1959 Brunks, Beeches and Birds

1959  Brunks, Beeches, and Birds. George R. Brunk family; responding to invitation and Roman J. Mullet; revivalists Rex Humbard, Oral Roberts, and Billy Graham; Holmesville renewal families: Howard and Sally Hovatter, Lewis and Ruth Beech, Sidney and Lois Corl;  bird watching, Waynedale biology teacher Alden Schaffter, considering new vocations; crow hunting. 

 The summer of 1959 brought revivals to Holmes County. The Brunk Tent Revival gave its mix of religious theater and Christian devotion and commitment to our community for about a month. The meetings were scheduled for three weeks in June, but were so well received and attended that a week was added to extend through the first week in July. The headliner George R. Brunk was a tall larger-than-life figure who had a deep bass voice, wide biblical knowledge, and entertaining stories. He spoke in a way which was especially suited to his popular audience of builders, entrepreneurs, farmers, craftsmen, housewives, teachers, and merchants. Twenty years later when I heard Brunk tell some of these same stereotypical jokes at an Allegheny Mennonite Conference meeting, I was embarrassed and cringed, but today I remembered that earlier time and place and Brunk’s main purpose. He reminded the Mennonites and Amish of Holmes County that we were sinners in the hands of a forgiving God.  

George R. Brunk was also interesting as a family character; his father George the first, I learned later, had been an outstanding conservative minister and bishop among the Virginia Mennonites. Brunk had a younger brother Lawrence who had financed the initial tent purchases with a successful poultry operation and then served as the campaign’s song leader and business manager. Called the Brunk Brothers, my parents had attended their meetings in 1951 in Orrville while my parents were still Amish. My father’s bookstore had a book called Revival Fires (1952) with photos of the two brothers, their families and the campaigns, including a full page photo of Lawrence’s flock of 5,000 chickens which had financed the launching of their project.

Then the two brothers had a falling-out, each going his own way. By 1959 the evangelist George R. Brunk brought his wife Margaret and family along with large semi-trucks, house trailers and the tents. It was almost circus-like including the sex appeal of four handsome unmarried sons helping in song leading, announcements, and other parts of the operation. By the end of the four weeks, we knew them by name: Gerald, George Rowland, Paul, and Conrad. There was also a daughter Barbara.

The meetings had wide appeal, even to the young. That summer my little brother James held daily revival meetings on the tree stump in our front lawn, preaching in as deep a Brunk voice as a seven-year-old could have. Attending were James’ two obedient little sisters Rhoda and Miriam (barely out of diapers) coming forward to his invitations, and escaping as soon as possible. The Brunk meetings brought together tremendous collection of churches, across the full spectrum of Mennonites and some Amish. The meetings were sponsored by 17 Mennonite churches in Holmes County, and Maple Grove Mission strongly supported them. We attended regularly, and by the end of the meetings, 27 pledge cards were sent to my father as pastor, noting decisions made for Christ with associations to Maple Grove Mission.

My card dated June 18, 1959, and signed by Roman J. Mullet was among them, and I remember the evening very well. Brunk preached and then an invitation was given softly singing “Just As I am without One Plea.” After several verses, Brunk asked those who had peace with God to raise our hands. I could not and I thought everyone around me was looking longingly over at me. We sat in the back quarter of the full tent, and I walked the long sawdust path to the large curtain strung in front. Behind the curtain, they assigned me to a young Amish counselor from Sugarcreek, Roman J. Mullet (1920-2004). We sat down on chairs facing each other with Roman counseling me and then praying with me. Roman checked on the card afterwards that my reason for coming was “confession of sin” and “backslider in heart.”

Throughout much of my adult life, I met Mennonites who spoke in regret or even anger for having responded to Brunk’s invitations. They remembered the psychological coercion at the meetings or that the meetings removed the Christian confession and commitment from a local church as was typical of our Mennonite churches. Or some associated Brunk with the restrictive norms of the 50s such as banning TVs and immodest clothing. All true of course.

Still, I never had many of those negative feelings. I was baptized as a Christian two years earlier, but I needed to confess my sins many times before that night and have backslid many times since. Furthermore, I felt better that night and the following weeks, and I may have lived a little better. My consultant Roman Mullet summarized it well on the back of my pledge card: “Thank the Lord for bringing him back to fellowship.”

