1963 The Birth of Loneliness

1963  The Birth of Loneliness. Higher education for Andrew and sons; final years of Maple Grove Mission and distributing The Way; Andrew’s troubles and a telephone conversation; the end of Maple Grove Mission, transition to Millersburg Mennonite; Miller Cabinets; Kent State University at Orrville, Henry Adams, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forester, James Baldwin, Gordon Parks; Fanny Mae hears the Lord’s call; Clyde M.  Narramore counsel; President Kennedy shot, Aldous Huxley dies.

The year 1963 was a sad year of my youth; it was the death of innocence and unbridled optimism and the birth of loneliness. My older brothers were gone; Paul for college in Virginia and Roy for voluntary service in Mississippi; my father was at a difficult stage of life, and my girlfriend left me. It began with my brothers leaving and my father’s ambiguous relationship to our educational aspirations. At about the same time that we oldest children were beginning to think seriously of higher education, my father also became quite interested in it. He took some Ashland College Bible and religion classes by extension at Millersburg High School, and would invite a Professor J. Ray Klingensmith to speak at Maple Grove Mission.  He even dabbled into an early clinical pastoral education course but soon left it when it became intense.

I remember Andrew telling me that they sat in a circle and the other participants were telling very personal and embarrassing things about themselves. When it was Andrew’s turn, he said the other participants began to probe into things which were personal and none of their business. Although throughout our entire childhood our parents were pointing us to higher education and professional careers, at the very time when we were ready to enter college, Andrew was ready too. Whatever the merits of mid-life adult education, in our large family and young children, it became a competition for the family resources and energy. Or so it seemed to me.

It was a difficult time for Andrew because he was losing his church and his standing as a pastor. By the Fall of 1963, the last year my Father kept records, the officers of the Maple Grove Mission were mainly Andrew A. Miller, plus members of our immediate family (minus my two oldest brothers), Lorie Gooding, and some youths from the community. On the surface some things were still going well as Andrew had changed it from a small Mennonite mission to an even smaller evangelical mission.  In June of 1962, over one hundred people gathered for a mortgage-burning ceremony which concluded in a fellowship circle around the bon-fire, later used for a wiener roast. Now that the building was paid; there were plans (mainly Andrew’s) to excavate for a basement with Sunday school rooms, restrooms, and a nursery. And a special anniversary service was held in August with many of the former members and Pleasant View workers returning. In addition, there was participation by people Andrew had co-opted from area churches such as the Millersburg physician Charles Hart and the Holmesville grocer Lewis Beech.    

Along with services, Maple Grove Mission had a program of Christian literature distribution such as Bibles and evangelistic tracts. This had been going on for a few years, and our youth group would regularly distribute a Mennonite evangelistic publication called The Way in Brewster and Killbuck. I’m not sure why these two towns were chosen, Killbuck was in southern Holmes County and Brewster was north across the line in Stark County. Brewster seemed especially hard territory for me; the common practice was to simply leave the leaflets at the door. But at one of the Brewster homes, I left The Way at the door and upon retreating on the sidewalk, a shirtless beer-bellied man opened the door and shouted, “Hey sonny, come back and pick up this litter you left on my doorstep.” I think I tried to say something about it being good reading but he was not convinced. I went back and picked it up, apologized and walked for quite a ways trying to recover some sense of dignity for our project. I decided to knock on the doors after that, inviting people to take a copy of the The Way. That seemed to work better, most people were obliging, and some even chatted perhaps pitying me. It was Sunday afternoon, and I remember a number of houses had Cleveland Indians baseball loudly on the radio, and at least that was a point of conversation. But this approach slowed down the distribution, and the rest of the group beat me in amounts of copies distributed. 

My recall of Killbuck’s response is better because I had the street which led to the dairy isle (an ice cream stand) and so I bought a cone, gave copies to the waiters, and just stayed there on the picnic table giving them out to any customers who came. This seemed to work okay, and if the owners or workers had any misgivings about using their little ice cream business as a distribution center, they did not saying anything.  Even though this was the end of my literature distribution days, it did give me sympathy for the Jehovah’s Witness, Mormons and other missionaries who came to our doorstep over the years. I always tried to treat them courteously and took their papers. Generally, I stopped short of buying their literature, however, noting that I was a book and literature publisher myself and probably not their best customer prospect.

