1065 "Lee" in St. Louis

1965  "Lee" in St. Louis. Kent State Orrville, my last biology class, Roy and Ruby Burkholder wedding; summer voluntary service in St. Louis, Missouri; Dayton Street and the Pruitt-Igoe; Vacation Bible School and day camping; St. Louis Cardinals baseball, named “Lee,” Near North Side Team Ministry, reading Harvey Cox, Michael Harrington; transferring to Malone College; Joseph Grabill, Burley Smith, becoming an English major.

Every year is a transition but 1965 was especially so. During the Spring I finished my last semester of study at Kent State Orrville classes and my day job of building Miller kitchen cabinets at nearby Riceland. During the summer, I did several months of short-term voluntary service in St. Louis, Missouri. In the fall I transferred study to Malone College in Canton, Ohio. During my last year of study of introductory survey courses at Kent Orrville, I enjoyed courses such as history of Western civilization, economics, and sociology, and even an upper level course in social problems.

Whatever the down side in these general education courses in being I suppose simply too general, I still enjoyed them. The history gave background to what I was reading in the newspapers; the economics history of Adam Smith and Karl Marx gave background on the Cold War, and I was sure my family and community had all the social and mental disorders I studied in sociology and an upper level course called “social problems.”  I decided that even if the Millersburg merchants were not hiring philosophers these days, I would have a hobby as a lay philosopher the rest of my life.

Still, my positive response to these introductory college courses hit a bump in the Spring when I took a biology class. I was especially looking forward to this course, based on my study of natural history in somewhat of a romantic fashion of enjoying nature. This biology course however was a long distance from my bird watching days six years ago with Alden Schaffter at Waynedale, and little from my general reading prepared me for all the memorization of cells, genes, metabolism, and plant and animal tissues. The 600-page text which I still have with lots of markings and the lab work would have been challenge enough, but then in the middle of April I took off for two weeks, and by the time I returned I was hopelessly behind. It was the only time I ever got a D in a college class and it changed my career aspirations. I understood now that I had no future as a biologist or biology teacher, but that my real love was in the humanities, in history and perhaps even literature.

I and my younger brothers and sisters missed classes in April because my brother Roy and Ruby Burkholder were getting married in Meridian, Mississippi, and the family was going. I was to be his best man. So my father and Mother hitched one of our Apache campers from our sales lot behind the station wagon, and we headed to Mississippi. From the mid-sixties when Maple Grove Mission closed to the mid-eighties my father would start various businesses which he would do for about five years; these projects seemed based on his personal loves and what happened to be selling at the time. Businesses included the Apache campers, mini-bikes, travel trailers, Skyline mobile homes and finally musical instruments (Miller Music), especially Fender guitars and the Homer harmonicas. All these businesses he ran alongside his own camp, Lookout Camp ground. In 1965 my father was just starting the Apache camper business, so this was kind of a working holiday for him, and for the rest of us it was a family vacation of sorts. In fact, it’s about the only trip of this duration I remember taking with my family.

Traveling to and from Mississippi with Andrew had memorable episodes. One time we found ourselves on a bridge with two lanes both going the same way, and my father was driving the wrong way. He simply stopped, turned on the emergency lights, and backed the trailer off the bridge while cars braked, swerved, honked and sped past us with people shouting unfriendly greetings and hoisting their middle fingers. Andrew seemed totally unfazed by this attention and took considerable pride in his ability to back our trailer accurately, staying in his lane (even if it was against the traffic), and mentioned this achievement to us several times afterwards.

At night at travel trailer parks which Andrew had checked out with his AAA campground booklet in regards to facilities where we could take showers, have an electrical hook-up, and Mattie did outdoor cooking. One night we stayed at a fairly modern park near Mississippi; everyone spoke southern English, and this campground had roller skating rink in the center where local villagers and travelers could mix. I went roller skating with some up-beat music and what I thought were all beautiful southern girls.

