1967 A New Year's Eve Conversation

1967  A New Year's Eve Conversation. Government class with Paul Perkins; February Washington DC seminar with Milford Hinkel, summer intern at Wooster’s The Daily Record, Harold Murray, visiting College of Wooster admissions with Raymond Dix; New York City theater week, marriage thoughts; Professor Lauren A. King, “Mating in the Faith,” Seiske Kohno, a New Year’s Eve conversation with Gloria Miller.

While studying at Malone College, a government course by Paul Perkins and a Washington D.C. seminar made a long impression on me. As I recall the class met on Saturday mornings because Perkins was an attorney and the chair of the Stark County Democratic party.  In the class we studied the dynamics of national state and local governments, including for the first time reading some of the federalist papers and how the American constitution was put together, some of the compromises of Madison and Jefferson. The American republic came out of considerable thought, debate, and compromise, which after about two centuries has worn quite well. Perkins cared about the conceptual framework of the American republic but gave the class interesting illustrations of how this played itself out in Stark County electoral politics.

I still have the underlined page: “The critical element for the health of a democratic order consists in the beliefs, standards and competence of those who constitute the influentials, the opinion-leaders, the political activists in the order… If a democracy tends toward indecision, decay, and disaster, the responsibility rests here, not in the mass of the people. This analysis and its implications should be pondered well by those young gentlemen in whose education the Republic has invested considerable sums.” I wrote “good,” in the margin and took it as a calling to be among those “opinion leaders” among whom thankfully the women would also join during my lifetime.    

Although the head of a political party, Perkins was about as non-ideological a person as I ever met.  One of his mantras was that political parties have one main goal and that is to elect candidates to office. In some ways this practical wisdom seemed to take care of the ideological emphasis of Democratic and Republican politics in Stark County. He would say that for sheer pleasure (he compared it to a sporting event), few things can give pleasure like election evening. He described gathering at the county party headquarters and watch the results roll in to see which of the would-be sheriffs, commissioners, senators, or county recorders won their race.

Even the lowly school board races have their charms, and later in life on election night my family would drive to the many polling places in the Southmoreland School district to tabulate the results; it had all the excitement of a ball game with eight quarters (polling stations with exotic names such as Bessemer, Whites, Stoners, Strohms). We would tabulate our cumulative scores for the wins which as of 2013 are 5-0. In 2009, even with our kids all gone and the election polling results available on the internet, Gloria and I drove around to the various polling places and looked at the penciled results hastily taped to the doors, just for the fun of it. Anyway, I blamed it all on those Malone government classes with Paul Perkins.

In February, professors Milford Hinkel and Dale Hess took several Malone students to a week-long Washington seminar sponsored by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) with the staff executive Clyde Taylor giving leadership. These were confrontational years for the country during the Johnson administration, although I do not remember much discussion of Vietnam during the week. We met with Supreme Court Justice Byron White (1918-2002): Ohio Senator Stephen Young, and Representative Frank T. Bow. Senator Mark Hatfield, an evangelical Christian from Oregon and opponent to the Vietnam War, also spoke to the group. Students and professors from Evangelical colleges from Wheaton to Geneva (in Pennsylvania) made up the seminar. We met with representatives from the Civil Service Commission, and I think one of the attempts was to have more graduates from evangelical schools enter into government service or employment. I was surprised how often questions were raised in regards to how foreign policy would affect Christians in that country or missionary efforts; at least Taylor would raise those questions.

One impression during the week was the contrasting make up of our Malone students and professor Hinkel and the other colleges. Students from the traditional evangelical colleges were attuned to church state legal issues such as public prayer in schools; they were quite articulate about their conservative protestant beliefs. The Malone students tended to be lunch-pail oriented political science students such as William (Bill) Heitzman (not on this expedition but active on campus) and Roger Kienzle of Stark County who might perk up if the topic was on minimum wage or labor union rights.

