1957 Baptism and Murder

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

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

Give to us, Lord, true courage

To serve thee without any fear;

To honor and love and adore Thee

All the days of this glad New Year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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