, it was considerable effort for a youth of modest physical size and strength to get up at six in the morning and do outside carpentry work, what we called roughing up houses. And Paul was too young for an Ohio driver’s license, so that summer it became a mother and son project. 

Mattie would drive the car for about eight miles to Mt. Hope in order for Paul to catch a ride with Jacob Miller’s carpentry crew, and then she would go pick him up in the evenings. I sometimes went along and remember the early fog as my mother would drive along slowly. But most of the time, I stayed at home milking the cows and doing the chores; this role had now fallen to me easily because I enjoyed working with the animals.

Paul’s step outside the family farm established a pattern and relationship with Jacob S. Miller which all of us brothers Paul, Roy and I would follow for the next decade. My younger brother David also worked for Jake briefly but not near as long as the rest of us did. Paul’s influence was a pattern which we would follow later on anything from buying a car to college choice, vocations, money management, investments or choosing our mates.

If this almost father-like concern for younger siblings and the rest of the family is typical for eldest brothers, I think the role may also have sought out Paul because of some unhappy events in my father’s life. During these years, Andrew vacated his paternal seat, and I’ll describe how this came about. During the summer my father became immobilized by a roofing accident, and lost his ability to work. For the first time we had no income beyond the benevolence of our 80- acre farm, meaning plenty to eat but not much cash. During all of our farming years, my father had always worked outside the farm for cash income whether it was in roofing, spouting, laying bricks or blocks, or selling and installing iron railings for porches and steps. 

Then one evening the news came that Andrew had touched the TV antennae of Waive and Vera Boyd’s house, been electrocuted by a shock and had fallen to the ground below. I remember visiting my father in the Pomerene Hospital in Millersburg with his body in traction, attached and pulled by cables and pulleys from the bed posts; he had fractured some vertebrae in his back when he fell. When he came home from the hospital he wore a body cast around his midsection and trunk. I remember it was a warm summer, and we had a wooden back scratcher with which we children used to give him some relief from the itchiness.

Now my father, who I had believed could do anything, could do nothing. Meanwhile, Paul worked outside the home in providing financial support for the family; Roy was good with the tractor, farm machinery, crop farming, and fixing mechanical things around the house and farm; and I took care of the small dairy. Our mother Mattie provided much of the emotional support for the children and managed the finances. But my father did not only lose physical strength, but he also was diminishing his mental and rational resources while seeking increasing emotional help from unseen spirits. During this time, Andrew moved from a fairly high volitional and discipleship type of Christianity to a mystical and paraphysical Christian religion which was unusual to our family and community. We had enclosed the front porch with windows which he turned into an office and bedroom (with blinds pulled), and during that warm summer Andrew communed with the spirits speaking in unknown tongues (glossalalia) and seeking divine healing for his back.

Christianity is always a mixture of the human and the transcendent, the unseen and the rational ethical commitments with various groups emphasizing one or the other. Both of these elements are in the Biblical stories and certainly both were in the Amish Mennonite community. By most measures, however, our Anabaptist communities weighed in the direction of the rational and commitment of the will and community. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” we quoted the Apostle. I know the rest of the text also talks of God working in and through us, but we began with our human effort. 

The degree to which my father moved to a mystical and Pentecostal Christianity was simply a direction which his children and his wife Mattie could not follow. One might suppose that given his physical condition and no additional medical help in sight, it is quite understandable. Why not appeal to supernatural sources, and there is a healing stream in the Scriptures and Christian history. Anyway, Andrew disappeared, often not showing up for meals and shut up in a dark room, comforted by angels and rebuking demons. He got lots of literature from free-lance evangelists in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Waco Texas.

I’m not sure whether our father rupturing his vertebrae was the only element in his vacating his paternal chair, but I do know that by the early sixties, he had disappeared for me.  And a number of stand-ins seemed ready to pick up on his leadership role. There was the eldest son Paul who seemed emotionally ready and level-headed quite beyond his years.  Paul would leave high school at age sixteen that winter and worked full-time with Jacob Miller and Clarence Summers, hence a key provider for our family during those lean years. And brother Roy did the same a summer later. I think later in life some of us (including our poor bewildered spouses) may have outgrown and even resented Paul’s leadership, irrespective of how functionally he came to the role. In due time most of us either came to terms with this arrangement, with mixtures of appreciation, accommodation, humor and even rejection. 

But looking back after five decades, I don’t think Paul sought this role as much as having it thrust upon him at an early age. And he was not the only one who had additional parent roles given to them. There was my mother Mattie who was the stable leader of home and farm during Andrew’s absence; her stature and influence greatly increased. And there was our employer Jacob S. Miller. 

Jacob S. and Elizabeth Miller of Mt. Hope were already family friends to my parents before we went to work with Jake and Clarence Summers who was the other partner in home construction. Clarence lived in Kidron and focused on the financial and brick and block (masonry) part of the projects and Jake with more of the carpentry. Jake was a hard worker, somewhat small in stature, but strong in muscle and determination. He was soft spoken and generous in attitude with his employees whether we were fast or slow or how much we differed from him.

He went to bed early, ate an early breakfast and passed on lunch, working right through it, but he had no such expectations of any of the rest of us. Jake was punctual, devout, and totally honest. The only time we ever questioned his integrity was when he told us that he and Elizabeth only had sex three times in their lives—for their three children Dean, Ann, and Gary. His father was Stephen and because Jacob was a common name, many people knew him primarily as Steffy’s Jake. He was an unusual employer and friend to our family, and we all benefitted from our association with him. I also enjoyed his wife Elizabeth, a tall, direct plain-spoken woman, totally loyal to Jake, her family and the Mennonites. Her only outside loves were for the evangelist Billy Graham and his singer George Beverly Shea.

The big fears in Lorie Gooding’s glad year were the nights after Paul Coblentz was murdered. One morning when Paul and Mattie went to Mt. Hope, they saw lots of sheriff cars parked near the Mose Coblentz farmhouse between Benton and Mt. Hope. Later that day, word soon spread of two young men having wrecked a stolen pick-up truck along Route 241; the two men struck out on foot across the field with weapons and saw light in the Coblentz window; the family was still up at about ten, getting ready for threshing wheat the following day. The two men tried to rob Paul and Dora Coblentz who lived in a basement house near their parents. Dora hovered over their 17-month old child while Paul tried to escape seeking help. He was shot in the head twice at close range and killed near the doorway.

