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/

1954 Becoming Mennonite

1954  Becoming Mennonite. Grade 5 Ida Rumbaugh, Parent Teacher Association (PTA), Andrew’s interest in schooling and  professions, Elmo M. Estill, James H. Miller; horses Dick, Bob and Bess to Ford-Ferguson and Plymouth; Arkansas trip, Rudy and Susie Wickey family and John R. Martin; Christian Fellowship Review, Maple Grove Mission, resignation from Mission Interests Committee, leaving the Amish and becoming Mennonite.

The 1954 year was momentous for our family, even if we did not know all the implications at the time. It was my first year as a Mennonite, well sort of becoming a Mennonite, and my last year as an Amish child, again sort of leaving the Amish. Later in life, I’ve often been fascinated by why this change occurs that people make the fairly radical shift of changing churches—especially if it is a close church community such as the Amish. In retrospect the change was probably inevitable, a mix of my father’s religious and cultural aspirations. I’ll note several events that year, none of which is the sole explanation.

This year I entered the fifth grade and the teacher was Ida Rumbaugh, Nellie Siegenthaler’s sister and was equally strict and good. One morning she showed new library books, pointing out one which may be of special interest. This small book had two Amish boys on the cover, and I had earlier seen it in my father’s bookstore Goodwill Book Exchange. It was Amish Life (1952) by John A. Hostetler, and I did not expect to see one of my father’s books in the school library. And I also knew the author because John A.  Hostetler had visited our home. At recess I went up to the table and looked at the book and its photos and drawings in a new way. It was also the first time I was aware of anyone being interested in the Amish, except of course God and the Amish themselves.

Anyway, there were occasional Parent Teacher Association (PTA) meetings in the evenings, and my parents would go. Both parents attended off and on, but I remember especially Andrew at those meetings; he visited with Roy Stallman, our principal; Ida Rumbaugh, my teacher; and Dale Stutzman, (my brother Paul’s Mennonite teacher). Both parents respected our teachers, but Andrew seemed to consider them his peers, perhaps thinking back of his favorite teacher Clarence Zuercher. 

About this same time, I went with Andrew to Millersburg to see the attorney Elmo M. Estill who was also the Holmes County common pleas judge from 1937 to 1955. My father showed the attorney his tax forms, and the farm generally showed very little net income, but it was good work for us boys and fed our growing family. Judge Estill reviewed the tax form page for a few minutes, and handed it back to Andrew. “That looks about right, Andy.”

It was never clear to me whether my father really wanted information from Judge Estill or whether he mainly wanted to show his sons that attorneys are important. The same was true when my father cultivated friendships with professionals such as the editor Paul Erb, the physician Charles Hart, the banker Alvin Ruess and the merchant Lewis Beech. With most of these people, there was an explicit Christian bond, but what was also clear was that Andrew admired people who were professional leaders. It was as though he considered them his peers, had he had the opportunity for more formal schooling. The implicit message to his children was that we should achieve such education and professions.

Even an intellectual hermit could count for this relationship. One day we went to Berlin, and my Father stopped in to visit James H. Miller (1884-1964) who had a clock and watch repair business, but what interested my father was that James Miller’s house was full of books and magazines of natural history. James Miller patiently showed us some of his arrow heads and stacks and stacks of books and magazines. When we left, it was clear that the visit was for our (boys’) benefit as Andrew confided to us that James Miller was one of the best educated people in Holmes County. I later learned that Miller had studied at the College of Wooster and had earlier been a teacher and superintendent in the Eastern Holmes County school district. I don’t think our father ever came right out and said it, but the message was repeated many times in my childhood. Andrew and Mattie wanted their children to have more formal schooling than they had and to enter the professions.  

Andrew also preferred cars and tractors to horses; this may seem strange to his grandchildren who remember when Andrew as their elderly grandfather who had a pony and would often take them for rides in his cart. Perhaps by the 1980s a pony was a hobby for Andrew, but in 1954 my father was eager to exchange horses for a 1948 Ford-Ferguson tractor and a 1949 Plymouth automobile. This was the last year of our draft horse team of geldings Bob and Dick and our road mare Bess, so we’ll honor their memory. Our draft horses were studies in contrast. Dick was a good natured, reddish-colored Belgian, and we boys could pull his mane or ride him and he never bit or bucked. Even though he was a large draft horse, he seemed be able to do anything whether pulling a garden cultivator, pulling our surrey with the high step of a Standardbred on Sundays or putting up with Bob during the week.

Dick was generally teamed with Bob, but even to call them a team was a stretch, because if Dick was a Hebrew and a Christian, Bob was a Philistine and a pagan. Bob was known for kicking, biting, overworking (and then trembling), and being generally unpredictable. He looked like a wannabe Percheron from Hades. Finally there was Bess, our sure-footed little trotter who pulled the surrey and buggy, without incident and accident, causing little David to quip: “Bess net lip.” (Bess does not slip). Whatever good feelings the horses engendered from Mattie and us boys, I always thought Andrew saw them as a burden, more than as beasts of burden.

During this transition time we boys were ready for the car and tractor, and drove at every opportunity. Andrew and Mattie purchased our Plymouth in April and on Sunday afternoons when our parents went to fellowship meetings, they sometimes combined transportation with Homer Dotson, a seeking soul from Columbiana County. We took the opportunity to take whichever car was left behind (Dotson’s old Chevrolet or the family Plymouth) for rides around the countryside. Paul at the ripe age of 13 would put cushions on the seat to see over the steering wheel (I don’t remember how he managed the pedals), and we would all get in and make a round trip up the Fredricksburg Road to Arthur E. Parrots, then head south up over the hill circling back down to the Benton Road and home. It was quite a ride and all went okay, until one Sunday, Paul lost his nerve on the first curve and we ended up in the ditch.

We quickly went up to the barn and harnessed Dick and Bob who rescued us, pulling the car out of the ditch. The car had little damage except tearing off the chrome at the bottom of the passenger door which we put back on as best we could. Paul drove the car back and parked it, and we returned the Dick and Bob to the barn. Neighbor John M. Miller came by and dutifully reported the accident to our parents. Nothing much came out of it except guilty consciences by little boys and some smoldering resentment toward our neighbor (who we now called Mountain Lion) for what we thought was too eagerly reporting on us.

