1975 Bowling Green, Ohio

1975  Bowling Green, Ohio. Daughter Hannah’s birth January 24, visiting James, a Geauga County Amish Sunday, Geoffrey Chaucer, John A. Yoder braucher-chiropractor, John A. Hostetler, Amish English, Henry David Thoreau, final MA Exam, Mennonite seminary courses, Guy F. Hershberger, buying property at 903 Arthur, Scottdale, Ralph and Elizabeth Hernley. 

"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." – Henry David Thoreau

Hannah Elaine is born on Friday, January 24, 1975, on a cold day and night at Bowling Green, Ohio’s Wood Memorial Hospital. We anticipated the day because Gloria’s labor would be induced, and her sister Bonnie was at the hospital, in case she needed extra blood. Gloria had a rare blood type (TJA Factor), and when we got to the hospital, everyone was ready for Gloria, deferentially calling her out of lines by name, as though she were the hospital’s guest of honor. Gloria with her usual goodwill and nature took it all in good stride, soon doing her breathing rhythms and focusing exercises, in the Lamaze style. Her doctor, family name Householder, was a competent and fairly practical personality and sometime during the day he and I got into a long somewhat contentious discussion on everything from Vietnam to health care. I remember Gloria asking me, when he stepped out, whether her birthing was the setting for such a discussion.

All afternoon Gloria was in labor and by evening the contractions were more intense and frequent with Hannah arriving that evening. Hannah was in fine shape, but later I went back to Gloria, and she had a hematoma following the birth, had lost blood and was totally weak; I thought near death. The contrast was especially frightening because Gloria was a strong young woman. Gloria soon recovered, and Hannah was an easy baby, contented by the simple pleasures of eating, sleeping and being held. I would sometimes mention on her birthdays that even the animals seemed happy for her arrival, some black squirrels cavorting and jumping around all day on bare trees outside the hospital’s third floor windows. By evening and the next day, they did extra summersaults and ever higher twirls, as though announcing that someone special had arrived on earth. Gloria’s mother Berdella and Bonnie stayed with Jacob that weekend, and then my mother Mattie came out for a week.

Aside from Hannah, the year had not begun on a happy note. On January 5, 1975, I wrote: “I have just come from the apartment of James in Cleveland and find myself utterly drained and distressed. That one can live in such a state of unreality or simply servitude is more than I can comprehend or perhaps tolerate. The most frightening thing is that except for the grace of God, Gloria, Jacob, and maybe a little half-witted effort, I could be in his shoes. His cockroach infested apartment is certainly not bad in itself, but its musty smell represents a way of life which I find extremely slothful and disdainful…”

I had visited James all day on the first Saturday of the new year; we went to the Cleveland Art Museum; and I gave him some money as I left.  James was a good conversation partner because we shared so much in common in discussing and debating current events and culture. And we were both aspiring writers. But James seemed to feel the world and certainly his family should support him financially and emotionally, and he seemed at a loss to know why we did not. I left him feeling (perhaps it was survivor’s guilt) sad and depressed at how the world had become such a prison to my brother.

That Sunday I got up early and drove from James’ apartment out to Geauga County to attend church at the Albert L. and Martha Miller home about a mile north of Mesopotamia, Ohio. It was a cold morning with some snow on the ground; my feet got cold in standing around by the barn and visiting with the men before the service, but when we got inside the house it was comfortable. After the Lob Lied, I fell asleep during the opening sermon and again slept through most of the main sermon. It was not that the sermons were bad or uninteresting, but that I had slept little the night before in a motel, what with thinking of James and my own hopes for the future, Jacob and now another little one coming. I saw the young fathers with little boys and girls beside them and leaning on them and sleeping or doing puzzles. I had learned that Albert was a butcher who earned his living with his hands, and he and Martha had ten children; they were of modest means but took care of their children, worked hard, and seemed at home in the universe. It was as if I had stepped into a real medieval Chaucerian England I was studying at Bowling Green. I felt so comfortable I slept until the final prayers and hymn and then joined with the others for lunch.

The background of this Geauga County visit was that I had been thinking for several years that with a young family, we should move back to Holmes County, and I might teach in an East Holmes public school with Amish students. I had gotten a letter from Laurence Martin at the Publishing House that they had a position for me when I would return. Martin had replaced Paul Lederach as director of the curriculum division. But I still was not sure I would return. I remember visiting Scottdale that winter with its bleak streets and bare trees and pasty-looking street walkers. A good-natured but sad little man people called Duffy (I don’t recall his formal name) who lived at the New Central Hotel was out walking Pittsburgh Street that day.