Several nights later we went to the Mose Coblentz place for the wake. A large crowd had gathered around the house, and cars and buggies were parked all along the lane and roads. It was dark and there were only gas lanterns, and I remember following my parents, shaking hands with people in the front room and then ushered into a back room where the dead body lay in an open coffin for viewing with only the white face revealed by the lantern’s light. Visiting the Coblentz family was sad, but fear was my main emotion in the nights that followed before we knew what had happened to the men who had killed Paul Coblentz. 

Were these men still hiding somewhere near one of our farms? Even after Eugene Peters and Michael Doumoulin were apprehended in an Illinois hunting cabin, the fear remained for a twelve-year old. This was the first murder I was aware of in Holmes County, and it became a summer of fear.  I would look out the upstairs window, and I could not sleep, wondering if some wandering intruders may show up at our farm.

Peters and Doumoulin were brought back to the Holmes County jail, and in the trial Peters was convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair; Doumoulin sentenced to life in prison. About this same time, our Holmesville School which sometimes showed movies during the noon hour showed a black and white documentary of the Ohio State Penitentiary and the electric chair. A local Mennonite pastor Paul Hummel took Amish ministers and Coblentz family members to visit Peters in the prison, and the Amish and Mennonites sent letters to the governor pleading that he give the condemned man clemency which he did. Coblentz told Peters that he hoped God would forgive him. Later the case was lifted up for the nonresistance of the Amish and Mennonites in not wanting the state to kill a man in their name.

In September I took a big step in the Christian life. I was baptized along with brothers Paul and Roy by Bishop Harry Stutzman at Maple Grove Mission; actually there were eight of us Millers from three families. Freeman (1944 - 1964) and Dorothy (1943 - 1999), both now gone to their eternal reward, were children of Abe and Katie Miller of Berlin. Dorothy married David Yoder and, as we used to say, served on the mission field with Wycliffe Translators in Ecuador. This had to be one of the choicest mission assignments what with all of the faithful having read the book Through Gates of Splendor, the story of the five American young people who lost their lives trying to establish contact with the  native Ecuadorians, the Waorani people, then known to us as the Auca Indians. I must have heard this missionary story a thousand times in sermons and talks. 

Sadly, Freeman was hugely overweight, had blood clots, and died young. Freeman’s death took on esoteric interest in our community because at the time of his death a Pentecostal movement was emerging in Berlin (sometimes called the Johnny Schrock church). Oral tradition had some of these Pentecostals going to Freeman’s grave site and were trying to raise him from the dead.

Three other members of the baptismal class were the children of Eli J. Millers who lived near Beechville: Monroe, Mary, and Barbara. There were three Eli Millers at Maple Grove Mission in the fifties, and this one was called Mexican Joe’s Eli; the others were Eli J. and Eli M.  In any case, we lost track of these Millers; they did not attend Maple Grove Mission very long. My father Andrew wrote in the bulletin regarding our baptism: “We trust they will all remain faithful to God, and find joy in his service.”

Although this was a spiritual experience, it was also quite physical, and it was all mixed together. First there were about six weeks of an instruction classes getting us ready with the basic beliefs of the Christian faith and of the Mennonites; the Dortrecht Confession of Faith. One night we went into two groups the boys in the one and the girls in another one. I don’t know what Mary Stutzman told the girls, but Harry told us boys about our sexual organs, hormones and having wet dreams (and not to worry about them), and that we should remain as virgins until marriage. I often met people as an adult who said they were sexual innocents or mis-informed about sex or that it was never discussed in their family, church or community. 

I confess I did not know what they were talking about. I learned a good deal about sex from our animals mating and birthing, then there was our bathing at home in which I would glimpse my mother and father, certainly no exhibitionists, but also quite unashamed about their naked bodies. Finally, there was this kind of sacred teaching by our bishop which was quite common. Sex was generally considered natural as with the animals, often somewhat humorous as in our ribald jokes, and also to be directed and controlled by institutions such as marriage, baptism, instructions and the biblical stories (think King David and Bathsheba and the Song of Songs).    

 I got a new suit for the baptism, what we called a plain coat. We went to Freedlander’s in Wooster and bought a dark suit, and took the coat up to a Brethren in Christ seamstress in Sippo not far from Massillon to remove the lapels and convert it into a frock or a straight cut. It was the only altered straight cut coat I ever owned after we joined the Mennonites. Second, there was the physical act of our all kneeling on the floor. I remember the hard wooden floor, Harry asking if I “was truly sorry for my past sins, and willing to renounce Satan, the world, and all works of darkness, and my own carnal will and sinful desires.” On hearing me say, “I am” and then promising to submit to Christ until death, Harry folded his hands into a cup, my father pouring water into his cupped hands and then Harry rubbed the water on my hair, drops flowing down the side of my face.

After going down the row like that with all of us, Harry then started over. He took my right hand saying: “In the name of Christ and his church, I give you my hand.” “Arise!” he commanded pulling me up to my feet and continuing: “and as Christ was raised up by the glory of the Father, even so thou also shalt walk in the newness of life.” There was more about needing to stay faithful till death, and I “would be acknowledged as a member of the body of Christ and a brother in the church.” I now stood face to face with Harry, a short plump man with a little goatee beard on his chin, and I a gangling thin smooth-faced boy giving each other the right hand of fellowship and concluding with the kiss of peace, better known in our church as the holy kiss. We literally kissed each other on the cheek and Harry said briskly: “God bless you.”

This was all pretty heady and solemn stuff for a boy of who had just passed his thirteenth birthday on September 15 and was baptized a week later on September 22. Later in life I discovered that for an adult believers church such as the Mennonites I may have been baptized too early. This may be the case, and theoretically at least I’m committed to adult baptism for Mennonites. But I never really regretted my baptism, its commitments and grace, except perhaps for a few occasions when I thought I might be an agnostic. I thought I knew what I was doing and what Christ had done for me, and I was baptized with my two best friends Paul and Roy who supported me in the Christian faith the rest of my life. Anyway, it was a scary summer with our neighbor Paul Coblentz murdered, and we needed all the help and consolation we could get. 

Another important occurrence this year was my Grandmother Martha Miller’s death in April. For all practical purposes, this was the end of the Martin and Martha Miller family in our lives during my growing up years. We had joined the Mennonites, lived at the other end of the county, and were now active in the Maple Grove Mission, and they had their own gardens to till. We did not get together for family reunions, and lived in different worlds. The one exception here was my father’s sister Ida and her husband Henry Yoder who attended Maple Grove. We knew them very well during those years and did many things together, but when Maple Gove ended we never saw them again. We remained Mennonite and their family largely became part of the Berlin Christian Fellowship and various Pentecostal churches, or as we used to say “scattered to the four winds.”