The Plymouth soon had lots of use. By summer my parents, Paul, and baby Rhoda (nine months old) were on their way to Harrison, Arkansas, to visit a voluntary service unit which the Mission Interests Committee had set up at Hillcrest Home, a county old people’s home. But the trip and the stories which came out of it became important in our family lore not for the Harrison destination but the trip itself. We were regaled with stories of their singing as they crossed the rivers (the big Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri and some smaller ones). They would sing gospel river songs, and I imagined the big broad rivers with a little Plymouth of singing Millers.

And they reported of their memorable visit to an eccentric and short-lived Amish settlement in Hohenwald, Tennessee. Here in the Tennessee hills (high forests) lived the Rudolph (Rudy) and Susie Wickey family and the Paul Martin family. Andrew and Mattie used to call him “flee to the hills Wickey” based on Wickey’s interpretation of the Luke 21:21 verse which says that in the latter days, those in Judea should flee to the hills. Even though Wickey wanted to flee from the apparently degenerate Wayne County in 1947, he drew considerable attention when he and wife Susie and five little children left Wooster with an overloaded homemade covered wagon with two horses pulling, and a buggy and pony hitched behind.

By the time the unusual caravan reached Millersburg and good-natured neighbors and passersby had helped to push the wagon up the steep hills for the outmatched horses, the Holmes County sheriff and probate judge were waiting for Wickey. The county officials tried to convince him that he was endangering his family as well as his horses, and even tried to get the local Amish ministers to mediate but to no avail. Finally, they convinced Wickey to send Susie and the children by train along with some of the heavy household items, and then he could continue. Rudy then continued on his 550-mile trip alone, arousing newspaper coverage all along the way, and when he reached Tennessee, the Associated Press picked up the story announcing to the nation that Wickey had arrived to the Tennessee hills. 

Our family reports had the Wickeys all barefoot, and that the doors of old refrigerators served as paneling for the inside walls of their house. They raised some chickens for food and eggs, and the children had to check for eggs on the hour in order to get them before the black snakes ate them. Mattie especially with her practical instincts described the Wickeys and Martins as “poor as mice” and saw them as a cautionary story of religious extremism. John R. Martin of Old Order Mennonite background was of a literary bent like Andrew and had just published a booklet called Der Schmale Weg (The Narrow Road). Our family had visited just in time because the settlement was finished by the next year 1955 when everyone moved away. The John R. Martin family’s next stop of the narrow way was in Mexico. 

But the biggest impulse in my father in life was always religious, and he gave full reign to it by publishing his own periodical and buying land for his own church. Within six months after discontinuing the printing of Witnessing, Andrew was writing and publishing his own about bi-weekly publication, a small four-page mimeographed piece called Christian Fellowship Review. On the masthead, he published its mission: “Christian Fellowship Review is published in the interest of the Full Gospel, as taught and practiced by Christ, the Apostles, and early Christians; the spreading of its message, and the benefits of its precepts.” The early issues give some sense for where Andrew was now giving his religious energy, at home.

Several themes stand out from the 21 issues of the Review which were issued that first year. First it was a personal call for Christians to work at home and with what is near at hand, an “everyday life of love and humble service one to another.” An issue began with “A Kitchen Prayer” with rhyming lines: “Pray, let me serve by getting meals and washing up the plates,/ By scouring pots and pans and things from early until late.” And ends with this couplet: “Thou who didst love to give men food, in room or by the sea, /Accept this service that I do… as unto Thee.” Although Andrew’s publication honored domestic and household duties, he himself kept the traditional gender roles and never helped in the kitchen.

But a direction was clear. 

Andrew says that mission boards and international relief efforts have their place and acknowledges an “Elijah or a Paul, or a more modern Moody or Menno Simons.” But still, he says, “our point is that everyday unnoticed service becometh every child of God.” (All quotes and underlining here are from the April 4, 1954, issue.) Throughout rest of the year, this theme runs through the issues, noting Andrew’s shift to working locally in Holmes County rather than with the North American Mission Interests Committee and with a national publication such as Witnessing or Herald der Wahrheit.  

A second part of this personal and local focus is quite literal; Andrew is the now the publisher, editor, writer and printer of the publication. He does it all and no one controls him. Even when others write for the publication, he inserts comments or additions at will. When B.Y. of Virginia in “Review Readers Write” (May 16, 1954, page 3) says that we can be redeemed by Jesus and “We do have much evidence of His power yet today.” Andrew inserts ”(Yes, ‘Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever,’ the Bible says, Ed.)” He regularly helps his writers by inserting an “Ed” and parenthesis. For example, his fellow-Holmes County mission interests friend Yost H. Miller writes an article (May 23, 1954, pages 1-4) on where we stand before God and asks: “Have I honestly accepted Christ as my offering for sin (and Lord of my life, Ed.) and therefore my only hope of salvation?” 

Theologically, Andrew is now combining a historic Anabaptist emphasis with a twentieth century Pentecostalism. References to the Martyrs Mirror, persecution, and separation continue, and the key verse on the front page is 1 John 1:7: “If we walk in the Light as he is in the Light we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin.” But many references to the Pentecostal language of full Gospel, always capped Full Gospel also appear. On the November 21 issue’s front page, Andrew would insert: “Published in the interest of the Full Gospel from an unsectarian and impartial viewpoint.” Favorite texts came from the first several chapters of Acts on the early New Testament Church.    

Finally by the end of the year, Christian Fellowship Review became a voice for the local congregation Andrew began: Maple Grove Mission. In the summer of 1954, Andrew and Mattie purchased three acres and an abandoned school house west of Millersburg near Paint Valley. By August they were holding services at the building with people who had attended the earlier Sunday afternoon Fellowship Meetings and neighbors such as Lorie C. Gooding. Andrew and Mattie transferred their church membership to the Pleasant View Conservative Mennonite Church near Berlin with the understanding that they work at the Maple Grove Mission.

By December 19, when Andrew issued the last Christian Fellowship Review of the year, he had produced 21 numbers, sending out about 300 copies per issue. In his year-end note, Andrew thanked the faithful contributors who shared about half of the expense of mailings. He noted that the cost is about one dollar per name per year and that “Less than that threatens its discontinuation or fewer issues.”

By the end of the year, Andrew also sent a resignation letter to the Amish Mission Interest Committee, noting that the reasons are “numerous and too lengthy to discuss here. They are largely circumstantial developments locally which we have accepted as the Lord’s supreme will.” The full-page letter continues “My wife and I with some others are laboring and associated with the work at Maple Grove Gospel Mission [and] have been publically accepted and recognized as in full fellowship with the Conservative Mennonite Church.” Andrew says their decision has given them “unspeakable happiness and joy in the Lord,” but he has continued interest in the committee’s work, wishing the members well, thanking them for their kindness and cooperation, and finally asking for mutual forgiveness and forbearance where their views had differed.