Meanwhile, when Gloria’s father Roy R. Miller left teaching at Hiland High School, he ran for East Holmes school board and was board president. He hinted that we were well-positioned to take teaching positions in the district. When the opportunity came that spring, however, we were hesitant, much as we loved our families and I, at least, idealized the community. In the end Gloria was never that keen on moving back, and I also knew my limitations as a teacher. I might get tired of teaching in a year or two.

But that year of graduate school classes re-kindled my ties to the Amish; especially the first class I took at Bowling Green had a pre-modern feeling in Geoffrey Chaucer (ca 1343-1400). I suppose part of the newness was because I had never read much Chaucer before, having gone directly from Beowulf to Shakespeare in high school and college. I loved the Canterbury Tales, memorized the Prologue, and took special interest in the characters and their pilgrimage. Their stories were sometimes religious, often earthly and sometimes comical. Perhaps it was also the degree to which Chaucer was such a good-natured story teller, wise but never heavy-handed, as if he were lightly tripping along with the pilgrims, telling us their stories. The old English of Chaucer has Germanic roots, or so it sounded, and after Chaucer I tied in a number of my courses to my re-awakened Amish heritage.

Carlos Drake’s course in folklore was a natural and I did a study of a Holmes County braucher chiropractor near Becks Mills called John A. Yoder (1922-2001). Yoder known in the Holmes area as Brauch John was of some interest to me because our Holmesville neighbor was Rudy Coblentz, often called Shittle Jake’s Rudy. Both Rudy Coblentz and his father were well known braucher or sympathy healers in our community. My parents and people with strong Enlightenment beliefs sometimes called them pow-wow doctors and had misgivings about brauchers, considering some of their practices as witchcraft. But I never found any of Yoder’s practices to be evil or hexing, such as to cast an evil spell on someone. He simply practiced a pre-modern folk medicine which generally did no harm and sometimes may have done some good. It seemed to me Yoder with his “electric hands” was especially effective with chronic ailments such as sore backs, rheumatism, nerve troubles, sleepy feet and arthritis.  Yoder was a charismatic and empathetic person and my study was published in the April 1981 Mennonite Quarterly Review.  

My consultant during these Amish projects was John A. Hostetler at Temple University. I would see him at Historical Committee meetings twice a year, and he seemed to take a special interest because he knew our family and background. He sent me copies of his own studies on the Amish, and then gave Gloria and me a Myers Briggs personality test. I turned out to be an EIFJ: extravert with intuitive, feeling and judging and Gloria was an ISTJ: an introvert with introvert, sensing, thinking and judging. Hostetler noted that he and Gloria were close to the typical Amish personality profile (ISFJ), I was not. I took the profile later several times (it seemed the thing to do during the next decade), and I learned that I enjoyed relationships with other people, could work well in an office environment, alas, might even be able to work in sales. Perhaps given my literary interests, I had a shadow identity of myself as a hermit who should be living out on the back forty, perhaps in a hut by the water—perhaps near Walden. Still, I enjoyed being around people.    

Finally, a linguistics course on social and regional dialects sent me on a small study on Amish English or how English is spoken among the Amish of Holmes County. This was at a time when educators and linguistic scholars had interest and also controversy about dialects such as Black English. The Berlin and Wises elementary schools in the East Holmes school district gave me access to their students as informants. One could locate Germanic pronunciations, syntax, and word choices which reflected Pennsylvania German interference. James Mast, the principal at Berlin, granted me individual student interviews and class time to test usage of word choices such as bag, sack and polk, and cheit, right and properly. For example, regarding word order, one young informant told me that “my father works away.” This was a direct translation of “Mei vater schaft fat.” The meaning is that my father is an employee and not on the family farm or home shop. A surprising element was the degree to which the Amish English approximates Standard English given its status as a second language within the Amish community. I would have needed to spend much more time to prepare a publishable study, but my fellow class members were quite fascinated, reminding me of the world’s fascination with Amish culture.

The MA English terminal degree at Bowling Green was a good fit, designed for persons with professional plans in an English related field but with considerable latitude in choosing the required fifty graduate credit hours. Given my professional goals of denominational editorial work, the English department chair Richard Carpenter accepted two courses from the Mennonite seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. For the one-day oral and written examination, one needed to chose an author, so I chose the nineteenth century American Henry David Thoreau. His writings of simplicity, anti-war, and appreciation of nature were of long standing interest since I had first read Walden and Civil Disobedience in college. The Yankee individualist nay sayer never considered himself a victim; rather he made a virtue of necessity—as Chaucer would have said. In America’s long-standing conversation with unfettered optimism or human progress, especially material and scientific progress on one side, Thoreau firmly said no. A critic of progress, democracy  and manifest destiny (the 1848 war with Mexico), he still shared with most Americans an optimism. But Thoreau’s optimism lay in the possibilities of the human spirit and nature, not in material advancement.