In September I began my final years at Holmesville School, grade 8 with teacher Henry Troyer from Walnut Creek. Troyer already in his mid-years loved sports and was quite emotional and affectionate. I had my first love of history in his class when we studied Ohio history and we did projects of Indian customs, dress, and artifacts. We built a clay and paper mache Native American settlement and the Wooster Daily Record ran a photo in October of 1957, which has us in full Indian headdress and bow and arrows. In the photo beside me are Roy Snyder, Nancy McCluggage, Jackie Burkhart, Susie Mast, and Ben Miller.  If Mister Troyer was quite expressive in appreciation, he could also become quite angry. Henry would go to sleep after lunch, and if someone woke him up or was walking while he was sleeping, he would fly into a rage and shout at us. We would tip-toe around so as not wake him or arouse his anger.

I first ran into his emotional outbursts in sports. Henry was the basketball coach, and wanted me to play on the team. I could not partly because I was now the main farmer in charge of milking our cows (conflicting with practice and games), and I suppose some was also the negativity my father carried regarding sports. In any case, after a loss of the team one night, when I was already in the seventh grade, Henry visited our house after dark, and gave my father and mother an angry outburst for not allowing me to play and that they were the reason why his team lost that night. I would have liked to play earlier, but after hearing this outburst from the next room, I lost all interest. 

Fortunately, Henry’s hot temper whether from sleeping or basketball was short-lived and soon forgotten. Aside from basketball, Henry loved softball too and one time he had my father’s old teacher Clarence Zuercher’s school come and play us in softball. Another time the Amish vocational school near Mt. Hope (called Possum College) came to play us; Monroe Weaver, a neighbor west of Homerville was the teacher. We lost to both of them. At the end of the game with Zuercher's school, the teacher, now an elderly man, threw his hat in the air and did a somersault.    

Finally, before I leave the Holmesville School there is Roy Stallman, the principal. If ever I felt an educator gave special attention to our family’s well-being, it was Mister Stallman. But then I suppose many of the Holmesville families felt the same way. Roy Stallman was a teacher in Holmesville schools for 45 years. From 1953 until he retired in 1972, he was principal of the Holmesville Elementary School which was during most of my brothers and sisters’ school spans. Even tempered, serious, and positive, he encouraged us in our studies and provided a safe environment. He selected several of us from the seventh and eighth grade to serve as crossing guards at the school entrance onto the streets, and gave us affirmation for good safety work.  

He arranged field trips to the Cleveland and Columbus Zoo for those who won ribbons in spelling or gained other academic achievements. During the noon hour he sometimes showed films and in the winter played records and organized square dancing in the gymnasium. He was respectful of our cultural and religious diversity such as the Amish and Mennonite children who were selective in not participating in some of these activities. But perhaps the main reason I liked him was that I knew my parents also respected him as a Christian and a community leader. During the summer months, he did some house painting, as I recall.  

I realize today that my admiration of Roy Stallman was part of my assimilation into more of the cultural mainstream of American life. About this time, I for the first time became self-conscious about my Pennsylvania German or Dutch accented English, and made an effort to speak more English at home or in other settings. Our family had always been bilingual with the Dutch or Pennsylvania German spoken at home and English in the school and community, but about now I decided I should speak English better. 

I don’t think it was that some English speaking neighbors made fun of us Amish and Mennonites for speaking with a Dutch accent, although that did happen at times. Both at school and the community the Pennsylvania German was so common that it was simply assumed as a part of the cultural woodwork. Maybe it was that one of my teachers, I think maybe it was Elsie Snyder, told me that if I spoke more English, I might do better in English class. Maybe it was in part that I now thought I would go on to high school. Whatever the reason, I remember making a conscious choice to use more English and that somehow the English language was important to my future.   

The full verse: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12). The Paul Coblentz murder appears in John C. Miller’s book Tragedies along County Road 235 (Walnut Creek: Carlisle Printing, 2000). Regarding Freeman and Dorothy Miller of our baptismal class, Paul Kline gave me information in a telephone conversation on January 19, 2011. The exact words of the 1950s Mennonite baptismal ritual come from Mennonite Church Polity, which included Confession of Faith and Ministers Manual (Scottdale: Mennonite Publishing House, 1944, pages 105-108). A profile of Holmesville School principal Roy Stallman appears in his son David A. Stallman’s book Our Home Town Holmesville, Ohio (self-published, 5809 Bentley Gardens Land, Wilmington, NC 28409, 2001, pages 103-105).  

1956 Operettas and Poetry

1956  Religion, Operettas and Poetry at School. Finish Grade 6 Mrs. Foster to Grade 7 Mrs. Snyder; religion in school, the 1963 Supreme Court school prayer ruling; after lunch reading of Caddie Woodlawn; chorus from India at the Federated church; annual spring operettas; verses in School Memories book; Jackie Burkhart; Sister Miriam born April 16; the Mennonite tent evangelists Augsburger, Brunk, Jantzi and Mattie’s Christian service.

I finished grade six with Mrs. Louise Foster as teacher and started Grade seven with Mrs. Elsie Snyder. Of all the elementary school teachers, I had Mrs. Snyder stood out as the most explicitly religious, in a conservative Protestant sense. Each morning we began with the flag salute, “My country tis of thee,” and  then a Bible reading and prayer, the “Our Father” Lord’s Prayer. The Bible reading was from the King James Version, specifically. I recall occasionally she made a little speeches about the evils of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) which had been  released in 1952, the translation project sponsored by the National Council of Churches. Discussion and denunciation of The Revised Standard Version, now a full protestant Bible, and first major update from the King James Version for half a century, was in the air during those years.

Bible translations crossed my father’s radar because of our having a bookstore, and Andrew’s vivid interest in the Bible.  Already when it was first released, Andrew was quite even-handed about the new translation. Noting the noisy arguments, he counseled against making quick judgments but to allow history and time to determine the Revised Standard translation’s value. My own childhood interest in translations was much less noble, what with some bias to the King James Version’s earthy references to “him that pisseth against the wall.”  A boyhood diversion during long sermons was to look up the pisseth verses such as 2 Kings 9:8 verse and pass it to a friend. Later in my life as a church and curriculum editor, selecting Bible translations was often part of my life. But back to the Mrs. Snyder and religion.