Still the farewell had to be bitter sweet for Andrew, knowing that he had become a liability to the committee similar to Russell Manaiaci who a year earlier Andrew had helped to remove. A week before Andrew had sent the letter, the committee had met in Chicago and had already accepted his resignation de facto by his absence. At this point the committee’s intention was to work within an Amish framework, not to serve as a vehicle to transfer to the Mennonites or much less to begin one’s own church. Andrew confided to Gertrude Enders Huntington that when he “was put under the ban for joining the Conservative Church,” members of the [Witnessing] staff severed all connection with him. His articles were not published, and his subscription to Witnessing stopped abruptly. Enders Huntington concludes: “He commented with considerable feeling that they no longer wanted to have anything to do with him.”      

Perhaps Andrew’s transition was summarized best by his friend and Indiana confidante Harvey Graber who wrote two years later: “Andrew A. Miller was lost to the new movement because he found it impossible to labor on under the control of the Amish church. He was very active in the mission movement before he left the church in the spring of 1954.” Mattie and family members and the Mennonite bishop Harry Stutzman might have added that Andrew found it impossible to labor under the control of any organization, whether church or otherwise. Andrew may not have agreed with Henry David Thoreau’s theology, but every instinct in him led him to live Thoreau’s philosophy: "If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away. "

Most of this chapter comes from memory and conversations with family. A profile of James H. Miller appears in the Sesquicentennial History of the Berlin Community compiled by Oscar R. Miller, Roy R. Miller, and Stanley Kaufman (Berlin: Berlin Sesquicentennial Historical Committee, 1966, page 112). I wrote a piece on our horses in “The godly horse,” Christian Living (Mennonite Publishing House, October, 2001, page 7). The Arkansas trip and Wickey story relies on family members, especially brother Paul, and from David Luthy’s chapter “Hohenwald, Tennessee,” in The Amish in America: Settlements that Failed, 1840-1960 (Alymer: Pathway Publishers, 1986. pages 449-452). The Amish Mission Interest Committee minutes (December 21, 1954) forcing Andrew’s resignation as well as Andrew’s farewell letter (December 27, 1954), are in his collection of the Archives of the Mennonite Church. Andrew’s lament on leaving the Amish Mission Interest Committee appears in Gertrude Ender Huntington’s unpublished dissertation Dove at the Window (page 273) in the Mennonite Historical Library at Goshen College, also where one finds Harvey Graber’s summary regarding Andrew in an unpublished 1956 paper for a Harold S. Bender class: “Spiritual Awakening in the Old Order Amish Church.” Thoreau’s quote comes from the conclusion of Walden.  

1953 Strangers and Pilgrims

1953   Strangers and Pilgrims. Grade 4, Nellie Siegenthaler, Spell downs, Flag salute, Melvin Schlabach, William F. (Bill) Miller, Emmanuel Schrock, Joseph John Clauss, Witnessing and Amish Christian Fellowship Bulletin, David A. Miller meeting; Fourth Amish Mission Conference in Hutchinson, Kansas, September 3 birth of Rhoda, Signs of Andrew’s separation from the Amish.

I entered the fourth grade at Holmesville School with Nellie Siegenthaler as our no-nonsense, sharp-eyed teacher. Ms. Siegenthaler was with the outstanding 1926 Holmesville High School class of Roy Stallman and Eva Sterling Humrichouser, and though short of stature, she was considered one of the strictest teachers in the Holmesville School. Ms. Siegenthaler or Nellie, as we students called her among ourselves, liked to do spell downs as a featured activity every Friday. Fourth grade spell downs were a learning game in which the class formed two sides, lined up on the two sides of the room in a random way, and if you miss-spelled a word or got the wrong answer in mathematics, you had to sit down. The turn would go from one side to the other to see which side was left standing. 

Other times we would all line up, and if you got the wrong answer you simply went to the end of the line; thus whoever was left at the front of the line (think Benny Miller, Joyce Paulocsak or Sarah Miller) at the end of the period, was the winner. She also had flash cards for addition, subtraction, simple division and multiplication, and again they were in the form of answering correctly, and you would stay; if not you were down, or heading to the back of the line.

Though sharp- eyed and rigorous, Ms. Siegenthaler also had a soft and funny heart on an individual basis. For spelling words, she would say the word, use it in a sentence, and then say the word again. Here we might get some of her humor, such as when the word “mischievous” fell to Jacob Mast who was in fact quite ornery and got into trouble with Ms. Siegenthaler. She said the word “mischievous,” “Jake is sometimes mischievous in our class,” “mischievous.” Jake often missed school and failed to bring written excuses from his parents, but we knew that she liked him. Jake wrote his absentee excuses himself on behalf of his father Andy Mast.

During the year I also remember taking my younger brother David along one day; it was not unusual to bring a younger family member along if there was a special day. Anyway, one day we dressed up as circus and zoo animals, and had a parade, and I took David along. I was a lion and David walked along as a cub and a big hit; the girls all said that David was cute and Ms. Siegenthaler liked him too.   

About once a month, we had an all-school assembly and one of the classes would take turns in leading an assembly. In November it might have been on the origins of Thanksgiving in the United States, and in February it may have been on the presidents such as Washington and Lincoln. Every morning we would do the American flag pledge of allegiance or the salute. This was an ambiguous issue for Amish and Mennonites; we carried national symbols and patriotism lightly, growing up in homes and a church of conscientious objectors to war. Everyone stood, most of the Amish did not put up their hands in a salute, some recited the pledge and others did not. No one meant any disrespect to our nation, and I think there was a great deal of gratitude to be able to live in a country which had religious freedom. It was never a public issue, and Ms. Siegenthaler and the other teachers would respect the children’s non-resistant responses.

But one flag salute became memorable for me. Ms. Siegenthaler was looking for people to lead parts of an all-school assembly and I--eager to please-- immediately raised my hand for the flag salute, along with Roy Snyder. But after I volunteered, I realized that this was not the proper role for an Amish Mennonite child to do, much as it was quite appropriate for a Boy Scout such as my friend Roy Snyder. I did not feel well the rest of the day, and that evening I asked Mattie what to do, not wanting to back out of my assignment nor wanting to make a scene with Roy or the other students. But my Mother was sympathetic and said, yes, go ahead with it this time, but you’ll know better the next time. I suppose that early incident became my default stance as a Christian pacifist, trying to follow my conscience as a Christian pacifist, but also trying to be respectful to others and grateful for the freedom of living in United States of America.

