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.