Noting Elsie Snyder’s explicit piety, is not to say that the other teachers were not religious and Christian, they simply that they did not talk about their faith in quite as explicit a way. Most of this religion in the school was of a benign character, protected by the free exercise of religion in the United States constitution, but this approach was soon to change. During most of my adult life I lived with the US Supreme court ruling declaring that school sponsored prayer and Bible reading are unconstitutional. The Abington Township School District v. Schempp decision (1963) decision came from a school district north of Philadelphia where a Unitarian Universalist parent  Edward Schempp objected to a prescribed Bible reading of 10 verses each morning in his son Ellery’s classes.

At that time, Pennsylvania state law included a statute compelling school districts to perform Bible readings in the mornings before class. The court ruled that state sanctioned prayer and Bible reading violated the first amendment that government shall not establish religion. The court not only ruled against a state prescribed prayer and Bible reading, it also ruled against the expression of religious piety in the public schools. Justice William J. Brennan's majority opinion noted the common practice of public prayers and some religious sentiment in government life and the specific prohibition of establishing a state church. But he argued for updating a more expansive interpretation which the court felt was appropriate for an increasingly pluralistic twentieth-century America. For example, he noted the problem of which scripture should be singled out whether the Protestant King James, the Catholic Vulgate, or the Hebrew Talmud.

It was a strong ruling by the majority, and only Justice Potter Stewart filed a dissent in the case, noting the long practice of religious expression in public life in the United States, such as Senate prayers, and some permeability regarding religion and public life. Several years ago I attended a Westmoreland County law meeting with my friend James Lederach in which New York University professor Stephen D. Solomon spoke on the history of the case based on his book entitled Ellery’s Protest: How One Young Man Defied Tradition and Sparked the Battle over School Prayer (University of Michigan Press, 2007). 

During the questions, a student quoted Potter Stewart: “If religious exercises are held to be an impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed in an artificial and state-created disadvantage. And a refusal to permit religious exercises thus is seen, not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism, or at least, as governmental support of the beliefs of those who think that religious exercises should be conducted only in private.” 

Although the 1963 ruling made good sense in striking down prescribed prayers and religious activities in schools, it seemed to me it went too far especially as it was interpreted in subsequent decades. Hence, I often ran into this ruling as a school board member when our district was nervous about the possibility of a law suit about such practices of having a Bible club in school or having ministers or priests pray at public school events such as Commencement. The practical end of the ruling was to eliminate ministers, priests and rabbis, which has led to the nationalization of school ceremonies. Without religious ceremonies, we have simply added to the military color guard and national emblems of opening and closing ceremonies.

In the daily life of schools the elimination of the religious standards has led to a coarsening of morality (to pure functionalism) and the emergence of an exotic religiosity. In our school, some zealous students now did voluntary morning prayers around the flag pole, and other students started a Bible club. The net effect was to reduce the role of the Christian religion in the public schools to the equivalent of a butterfly, Wicca, or ski club. Whatever was gained in ensuring that Christianity does not become America’s state religion (a worthy goal), there were also losses in a religiously naked public square. That the two biggest 20^th century experiments in secularism turned to religious nationalism (the Third Reich and the Soviet Union) were hardly re-assuring.   

But it was not the morning Bible reading which I remember most; I after all, got a lot of Bible reading at home and at church, but the books which Mrs. Snyder read after our noon recess. I’ll mention the context; I would often return from noon recess all wet under a sweat-drenched shirt as we played rabbit or softball in the fall and spring and basketball and dodge ball in the gymnasium in the winter. We played vigorously and hard and then it was refreshing to simply start the afternoon with a story, and this is what Mrs. Foster did, a chapter each day.

You could put your head down on the desk and rest, and hear and see the story in your mind. One book she read was Caddie Woodlawn, about a frontier girl in Wisconsin, living in about the 1860s. Caddie was a tomboy who went swimming with the boys, developed friendships with the neighboring Indians, and loved to do things outside in nature. I later learned that Carol Ryrie Brink's Caddie was based on her grandmother’s life and the book was a John Newberry Medal winner in 1936. But whether it was the quality of the literature or simply the luxury of having a half hour to rest after noon recess, Mrs. Foster’s oral reading made it a memorable time.

It was also about this time that I had my first introduction to international expressions of Christianity. A choir from India, probably sponsored by the Methodist foreign mission offices, travelled through the United States and stopped at the Federated (Presbyterian-Methodist) Church in Holmesville. Our family went to the concert and loved the singing; this was Indian sounding music with Christian lyrics, and we were enchanted with the strange sound; these were not simply Western tunes in the Hindi language but veritable Indian melodies which I had never heard before. The day after the concert, some of the choir members visited my father‘s bookstore, and we received a 33 long-playing record of the group which we played constantly.

“U tally bat ban; u tally bat ban; u tally bat ban; wannee, banaban, u tally bat ban.” To this day, I have no idea what the words meant, and our pronunciation was probably so far removed from the original, that even an Indian reading this would have no idea what might have been sung. But it was beautiful to us, and these were real Indians who I had only seen in the World Book encyclopedia, and they reminded me of an exotic land far away, of the Christian faith being universal. That concert gave meaning to India, and years later in college when I read E.M. Forester’s A Passage to India, I still heard that choir in the background.    

Another unusual world we experienced at the Holmesville School was on stage along the side of the gymnasium. Every spring our school would do a musical. We called them operettas, directed by our music teacher Mrs. Emerson Dilgard. Mrs. Dilgard visited our school once a week, and we looked forward to these annual musical and dramatic events when we would perform for our parents and neighbors. The music often had melodies from the classical tradition such as one we did on the bears and the bees with lyrics to the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák’s piano cycle the “Humoresques.”  We dressed as bears and bees, stepping across the stage singing:  

When the Bears get very funny,

And they steal the golden honey.

To their lairs they softly creep away.

Quickly then the bees will chase them

And the bears will have to face

For their mischief, they will pay.

Another operetta we did was a who-done-it thriller featuring the world’s renowned detective Tip-toe Pete:

When Tip-toe Pete comes down the street,

There’s always something brewing.

I kept a Wooster Daily Record photo of one the seventh and eighth graders did in April of 1957 called “The Dream Ranch.” There I am in full western cowboy hat, bandana and guitar and my brother Roy and Harry (Junior) Hostetler alongside. Center stage is a tall ranching dude Billy Hites holding a gun and greeting some eastern (surely urbane) visitors: Peggy Painter, Emily Shaw and Alice Ramseyer.