Except for Roy and Ruby’s happiness, Meridian, Mississippi, all blurred for me and I remember nothing about the wedding itself. What I do remember is the surreal experience of sitting around the table at a pre-wedding dinner with members of the Yoder family (with whom Ruby had lived). The Yoders said very little, seemed unhappy, and gave the distinct impression that they believed Ruby was making a precipitous and perhaps unwise marriage choice. You can imagine how that tone (real or imagined) went over with us Millers. We thought highly of the beautiful Ruby, and we also thought she had made a fine choice with our Roy.   

In the meantime, that spring I also noticed an announcement in the Gospel Herald, the Mennonite weekly paper, that short-term volunteers were sought for various summer programs. Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities in Elkhart, Indiana, sponsored programs such as helping migrant worker families, vacation Bible school caravans, inner city day camping, and Puerto Rico evangelism. I applied and was assigned to work with a team of four attached to the Bethesda Mennonite church located on the near north side of St. Louis. It was a life changing experience for me, especially because of the context. Bethesda Mennonite Church was located on 2823 Dayton Street, several blocks from the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects, the home of about 10,000 people, African Americans living in 43 buildings of 11 stories high.

About half of the residents were on some form of public assistance and the rest had low family income; over half of the families were headed by a single parent, usually the mother. Pruitt-Igoe was a young community with median age of the entire population of about eleven; in other words a lot of children, confined to a small area, locally called “the projects.” And that was our summer assignment--taking these children outside the immediate projects in what we called day camping.

But the assignment was secondary to the experience of immersion into inner city living and African American culture. We stayed in a unit house above the church building, and I slept on a cot in the pastor’s office on the second floor. Often late at night as I read or listened to the radio KMOX, I would hear voices in the street outside, but I could not understand them. Young men walked along on the warm summer evenings speaking the informal Black English dialect among themselves. Their conversation had all the exclusiveness to me that an outsider may have had overhearing a bunch of young Amish men chattering in Pennsylvania German.

I soon became acquainted with some of the young teenagers, especially those who hung around the church where we had in common our Christian beliefs. Another common interest on the streets was basketball. I played lots of pick-up games on the Pruitt-Igoe courts. The ritual before a game was to empty one’s pockets—usually keys, billfolds and weapons (mainly knives) -- before the start of the game. Even though the area was known for its high crime rate, there was a kind of honor code that one’s valuables should be left alone during a ball game.

Our summer voluntary service team consisted of Lois Liechty, a recent high school graduate from Grabill, Indiana,  Eileen Moyer, a teacher from Christopher Dock High School, Souderton, Pennsylvania; Bettie Norman, a strings music teacher from Goshen, Indiana; and myself. We teamed with some long-term voluntary service people at St. Louis David and Miriam Hershberger and the local pastor Hubert Schwartzentruber and his wife June. After a weekend orientation with the Hershbergers and Schwartzentrubers, my first assignment was to get Missouri chauffer’s license for driving a 36-passanger bus to carry the day campers. For me, this assignment was easy, what with my Maple Grove Mission bus experience, and I spent the rest of the summer driving the day-camping bus. It gave me an immediate role and valued job in the unit.   

A part of the day camping began was a two-week cooperative summer Bible school program held at the Pruitt-Igoe Community Center, Bethesda Mennonite Church and the True Light Missionary Baptist Church. This was a large Vacation Bible school of over 500 students, about 100 volunteer teachers. Our team of four served mainly as coordinators and couriers for the superintendent and the various centers. The programs had interesting cultural mixes as we used the Mennonite rural-based Herald Summer Bible school material which had some of the teachers scratching their heads regarding its appropriateness. Meanwhile, the True Light Missionary Church’s pastor, unannounced to the planners, did a quite successful altar call on the last day of school. His success brought some consternation of the teachers and planners who had misgivings about child evangelism.  

The day camping program consisted of doing day-visits to places such as a Forest Park (St. Louis’ Central Park) and other smaller parks (with a swimming pool), and Grants Farm (petting zoo and wild animals). The latter was the historic home of the August Busch beer family who now also owned the Cardinals baseball team. Most of these day camping programs were going to the same place all week with Mondays for juniors, Tuesdays for junior highs, Wednesdays for teens, and one day for families with young children. Other adventure educational trips were regular weekly trips to the Municipal Opera (The Muny summer musical theater) and the St. Louis Cardinals who were in their final summer at the old Busch Stadium (Sportsman’s Park). We also visited Lambert Airport, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, KMOX radio and TV.