   

Our relationship to the government was in Christian terms to be strangers and pilgrims on this earth, and that our citizenship was in heaven. So you can imagine our parents and grandparents dismay when my mother’s brother and our Uncle Melvin registered to enter the U.S. Marine Corps upon his eighteenth birthday. My parents took it especially hard and sent out letters asking for prayer that he would change his mind, and often at family prayers Melvin would be noted as a special petition to God, in hope that he would repent and turn to God. But none of this seemed to deter Melvin. 

Today, I can appreciate that this was a big step for Melvin to take to go from an Amish farm boy to entering the United States Marine Corps. This was during beginnings of the Cold War, the Korean War, and perhaps Melvin felt defending his country was his duty. Melvin would later in life point out that the Marines were also his opportunity to get more schooling education, that his parents would only allow him to go the eighth grade. The rest of the family’s interpretation, however, was that Melvin was in rebellion against his father Levi, the church, and God and needed to repent.  

If Uncle Melvin’s decision jolted our world, I also had my first encounter with the sadness and terror of severe mental illness during this year, and my father often prayed for Emmanuel Schrock at family devotions. Andrew and Mattie visited their friend Emmanuel quite regularly at the Massillon State Hospital during this year, and sometimes we children went along. Emmanuel and Andrew ran around together as youths and used to play musical instruments together, and I think my father sympathized especially for his friend who had been engaged to be married to his sister, our Aunt Esther Miller. The wedding had been called off as the family had become increasingly aware of Emmanuel’s emotional illness.

But the Massillon visits were scary to me with a big brick building which had bars at the windows, even though the building and doors were quite open when we would visit. I was seeing people who looked straight at you and said random things; one woman came up to me and tried to pet my hair in a strange way. My mother and father would visit with Emmanuel, and give him reading material, and he seemed quite normal to me. Still to see someone I considered a relative and dressed in Amish clothes seemed incongruous and fearful, and I knew he could not go home. We used simply to say that Emmanuel had gone insane, and I would at night wonder if I might also go insane and need to live in a terrible building separated from my family. Years later as an elderly man, Andrew  would again visit Emmanuel regularly at a day care home and sing for him, and give him tapes of his music.

    

At that point our religious economy of the Amish and the world and Christians was pretty clear to my parents and to us. You might be a good heathen or a moral person but you may still not make the grade if you were not among the Christian faithful, as our family and church understood it. In real life it was of course not always that clear, especially with our neighbors. Our nearest neighbors across the road at Holmesville were Eli and Alma Weaver; we called him Peter Sam’s Eli, and they were Amish. They did not live there for very long, and I remember the Weavers mainly for their animals. Eli had big Belgium horses, and occasionally his stallion would mount a mare in the barn yard, or someone would bring a mare on the truck for breeding. It was quite a show, and then there was his dog which fought with our Buster.

But the Weavers soon moved, and were replaced by William (Bill) and Maxine Miller, whose religious affiliation I never knew. Maxine’s parents Arthur (A.E.) and Mellanie Parrot lived up the road on another farm, and her brother Rollin Parrot and his wife Jill Menuez lived in a stone house also near the home place of the Parrots.  Maxine was quite vocal while Bill was a man of few words. Religiously, I did not know exactly what to make of the Millers because they were thrifty moral neighbors, but they were not very religious at least not in the sense that they worked in the fields on Sundays, drank some beer, and did not attend church worship often, at least the way we did.

Most of Bill and Maxine’s farm land was on the south side of the Fredricksburg road and ours on the north, but they farmed the land along side ours behind the railroad tracks and along Salt Creek. Quite often Bill would drive his big Farmall M tractor on the little driveway in back of our lawn to get to his fields.  Anyway, one spring Paul, Roy and I were back cultivating our corn field with the horses, and then we went across Bill’s field and put the cultivator down and plowed out some of his corn. It was sheer boy vandalism, and why we did it, I do not know. 

Several evenings later we were playing ball in our front lawn, and we heard Bill back in his field cultivating corn. It was almost dark when we heard Bill approach on the big Farmall M from back of the railroad tracks. The big diesel roared louder and louder as Bill approached closer, and when he came even with our lawn and playing field, he stopped the tractor. The engine idled a little; he let the cultivator down, and then he shut off the engine. Paul, Roy and I immediately stopped playing and stood in attention, down cast faces and all ears.

All was quiet, and then Bill spoke slowly: “Okay, boys, I saw what you did.” He sounded angry, and perhaps even sad. All was quiet, but then he added. “I’m not going to say anything to your parents this time. “ He seemed to be piecing this together, and there was a pause. And then he finished, “But don’t you ever do it again.” Immediately, the big Farmall M started up; he pulled up the cultivator on the hydraulic lift, went past us on the Fredricksburg road and drove home.

We just stood there; we did not have time to apologize, and he did not even give us a chance to thank him for saving us from the spanking which Andrew would have given us. But that was the end of it; Bill never brought it up again, ever, and we had been taught and important lesson on grace. For the next several decades, our families lived side by side in different cultural and religious worlds, and we never socialized together. Perhaps Bill’s personality of being a hard-working man of few words made him seem impersonal. But to us boys, we knew Bill had another side, a soft side of grace.   

Andrew had another time of inter-religious exchange when he and Yost H. Miller of Berlin took the bus to Goshen, Indiana and visited extensively with Joseph John Clauss, a Catholic professor at the Mount Saint Mary of the West Seminary in Cincinnati. Clauss’ family was in Mishawaka, Indiana, hence the travel with Andrew and Yost. After the meeting, Andrew sent Clauss a letter noting that he and Yost felt a certain “oneness and fellowship” with Clauss,  and “my wife and I and brother Yost had been led” to send him some Bibles and books. Andrew encouraged Clauss to read them with an open mind and seemed to identify Clauss’ Catholic tradition with his own Amish background, noting that “the Lord of mercy and compassion opened my heart and mind to His blessed gospel of salvation,” otherwise “I would have had to reap the harvest of the deluded, the superstitious, and misinformed who know not God, nor obey His Gospel.”