If the operettas had classical tunes which our children and grandchildren generations later played at piano and violin recitals, and Mrs. Snyder read us good literature from the Bible and books, not all our writing was as elevated. School life and writings had earthy elements which are recorded in a little book “School Memories” of Prairie Local Elementary (Holmesville) 1956-57. The booklet has photos of our principal Roy Stallman, our teacher Elsie Snyder, classmates, and then some "autographs" which turn out to be ribald, humorous verse. Almost all of these begin with “Dear Levi” or the Pennsylvania German: “Ve Gates Levi” and end with “your pal” and the name which I will spare both you and my classmates. This is a sampling of my school friends’ good wishes:  

When you get married 

And live in the city

Don't forget to remind your wife

to give the baby titty.

Roses are red

Violets are blue.

God made me beautiful

What happened to you?

Geese in the millpond

Ducks in the ocean.

Levi can't get married 

Till Jackie gets a notion.

When you have a girlfriend

And think she's sweet.

Take off her shoes 

And smell her feet.

Out behind the chicken house

Down on my knees

I just about died laughing

To see Levi and Jackie squeeze. 

Down by the river

Carved on a rock.

Are these little words:

For-Get-Me-Not.  

The night was gray

The sky was blue

When down the alley

A shit wagon flew.

A crack was hit 

A cry was heard

Levi was killed

By the flying turd.

That last one was written by my good brother Roy. Sometimes at the bottom of the page, a PS is attached to these notes with “Yours till the bull gives shaving cream.” Or some variation of this friendly thought: the bull may also be a cow and the shaving cream may be cottage cheese. And we’ll identify Jackie. I was romantically linked to Jackie Burkhart during this year, and as I recall so were a number of my friends (Billy, Melvin, Larry, Roy). The Burkhart family had moved into our school district west of Holmesville, and Jackie was new, attractive and friendly. Anyway, Jackie somehow survived all this attention, may even have enjoyed some of it, and did not seem to hold it against our family over the years. Jackie and her husband Keith Woodruff have been friends of our family doctors: Roy and Hannah.  

In the meantime, our family was growing, and little Miriam was born on April 16. Now, there were seven of us; Paul was approaching his teens and we boys were old enough to know the origins of babies. Sometimes we even speculated as to whether Miriam was the last one. Our mother Mattie ever the pragmatic one however would only address this question in the most mystical terms. However many children God would give her, she would be thankful, she often said. If that explanation seemed unnecessarily opaque to me at the time, it was surely as authentic as anything my mother said in her life. 

During these years, various tent revivals visited our community. In June of 1955, we attended the young Myron Augsburger’s tent meetings sponsored by an organization called Christian Layman’s Evangelistic Association, and several years later (1959) George R. Brunk (1911-2002) and his family rolled into Holmes County with large semi-trucks and mobile homes. The Brunk and Augsburger tents were at the bottom field of the Joe Miller farm hill just west of Berlin. The other evangelist who visited was Andrew Jantzi from Alden, New York, and his tent was pitched at Bunker Hill. He also brought along the lovely music of the Gingerich Sisters of Hartville, Ohio. 

These evangelists gave invitations for people to make public confessions, called decisions for Christ (more on these later), but during a campaign there would also be a special meeting for persons to dedicate their lives in Christian service. The ultimate in this kind of Christian service was to go the Amazon region of Brazil to convert the natives, but there were all kinds of lesser service whether IW alternative service to the military, voluntary service with a mission agency, Sunday school teaching, or helping at a mission station in Coshocton or our Maple Grove Mission.

But these evangelists were also sturdy Mennonite fathers, and at the dedication service they would tell a story of a mother with seven little children behind her who came up to the evangelist, confessing that she had no calling and could not see herself going to the Amazon to convert the natives, at least not in the near future. So the evangelist asked the mother, “Well, now sister, how many children do you have?” And her answer was seven and another one on the way. “Ah,” the evangelist said, “then you do have your calling. You raise those eight children in the Lord, and you’ll have done as much Christian service as any missionary, teacher or preacher.” Whether it was Brunk, Jantzi, or Augsburger or all of them who told this story or some variation of it, I don’t remember, but I do know I heard it various times, and I remember my mother Mattie repeating it as gospel truth.      

As a post-script I met George R. Brunk years later at Laurelville Mennonite Church Center when Brunk, now in his eighth decade, and some of the younger leaders were debating over church controversies. I was sympathetic with the elder Brunk, if for no other reason than that he seemed like an old King Lear raging on a heath, and we all knew how tragic the play would end. Anyway, I went up to Brunk and told him the above story and how much it meant to my mother Mattie, and my appreciation for his honoring her Christian service. 

Brunk acknowledged this comment as graciously as he could, but I had the clear impression from his response that he felt I was another young Turk insulting him with faint praise and wanting to remind him of his earlier hay seed revivalism. Brunk was now a retired seminary dean and was trying to straighten us out regarding the nature of Christ, the Trinity and Anabaptist biblical interpretation. But whatever the misunderstandings, my appreciation was heartfelt; I always thought we as Mattie’s children were the happy beneficiaries of a woman who saw her home and family as Christian service.  

Much of this comes from my memory, and the Seventh Grade “School Memory” book of verses was in a school file which my mother kept of these years. The basic facts and dates of the 1963 Supreme Court decision regarding prayer and Bible reading in the public schools was gathered from Wikopedia. Andrew A. Miller’s comments on the Revised Standard Version appeared in Herald der Wahrheit, January 1, 1953, page 2. The photos and story of the Holmesville School operetta “The Dream Ranch” appeared in the Wooster Daily Record, April 22, 1957. 

1955 My First Story

1955    A first story, horses, books and reading; Roy’s mechanical skills, builds a tractor; finishing hogs and the Wooster livestock auction, bulls and auctioneers; Maple Grove Mission organizes, the dilemmas of Amish and Mennonite modernizers; Lorie Conley Gooding, the poet; a Thanksgiving program; citizens and subjects; Stalin to Khrushchev; responses to the Cold War.