I learned something of our contrasting rural urban gestalt when we took the teens to an extended overnight camping trip in a state park several hours out the city. After a month of North Side St. Louis immersion, this was my first travel away from the city, and I was getting excited as we drove into the camp, the lush green trees and prospects of bird watching and returning to nature. As we approached, however, I noticed the bus became quiet and there was some nervousness among the youths about the foreboding environment they were entering. As the week progressed, the St. Louis kids adapted to the camping environment and mixed quite well with the other kids. On the return trip my heart was heavy with the thought of Pruitt-Igoe concrete and asphalt harshness. But for everyone else, as we approached the city, the bus was filled with animated chattering, whooping and singing camp songs. We were going home to Pruitt-Igoe family and friends.

I often had double bus driving experiences that summer. During the day, I drove up and down some steep hills shifting down to pull us up hill and then shifting down again to save my brakes on long down hills, especially when I began to smell rubber; it was an old worn-out school bus. At night I was again driving the old bus going slower uphill and faster downhill in my dreams or nightmares. Many a night I would dream of going down a steep hill with a bus full of whooping kids and the brakes getting hot and giving out—and wake up in a sweat on my forehead, just as we were careening off of the highway.   

Aside from playing basketball with the boys in the Projects, I also went to lots of Cardinal baseball games with neighborhood teens; the old Busch Stadium (Sportsmen’s Park) was within walking distance of Dayton Street. Here we would cheer for the speedy infielder Lou Brock (the old stadium would rock when he got on base), and the outfielder Curt Flood and the great pitcher Bob Gibson. One of the most memorable games was when the Dodgers visited with Sandy Koufax pitching and winning; another time the San Francisco Giants came with Willy Mays making his under-handed basket catches in the outfield. I had heard of these players growing up, but these games were the first professional games I had ever attended. I even considered giving up my college and teaching aspirations, and becoming a full-time popcorn, hot dog or “beer here!” vender at a ball park. Okay, I learned it was only a part-time job. 

One other player I saw all summer was the Cardinal shortstop Dick Groat. Little did I know that Groat would become a beloved household name and voice for the rest of my life during the winter when I followed the Pittsburgh Panther basketball team. In 1979 the Pittsburgh native began announcing the University of Pittsburgh Panther basketball games and still does as I write this in 2011.  

During the Sumer Bible School weeks, our circle was enlarged by a number of Mennonite Youth Fellowship (MYF) kids from Fisher, Illinois; they had done this project for several summers and seemed right at home. These youths seemed to know how to do various magical arts. They knew how to do hypnosis and had some of us going to sleep and coming back in laughing and crying or saying idiotic things. Other popular activities were predicting ones future with Ouija boards, including selecting girl friends and boyfriends—even marriage partners. Of a more serious nature, the church asked our youth group to plan one of the Sunday morning worship services in August, which we planned with some earnestness. I don’t remember specifics of the service except we spent many evenings planning and sang “Holy, Holy, Holy,” as the choir-entrance anthem. But then, come to think of it, that song was sung at each Sunday as the processional at the beginning of the service.

Singing was a big emotional bond that summer, and many an evening, I would join a circle of youths in singing gospel spirituals and the decade’s anthems such as “If I had a Hammer,”  “Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore,” and “Blowin' in the Wind.” I enjoyed the Bethesda youth group; we became friends, and by the end of the summer one of the young women gave me a silver bracelet with my name “Lee” on it. That was my only summer when I went by any name other than Levi. I remember distinctly how I became “Lee.” At the Mennonite Mission headquarters in Indiana, one of the leaders started calling me Lee and then later asked if it was okay. He gave me the clear impression that he was doing me a favor in what he thought was a name upgrade. And so as not to disappoint him I did not object. However, I always liked my name Levi; it is a good solid Hebrew and Amish Mennonite family name, the name of my grandfather (and great-grandfather). Any later attempts at changing my name (with the exception of an occasional "Leviticus"), were cut off at the start.   