After telling the priest the story of his own Christian conversion experience at age seventeen. Andrew concludes the letter: “I hope and pray that your superior learning and status will not make a barrier between us. We send our love. Andrew A. Miller and wife.” A year later the two were still writing to each other, and exchanging periodicals as Andrew now sent him his new publication Christian Fellowship Review, and Clauss returned the favor sending Andrew  the Catholic weekly called, Our Sunday Visitor. Clauss thanked Andrew for his letters and literature but noted: “As you no doubt realize, I am in complete disagreement with many of the ideas.” Other magazines which Andrew received that year were: Healing Waters, “America’s healing magazine” with the editor and founder Oral Roberts listed; and the Mennonite magazines: Youth Christian Companion and Gospel Herald.  

This was another busy year for Andrew as chair of the Mission Interests Committee. One of the first projects of the committee was to begin its own periodical separate from the earlier Russell Manaiaci newsletter called Amish Mission Endeavor Bulletin. The Amish committee now saw Manaiaci as a liability and moved decisively (at Andrew’s urging) to separate from Manaiaci. In retaliation for the unhappy parting, Manaiaci withheld his extensive mailing list from the Amish committee. According to the Amish Mission Interest’s Committee, however, Manaiaci’s leadership was causing opposition because (1) he was not Amish himself, (2) he did not know the German or Pennsylvania German dialect, and (3) he was too inter-denominational.

Andrew led the committee in a separation action, calling Manaiaci’s proposals “unthinkable.”  The committee named Harvey Graber of Indiana as editor of the new paper called Witnessing. Andrew volunteered to get the publication going by printing the first issue on his own mimeograph machine at Holmesville.  The publication began to about 300 addresses with an April- May issue, but by the third issue, the printing had moved to The Mennonite Press in North Newton, Kansas.

In the meantime, Andrew was doing some publication and writing of his own. In the December of 1952, Andrew released a mimeographed newsy paper called Amish Christian Fellowship Bulletin which told of the various Amish Christian fellowship meetings held that year in Holmes County, the first one being on August 31 at the Andrew and Mattie Miller home and others on alternate weeks at homes of interested families such as Homer (Dien Eile’s Homer) and Fannie Miller of Fredricksburg, David (Heine David’s Davey) Yoder, Jacob S. (Steffy’s Jake) and Elizabeth Miller of Mt. Hope. Andrew said “what the future holds for the Amish Christian Fellowship we do not know. We want to be fully resigned to the word and will of God.” 

These bi-weekly Sunday afternoon meetings began in the summer of 1951 at Beechville School and were held in homes until the summer of 1954. Of his bulletin, he said, “Christian Fellowship Bulletin is published occasionally in the interest of Bible study, unity, missionary endeavor and fellowship of nonresistant Christian believers and followers of Christ.” But after one issue, Andrew discontinued it “for the time being,” as he later told Gertrude Enders Huntington: “Perhaps when I retire from farming I’ll start it up again.”  

Andrew’s biggest writing project that winter was the front-page article of the Mennonite Gospel Herald on March 17, 1953. Entitled “Illicit Fellowship,” the article called for the traditional Anabaptist separation from the world, although Andrew allowed some exception: “Differences of opinion concerning certain outward observances, cultural and personality clashes, denominational bickering and prejudice, and the like, are not biblical grounds for ‘putting away’ and withdrawal of fellowship.” As examples of being unequally yoked with those outside the true saving faith, he included: “business enterprises, community social and civic associations, sitting on juries, and holding public office, however innocent it may appear.” During the next months and year, Andrew got numerous complements from his Amish Mission friends on the article. 

The big event for the whole Miller family that summer however was hosting a meeting of the Thomas, Oklahoma traveling minister and evangelist David A. Miller. On the evening of August 7^th Miller preached before a crowd of “approximately 800 people under the open heavens in Holmesville” as Amish historians would report a quarter century later. I well remember the lanterns spread across the front lawn as the evangelist spoke to the large crowd. Miller stood on the large stone slab by the house in the front lawn, and I remember going to the stone afterwards to see if it was okay after everyone left, and then going out to the chicken house where our Rhode Island Red hens were roosting, as if to see the animals had some form of normalcy. David A. Miller, often called Oklahoma Dave, was an engaging and passionate speaker who the Amish mission people saw as their own answer to the Mennonites’ evangelists such as George R. Brunk II and Andrew Jantzi.

A week later Andrew attended the Fourth Amish Mission Conference held August 12-14, 1953, at Harmon Yoder farm near Hutchinson, Kansas. Again, this same Oklahoma David A. Miller was the featured speaker, giving three sermons during the three days. Andrew also gave a talk at the meetings on “Witnessing by the Printed Page—Bibles, books, Periodicals, and Gospel Literature.” The committee secretary David L. Miller’s report in Witnessing, noted: “[Andrew A. Miller] gave an intensely interesting historical survey of how we got our Bible. He mentioned the various translations and remarked that he did not see a reason for becoming unduly alarmed at the RSV [Revised Standard Version].” The report concludes with Andrew’s personal testimony of conversion and reading only the Bible for six months.

As chair of the organizing committee Andrew Miller also closed the last session “with an expression of gratitude to the local group.” Andrew “told all of us that the mountain-top experience upon which we had been dwelling the past few days could be ours at home with the same means that we had experienced [it here], that of intensive Bible study and prayer.” In the business meeting, Andrew was again elected to the continuing committee, this time as assistant chairman.  When Andrew returned home, Mattie soon delivered the family’s sixth child and first daughter on September 3: Rhoda.  Mattie and Andrew liked to give their children biblical names.

Throughout the year Andrew wrote widely and received letters from all over North America, especially where there were Amish dissenters or religious seekers such as a Homer Dotson of North Lima, Ohio, and he wrote to his confidante the young Witneslsing editor Harvey Graber on how criticism can help us. But Andrew and Mattie also were increasingly aware of the precarious nature of their relationship with the Holmesville local district where norms were largely maintained by extending or withholding fellowship. Andrew wrote to the minister Noah Keim, father of the Eastern Mennonite University history professor Al Keim, inviting him to come and speak at a Sunday afternoon Amish fellowship meeting. But Keim declined, saying that much as he would like to come, if he fellowships with Andrew’s group, Keim would no longer be invited to preach among the other Amish districts in Holmes County.

By December 30, Andrew writes a deeply personal letter to his friends Harvey Graber and Daniel Beachy of Goshen, Indiana, noting that “a good brother” had been unfairly disciplined by those Andrew called “the Judiazers” in his own church. Clearly, Andrew’s days in the Amish church were coming to an end. He concludes the letter on a domestic note, that he said he is at home baby sitting with Rhoda, and that Mattie and the boys went to Wooster on the bus. His busy correspondence, committee work and farming also did not keep him from organizing a Christmas package project to local needy families with boxes of food, comforts, coats, mattress, and quilts with contributors individuals such as the “June Weavers, Ammon Wengerds, John Hochstetlers, Ivan Hochstetlers, Neal Wengerds” as well as groups such as various Mennonite sewing circles and Bible classes. These kinds of personal charity drives would characterize much of the rest of Andrew’s life.