In the fifth grade, I wrote my first story on little tablet of 26 pages which I still have; the story is about a horse who has many adventures with his owner Tom. The pencil-illustrated story is a growing up story of a horse Skipper who encounters adventure at every stage after leaving his safe stable. He’s  racing cars, running red lights, performing in the circus (with Tom along, of course), going to the fair (and winning first prize), and finally going on a camping and hunting trip. The dramatic climax is this overnighter when Tom bags several rabbits for supper and during the night shoots two raccoons which become part of the breakfast menu. Also during the night a deer wanders by disturbing Skipper, and Tom shoots the deer. If that is not enough excitement, the next day Tom and Skipper are attacked by a wolf pack, “a flock of wolves,” which turns nasty when Tom now out of ammunition has to beat them with the gun barrel while Skipper “was kicking and biting” them. By the end of the fight, the wolves are all dead and Tom “tied them all together and hung them behind the cart.”  

Finally on the second day, they meet a panther in the woods, and a fierce fight ensues with Tom and his faithful horse eventually prevailing. The young author describes the ending: “The panther was all bloody from Skipper biting and kicking. Skipper was all bloody too.” In the meantime, Tom somehow gets more ammunition, and shoots the panther, after which “they tied the panther with the wolves” to the back of the cart. So our horse Skipper returns home and is acclaimed by everyone as a hero for saving Tom’s life; that evening Skipper is well fed in his stable, and the last drawing has Skipper contentedly out in the pasture with the sun shining.

If subtlety in character and difficult choices did not rate high with this young author, the imagination seemed to thrive on as much excitement and conflict as possible in the small space available—and a happy ending. If the story elicited responses from anyone who read it, I do not recall it. But the story had all the things I enjoyed most in my imagined and lived reality including loving animals, the horse especially and the wolf and puma (panther) stories I read during those years. I suppose one hears American Western and the biblical Samson themes in the hero being the horse, of course. Reading it as an adult a half century later reminds me of how much the rural hunting culture was a part of our community, although much of the violence and fighting with the wild animals was also a fifth grader’s summary appropriation of the horse stories and the western wolf stories I read at that time. The main horse stories I remember from that period were Walter Farley’s Black Stallion books; my first book of that series was The Black Stallion’s Sulky Colt (1954), but then I eventually read most of them from the school and Holmes County Library backwards to the original The Black Stallion (1941).

The wolf and the wild horse stories were in the spirit of Jack London’s Call of the Wild in which the untamed wild animal life is described and idealized. For the horses, usually a stallion, this wildness meant leadership of the mustang herd by a loyal lead mare, the stallion’s annual driving off the young studs and the eventual displacement of the old stallion himself. Some were told from the hunter or rancher’s point of view but most were from the animal’s sense of remaining in the wild, my idea of the good life. We had these dime novels in our school library which were shelves in the back of the room, and we could buy them from a TAB series which were sold monthly in our schools. These were inexpensive books for our various age levels and had a brand name in Tabatha the Cat; and my parents allowed us to buy them.

During these years, the Holmes County Library also opened a branch in Holmesville along Main Street in what used to be Bucher’s Store. It was open in the evenings and I remember visiting it. Reading was encouraged in the public schools, and I still have a 1954 certificate for completing a four-year course of prescribed reading in what was called the Ohio Pupils Reading Circle. The book I most recall on the list was, you guessed it, an animal story, Dusty of the Grand Canyon. Actually, I drew illustrations of the book which was chosen to be in the Holmes County Library for an exhibit. At that time the county Library was on the bottom floor of the Holmes County Court House.  Aside from the Bible, at Christmas of this year, my parents gave me my first book, an illustrated nature guide called In Woods and Fields (1950). I still have it in my library.

Aside from books, my brother Roy gave us excitement with his mechanical skills in building things. During these years he built a little tractor which he would drive around the farm, and to which we would attach our children’s wagon on the back for rides. It was a simple tractor powered by a Briggs and Stratton motor and with a gear box and lever to reduce the speed as the power went to the back wheel; only one wheel did the pulling. Roy worked on it for a long time, and even took it over to Holmesville occasionally driving it on the streets where it got considerable attention. Roy was like my father with the ability to do about anything mechanical or so it seemed to me; as I write this he regularly builds and flies model airplanes.

Later before the age of sixteen and a driver’s license, Roy stripped down a car and made it into an off-road vehicle; we called it a hoopey. This was an open vehicle with the top, doors, and sides off and only a seat. Roy somehow shortened the wheel base, and we ran it around the farm through the fields. One time one of us took it to Holmesville, and an Ohio State Patrol followed us home, and told us not to take it on the road again. I don’t think any of us had a driver’s license at that time anyway. Later on in the summer when we had bought a small combine to thresh our oats, barley and wheat and it was always breaking down; Roy was good at fixing it.

  

Some of us were more animal than mechanical, and a favorite farm activity during these years was going to the Wooster Farmers’ Livestock Auction. Aside from our small dairy in which we sold milk to the Ramseyer cheese house west of Holmesville, we also raised hogs for the market. Although at an earlier stage we bred sows and had litters, mainly we raised feeder pigs from the time they were weaned to their market size of about 225 pounds. My father Andrew had a half-ton Ford pick-up truck upon which we had made a rack for the back and we would regularly go to the Wooster Auction and buy small feeder pigs. This was interesting because we would walk over the top of the pig pens looking for the ones which we wanted to buy; then my father would get a number at the office and bid on them.

The pigs and all the animals would be shooed into the ring for display and selling. The front row seats usually went to the main buyers from the various meat companies, unless vacated for a coffee break, The rest of us were scattered all around the ring. The pigs were sold early in the evening, and when my father had bid up a litter, we would go up into the office above the ring, and pay for them, and we were soon going home again. Andrew preferred the white Yorkshire pigs or some mix of them which would stay quite lean, good for bacon he said, and generally brought a top dollar when we would sell them.

   

But sometimes we stayed longer, and saw the other animals selling, the beef and butcher cows being last. The highlight of the evening was when the bulls would come into the ring; this was our weekly Pamplona, the running of the bulls. At Wooster, a big caged animal scales was right behind the auctioneer and a holding pen was behind the sales ring door. One heard extra shouting by the aides, and then you could see the bulls’ big thick necks and heads behind the ring, sometimes some rumbling or kicking of their hoofs; it was anticipation. The auctioneer would say now clear the ring and the first row seats were cleared of children and all hands off the rails. The door opened and in charged a bull often snorting and moving from one side of the ring to the other as the stock men warily goaded them to move around so the buyers could take a look.