I liked my one-night counselor Roman J. Mullet and it must have been mutual. He made it a summer relationship by even coming out to Maple Grove Mission for two weeks in July and taught my Summer Bible School class. Then I lost track of him entirely. I learned later that he was actually a minister in the Bethel Fellowship Amish Mennonite or Beachy church and during the sixties would go to El Salvador for a few years of mission service.

I don’t recall that I ever responded to other evangelistic invitations, but it was not for lack of opportunity. My father Andrew was what might be called a junkie for revival, healing, holiness, evangelistic and camp meetings; you name the renewal meeting of this type, I have probably attended. As children we would go with our father and aside from often hearing an unusual speaker, Andrew always treated us to ice cream on the way home.

A coda on the Brunk brothers was several years after the George R. Brunk’s Holmes County revival, his brother Lawrence again showed up in our community and my father attended, of course. My recall was that the tent was near Wilmot, and Lawrence Brunk had moved to a holiness theme with respondents praying all night until they received a second blessing or were sanctified. Not many people attended, but it may have paved the way for John Schrock’s homegrown Pentecostal revival at Berlin several years later.   

Aside from the Mennonite standard bearers already mentioned (1956), there were others who became nationally and internationally known. I remember in the 50s going to a meeting of the Rex Humbard family, using a tent on the fairgrounds at Wooster. The family sang beautifully; I think even Humbard’s parents were traveling with him at the time. Then two decades later in the seventies, I went to hear Humbard at the Civic Arena at Pittsburgh; that was actually a part of writing an article on Humbard’s ministry and enterprises. In between those two dates, Rex and his wife Maude Aimee had built the large round building Cathedral of Tomorrow in Akron, Ohio, and we would watch their New Year’s Eve concert on TV. By the 70s Rex Humbard was in financial trouble from having over expanded into businesses such as a girdle factory in Brooklyn and an office tower in Akron. The Mennonite editor said the Canadian Mennonites were sending money to Humbard and wanted some investigation; it was not a pretty picture, at least financially.  

In the early 60s I went with my father to hear Oral Roberts while he still traveling around the country with a tent near Youngstown. Roberts was a faith healer and a long healing line formed at the end of the preaching service. I can still hear Roberts, after hearing the person’s ailment, placing his two hands around the head of the person, and saying “in the naaame of Jeeeesus, be healed.” Assistants nearby would catch the supplicants as they fell backward or collapsed or sometimes they jumped about in ecstatic frenzy.

On the way home my father asked what I thought of it all, and I said probably those people who went as believers saw miracles and those people who went as skeptics did not see any miracles that evening. I was among the latter, but I knew my father was among the former and hoped for his back to get better. Later in life during the 1980s my father often watched the Oral Roberts weekly TV broadcast and got his mailings on abundant living and expecting a miracle. 

I somehow missed the most exotic faith healer in our northern Ohio region Ernest Angley, but my mother reminded me that Andrew took the family to an Angley service one time. By my mother’s telling,  Angley’s “all things are possible to him that believeth” was too much, even for Andrew’s tastes and they never returned. I suppose I could still catch Angley myself, and in this miracle business, extremism seems to have its virtues for success and longevity. I notice that the Angley ministry is still going strong (2011) at age 89. He bought Humbard’s old Cathedral of Tomorrow campus for his headquarters and has moved into healing people with HIV Aids.   

Of a more mainstream evangelistic nature, my parents became involved with the Billy Graham meetings when he was at the stadium in Columbus, Ohio, in 1964. My father and others from the Holmesville Federated Church attended training classes as counselors, and I think a few sang in the chorus. Which brings on a second revival which was occurring about this time that affected our family; it was in the Holmesville Federated Church. This came about because the pastor was Howard Hovatter and his wife Sally who soon became friends of our family.

Hovatter came out of the Wesleyan tradition, was a good singer and a charismatic leader; we might have called him a fly-by-night or schouft in Pennsylvania German. But whatever his reliability for long-term relationships, during his short tenure at Holmesville several families had a Christian spiritual renewal.