The Andrew Miller and Catholic priest John Joseph Clauss correspondence is found in the files of Andrew A. Miller personal collection in the Archives of the Mennonite Church (AMC). All the other correspondence quoted is also found in these same files. Information of the Amish Christian Fellowship meetings comes from Amish Christian Fellowship Bulletin (Volume 1, December 1, 1952, Number 1), published once from Holmesville, Ohio, in the files of Andrew A. Miller (AMC). Andrew’s comment on only publishing one issue appears in Gertrude Enders Huntington, Dove at the Window, unpublished dissertation at Mennonite Historical Library at Goshen College. The David A. Miller evening meeting is noted in Edward Kline and Monroe L. Beachy, “History and Dynamics of the New Order Amish of Holmes County, Ohio," Old Order Notes (Fall Winter, 1998, pages 7-19).  Andrew’s talk at the August Hutchinson, Kansas, conference was reported in Witnessing (September October, 1953, Number 4, page 4), in the Andrew A. Miller collection of AMC.  

1952 Amish and Mennonites

1952  Amish and Mennonites. Grade 3, Miss Betty Litteral; relations with Mennonites, Roman Stutzman and summer Bible school, memorization; Paul Erb and Mennonite Publishing House staff visit; writing with Paul and Roy; Andrew’s leadership with Amish Mission Interests Committee, third annual conference in Indiana; Jacob A. and Orpha Yoder and Roy L. and Ivy Schlabach families; comparing two renewal attempts: Amish mission movement and Mennonite Concern pamphlet group.

In the spring of 1952, I finished the second grade with Mrs. Violet Philips, our neighbor who lived at our end of Holmesville. She was wife the well driller Harry Philips who walked with a stiff leg. And for the third grade, I entered a new elementary school building attached to what used to be the old Holmesville High School. The last high school class graduated in 1951, the Holmesville high school students joined with Fredricksburg and soon after with the Southeast Local Schools which would include Apple Creek and Mt. Eaton. My third grade teacher was Betty Litteral, a pleasant young Millersburg woman, who had recently finished college. I think she was the only elementary teacher I had who was not a neighbor or known to our family. A Betty Jane Litteral of Millersburg, Ohio, shows up as a freshman in the yearbook of Union College of Barbourville, Kentucky, 1946, on Google.  She was probably our Holmesville teacher. I learned Miss Litteral later became Mrs. Don Bertler, a well-known real estate agent in Holmes County. 

At this point the Benton area children of families such as Feikerts (Gary), Phillips (Cynthia), Masts (Julia), and Troyers (Linda) still attended the Holmesville School, although soon they all would transfer to the East Holmes School District when it was formed. We would walk to school with the Rudy Coblentz’s boys and the Roman Stutzman’s boys. Dale was in Paul’s class, and his dad Roman was a farmer and the bishop of the Martin’s Creek Mennonite Church.

Roman Stutzman gave us our first experience with the Summer Bible School when Paul, Roy, and I attended at Martin’s Creek. Actually we earlier had the Herald Press books at home; Andrew and Mattie had thought Bible learning was so important, that that they bought the Herald Press books for us at home, but now we would join the Mennonite children. In his stationwagon, Roman would drive us over to Martins Creek with his own children. Here we learned Bible verses and sang “This is my Father’s World” every morning. I have many positive and pleasurable memories of 1950s Mennonite meetinghouse basements with their curtains for classroom walls from Martins Creek and Pleasant View near Winesburg. Sounds constantly came from the classes, and if you were not interested in your own class, you could listen to what was going on the other side of the curtain. We learned the Ten Commandments, stories and teachings of Jesus, bishop Harry Stutzman’s martyr and missionary profiles and a tremendous amount of memory work.

That said, Summer Bible School actually began on a negative note at Martins Creek. Paul, Roy and I were used to going without shoes in the summer, and a few of the Martin’s Creek boys apparently saw this al fresco style as an invitation to step on our toes, physically and surely on our egos too. We saw it as hostility, and for many years after that we called the children of Martin’s Creek Mennonite the toe stompers (die Zehe Dretter). For me, going without shoes was a cherished part of summer, and I remember during my elementary school years running around our house barefoot on the first day of May, sometimes it was still cool, but it was a sign of summer.

Anyway, most of Summer Bible School was positive, especially as we started going to the Pleasant View Bible School in the mid-fifties.  During recess we played games everyone could play such as Drop the Hanky, Red Rover and Flying Dutchman. The latter game was especially fun for its contrasts, such as having a big robust or older teacher running around the circle and holding the hand of a little child. Mary Catherine Mullet, at that time known as Girly, comes to mind. Aside from her rotund physical size, Mary Catherine’s enthusiasm went a long way as an outstanding teacher, and I remember hearing her class from several curtains away. She motivated her students to learn their memory verses and quoted them vigorously.  Of course, we all did. I had many good teachers in Summer Bible School and can name most of them Susie Mast (soon to marry my uncle Abe Schlabach), Ana Aileen Yoder, Albert Coblentz, and Roman Mullet.

Memorization was still an honored part of learning in the fifties whether in the public school or in the religious summer school. My father would quote the classic American literature such as “The Village Blacksmith” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and he knew whole sections of the King James Bible from memory. When the Mennonite Clayton F. Yake put the Summer Bible School curriculum together in the late 30s at Mennonite Publishing House, he included a strong memory element. Even a graduate school course on Chaucer had enough of the tradition remaining that I learned the first part of the prologue by memory. Now, every April when the showers return, I remember the old English lines of the sweet rains engendering the appearance of flowers. Then I think of pilgrimages, the wife of Bath, and the Pardoner, and the good-natured narrator Chaucer trotting along with them and telling us all about them and their stories. 

Whan that Abrill with his shoures soota,

The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

But whatever memorization’s benefits in later life, it gave me mixed feelings at Pleasant View Summer Bible School. Our class had two boys, Clyde Erb and I, and the rest were girls, all of whom were veritable memory learning machines, or so it seemed to me. Unlike Clyde and me, the girls had already memorized all the verses by the second day of school, and we all needed to achieve that goal, especially to say them on the last night’s program for our parents and neighbors. So after the second day the rest of the two weeks during memory time were pure indignity for Clyde and me stammering and trying to recite the lines, while the high-speed memorizing girls gave us hints or condescendingly urged us on.