Back to Maple Grove Mission tract distribution efforts, I don’t know of any positive responses, and attendance was going down at the Maple Grove Mission. It may have been related to my father the pastor. Andrew was an individualist; he was also a lonely man.  During most of his life he related to many people, customers, and neighbors, but he was close to no one during this time—and he was becoming a stranger even to his wife.  He spent a good amount of time counseling a woman whose’ children came to church but whose husband refused to allow his wife to come to church. I suppose most of this activity is normal for a pastor’s work, and my father did a lot of visiting of homes during his time as leader of Maple Grove Mission.

But somehow this pastoral case did not sit well with our family, and I was faintly aware of some whispering about the relationship although never thought much of it. I also became aware of unusual late evening and early morning phone conversations. Then early one morning before any of the other younger children were awake, I heard my father on the telephone, and went to the open register in the floor above where the telephone was located. The conversation went on for about a half-hour. Although I only heard my father’s part of the conversation, it was intimate language which I had never heard my father use with another woman except my mother.

I became increasingly angry as I listened, and when it was over I went downstairs immediately and confronted my Father. I told him that I had heard his phone conversation and if I ever hear a phone conversation like that again, I would beat him. My father tried to make some explanation, but I walked away. I looked down and saw that I had made fists of my hands, and I was shaking and confused. I was afraid of myself for being so angry and what I had said. I was scandalized that my father would have stooped so low to what I felt was a betrayal of my mother and our family. It was still early in the morning, and the rest of the family was not awake so I went to the barn and did a few chores and soon went to work. If I was angry with my father, I was equally ashamed of myself; I had said threatening words which I never thought I would say. But now I also thought my father was a weak man, unable to avoid the behavior he had taught us to resist. I associated him with what we used to call cheap grace and eternal security churches where they gave nice testimonies but did not practice their faith. I never went back to Maple Grove Mission.

Maple Grove Mission worship services ended in the next year or two; I think it just kind of dwindled down until my parents closed the doors. The records which my father kept ended in this year with no comments. It was a painful closing chapter, and my parents and the rest of the children were pretty vague about it. Ten years later, the trustees quietly appointed Andrew to sell the property with the understanding that my parents could keep whatever it brought for the work they had put into it. Eventually, an Amish Mennonite group led by a charismatic pastor Wayne Weaver bought the property and enhanced the facilities considerably.

My brother David and I visited one Sunday morning in 2009, and joined a full house in singing psalms and evangelical choruses with a beautiful little string band of mainly Ervin Gingerich’s grandchildren. By 2012, this church had moved to Sugarcreek, Ohio, under the name of Oasis Tabernacle. We still have a church bench and some folding chairs and occasionally see former attendees, as reminders of some of the good days of the Mission. Another family reminder is Paul Phillips whose family used to come to Maple Grove Mission, and he married my aunt Katie Schlabach. They became life-long members of the Pleasant View Mennonite Church, giving a home and loving care to my uncle Levi Jr. who had Down’s syndrome.

My father’s affair, such as it was, had to be one of the minor ones in the vast literature of pastoral counseling, and I realize my own response was probably disproportionate to its violation of our family and marital expectations. But it came during a difficult period of our family’s life and is perhaps a comment on how much I wanted the whole project (Andrew and Mattie) to hang together. In a church or communal culture of easy divorce (which Holmes County was not), I suppose my parent’s marriage could have fallen apart. As it turned out, the pastoral visitation all ended soon enough, but the experience left a marked effect on our family. I think the most difficult part for my father was the giving up of his ordination vows, and he continued to have a quasi-pastoral function at his Lookout Campground, even marrying people who could not find anyone else to marry them.

My father had begun the camp on his 20-acre woods and would conduct worship services during the summer for his campers, and in the winter he would visit other churches especially the Moorhead Mennonite Church west of Holmesville, although he never felt at home there; perhaps it was too close to Maple Grove. By the seventies, my mother and father and the family began to attend the Millersburg Mennonite Church which became a good fit, especially with the arrival of David and Mary Groh. The Grohs were Ontario Canadians, unpretentious pastoral professionals (Mary a nurse), and intuitively Mennonite. My parents could not have found a better match; David Groh was a perennial outsider (Andrew’s soul mate) and a gardener (Mattie’s ideal). This congregation provided a healthy Mennonite context for my young sisters Rhoda, Miriam and Ruth to be nurtured in the Christian faith.