The plan was to meet with the committee in the morning and write for two hours in the afternoon. An English major might do about anything and was promised nothing vocationally, and the economy was now heading toward double digit inflation and high unemployment, very unlike my Malone graduation in the late sixties. About mid-way through our morning session, my committee members became aware that I had a job awaiting me in religious publishing, and I noticed their mood immediately became upbeat; they asked questions about the Mennonites, cut short the time, and congratulated me on a job well done! I had the feeling that short of my calling Thoreau a French entrepreneur who started the Walden bookstore chain, they were quite eager to declare me MA competent.  

During the summer I took courses at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries at Elkhart, Indiana. One was an Anabaptist workshop called historical Issues in the light of 450 years.  Cornelius (C.J.) Dyck, coordinated the course and had visiting lecturers such as Myron Augsburger, J. Denny Weaver, and Ray Gingerich, the latter two newly minted PhDs. I would meet many of these people later in life as an editor, but it was an old professor who was memorable-- Guy F. Hershberger. I had known Hershberger from his 1940s book, War, Peace and Non-resistance, but I had obviously not kept up with him moving into regarding himself as a late-blooming prophet and a left-wing political analyst. Hershberger made a long and fierce denunciation of Richard Nixon (not hard to do in those days, of course) and American imperialism. 

I suppose his strident political critique all seemed natural given the polarized times, and I obviously had not followed Hershberger's career since his nonresistant years. But somehow, it all seemed disappointing to me, a rather plain Mennonite mouthing the then-popular students at the barricades slogans. I had expected a more nuanced church first and theological approach at the seminary, but it was a good introduction to what I would often discover later as an editor. Another course was called Discipleship by David Schroeder of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I wrote a paper on Anabaptist hermeneutics and editorial principles in preparing curriculum materials for the Mennonite Church.

But whatever my studies at Bowling Green and whether I could continue as an editor among the Mennonites or a teacher among the Amish, I ultimately wanted to be a writer. This vocation would be in addition to whatever my profession as an editor, teacher, minister, publisher, carpenter or journalist. I also took some fiction writing courses from the MFA (Master in Fine Arts) program and started a file which I called “the Amish novel,” to complement my earlier file: “the Puerto Rican novel.”

Writing and fiction classes and workshops seemed to have a spirit of post-realism, fantasy and exhaustion. Narrative, meaning and plot of the traditional novel since the time of Cervantes and Fielding were banished; a writer who tells you everything, I discovered, may be  a fascist. Solipsism or only the self can be known, hence an extreme egocentrism was the norm, and I suppose there is an element of that in all writing. Still, signifying was a part of my own life, and I noticed that in spite of literary theory, many sequential stories were still being read and written. After two classes from the MFA offerings, I decided I had learned enough from them. I took another class of Shakespeare’s plays and would also spend hours in the Popular Culture library—reading their film reviews and Sports’ Illustrated.  

By late summer Gloria and I with Jacob and Hannah were ready to move back to Scottdale, after many moves. We had lived in the Mennonite Publishing House apartments, with Ben and Rosie Charles on Market Street, at Arnold and Rhoda Cressman’s farm (while they were in Europe and Canada), at the Cressmans’ fix-it-up rental on Homestead Avenue, and then at 300 Napoleon Bowling Green—five places in five years. When we returned, I visited Ralph Hernley and asked if he had any suggestions; he said yes, its’ time for you and Gloria to buy a house. He said it as matter of fact as if he were noting that it was going to rain on a cloudy day. I told him we only had a few thousand dollars for down payment, but Ralph would hear none of it. Don’t worry, he said, you can afford it. On hearing Hernley, this move now seemed totally natural and perhaps even pre-ordained by the stars. After that, Gloria and I checked with Ralph and Elizabeth Hernley for every major move our family was considering. They were like a eloquent uncle and aunt, never intrusive but nearby and available. I'm posting this during the week when we learn of Elizabeth's death, age 99, January 22, 2015, a wise and gentle Mennonite; may she rest in peace.    