You can imagine my relief in the sixties, when public educators discovered that such rote learning was not important and for all practical purposes discontinued the practice. How and why and processes of learning were emphasized, and memory learning fell into disfavor. I suppose it was only as an adult several decades later that I recognized some value in schooling before all memory work became discredited.

Amish and Mennonites are related, and we often had a lot of relationships with the Mennonites such as attending their summer Bible school classes; they were out neighbors, religious cousins, and often provided professional services such as teachers and later physicians and attorneys. My parents Andrew and Mattie had Mennonite public school teachers in Clarence Zuercher and Roy R. Miller. Religiously, when the historian and theologian John C. Wenger held two weeks of meetings at the Berlin Mennonite Church, Andrew and Mattie attended. They had many Mennonite books in our library, sold Mennonite books at Goodwill Book Exchange, and Andrew wrote articles for the Mennonite periodicals.

In October, Andrew got a letter from Henry A. Mast of Scottdale, Pennsylvania, wondering if he and Paul Erb, the Mennonite editor of Gospel Herald, could visit the Millers on the weekend of November 15. Mast wrote that Erb “has expressed himself that he would like to have an opportunity to become better acquainted with the Amish people,” noting he had seldom been in an Amish home and never attended a worship service. Erb would return from Chicago by train on the 15^th, and Mast could go up to the Canton, Ohio, train depot to meet him, and “we were wondering if Brother Erb and myself could invite ourselves to your place for Saturday night.” Mast said the “girl who is keeping house for me lives close to Sugarcreek” so he was going to be in the area in any case. Andrew and Mattie readily agreed and two weeks later Mast was writing again, noting that he would also like to bring along two additional staffers Lois Yake and Alice Buckwalter, lamenting that “many of us here in Scottdale have very little if any first-hand knowledge of the Amish.”

We boys were eager for the meeting, and on Saturday gave the two young Mennonite women a pony cart ride with Patsy. On Sunday the Scottdale women got an additional buggy ride from the home where the worship service was held on the Weaver Ridge in the forenoon to the Emmanuel and Alma Mullet home where an Amish and Mennonite publishing meeting was held. This turned out to be kind of a marketing meeting for the Mennonites noting their publishing program and asking what services they could provide for the Amish community. In fact, that seemed a primary motivation for the entire weekend, because Yake and Buckwalter worked in sales and advertising. Andrew reported on the meeting in the Herald der Wahrheit noting the buggy ride and the interest of the Mennonite Publishing House to better serve the Amish community. But we Miller boys remembered it for the excitement of the overnight Mennonite guests and also duly recorded the visit in a letter (Roy or Paul) sent to the children’s section of the Herald.  

Writing letters to “Our Juniors” section of the Herald der Wahrheit, is the earliest remaining existence of the Miller brothers literary activity and on September 4, of 1952, I followed my older brothers’ letters with my first one: “Dear Aunt Mary and All Herald Readers: Greetings in Jesus’ name. This is my first letter to the Herald. I will be eight years old on September 15. I am in the third grade. Best wishes to all. Levi A. Miller.”  The editor Aunt Mary combined my letter with my brother Roy’s letter in which he also noted that our “school didn’t start yesterday on account of polio. It will start the fifteenth.” Our brother Paul included a letter in the same envelope with similar formulaic Christian greetings and closing. In between, Paul noted our pet pony Patsy and that his birthday is on Feb. 1, 1942, and wondered about “a twin, or someone near my age, please write and I will gladly answer.” Mattie kept a record of all her sons’ Herald letter writing in a brown notebook, writing out copies of the letters, as well as keeping account of the credit the boys got from “Aunt Mary” for sending in quizzes and word games as well as answering them. As of September 1952, our accounts were Paul 83 cents, Roy 65 cents, and Levi 10 cents.

  

I later discovered that these early financial numbers may be some indication of our relative wealth the rest of our lives. But to my brothers’ credit, including the infant David, financial numbers seldom interfered unduly with our relationships. Whatever stress our later relationships brought regarding arguments in theology, culture, and politics, these early shared experiences seemed to go a long way in our life-long friendships. Or as Paul sometimes reminded us four score years later; he’s getting a little late in life to go out looking for new friends, let alone looking for new brothers.

Andrew and Mattie were continuing their farming and raising their five little sons, but Andrew was especially involved in the Amish mission movement and in his writing. One could hardly overstate Andrew’s prolific literary output during this year. Writing mainly in German, his short articles and news items appear in almost every issue of the bi-weekly Herald der Wahrheit. Andrew also helped organize the national Amish mission conference at the Clinton Christian Day School near Goshen, Indiana, on August 17-19. Both he and Mattie attended, Andrew giving a speech on “Requirement of Missions.” He gave a “hearty amen” that “mission work does not always mean service in a foreign country; but it does mean that we must know Christ and know that we are His.” This would be a frequent refrain for Andrew that we should be missionaries here at home where we live.

Mennonite Central Committee representative Christian L. Graber also spoke telling of his recent trip to Europe, describing Mennonites who had escaped the Soviet Union and were still in camps in Germany and of the PAX boys who were working in Germany, noting the poverty of the war-devastated Germans. “A [German] man earns as much in one day as one [in] the U.S.  earns in a few hours.”  He also told of work in Greek villages where there was much poverty. “They were torn up by Communists.” He concluded: Let us keep in mind to do good unto all men if we want to be clear before God. We need prayers, workers and money.” The Soviet Communist surge was a backdrop for political evil, as well as a kind of cautionary challenge for missionary zeal. Willie Wagler of Hutchinson, Kansas, concluded a sermon with the question: “Who spreads his belief the most—a Christian or a Communist?”

Andrew read scripture (Romans 8:1-11) at another session, and two of Andrew and Mattie’s relatives were also a vital part of this conference. Jacob A. Yoder of Sugarcreek, Ohio, was a minister who gave a testimony one evening. He was Andrew’s first cousin, and his wife Orpha was Mattie’s first cousin, and we used to call him Orpha Jake. Jacob was a devout man who shared many of my father’s Christian convictions, and we used to visit them quite often; furthermore, they had young children about our age such as James, Edith, Albert, Edwin, and Robert. What fascinated me about Orpha was her ability to nurse her little ones, even after they could walk and talk. One time we were all sitting in the living room, and one of her toddlers came running to her, asking for a drink. Without missing a beat Orpha obliged, and the little one slurped happily until he bit her nipple. Then she gave him a friendly slap and told him to get going, na gehts du.