On the other hand, professor Milford Hinkel was a conservative Baptist minister with a doctorate in philosophy, an internationalist and an anti-communist. Hinkel cut a large figure with his football lineman-sized-body in dark suits, short pant legs, bright red socks, and vocal Christian apologetics. If some of the students from other schools rolled their eyes at our delegation, Hinkel seemed to take this all in stride and good humor. In fairness, I should note that Malone also had thoughtful conservative student activists such as Fred Boots, Mary Cattell and Richard Sartwell. Their organization called Tau Lambda Rho brought the influential free-market economist Ludwig von Mises to campus. But I did not move in those circles.    

That summer I moved from the Aviso to working for Wooster’s The Daily Record or the Dix family.  Raymond Dix was the publisher and his son Victor the heir apparent, but currently assistant publisher and executive editor (we called them Ray and Vic). They offered a summer internship (with pay) for a college student such that one filled in for whatever editor or reporter was on vacation. I loved it from the first day to the last and if I benefitted from my student journalism Aviso experience, I also used my Waynedale High School’s typing classes. One took news stories over the telephone, typing as fast as one could while on the other end of the line a source would tell you the story, responding to who, what, when, and where questions. Or a fellow-reporter might dictate the story even with punctuation, ending sentences with “period,” “question mark,” and “new paragraph,” as well as spelling out important words and names.

I began badly. One of my first days, I took a police story about an accident over the phone. The report had one driver leaving a bar (hence alcohol-related) and two vehicles colliding on the Wooster square.  The story went immediately into that Monday’s paper. Unfortunately, I somehow got the two driver’s names exchanged, and we soon got complaining calls from family members. The next day Tuesday a correction was posted on the front page with the headline: “Errors In Report of Collision.” The original story had appeared on page four. At the end of the week, when our pay checks were passed out, I went to Vic Dix’s office and told him that I could resign and that I was sure my old friend Jacob Miller would take me back to work in the cabinet business. But Dix would not hear of it. In fact, bad as I felt, the older staff actually seemed quite civil about it all, and treated me as if I had now been duly welcomed as a member of the guild. I sometimes wondered if an editor had not slipped the mistake into my story simply to test my mettle--although I don’t think so. 

Editors were a news and wire (wire services, mainly United Press International), city, area (explained below), Orrville, society, farm and church editor, and several reporters; the two heavies being Elinor Taylor and Bee Collins. There was also a sports department, but these folks seemed to run their own show and I had little interaction with them. The wire editor Harold (Nig) Murray was a study in predictability and punctuality as he came in the news room every morning at 6 a.m., checking on what had come in on the United Press International machine which was generally clicking away. He took care of national and international news, and the Israelis and Arabs were fighting the 1967 war that summer.

Murray said little as he brought together the front page presentation, but one day I recall he growled admiringly on seeing a Middle East conflict story, something like nobody beats those Jews. Then on Saturday, July 15, Murray died. He came in to his desk by the usual time, fell ill an hour later, and by 4:45 that afternoon was dead of a massive coronary attack.  He was 69 years old and had worked for The Daily Record for 37 years. I suppose it was a lesson in our professional dispensability that very soon Donald Green was named editor, and life seemed to go on as usual. 

The area desk where I edited the latter part of my summer was one of the least interesting but most esoteric for its quaintness. This editor got handwritten and typed notes from correspondents in the various small towns and townships, often badly written on spiral lined notebook sheets. They might be reports of garden clubs, council meetings, or some agricultural society such as Grange. The Record paid several cents a word published, as Vic Dix told me one day, the Daily Record had an expansive news policy; newsprint paper did not cost much and it was a home-town paper.

Exhibit number one might be a story I edited of three-year-old Amanda Trego of the Carpenter Trailer Court in Killbuck having her parakeet returned after it was missing for a week. The parakeet Jeannie “took its freedom out the front door” but was discovered and captured a few days later when it was hopping on a police car. In the meantime Amanda “had put in many miserable hours crying” so a neighbor and the parents each went out and bought replacement parakeets, hence with Jeannie’s return, Amanda now had three parakeets. I was certainly following Vic Dix’s editorial guidelines.  