The cattlemen in the sales ring stayed close to a door or gate in case they needed to escape from the bull. Of course, sometimes a bull was quite calm and simply stood there like some Ferdinand, looking out over the crowd into the bright evening lights and smelling the fat cigars. The cattlemen were quite savvy about animals, and I don’t know of anyone who was ever hurt in the livestock yards. The main excitement and entertainment may have been in the anticipation of the bulls’ themselves; so be it, bulls are attractive animals. The bidding started, and soon the auctioneer would say “now let him go,” and the bull would go out the other side and back to his pen. When the bulls were finished, usually not more than a dozen, it was back to the routine animals. Years later, one evening in Moscow our hosts took us to a fine restaurant, and I ate some bull testicles for dinner. Whether it added to my virility as the Russian waiter claimed, I do not know. It did bring back many good memories of the Wooster bulls.

The auctioneer had a special recognition and status in our community, somewhat on the level of a secular preacher, and the Wooster auctioneer was the fairly low-key Chester James of Ashland. Our Holmesville auctioneer was Glen Lecky, and area’s best known auctioneers were the Kidron Auction standard bearers, John F. Andrews of Holmes County and the Kidron owner auctioneer Silas C. (Cy) Sprunger. The auctioneers usually wore genteel western hats and sometimes even a string tie such that they looked like Western country gentlemen. They often had lines which they predictably used; Andrews used to say of an especially fine dairy cow’s udder, that if she is not a good milker, she should take the signs down. Cy Spurnger of Kidron shocked us all when he ended his life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound on July 14, 1956.

We took the little pigs home and raised them for several months to prime meat status of about 225 pounds. We sent milk to the market from our dairy, and then we got whey back from the cheese house which we in turn mixed with grain feed and fed to the pigs. When they were ready for market, we loaded them onto the pick-up, washed them nice and clean with the hose, and took them to Wooster again. Sometimes we even took two loads, taking one load and returning home and getting another load by sale time. We would wait and watch for our batch to enter the ring, always hoping they would bring top price.  Andrew would buy us a treat at the restaurant, maybe a hot dog or a milk shake, and we would head home. Even though there were also nearby livestock auctions at Mt. Hope, Kidron, and Farmerstown, it was mainly the Wooster Auction which we patronized when we raised hogs for sale. The auction and stock yards are long gone, since the by-pass of Route 30 was built south of the city in the early 1970s.

If our farm life was fairly constant and attached to the seasonal rhythms of 1950s rural Ohio agriculture, our religious and church life now took on a new intensity. The Amish church for all its strictness is actually a low intensity church with few explicitly religious ceremonies and most norms simply caught rather than taught. We would have worship services every other week or about twice a month, and most of the time the ministers were simply part of the cultural geography. Religion and daily living were mixed in a fairly casual way and the folk tradition seemed to guide us as to what was God’s will. Now at Maple Grove Mission all that changed; there was no tradition.

So we picked up what other churches were doing at this time; we had three weekly services, Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and a Thursday evening meeting which included prayer, singing, teaching and Bible study.  My father had been busy with the Amish Mission Movement but most of this activity was distant from home and adults only or through letters and ministerial visits. Now, my father was superintendent of the Maple Grove Mission and the entire project revolved about our family, even at this young age.  By the end of the first year, Andrew listed “your mission staff” in the August 28, 1955 Maple Grove Mission Bulletin, and over half of the 15 offices were filled by family members. These included my mother Mattie as primary-aged children’s Sunday school teacher and finance secretary; my brother Paul (age 13) as usher and soon to be named librarian; my brother Roy (age 12) as recording secretary and later often listed as chorister or song leader. Grandfather Levi L. Schlabach, somewhat to our surprise, also decided to change from the Amish to Mennonite about this time coming to Maple Grove and immediately helped lead the adult class.

And there was my father’s cousin Albert with his wife Emma Troyer and family. Albert served as mission treasurer, assistant superintendent, and Sunday school teacher, helping my Grandfather Levi with the adult class. Also a musician, Albert and my father Andrew enjoyed playing the guitar and mandolin and various arrangements in evening singings. Amos Olinger from Holmesville sometimes joined them on the fiddle, and we would all sing along.  Although at this point we did not use the musical instruments in church, we often played together in homes. Being able to play instruments again meant a lot to Andrew; I remember one time we went out the Maple Grove Mission during the week to fix something, it may have been cement work by the steps. My father took along the mandolin which he played during the noon lunch and left the instrument lying on the lawn beside the truck. That afternoon, I accidently dropped a cement block on the mandolin and broke the neck. When Andrew saw it, he picked up the broken instrument and he did not say anything angry to me; he simply wept. I felt terrible.    

Maple Grove during these early years was really a mix of ex-Amish who were somewhat outreach oriented and becoming Mennonites. Later in life I was often in Amish study conferences in which sociologists or a graduate student would compare the traditional old order communities with the various Beachy Amish and conservative Mennonite groups which had Amish background. Inevitably in these comparisons, the liberal Amish or conservative Mennonites such as our Maple Grove Fellowship were compared unfavorably because they had developed doctrinal or explicitly biblical markers. They were becoming conservative Protestants in the way they defined their community in verbal and written forms as opposed to the traditional unwritten folk traditions of the old orders. It always seemed to me understandable why the casual old order folk approach was more appealing and comfortable to the outsider.

But I also sympathized with the modernizers’ dilemma. They had taken the big step of leaving the traditional community and its security and needed more guidelines which now were provided by explicit biblical quotations or doctrinal statements. The Mennonite academics especially should have been sympathetic to this project because their own church had gone through a similar change several generations earlier when it moved from a nineteenth century folk tradition to a more rational theologically based fellowship. Even the nonresistant peace teaching had undergone this change. The 1940s and 1950s Mennonite pacifist was often a conscientious objector because parents and family had been; it was our church tradition and simply what Jesus simply taught in the Sermon on the Mount.

Now this tongue-tied nonresistant became an embarrassment; I heard many a Mennonite’s complaints of having served in 1940s Civilian Public Service Camps and 1950s alternative service IW with young Mennonite and Amish rubes who could not give a rational explanation for their service. By the fifties Mennonites were supposed to give a consistent biblical and theological explanation for pacifism in quite a rational way. Some who had mixed with secular pacifists and Fellowship of Reconciliation’s religious and political pacifists were expected to give some explanation of how pacifism may contribute to better citizenship or even to provide American foreign policy initiatives. 