The main Holmesville people involved in this revival were the Holmesville grocers Lewis and Ruth Beech, and the Holmes County game warden family Sidney and Lois Corl. The Corl family lived in Holmesville, and often visited us during the summer. Lois and my mother became friends, joining us for meals, and Sidney (Sid) and their little children even helping in the garden. Sid occasionally stayed around and joined our family circle on the back porch blicking peas (as in shelling) or tipping the ends off of green beans. Any man capable of such humble communal work, even if occasional or for ceremonial purposes, was highly regarded by my mother; a gesture which seemed never to occur to her husband. 

We boys took special interest in Sid, a veritable wild game protector and a good natured naturalist. A tall lean man, he was an open shirt friend to us boys, but he always had a clip neck tie hanging from the mirror of his dark green state car. When he had official duties, he would clip on his tie. One time when I was driving with him, I opened the glove compartment, and I saw a revolver. But mainly Sid was a friendly neighbor who took us along as we explored nature. My biology teacher Alden Schaffter had gotten me started in bird watching and Sid was not only a bird protector but a bird watcher, and being generous with us boys, would take us along on his bird watching.

In the Spring we spent evenings at dusk watching a Woodcock do his ritual mating dance near the swamp area on the west end of town. Sid might point out a Coot diving in the water, a little Green Heron doing a wobbly flight, and hear the pumping sound of the American Bittern, but what we were waiting for was the nasal beezp of the Woodcock. It was a distinct sound at intervals coming from a little brown bird about the size of a softball with a long bill. We listened to the beezps from the unseen bird until we heard a twittering whirring sound and then you could see the Woodcock making a circular flight up into the evening sky until he was so high you could only see him with the binoculars. Then at the climax of his flight the sound became thick warbling; next down he came, dropping to earth in a zigzag pattern, where he started the nasal beezps all over again. One time while the Woodcock was up in the air we moved closer to where we thought his mating dance began, and he dropped down only a few feet from us. He discreetly flew a short distance away and started his beezps dance right on schedule.

Whether we have lived in Holmes County or Bowling Green, Ohio; within the borough or on the outskirts of Scottdale, each year in March and April, I go out at dusk to a swampy area with a grassy clearing or even an upland meadow along a woodlot and listen for the Woodcock mating calls. Most years, I was rewarded, but the Woodcock dance shows have recently been harder to find; they are no longer as prevalent. According to the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the population has been declining about five percent a year since 1968 due to loss of habitat.

Sidney Corl also took us along doing his work during the day. In the spring we followed Sid down the trail behind the Holmes Sportsmen’s Clubs west of town and checked the colorful Wood Ducks and their nesting houses. Another time, we watched the Great Blue Heron nesting area in the Killbuck bottom half way between Holmesville and Millersburg, behind the Wengred farm, now a bike and buggy trail. 

Sid even took us out to Mohican State Forest near Loudonville explaining how that many large hemlocks grew on the north side of the small mountains of Mohican. Sid said the main habitat of the hemlocks was further north, but that the seeds had come along down with the glacier thousands of years ago. These remainders of the glacier thrived here on the north side of the hills where it was cooler all summer.  And we identified some spring warblers some of which I still see most years such as the Yellow Warbler and some of which I do not such as the bright orange and black and white stripped Blackburnian.

I was only vaguely aware of the creationism and evolution debates, but Sidney’s Christian conversion and now regular reading of the Bible did not seem to influence his views of God as creator and a long evolutionary process. But his Christian commitment did influence his vocational choice; he felt a calling to the Christian ministry, and soon was on his way to Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, to become a United Methodist pastor. Our brief years of nature wanderings, bird watching, and family friendships ended quickly, when Sidney and Lois had a large trailer built of plywood, kind of a homemade project. We helped them load the trailer; they hitched it to the back of a station wagon, and headed west. We missed them very much.

Aside from the spiritual connection to the Beeches, they also provided us some new recreation—water skiing. The Beech family lived along Odell Lake near Big Prairie Lakeville in Western Holmes County, and Lewis was an avid water skier. On Sunday afternoons he would pull us on his boat in flying over the water and jumping across the waves. The last I saw of the Hovatters was in 1963, when Howard stopped in to see me at the Miller Cabinet shop in Orrville; he wanted something to be fixed on his trailer.  The reason I remember it is because it was on November 22, the day President John F. Kennedy was shot. My mother told me she liked Sally Hovatter better than Howard, and the last she heard, the Hovatter marriage had ended in separation.  