Mattie’s brother Roy L. Schlabach was clearly the keynoter of the conference, although in traditional modesty, no such designation appeared on the program. Already on the first day, he gave a short testimony or reflection on “thinking and hearing of the Anabaptist Vision,” urging his listeners to recapture the Apostolic and Anabaptist vision. Then he gave the concluding sermon of the conference on “The Need of Mankind” as well as the benediction. For the conference planners having Uncle Roy, as we used to call him, on the program was an important move in giving their new mission project some legitimacy in the Amish community. Roy was already a respected young minister and writer, well-known in Holmes County circles as well as in the larger North American Amish community.

My mother’s favorite brother was like Andrew, literate in both German and English. And like Jacob and Orpha, Roy and Iva Schlabach also had children about our age: Emma, Clara, Rob(1945-2011), and Levi.  Both Roy and Jacob would come and speak at the local Amish Christian Fellowship meetings which my father organized on Sunday afternoons, as a follow-up to the national conference. However, this year may also have been a high water mark in these three families’ participation in the Amish mission movement, for within two years each family’s moved in different and distinct directions. Roy and Iva decided to stay rooted in the Amish church; Jacob and Orpha cast their lot with the fledgling Bethel Fellowship or Beachy church, and Andrew and Mattie joined the Mennonite church. In many ways the three families’ decisions were paradigmatic of what became of the movement as well as their offspring.      

After the conference, the mission newsletter notes the unmarried young people had a “singspiration” while the young mission leaders went into another building for a business session. Here they elected Andrew A. Miller to chair a committee to plan next year’s event and take care of any business until the next meeting. The September Amish Mission Endeavor newsletter, a conference report, summarized the talks of the conference. Andrew on behalf of the committee, in an afterword, noted that however “smooth going” the conference may have seemed to most, it also had some “uneven places,” especially for the conference planners. Apparently, one well qualified speaker from Iowa was prepared to give a presentation on “The Missionary Zeal of the 16^th Century Anabaptists,” and was overlooked, “much to the regret of the committee.” And finally, Andrew mentioned that the “language question,” whether to speak in German or English, was left optional to the speaker, and apparently this left some participants grumbling. In traditional humility, Andrew concluded: “If we can have some forebearance with one another, we believe that we can go on, in spite of our imperfections and failures.”                   

The conference made numerous references to Harold S. Bender’s “Anabaptist Vision” (1944). Oral tradition had Goshen College's dean Harold S. Bender attending one of the sessions himself, including commenting to Roy L. Schlabach that he hopes the Amish mission movement does not “throw out the baby with the bath water” in its renewal and outreach zeal. During 1952 some of Bender’s students were meeting in Amsterdam in the first session of what was to become the Concern pamphlet group. Seven Mennonite graduate students, relief workers, and missionaries met for a week, and for the next decade issued occasional pamphlets on church renewal and the church’s role in society. Like the Amish renewal group which was informal by nature, the Concern group was informal in structure by conscious design. The Concern young people saw the Mennonite church becoming too Protestant, developing hierarchical institutions and strong conferences and bishops. Although there was no formal structure to the seven original members of the Concern group, and the pamphlets did not even have an announced editor until number five in 1958, all said the spirit behind the movement was the young Wayne County intellectual John Howard Yoder (1947).

If the young Amish were motivated by mission, the Concern group was trying to re-capture the nature of the church in the local congregation. Both the Amish mission movement and the Mennonite Concern group voiced a sharp critique of their traditional North American communities. The Concern people called them Corpus Christianum, equating these communities with what they saw as the fall of the Christian church in 312 AD, when the emperor Constantine united the early New Testament Christian movement with the Roman Empire. The Amish Mission Movement people would have heartily agreed. As with most young movements, both were often ambivalent and even in rebellion about their inherited ministerial leadership, their elders.

Neither group would begin a new church body or conference (closest being perhaps a Reba Place in Chicago and a Bethel Fellowship in Berlin), but both movements by the sixties and succeeding decades had significant ideological influence on the traditional Amish and Mennonite churches. The immediate effect for the Holmes County Amish was a tremendous conservative and traditional reaction with the beginning of the Dan Weaver affiliation this same year (1952). Nonetheless, in succeeding years the main body of Amish eventually adopted elements of the mission movement’s emphasis on personal morals, Bible study and outreach, especially relief efforts. For the Mennonites, a non-conference (Benton’s Zion and Hartville’s Roman Miller) conservative reaction would also begin about this same time. Nonetheless, in the succeeding years, Mennonite church life would also incorporate Concern group ideals of diminishing authority from the conference, especially limiting the traditional power of bishops, and giving this power to the local congregation, spawning small groups, and reducing the legitimacy of pastors, especially professional pastoral leadership.

Much of this chapter is from memory and conversations with family members. Information on third-grade teacher Betty Litteral came from classmate Melinda Gales Boekel in an e-mail June 6, 2015. Andrew A. Miller’s correspondence with Henry A. Mast of Mennonite Publishing House concerning the Scottdale staff visit appears in his files at the Archives of the Mennonite Church (AMC), Goshen, Indiana. Andrew’s report on the Scottdale editors’ visit appears the Herald der Wahrheit (December 15, 1952, pages 738-39); we brothers (Roy, Paul and I) also wrote a report on this visit in a “Dear Mary” letter which appeared in the Herald (January 1, 1953, page 29). My first “Dear Mary” letter appeared in the Herald der Wahrheit (October 15, 1952, page 635). I reviewed copies of Herald der Wahrheit at the Ohio Amish Library, Berlin, Ohio. The report of the 1952 Amish mission conference appears in Amish Mission Endeavor, Conference Report (Special Issue, September, 1952) in Andrew’s files at the AMC. Other of Andrew’s activities are reported in Amish Christian Fellowship Bulletin which he published in December, 1952, also in his files of AMC. Harold Bender’s attendance and cautionary quote regarding the Amish mission movement comes from a Rob R. Schlabach telephone conversation May 20, 2010, as he recalled it from his father Roy L. Schlabach. The Mennonite Concern project comes from a Laurelville Mennonite Church Center reunion of six of the seven original Concern participants (John Howard Yoder did not attend) which Rodney Sawatsky and I convened March 1-3 of 1990; papers appeared in Conrad Grebel Review (Volume 8, Number 2, Spring, 1990).