Editors and reporters were also expected to do feature stories as time allowed, profiles of events or people. I enjoyed this because I met people I would not ordinarily meet such as the Moores, a military family who escaped with only their clothes from an Air Force base in Libya; the Wrights, a physician couple who had traveled around the world; and the 80-year-old chaplain at Wooster Community Hospital, George F. Brown. The young veterinarian Robert Mairs told me all about harness racing at the Wayne County Fair (and he retired in the summer of 2011 after 50 years of practice). Then I interviewed my Amish neighbors regarding four new one-room parochial schools which opened that fall in the Southeast Local School District. Here I met some of the Holmesville Amish and my old Waynedale High School principal Edwin O. Thompson, now the Wayne County superintendent.

However badly I started in June with the Daily Record, by the end of the summer, Vic Dix called me to his office and said they would like for me to continue with the paper. I could work for The Daily Record and finish my schooling at the College of Wooster, hence working my way through college. If interested, he said his father Ray would take me up to visit the College admissions office, and I could check it out. I liked the work and Ray and Vic Dix as well; they were the ultimate family-owned business owning several newspapers and radio stations, now under Dix Communications. An early riser, I liked the immediacy of working on an article in the morning and that afternoon seeing it in print (The Daily Record was then an afternoon daily).

Several other College of Wooster students had worked for the paper in this way, and so one day I visited the college admissions office with Ray Dix where the word influence took on new meaning. It was very clear to me that the Wooster admissions officer had no interest in registering a non-descript transfer student who already had three years at Kent State and Malone. It was also very clear that the admissions officer would register me as a transfer student if Ray Dix suggested that this student would be good for the College of Wooster and The Daily Record.

On one level it was no contest, Wooster had a long tradition; Malone had little; Wooster had national achievement with graduates such as Karl and Arthur Comptons (see 1945), even a Nobel laureate. Malone took pride in getting its graduates Stark County and Ohio jobs and producing Quaker ministers and missionaries. Even among the small Christian schools which were emerging in prominence and growing during these years, Malone was no Wheaten or Gordon-Conwell. I did not even think it was as strong as my own denominational schools such as Eastern Mennonite and Goshen College.

Maybe that very modesty was in part what drew me to Malone; what others found problematic, I found attractive. Malone made no pretentions and at least for me few demands. It was no wannabe elite private college, denominational school or state university. It was simply, well, Malone, where a Holmes County Miller could be the proverbial big fish in a small pond. Dear reader, I confess I made this point earlier, but Malcolm Gladwell would make it almost fifty years later about higher education in David and Goliath (2013), so maybe it’s worth repeating. Furthermore, I was now carrying the secret ambition that I wanted to become one of Newsweek’s foreign correspondents, and if I could not become a correspondent, at least I wanted to travel and teach abroad. Much as I liked the Dixes (I adored them), I felt I would be beholden to them if I stayed on. I did not see a long-term commitment to the Daily Record as an avenue to getting out of the country.  

In the meantime, I would visit another country—this one in the USA. I left for New York City for a week in August before returning to Malone. I think a part of my interest was that as an English major I heard a lot of theater talk from some of the other students, who had visited New York. And by now I recognized it for its publishing capital where editor Maxwell Perkins had worked and Scribner’s had published Hemmingway and Scott Fitzgerald. And I wanted to visit the East Village, the home of the weekly Village Voice to which I had subscribed the past year. I took the Greyhound bus from Wooster to Pittsburgh where I stayed overnight and watched “To Sir with Love” with Sidney Poitier. I loved it; to be a foreign correspondent was good but to be an inspirational teacher among underprivileged inner-city kids also had it virtues.

The next day, I kept going to Philadelphia and then to New York City where I stayed at the YMCA near Times Square, a cheap room and a common bath for all the men on the floor. It was a week of traveling the subway, seeing theater, visiting museums and reading Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966). This popular dime novel was based on elements of real life characters such as Ethel Merman and Judy Garland, and it seemed so real in its descriptions of New York theater and Hollywood. I would stay up late at night reading it, and right below me was the noise of Times Square and all the theaters.  