During the dreary weeks and months that followed, I did what was our family’s tried and sometimes true response to stress and anxiety, I worked. Jacob Miller had added a kitchen cabinet shop to his construction projects. So now I worked in his barn-turned-shop near Riceland in which we built measured-to-fit to kitchen cabinets for pre-fabricated houses in the Canton area. The main customer was Michael Petros of Keystone Homes with whom we also did other projects during the next decade. For about three years I did the main cabinet work, cutting out the fronts, styles and doors fitting them on the top and bottom cabinets. Then I built the countertop, covering it with a product called Formica. Jacob’s wife Elizabeth did the finishing, spraying them several coats of clear varnish, and Jacob’s brother-in-law Emmanuel (better known as Menny) measured up the jobs and installed the cabinets. These were pre-fabricated houses, so mainly of one type with birch sides and doors and maple wood for the fronts. But it gave me good experience working with my hands and using tools such as a saws, planes, and routers for mortises and tenens.

The rest of my life I always felt I could make about anything I wanted with wood. At the same time there was satisfaction of growing the business with Jacob and Elizabeth and we had lots of orders; I gladly worked long hours and earned decent wages. This income was another satisfaction, with older brothers Paul and Roy gone, I now provided important cash flow for the family which was appreciated. We were a pre-modern Amish Mennonite family, and it was simply assumed that I contribute to the whole of the family, especially with five younger kids in school. Eventually, Jacob and Elizabeth Miller sold the business to Emmanuel who grew the business and then gave it over to his sons until they sold it several years ago from when I write this in 2011.

Miller Cabinet was at Riceland right next to Orrville, so in the Fall I started to take evening classes at a Kent State University extension at Orrville High School. I especially remember introductory sessions on history, sociology, and especially literature. Aside from high school, the only English literature in which I had a good background was in the King James Bible. I do not take that lightly for it was a good background. When Aldous Huxley wrote: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad, “ I knew the point of reference. Whether it was in knowing the value of the short stories such as Ruth and the histories such as the Judges and the Chronicles or the poetry of the Psalms and the Ecclesiastes, I had a good advantage over many of my classmates. In a Christian sense, the greatest value was in the New Testament literature, especially the gospel stories of the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus.

But beyond the biblical literature, the western canon of mid-century was mainly new to me. Even though at this time I thought that I would major in biology to be a teacher, it was the first year English classes which remain with me.  Of the nineteenth century writers, especially memorable was The Education of Henry Adams, a mix of autobiography, history and culture;  if Adams' life and education were such failures, as he claimed, how I wanted to fail like this congenial pessimist. The Education of Henry Adams was prescient of how I would study American literature the rest of my life, even though I did not know it at the time; it was literature as history. I was getting 19^th century American history through the eyes of one of its most observant players.  The Adams family went back to the second president, and Henry Adams served as secretary to his father Charles who was the American ambassador in London during the Civil War. Finally, there was that significant twenty-year gap around which Henry Adams structured his autobiography between 1871 and 1892, the sad years of his wife Clover Hooper’s death by suicide.  

In the twentieth century, standing out were the Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) which were a literary and cultural introduction to the western world of ideas. I found Huxley fascinating, thinking I had encountered the wisest writer who lived in our time, although admittedly I did not have a large frame of reference. He was a pacifist although he couched his beliefs in philosophical rather than biblical terms. I would later learn of his book Brave New World and also his defense of various drugs including LSD. His nuanced writing carried skepticism of science being able to sufficiently explain the universe at the same time that he had a great respect for science.  And ultimately, for all his respect of reason, he believed reason could not carry the full freight of our human life. For most of my college years I had his closing of “Knowledge and Understanding” on my bulletin board: “Of all the worn, smudged, dog’s-eared words in our vocabulary, ‘love’ is surely the grubbiest, smelliest, slimiest. Bawled from a million pulpits, lasciviously crooned through hundreds of millions of loud-speakers, it has become an outrage to good taste and decent feeling, an obscenity which one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced, for, after all, Love is the last word.”