About the same time Paul Lederach, my old publishing director who also enjoyed dabbling in real estate, had spotted a property on Arthur Avenue. He took us through it, inspected it and told us what to offer. On July 24, 1975, we signed for our first property, a red brick mid-50s two-story house at 903 Arthur Avenue, which we could occupy in October. Until then, we moved into Don and Ilse Reists’ house for a few weeks while they were abroad and then a month in a Laurelville Mennonite Church Center cabin called Friesland (they all had Anabaptist names). So, after now seven moves, we joined the stability of the Scottdale bourgeoisie; I called it nesting fever. Except for a few interludes, we lived on Arthur Avenue for the next thirty years.  And why, dear reader, did we move back to Scottdale? Patience, patience, amigo, for that we have the next three decades to answer, and as my mother used to quote her favorite verse from the Epistle of Romans: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” 

The Henry David Thoreau quote comes from the title page of Walden. The early section on visiting my brother James and going to the Geauga County Amish comes from my little brown address book in my personal files. In the early seventies, I started keeping a yearly journal in Composition Notebooks often called “Notes on Life.” The final quotation, one of my mother’s favorite Bible verses is Romans 8:28. 

1974 Lookout Camp

1974  Lookout Camp. Family gatherings on weekends; Andrew’s Lookout Camp, ponds and fish, signs; Paul and Carol, Roy and Ruby, David and Brenda, James, Rhoda and Jon Mast, Miriam and Veryl Kratzer, Ruth; Mennonite Publishing House editing stresses; moving to Bowling Green, Ohio, sources of income during graduate studies year.

In January we spent two weeks in the Caribbean, doing an article on our Puerto Rican friends the Josian and Auria Rosario family and having a week of vacation on St. John’s of the Virgin Islands. After our return from Puerto Rico, our family regularly got together on weekends at my parents’ place, often culminating with everyone gathering for the Sunday noon dinner. My mother would prepare a big noon meal and everyone would wander in. By this time David and Brenda had moved back to Wooster, and Paul and Carol and Roy and Ruby were nearby in Canal Fulton and Medina, respectively. Even James who had done a belated hippy and bohemian sabbatical to the West Coast had returned to Cleveland, although he was irregular at family events. Another event which pulled us all together was a mini-barn raising one Saturday when we built Andrew and Mattie a small chicken house for their Buff Orpingtons.  

These family gatherings changed from being largely young adults and dogs to the appearance of children. By 1974, Jacob and Kent were around and Amy was coming along in 1975. We had our usual discussions and debates at the table and the large kitchen dining room, and then went out into the large lawn for touch football. We were young and healthy and younger sisters and our wives would join in the games. Probably because we could all join together, touch football replaced basketball and softball as the Miller family sport during these years. The unwritten rules were that you could pound on your brother or brother-in-law at the line of scrimmage, but you made adaptations for his wife or a little sister. Often one of the teams would end the day with a trick play of sending a woman up the middle and everyone forming a wedge to protect her, or everyone blocking for a small child as the ball carrier. I don’t remember anyone ever getting seriously hurt in all the blocking, throwing, jumping and falls.

My father during these years was developing our woods into the Lookout Camp. We had about 20 acres of mainly woods along the east side of the Holmesville Fredricksburg Road, and my father slowly upgraded it. He initially placed a few picnic areas to putting in travel trailer sites, an office, an assembly building, and cabins. On Sundays during the summer, Andrew conducted worship services in the forenoon which provided a kind of outlet for his earlier pastoral role. More changes came when Andrew drilled for water and had a faucet for drinking water, and to provide for two small ponds, one for fish and one for swimming. In the shallow swimming pond, he placed a diving board, and the grandchildren enjoyed it although their mother’s had some question of its sanitation. There was no outlet to the pond, except drainage into the ground, hence a stagnate, dirty but comfortable little pool for the children. Still, I know of no one getting sick from it.

In the small fish pond Andrew stocked some goldfish and large carp, the largest of which he named Shamu. My father advertized Shamu on leaflets and on a sign announcing the Lookout Campground along Route 83 near Holmesville. Occasionally out-of-town visitors, who apparently had seen the mock heroic publicity, would drive up to Lookout and discovered that this Shamu was a large carp and not even close to the famous killer whale (orca) of Sea World fame. Andrew seemed unfazed by these misunderstandings and would show his prized fish along with some other animals and birds (all with individual names) in a petting zoo. He invited the big carp to the water’s edge with some little feeding pellets. Andrew was quite protective of his fish, whether from unauthorized fishing or from natural predators such as the Great Blue Heron. He kept a 22-rifle at the camp office, and one day when a heron was overhead looking for a meal, Andrew got the rifle and shot him out of the sky. He told us with some satisfaction that his action should teach the herons to leave his fish alone.

Aside, from Shamu and the carp, Andrew also advertised Lookout Camp’s Indian mounds. Some subsidence types of hollow spots were on top of the ridge, and my father considered them to be Indian creations, possibly to give off smoke signals. One time when I visited, he had a group of students and an Old Testament professor from Malone College digging for Native American artifacts; I think they found mostly glass bottles and shards. The professor had done archeology digs in Israel, and for Andrew this seemed quite conclusive evidence of the authenticity of these Indian mounds.