But back to Maple Grove, the main exception from our family and Amish Mennonites from the beginning was the poet Lorie Gooding (1919-1992) or as my father would say Lorie C. Conley Gooding. Born in Pennsylvania, Lorie Gooding was already known among the Mennonites when she had lived in Wayne County, and she got to know my parents when they would pick her up walking along the road with groceries. The Goodings lived on one of the hills several miles west of Holmesville, and the first we knew of the them was when the elderly father Joseph Gooding would come into town with a mule in the summer with wild  blackberries to sell in Holmesville; it seemed like something out of a nineteenth-century storybook. Joseph Gooding died in 1955 and was the first burial on the grounds of Maple Grove Mission.

Lorie Gooding’s poetry had been published regularly in the Mennonite periodical Gospel Herald, and a part of the editor Paul Erb’s interest in Maple Grove was to visit Lorie Gooding. But my father Andrew also cultivated Erb’s friendship because of his own writing interest, and because of similar millennial views regarding the end times. My father invited Paul Erb to come to Maple Grove to give his The Alpha and the Omega lectures which resulted in a book by the same title in 1955. In any case, Lorie Gooding soon began attending Maple Grove Mission, and except for our own immediate family I believe she was the only one who attended for the entire decade of Maple Grove’s existence. When Maple Grove ended in the mid-60s, she wrote a brief history of it. Herald Press published a volume of her poetry under the title Let There Be Music. Her poetry was pietistic, rhyming and spiritual, all traits which fell out of fashion during most of my adulthood, and she was not published as much after the sixties.

Lorie was a large woman and got into the car with a child on her lap, often Christina (also called Kippy) or little Danna. Lorie’s husband Raymond never seemed to have regular work outside the home and the family lived on modest resources, but in the 70s Lorie went on to school and got a licensed practical nurse degree and worked at the Castle Nursing Home. Her son Joe was my schoolmate for our elementary years at Holmesville. Lorie was always a good friend to our family, and when our family ended up in Millersburg Mennonite Church during the seventies and eighties, Lorie Gooding attended there too, now living in Killbuck.   

Lorie Gooding often wrote a poem for special occasions at Maple Grove, and by the fourth Thursday of November 1955, Maple Grove had a Thanksgiving program with over 30 parts to it of songs, scripture readings, brief meditations and poems, and a word on “our eternal inheritance” by Bishop Harry Stutzman. I along with five others (including Mary and Joe Gooding) had a poem; it was probably to us that Andrew noted in the program announcement: “speak plainly; learn your part well.” Andrew also noted Thanksgiving Day’s religious and national origins in the early Pilgrim and Puritan settlers in Massachusetts in 1620. Andrew wrote that the wild turkey, hominy, and venison had been replaced with native foods preserved and prepared by up-to-date methods, but that the custom remains. In the November 24, 1955, Maple Gove Mission Bulletin, he concluded: “We appreciate the recognition given to such a religious holiday by our honored president Eisenhower. May God bless the rulers and those in authority as they recognize the hand of providence that made America a land of plenty.”

Andrew’s sentiments of appreciation and gratefulness for living in America and respect for the rulers and the President were probably quite typical for Amish and Mennonites during that period. We viewed ourselves more as subjects than as citizens who were living through the heating up of the Cold War. American Mennonites and Amish were aware that not all was well for Mennonites and Christians in the Soviet Union. In 1955 Barbara Smucker’s gripping juvenile story of the Mennonites heroic escape from the Soviets in Berlin was published as Henry’s Red Sea. The destruction of the Mennonite communities and what were called the “suffering brethren” among all Christian groups in the Soviet Union was becoming well known. In the Soviet Union itself a major leadership change was underway from Joseph Stalin (1894-1953) to Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971). 

Stalin had died in 1953, and Khrushchev was consolidating his power as first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and in 1956 would give the secret speech to the party congress denouncing the atrocities of Stalinism.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn was about to be released from the Gulag and forced exile while secretly writing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The Gulag Denisovich story would not be published until 1962, but Khrushchev’s speech did signal some change in the Soviet Union and recognition of oppression and how an internal prison system of killing and exiling its own citizens had become a part of the Communistic system. The next year the American Mennonite Harold S. Bender and Canadian Mennonite David B. Wiens made a goodwill trip to the Soviet Union in order to try to visit and help their coreligionists. But they had little success and much disappointment because the authorities would not allow them to visit a single Mennonite settlement in the Soviet Union.

During these school years I had my first awareness of the Cold War when our teachers talked about what we should do in case of a bomb attack. In school we would hear talks of a bomb shelters or going to a basement, and the first Soviet name which I was aware of was Khrushchev, often pronounced in our community as rhyming with handkerchief. In retrospect, although I was somewhat of a fearful child with anxieties and bad dreams, the Russians bombing us did not register as one of them. Bomb shelters were too far away, and anyway my parents said they did not believe in them; I suppose in part guided as much by a pacifist impulse, and a certain Christian fatalism which said when it is time to die, one should accept death.

The debate of the Cold War and the competition of the Western democracies and Soviet communism would go on for most of my adult life. This same year 1955, William F. Buckley began the magazine National Review and became a major public intellectual for the American conservative movement. I never read the National Review, but I did read Buckley’s op ed column in the Wooster Daily Record as a youth, in fact often reading him until he died in 2008. Buckley was a devout Catholic, and during the seventies, I especially enjoyed his Public Broadcasting System “Firing Line” program on our Pittsburgh station with entertaining guests such as the British journalist and Christian convert Malcolm Muggeridge. Equally entertaining and informative were a variety of public figures with whom he disagreed and debated such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Germaine Greer and Noam Chomsky. But as a child the Soviet Union seemed far away, and I thought of myself, similar to my spiritual ancestors and my Amish Mennonite parents as an American subject. I was grateful that somehow in God’s providence, we had been blessed to find our way to a relatively free and we thought benign America.

Most of this comes from memory, but David Acker and Dempsey Becker gave me background on the 1950s Wooster Auction in a telephone conversation November 16, 2011, and November 28, 2011, respectively. The section on Maple Grove Mission draws from the Andrew A. Miller Collection at the Archives of the Mennonite Church in Goshen, Indiana. A fairly complete set of Maple Grove Mission bulletins are in those files. Some of the Cold War material appeared in a paper I presented at a May 1999 conference in Zaporozhe, Ukraine: “Not Totally with Honor: American Responses to Soviet Repression of Mennonites;” appeared in Mennonite Life (September, 2004) on line http://archive.bethelks.edu/ml/issue/vol-59-no-3/article/not-totally-with-honor-us-mennonite-church-respons/