So I went to theater: Hallelujah, Baby! the lively musical of the 20^th century African American (then a half-century and then Negroes) searching for freedom. A young Leslie Uggams was the star, and it was a positive story of greater freedom with only hints of the black power rages to come. I had become fascinated by the Negro experience and reading James Baldwin although his view of life was harsher than this show.  Then there was I Do I Do with Robert Preston and Mary Martin, Preston was at his height of fame with “The Music Man” and Mary Martin was on any short list of mid-century actors.

In fact Martin and Preston were the only actors in the play, a musical story of a marriage from hot romance, “I do, I do,” then kids and parenthood, and finally empty nest and only the two together again. I may have had marriage (or my total lack of it) in back of my mind; I was twenty-three with one year of school left and sometimes lonely. Roy and Ruby got married the year before; Paul and Carol were married earlier that summer in June, and David and Brenda might as well have been married, or so I thought. I had women friends at Malone, but for some reason, none of whom I could imagine living with the rest of my life. Gloria Miller with whom I had a fling the previous summer was in Chicago working as a nanny would occasionally write friendly letters, but she was only nineteen and marriage now seemed distant, if at all. I would tell my friends that being single may be my lot in life; I was enjoying my work and studies, and singleness was not without its positives in ease of travel, movement and decision-making.

Finally, I went out (uptown) to the new Lincoln Center theater and saw a revival of “South Pacific.” Now Florence Henderson was the provincial American ensign Nellie Forbush after the role had made Mary Martin famous back in 1949. I loved the music and the exotic characters and setting of the South Seas and I had read some of the stories by James Michener. Years later at age 70, I had a reprieve to this musical when I took a small part in Scottdale’s Geyer Theater production of “South Pacific.” New York City’s theater district was also loaded with sleazy bars during those years, and I had my introduction to cheap strip shows. 

Aside from theater, I especially wanted to see a piece of art, Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” which at that time was in a room on the Museum of Modern Art (MOMO). I had been vaguely introduced to modern art and visited the various rooms, but this large canvas had stayed in my mind because of the social content, as an anti-war statement during the Spanish Civil War and now during the Vietnam War. Finally I went to the Charles Scribner's Sons Bookstore at the old building on Fifth Avenue. Built in 1912-13, the old bookstore had second level balconies and I imagined that Hemmingway, Gertrude Stein or Thomas Wolfe may have sat up there in those cubicles looking out over their work. A 2011 visit to New York had me looking up the old building again as a historic landmark, but the books were long gone from the inside, the site inhabited by a cosmetics retailer.  

When I returned to Malone that fall, I focused on my studies, finishing my English major and getting my certification as a secondary school English teacher. And I especially took classes from my favorite English professor Lauren A. King. If Burley Smith had introduced me to American and English literature during my first year, Lauren King continued the project during my last year, adding to my reading enrichment and also teaching me writing. I became acquainted with Professor King when he arrived the year I was editor of the Aviso. King was brought in as vice-president of academic affairs, and I think it was President Cattell’s way of having an Ohio Yearly Meeting Friend give academic guidance to the school. I interviewed him regarding plans to revise the general education program at Malone.

King had already had a career at Muskingum College as a professor of English, and I immediately respected him for this wide background in American literature. I especially benefitted from his course in Advanced Expository Composition, which in many ways was the course I most used for the rest of my career: to write an honest topic sentence for a paragraph and then to fill in the details. This was not only basic copy for a newspaper or a periodical or a public relations release; it was also a basic principle for writing essay-type exams. We looked at various types of writing such as description and persuasion and the ancient Greek rhetorical devices. Then I also took a course from him on the American Romantics, and we discussed the memorable essays such as Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and “Walden,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s’ Divinity School Address, along with Whittier’s poetry.   