In any case, identification signs went up. The camp was well marked, and one could drive up a winding lane with round signs noting speed limits, no hunting, Indian mounds, and one pointing in the general direction of the woods for a Great Horned Owl’s nest. Andrew loved signs and regularly added new ones and updated old ones whether by a professional sign pointer, a [William, I believe] Faught in Wooster, or with his own script. After Andrew’s death, there were plenty of signs to be distributed among the off-spring. Here’s one I kept:

Take NOTICE  

No Fire-Works (No Water Pistols) of any Sort in the Park

No Guns, Toy Guns & BB’s

--Public Law Code B44

I once commended Andrew on his research in referencing the state's "Public Law Code." No, Andrew said, he had simply written his own law and code for the sign. He seemed pleased with its effectiveness. Meanwhile, In business, Andrew was now in the Skyline Mobile home business; he and Mattie put macadam on the field behind the house, put up an office on our old basketball court, and sold mobile homes. Generally, he was successful, and when my father had money, he gladly gave it away too. During these early seventies years, as we were leaving for home back to Scottdale, Pennsylvania, he would often write out a check of fifty dollars, saying here, this will pay for your gas and get a good meal.

My mother helped Andrew with his with mobile home and camp projects and provided some financial management or as she called it brakes (from impulsive decisions). But the main change in her life came in 1975, when at age 57 Mattie got her chauffeurs license and started driving the school bus at Holmes Training Center. By this time her youngest daughter Ruth was heading for college, and the bus driving was a good match for Mattie, getting up early in the morning, meeting with Andrew for brunch and returning on her route in the early afternoon. For fifteen years, she carried on this morning and afternoon routine, becoming somewhat of a legend among the Holmes County families with handicapped children, and retiring with decent state benefits at age seventy-two. I’ll catch up with various members of the family.

Paul age 32 and Carol Stevens were living in Canal Fulton, Ohio, and Paul had joined the law office of Amer and Cunningham in Akron, Ohio.  Carol was an English teacher at the Jackson High School near Massillon. I’ll backtrack a little on Paul life; he had graduated from the University of Akron Law School in 1972 where he had studied for three years. He and Carol were married on June 10 of 1967, and for the next two years, he taught of English at the Central Christian High School in Kidron while Carol was finishing her undergraduate degree at Malone. I well remember Paul and Carol while they were still in Canton, one day he told me he was heading for Law School that Fall. It seemed the most natural thing in the world, although I knew he was also considering graduate studies in history. By the summer of 1975, Paul and Carol moved to Millersburg where he joined the brothers John and Judson Schuler Law office, and they built a new house in Millersburg, and their daughter Amy was born on November 21, 1975.

Roy age 31 and Ruby were in Cincinnati from 1969 to 1973 where Roy was at the University of Cincinnati Medical School. I remember visiting them several times, in fact attending one of his graduation exercises with my parents; they were so proud. Then Roy and Ruby moved to Medina, Ohio, where Roy joined another partner in a family practice in a bedroom community. Roy developed a good medical practice and among his patients were the families of some of the Cleveland Browns players. He and Ruby at this point joined a fairly affluent suburban young professional set in hosting dinners, golf outings and various benefits.  Roy, however, always kept one hand in mechanics, and bought some 1930s Ford Model A roadsters which he kept in good shape. Ruby had a little Schnauzer dog or two which she kept well-groomed and behaved. But by September 13 of 1976, little Andrew was born, and they were busy with family issues. They called him Drew.  

David age 26 and Brenda left the Washington D.C. International Guest House in 1971, and moved to Elkhart, Indiana, where he was invited to becoming a Voluntary Service (VS) director and later placement officer when Kent was born October 13, 1972. Although David was a history and secondary education major in college, after student teaching he soon trended toward administrative and financial positions. After Kent’s arrival and the untimely death of Brenda’s father James Bricker, David and Brenda moved to Wayne County where in 1974, David became Central Christian High School’s first development director. A year later, when the Central principal office became vacant, David filled in as the school’s executive for a year. By 1977, he joined Wayne Savings as a branch manager. A daughter Abigail (usually called Abby) was born December 29, 1976, and Brenda was busy with the two young children.   