Our St. Louis day camping program, for which the Mennonites provided staff, was actually one of the programs of an umbrella organization called The North Side Team Ministry. This ecumenical group sponsored many other projects such as tutoring, pre-Kindergarten, dance, drama, music, Bible studies, work with the elderly, and employment. Four young seminarians were employed with the organization from Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Lutheran denominations, and the one who I remember best was Donald Register, a 1957 College of Wooster graduate who had been an outstanding football player so we had sports and Wayne County in common. Talking about changing names, Donald Register was known as Cash Register during his Wooster football days.

Weekly we would get together at the North Side Team Ministry’s offices and discuss the new best-seller The Secular City by Harvey Cox. What a read; it seemed to fit my entire summer of God creating the world in a garden and ending with a city, the New Jerusalem in John’s Revelation. Cox was a delightful writer taking major theological and biblical themes and giving many specific and telling anecdotes and stories. If he seemed trendy, a kind of religious propagandist for the sixties revolutions, I loved the read and listening to the seminarians’ discussion. I remember one week, one of the four seminarians turned to us four summer VSers saying: Doesn’t this make you angry? This chapter has to disturb you folks, coming from your farming background and Mennonite beliefs. We did not say much.

The degree to which Cox sensed the church taking on a non-institutional stance seemed prescient —although also in keeping with his Baptist congregationalist background. However, the secular part for which he argued as eloquently as the historical trajectory from the personal Hebrew and Christian God to the scientific age did not fit my summer experience. There still seemed a lot of Christian faith among the people in the Pruitt-Igoe. And 50 years later, the secularization argument still seems little more than the lament of a few unhappy Christians and atheists with what might be called a religious Paris envy; Americans never quite became secular Europeans.    

One other book made a great impression on me that summer was The Other America, Poverty in the United States by Michael Harrington. I remember our Mennonite voluntary service director Kenneth Seitz visiting us and showing me his copy and even reading sections of it. I read it in several nights, and it all made sense to me for where I was living and especially the chapter “If you’re Black, stay back.” Harrington had 40 to 50 million American people living in poverty which seemed scandalous for our wealthy nation. He wrote convincingly and President Kennedy was said to have read the book when it first came out in 1963.

President Lyndon Johnson picked up the themes of the book in 1964 by declaring a War on Poverty and developing his Great Society programs. The idea that poverty had a culture as Harrington discussed it was later influential to me when I read books by Oscar Lewis such as La Vida. I followed Harrington and Cox’s careers for the rest of my life, hearing Harrington’s socialist commentary on NPR in his later years before he died in 1989. I was even more interested in Michael Harrington when I became aware of his Catholic Worker background and how, unlike Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, he had lost his faith—except in socialism.

My Pruitt-Igoe summer remained with me when I exchanged notes for a while with my summer friends addressed to “Lee,” of course. And on TV evening news, I would occasionally see the Pruitt-Igoe buildings dynamited as they came down at intervals in the 70s. The buildings had become crime infested and totally unlivable, and were often written about as “a case history of a failure.” The summer also remained with me as I saw America’s cultural trend setters, writers, cinematographers, TV producers, and finally even church leaders discredit the two-parent monogamous family ideal.

Most of this cultural dismantling was done under the larger rubric of freedom, a cherished American ideal. But it always seemed to me at least Christians should have seen more paradox with this family freedom (easy divorce and burden of marriage and traditional two-parent families). Some, especially the most vulnerable in our society, paid a very heavy price for this adult freedom and abdication of responsibility: the children, especially the children of the working poor, the unemployed, and the poor Black family. 

I returned back to Ohio, now ready to join my brothers Paul and Roy at Malone College in Canton. Paul had transferred to Malone the year prior and seemed right at home in the history department and student life. Paul invited me to room with him at the dormitory where he was a dorm counselor. If this seems strange for two brothers to room together, for us it seemed natural; we had been separated for several years, and being together at Malone was low maintenance for both of us. Paul knew his way around, and we both were somewhat distinct from the general student body in being a few years older than our cohorts and had a different worldly experience.