What I discovered was that my favorite professor and friend was a poet and writer himself. Eventually, King went from being a mentor and a guide to becoming a friend and author as I got older and ensconced in Mennonite church institutions. During the 70s, I helped get him published in our denominational paper the Gospel Herald, read a number of his poems and reviews which eventually appeared in other, mostly Quaker, publications. I was writing myself and ran into trouble with readers by encouraging them to marry Mennonites, if they took their faith seriously. An avalanche of mail came to the editor; refuting the article and calling me narrow, arrogant, sectarian, bigoted, unkind to “the other sheep” and having my “head buried in the Mennonite sand.”

King graciously sent in a letter to the editor asking to “speak a word of defense of my friend and former student,” noting some of the difficulties in inter-faith marriages and also noting some value in the distinctiveness of our church. His letter concluded: “Do you want… your grandsons marching cheerfully away to battle? L.A. King, Norwich, Ohio.” Whether King agreed with my controversial point of view, he presented it in its best light. The article took on a life of its own, an adaptation was solicited for our youth monthly called With, and it also appeared in the appendix of a dating book called Love and Sex are Not Enough. MYF (Mennonite Youth Fellowship) groups invited me to meet with them, mainly to argue with me, and I suppose the main legacy of this youthful venture into marriage counseling to become an embarrassment to my own children.

But back to Lauren King, when I was at Scottdale in the 80s, he and his wife Helen would stop in to visit Gloria and me. Each Christmas, we would get a card and his own devotional verse, and I would sometimes visit him when I traveled to family in Holmes County. For many years until Helen died, he lived a few miles north of Interstate Route 70 a little west of Cambridge, Ohio; he lived to be 99 years old, and died on April 15, 2004. He was a wise mentor, poet and friend, a Quaker pacifist who hunted white-tailed deer.   

Over Christmas vacation my Japanese roommate Seiske Kohno went home with me. Kohno had lost his wife, was bored and lonely, and so I suggested that he go out with my young friend Gloria Miller who was back home over the holidays from Goshen College. I thought she was international in spirit, and they would get along okay. Sieske came back and told me he had a pleasant evening, that Gloria was a good woman who still liked me, and that I was an idiot not to have gone along with them that evening. So on New Year’s Eve, instead of watching Rex Humbard’s all-night TV program (my parents by this time had their own TV anyway); I brought in the New Year with Gloria.

My mind is fuzzy of what all happened before midnight, but sometime in the early hours of January 1, 1968, we talked of our futures. We talked of our dreams, hers to study German or Spanish in a country of native speakers; she had been accepted for a year of study at Marburg in Germany. I told her of my interest in journalism or teaching overseas and the good possibility of getting drafted (this was hardly a dream). I also confessed that I had loved her ever since that summer meeting at The Spot and hoped to marry her someday—maybe even during the next year. It turned out to be the most eventful New Year’s Eve in my life, and for the results, you, dear reader, will need to wait until an engagement and a wedding in 1968.

Most of this chapter comes from memory and my Malone College files and journal “Notes on Life.” The text used in Paul Perkins’ government class which I quoted is James MacGregor Burns and Jack Walter Peltason, Government by the People, fifth edition (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963, page 271). My first week at Wooster’s The Daily Record with the erroneous report “Cars Collide in Hospital Trip” appeared on Monday (June 12, 1967, page 4) and the correction appeared on Tuesday (June 13, 1967, page 1). All the other stories cited appeared in 1967 summer’s issues of the The Daily Record. “Killbuck Girl Is Owner Of 3 Parakeets” appeared in July 5, 1967, page 26. Veterinarian Robert Mairs’ “Retirement Time” by Amanda Rolik appears in The Daily Record (August 14, 2011, page B7). “Mating in the Faith” appeared in the Gospel Herald (August 31, 1976, pages 656-657). Responses appeared in subsequent issues, including Lauren King’s letter (November 9, 1976, page 879). An adaptation appeared in With (October, 1977, pages 9-12). And the article was reprinted in the appendix of a youth book called Love and Sex Are Not Enough (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1977).