If Huxley, opened my eyes to new ideas of the world, several fiction writers opened my mind to new people of the world: A Passage to India by E.M. Forester to Indians and the British while Notes of a Native Son and Another Country by James Baldwin to American Blacks living in my own country. Forester’s story got me so interested in India, and on such a different level of the conflict between India and the British, that seemed a long ways from the Christian Indians who had come to the Federated Church in Holmesville and sung so beautifully. And Baldwin was so disconcerting and raw in spirit with grievances against white Americans and the desire for freedom from what Baldwin considered to be the colonial rule of America. However, fascinating these introductions to the literary world of Adams, Huxley, and Baldwin, I was probably especially open to it because my own personal world was falling apart.

Reading has often complemented working in going through difficult times. Around this time my brother James and I read Gordon Parks’ The Learning Tree (1963). A growing up story of a young African American boy in rural Kansas, I loved the book for its realism and sympathy for the boy, his family, a gentle prostitute, and the townspeople, all of whom had troubles. In the end, the boy survives which was also my hope. At the time, I did not know that Gordon Parks (1912 – 2006) was much more famous as a photographer for Look magazine, than a writer. He did about everything, and I generally followed his career; one time when I was in New Orleans, its Art Museum had a major retrospective of his photography, and when The Learning Tree came out as a film, I enjoyed it. Parks also was director of first Shaft movie. Early in the 21^st century (2000), one evening when son Jakob and I visited New York’s US Open Tennis Center, who should be there taking photos of a newly completed stature of Arthur Ashe; that’s right Gordon Parks. He was an old man then, and I shook his hand gratefully. His first and I believe only novel had brought comfort to me during rough times.

That fall I got a letter from my girlfriend Fanny Mae who had gone to Eastern Mennonite College in Virginia. A devout Christian with a quite focused personality, she seemed to know where she wanted to go, and I was floundering in several hundred years of American and world history and strange ideas, with my main touch with reality in building kitchen cabinets. I remember well being in the cabinet shop when I opened a letter from Fanny Mae which began noting how she had been praying especially for me during the renewal meetings that fall at the college. I had been around religious people long enough to know immediately where this was going. The Lord told her to end our relationship. I discovered later she had also met an older seminary student who also knew the Lord’s will, and they became quite successful missionaries in South America.  Although I was sad and lonely, I could hardly argue with this divine leading, so I stayed on the same page and wrote to a Christian psychologist.

At that time a Christian radio station in Canton had a daily program called Psychology for Living and directed by Clyde M. Narramore which we listened to in the cabinet shop. I wrote to him about my life’s troubles in the last year: not sleeping well, girlfriend deserting me, brothers leaving home, and  father Andrew’s troubles and I asked him if he had counsel. His wife Ruth would read the letters on the radio with a little bird, I think it was a canary, chirping in the background, and then Narramore would give counsel in a gentle voice. I never heard my letter read over the radio, but he sent me a short written response saying he would praying for me (this was a little disconcerting what with Fanny Mae also praying for me) and strongly suggesting that I meet with a good local counselor.

I never made it to a counselor. Perhaps the closest I came to feeling counseled was with my employers Jacob and Elizabeth Miller with whom I stayed overnight when I had evening classes at Orrville; they seemed to know I was going through difficult times. I often visited with Jacob in the evenings after class, and early in the mornings I would join them at breakfast and a kneeling prayer. But mainly I did what our family always did in these cases; I simply worked harder and longer.  

Finally, the year ended with the president John F. Kennedy shot on November 22. I remember it well because a sales representative came to Miller Cabinet, and asked if I had the radio on. We turned it on and listened to the tragic accounts the rest of the afternoon. The Kennedy shooting was on Friday, and I went down to Leppley’s Radio and TV in Millersburg and rented  a TV and we stayed glued to the black and white rabbit ears set in the living room the rest of the weekend. We saw the little Kennedy children John Jr. and Caroline walk with the widow Jackie draped in black veil and the lone riderless black horse shying skittishly out on the pavement. Then on Sunday the violence continued as we saw images of the shooting of the alleged killer Lee Harvey Oswald by the nightclub owner Jack Ruby. The world was falling apart and about the only thing which gave it stability were the somber voices of Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite. I did not know it at the time, but a few hours after Kennedy’s death, Aldous Huxley also died. It was good bye and good riddance to a sad and lonely year.

Most of this comes from memory. The final records of officers, at Maple Grove Mission which appear to be about 1963 but with no date are in the Andrew A. Miller Collection of the Archives of the Mennonite Church, Goshen, Indiana. Fanny Mae is a pseudonym for a girlfriend.