I soon discovered that the world of middle class youth growing up in Canton, Ohio, from which Malone drew the majority of its students had its own definitions as had the world of my Pruitt-Igoe friends, my Holmes County relatives, or some Quaker children of India missionaries. I mention the whole worldly wise characteristic mainly as different not as some uniquely superior experience, because people who claim worldly consciousness can also be unbearably pompous, obnoxious and illiberal. Still, I confess my brothers and I had read and traveled through more different cultures and languages than many of our Malone classmates.

Roy was newly arrived with Ruby from Mississippi, having finished his alternative service assignment and was ready to begin a pre-medicine course. Roy had left high school after his second year and had passed GED tests (high school equivalent) to enter college, so this aspiration may have seemed unlikely to an outsider, probably even to his Malone professors. Yet, to our family, it seemed a totally natural course; if Roy decided to become a doctor, well, Roy would go to college, then medical school and become a doctor.

Malone College turned out to be a good fit for our family. Nominally an evangelical Quaker school with Bible College origins, it had moved from Cleveland to Canton in 1957. Members of the faculty were Friends or of some conservative Protestant group, often a Wesleyan stream, but the student body was quite diverse with half of the students being commuters with no religious or social commitment to the college’s stated ethos and theology. So although the faculty had a generous evangelical commitment, the student body was quite diverse with various old Protestants, Evangelicals and Quaker students, along with Catholics, Jewish, and non-believers. This religious and cultural diversity was not without its problems, but for the period when we brothers were there from the mid-sixties to the early seventies, it was positive. (David joined us during those years too).

Malone provided us a good space to study, exercise student leadership, relate to various denominations and Christian traditions, explore new ideas and consider various professional options. And it probably did not escape us that we could be the proverbial big fish in a small pond. And I loved everything in Malone’s pond, attending about every evening lecture (one night my bird watching idol Roger Tory Peterson even showed up) and concert and joining lots of organizations: Student Education Association, International Club, Men’s Glee Club, Varsity Ambassadors (Malone’s version of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship), and basketball.

My poor performance with biology during the Spring let me know that I would need a new major, and so I chose history; however, after one semester and meeting the faculty, I decided that another change was needed. The head of the department Joseph Grabill seemed to be going through the same issues I was; he had grown up in a conservative cultural context and was embracing every left-wing idea and liberal cultural trend the sixties could so easily provide. (I think Grabill grew up in a Brethren in Christ home.) Even though I mostly agreed with these  ideas, professors who desired to identify with students seemed too trendy for my tastes, too much like me.

In any case, I was enjoying writing for the student newspaper and also taking a world literature course by a professor named Burley Smith. This was another introductory course of the classical, romantic, realistic and expressionistic tempers in Western literature. Especially memorable to me was the Russian novelist Tolstoy ( Anna Karenina), and I loved the British  poets: Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson. Smith exuded a love of all these texts, writers and poets; he lectured clearly and analytically, as well as listening to various points of view. I switched to become an English major. The sixties were optimistic and romantic, and I felt like the youthful William Wordsworth during the French Revolution:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

A photo spread (including one with me among day campers at St. Louis) of the Summer Voluntary Service appeared in Gospel Herald (September 7, 1965, page 790). Information on the 1965 Summer Mennonite voluntary service (VS) program in St. Louis, the Pruitt-Igoe, the Near North Side Team Ministry, comes from the files of the Archives of the Mennonite Church housed at Goshen College in Indiana, Mennonite Board of Missions holdings, III-25-8; Folder 48, Bethesda Mennonite Church.  Background on Donald B. Register appears on-line at Woosteralumni.org where Register received a 1980 Distinguished Alumni Award. Maurice Isserman wrote Michael Harrington’s biography The Other American (New York: Public Affairs, 2000). Photos and records of my involvement Malone College organizations appear in the Malone 1966 yearbook Philos. The Wordsworth lines come from The Prelude.