James age 23 by the mid-seventies, having seemed such a promising adolescent, was on a prolonged detour, the destination unknown; he had returned to Ohio from Berkley, Oakland, Portland, and other stops along the West Coast. After leaving Central Christian High School in 1970 where he had considerable achievements in student leadership, James went to Goshen College for a year(1970-71)  and then to Washington D.C. (1971-72) where he joined a radical Christian men’s commune, largely male graduate students. The group seems to have been related to International Christian Leadership and the Church of the Savior, but James was always vague to me about this year, and I had the impression that something went bad during this time. By Summer of 1972, James fled the commune and was living as a bohemian poet on the West Coast, ushering at movie houses, and eating and sleeping at shelters; our brother Roy went out to visit him, once in California and another time in Oregon. James loved alcohol (as well as some other substances) to excess during those years, and I remember one Sunday when a bottle of wine was served at a family gathering, James drinking most of it himself, talking animatedly and causing considerable embarrassment. When James returned east in the mid-seventies, he moved into the coal bin in our parents’ basement for a while and then into the corn crib in the back of the barn. By the Fall of 1974, James made his way up to Cleveland, and within a year or two had a night job at the emergency room reception desk of St. Luke’s Hospital and by 1977 was starting to take university classes again.

Interestingly, for all the theological flavors of Maple Grove Mission and our father’s flings with exotic Christian movements, my brothers and sisters, with the exception of James, invariably attended a Mennonite church or fellowship where ever we lived. Mattie and Andrew associated this pattern with the effectiveness of their prayers.

Rhoda age 20 graduated from Central Christian High School in 1972 and studied at Goshen College for a year. Rhoda was an extrovert and a leader and may have been singular in our family as a high school cheerleader. She loved music, and while still in high school teamed up with Clyde Sundheimer’s close harmony quartet called “The Journeymen,” a regional phenomenon, even having a bus and singing "I Wouldn't Take Nothing for my Journey Now." They made a 33-long-play record which I wish I could hear again. Rhoda sang a high tenor as an alto, and played all over the piano keyboard. I believe the only time I heard them in person was when they opened for a visiting Southern gospel quartet at Hiland High School; it was all so beautiful until the featured group sang Merle Haggard’s “Walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me,” an angry backlash anthem to the Vietnam peace movement. On May 19, 1973, Rhoda married Jon Mast, a dairy farmer from the Abram and Mary Mast family near the Martins Creek between Berlin and Millersburg. The Masts had a large herd of Holsteins which they milked three times a day in a new electronic milking parlor; it seemed as though Orlando’s Epcot Center had moved right up to Holmes County and automatically fed, bred, and milked the Mast cows. Rhoda soon continued her studies in education at Malone College.

Miriam age 18 had a busy year in 1974. In May, she graduated from Central Christian High School in Kidron and by August 3, she and Veryl Kratzer were married. Veryl was from the Kidron Loyal and Rosa Kratzer farm family. Miriam did a senior paper on Amish tourism for one of her classes, and I remember we went over to Lancaster County to check out the scene. We visited with Joseph and Sadie Beiler near Gordonville, Pennsylvania. Miriam loved a cause, and the Beilers were ready for her; Joseph had even written an article on the negative aspects of tourism calling it the Amish Trojan Horse; I helped him get it published in Gospel Herald (June 8, 1976). 

I don’t know how Miriam’s paper turned out, but she and Veryl graduated in style—their own of course. I think Miriam refused to wear a gown and Veryl wore a short one with the pant legs rolled up and no socks. Miriam’s theatrical simplicity also extended to a charming peasant wedding later that summer at Millersburg Mennonite Church. As I recall, orange juice and donuts were served for the reception. The main drama was the rumor that James had come back from the West Coast with plans to stop the wedding ceremony, Jane Eyre style; I don’t remember what James’ reasons were. Miriam and Veryl moved to Berlin for a while and took care of Grandpa Levi L. Schlabach. But Miriam had a heart for children, and by January 6, 1976, Amos was born, more to come.

Ruth age 16 was a student at Central Christian High School, and I remember one evening attending a basketball game where she played and brother David gave the introductions. Of all of us children, Ruth probably had the longest unified church experience attending and joining the Millersburg Mennonite Church during her childhood and youth. I remember one evening she went to her instruction class with Bishop Roman Stutzman and preparing for baptism. Ruth and her sisters helped Andrew during his Skyline mobile home business years. He often talked proudly of the girls helping set up the trailers, blocking them and seeing that they were level and then attaching the aluminum skirting below the trailers.

Ruth was the last with Andrew and Mattie, and already in high school she had a colorful fraktur Heinz Gaugel painted hope chest. My parents’ hopes were not in vain; in high school she had a classmate John Roth who by his telling had already spotted her as a little pig-tailed girl who had accompanied our mother Mattie when she visited the Roth family, Mattie selling them a set of World Books. Mattie sold enough World Books to get our own family a free set to see the world—at least in print--and John and Ruth became friends during high school and later at Goshen College. Often at family gatherings and Christmas, we had talent shows. During these years, Ruth and John regaled the grandchildren and all of us with their original puppet shows. 