Sidney Corl served 30 years as a pastor in the Oregon Idaho Conference of the United Methodist Church, dying relatively young at age 63 in 1994 at Rainier, Oregon, where his widow Lois Corl still lives (in 2011). However large and honorable Sid Corl’s life change was in becoming a pastor, it was his love of nature and vocation as a game warden that got me to thinking of other vocations for me as well, other than farming.

The other person who nudged me in this direction was Alden Schaffter, our biology teacher at Waynedale High School. Not intentionally, of course. Schaffter simply taught general science and biology in the most mundane way. Alden Schaffter would assign several pages or a chapter to read in the biology text each day and then by going down the rows, he asked each of us a question from the science or biology text. We had lab experiments such as dissecting a frog and seeing its beating heart and other organs, but mainly he asked us questions and gave us a daily mark. But we could also get extra credit by extra activities such as identifying birds. Schaffter even though utterly uncreative about teaching method did have some redeeming qualities; the most important one was that he loved his subject material, basic science and biology. I knew very little about either, but I did like the living creation and biology, and Schaffter got us to identify birds; I liked Mister Schaffter.

He, like Sidney Corl, enjoyed identifying birds and gave me a life-long enjoyment of seeing birds, even taking me along on a Christmas bird hike one year. On Saturdays Alden Schaffter would take us students for bird hikes; we would meet up at his house on Fredericksburg Road near US Route 250 at Guerne. We would look for birds in his lawn and at his feeder and then we would go in his car out to the Lakeville and also to a lake near Shreve. He had a big tripod and here I saw my first Common Loon, the Redhead and Canvasback ducks, Black ducks, and any number of other waterfowl. It was here that the idea was planted that I could become a biology teacher or maybe a game protector. I bought a book by Roger Tory Peterson Field Guide to Birds and a pair of binoculars. My sophomore year was my last year of vocational agriculture and Future Farmers of America.  

One other kind of bird watching occurred this summer, looking for crows. But this was hunting, of which I have never done much except as a child some small game when Grandfather Levi L. Schlabach came to our farm to hunt for rabbits and pheasants. Later, when my brother Roy took up fox hunting for a winter I joined him and his friends and listened to the music of the fox hounds. But this summer I tried crows, I suppose wanting to have shot at least one wild game animal, maybe even to mount one. I watched the crow flocks where they roosted, where they often gathered at various parts of the day, and how they moved around. I watched as they sent a lone sentinel crow ahead to check out a field or tree as to whether it was safe before the flock approached.

I learned that crows were quite intelligent in discovering if I was carrying a stick or armed with a gun. After numerous attempts and sitting in wait for a shot, one day after freshly mowing one of our hay fields in the forenoon, I brought the gun. I placed myself in a thicket near a dead tree which was near our hayfield at the bottom of the woods. I knew crows like to look for grubs and insects in freshly mowed hay fields, and thought in all likelihood, a sentinel would come ahead checking out the safety of the field before signaling for the rest to come, all of which they communicated by calls.

Sure enough, before long I heard a flock calling from behind me near the woods, and then a lone black crow flew above me onto the dead tree limb. I immediately put up the 20-gauge shot gun, aimed along the barrel, and pulled the trigger. The crow fell to the ground, and I picked it up. It was still warm but dead. I took it home and felt sad about the beautiful large black bird. That was the end of my hunting; I never had a desire to shoot another bird. I spent the rest of my life in bird watching.    

Brunk Revivals background comes from a Katie Florence Shank booklet Revival Fires (self published in Broadway, Virginia: 1952).  The 27 pledge cards of Maple Grove Mission related people who responded at the Brunk meetings are in the Andrew A. Miller collection at the Archives of the Mennonite Church, Goshen, Indiana. “Rex Humbard: North America’s TV Pastor” appeared in The Mennonite (September 18, 1973, pages  526-27); it was reprinted in the Mennonite Brethren Herald (October 5, 1973, pages 12-13). Roman J. Mullet information came from a Leroy Beachy of Berlin, Ohio, telephone conversation on February 10, 2011. Woodcock background is found on the website of the Pennsylvania Game Commission, “Woodcock,” Wildlife Note # 21 by Chuck Fergus. Sidney Corl information was provided through e-mail February 15, 2011, by Becky Delurey, administrative assistant to Bishop Hoshibatain of the Oregon Idaho Conference of the United Methodist Church.