But back to Scottdale. After four years, I was ready to leave for a while. And since the rest of our staff had graduate degrees, the MPH management agreed I could continue with a master’s degree in English. I had some success in editing; Paul Lederach had me pull together a number of family essays and turn them into a discussion guide The Family in Today’s Society which went through several printings. I also picked up editing the Youth Bible Study Guide for Sunday school classes which hit a complication one quarter when my friend Arnold Cressman wrote the lessons. Arnold was enthralled by the sixties youth culture (his idea of a good Lord’s Supper was now of a group-sharing with Coke and chips), and he loved the colloquial Gospel writings of the Southern farmer theologian Clarence Jordan.  The word dude regularly entered his Bible study lexicon; I don’t remember if dude was applied to Jesus or some other New Testament character, but I unwisely allowed it to stand. Boxes of quarterlies were returned to Scottdale, and letters complained that we used slang terms in our church literature.

This incident and some others related to With, the youth magazine, evoked a one-day editorial, marketing and management meeting on how we were serving our constituency, our market, and the Mennonite churches. These meetings gave ambivalent tones because two signals came across; one was that we should not offend the traditionalists too much so that they stop buying our curriculum and periodicals. The second message was that we should offend the conservatives sufficiently to remind them that they are on the wrong side of history, and that we were the prophets announcing the future. We were resurrecting the left wing of the reformation, and hence on the vanguard of history’s 1960s, what we considered to be progressive. In essence as editors, we could largely do as we wished, and most wished for the prophetic mantel.

One need hardly comment on what this posturing meant for our eroding market share and evoking customer loyalty.  I remember walking home with my neighbor Jan Gleysteen after the meeting and asking whether I should resign. No, he said, this is simply a part of publishing and teaching the unwashed American Mennonites, apparently still not up to the European Dutch standards; to him it was all understandable. And then there were our General Conference (GC) cousins; that Fall, I went to Mennonite historical committee meetings at Wichita and Newton, Kansas where these Russian Mennonites were celebrating 100 years of living in North America. It was a trip I would often take for the next three decades because we cooperated with them on many projects.

For our immediate family that Fall was a time of moving to an apartment at 300 Napoleon Road, Bowling Green, Ohio, to start graduate school classes. MPH had a generous education program for employees called supplemental education in which gave a grant of up to $3,200 a year for training, with the understanding that one needed to work six years to redeem the cost. I used to call it indentured servitude, but with no complaints; it was a fair exchange.  I had already been accepted in Bowling Green State University back in 1968 and they simply renewed my application. So a part of the financing came from my graduate school graduate teaching assistantship which covered tuition costs.

I also mentioned to my mother that I may need another thousand, and she said why don’t you go back and talk to Uncle Roy; this would have been her brother the Amish bishop who was guardian of our grandfather Levi L. Schlabach’s life savings. Now in his eighth decade, my grandfather was in a stage called in Pennsylvania German kindisch (childish); today, it would probably be called an early stage of Alzheimer’s. So I went to see Roy, and he said, sure come back tomorrow and I’ll go up and draw some money out of the Killbuck bank at Berlin. The next afternoon, as I was driving back to Roy and Iva’s home on the Weaver Ridge near Berlin, I passed him along the road; he waved me to stop. He leaned out from the buggy and handed me an envelope with the check. He said pay it back but no interest which I did within the next few years. I don’t think I ever paid interest on any family loans.   

Additional income that Fall at Bowling Green came from a sign on a bulletin board at school announcing good hourly pay for unloading tomatoes at night on weekends. I went to a nearby Heinz processing plant, was hired on the spot, to help unload large semi and dump trucks of tomatoes onto a conveyer belt with the foreman happily shouting obscenities with each sentence. By the end of the night I had a new appreciation for the word fuck and all its variations as a verb, noun, adjective and adverb. I remember about midnight taking a lunch break in a dining room with a fellow worker who was on a 40-hour weekly shift. I asked him how he liked it, thinking he may feel a little demeaned as I did. On the contrary, he said he really liked it; it was a good pay check for his family. After two weekends, our tomatoes unloading season was over, and I decided to take my co-worker’s point of view. It helped to pay groceries.

But then I soon learned we could buy our groceries at no or low cost; many of my graduate school neighbors were getting food stamps. So I went in to the welfare offices and applied. The counselor seemed as eager to provide them for me as I was to get them, and that winter we had plenty of food. When I mentioned the food stamps to one of my family members, they were taken aback, as though we had stolen some money. So I don’t think we said much about it or to Gloria’s family although they all knew. In any case, we managed okay with additional income from Gloria herself working at a Lawson Store at the end of our street. From our first meeting at the ice cream eatery The Spot, I have noticed that Gloria’s unruffled goodwill and efficiency makes her a natural at retail where ever she goes. Still Lawson retailing ended at Christmas. Gloria was pregnant, and expecting our second child in January.  

This chapter comes from memory, family conversations, and my personal files of this period. 

1973 Editor of Miscellaneous Curriculum

1973   Editor of Miscellaneous Curriculum. Mission education, 1972 Mennonite Yearbook, John A. Hostetler and Amish writings, Lancaster Mennonite Conference, Builder and Ivan Illich, Visiting the Bruderhof, Scottdale residences, Ben and Rosie Charles, Gloria’s pregnancy and birth of Jacob, Mennonite Youth Fellowship (MYF) and leaving the youth culture, public school and parents.

When I came to Mennonite Publishing House, my title was editor of miscellaneous curriculum. This designation meant I did about anything which our director Paul M. Lederach assigned me to do. Among these projects were editing mission education materials, revising the junior club materials Wayfarers and Torchbearers, and editing a Sunday evening program guide which was later called Issues to Discuss. Many of these curriculum items were tied to a specific Mennonite church setting or activity for which curriculum was needed. Most of these were involved with sponsoring program groups which gave counsel for the curriculum so my work involved considerable travel of meetings in Chicago and other sites where agency and conference people would gather. Much of our work was cooperative with the General Conference Mennonite church with headquarters in Newton, Kansas. I especially enjoyed the mission studies which were regional by continent or country and often times gave considerable back ground to the country and the missionary and service projects.

The mission studies lost sales as Mennonites lost interest in evangelizing and starting Mennonite churches in other countries. During my time in the seventies, one could see a trend in these studies from earlier telling stories of Christian conversion and beginning (the word was planting) churches to becoming more culturally sensitive and less sure that Christ is unique among world religions. This gradual change is understandable, but the unintended consequence was less interest in the world. I learned that conservative Christians who evangelize often have a greater degree of an international sense because of their missionary ties to specific countries. I would sometimes attend the mission education meetings of the National Council of Church where mission education had basically become kind of global studies 101 or introductory cultural anthropology. Even the elderly Methodist women eventually decided that they can get that mission education from public television, the National Geographic, and the resources of the local university. For the Mennonites, as settings such as special mission studies, Sunday evening and mid-week meetings, and junior club programs diminished so did the need for curriculum. Small groups emerged, but they created their own curriculum.   

By 1971 Ellrose Zook retired, and I (editor of miscellaneous) picked up editorial responsibilities the 1972 Mennonite Yearbook which Paul Lederach had me arrange by the congregations into the five projected regions of the Mennonites instead of seventeen district conferences. I remember the new denominational executive Paul N. Kraybill came to visit us for a day at Scottdale explaining how it was all to be re-organized. There was great energy on how we wanted the local churches and conferences to behave in a more streamlined and efficient organization. Lederach would mention to me that the five regions were roughly parallel to the United States district conferences of the General Conference Mennonite Church which he assumed we would eventually join.

This new arrangement, however, got a strong negative response from pastors, the main buyers, mainly because of ease of use; reference material is based on accessibility, and the pastors thought of themselves by conferences rather than the new regions. The denominational leaders of course wanted the publication to lead and educate the members. But letters of complaint came in and sales went down that year; it was the last year that marketing people lovingly remembered how at the Spring Lancaster Conference meeting, pastors left the meetinghouse with a stack of yearbooks under their arms. With time we returned the congregations to their conferences and eventually the region idea was dropped altogether by the church bureaucrats. But it was a first learning that what energized a denominational official did not necessarily have the same stimulus effect at a local level. I felt bad for the loss in sales and credibility and also knew I (although a miscellaneous editor) was uniquely unfitted for this job which had a high statistical component. My colleague James Horsch picked it up the following year and did it quite successfully until his retirement.

I was better at combining my writing and editing experience with history, and that summer I was voted on as a member of the Historical Committee of the Mennonite Church. I probably became best known when I wrote an early Amish introduction in the ecumenical magazine The Christian Century called “The Amish Word for Today.” The word turned out to be regarding education, life style, evangelism and ecology. It got me in contact with our old Holmesville childhood family visitor (1951) John A. Hostetler who had since become the leading authority on the Amish; his standard work of the Amish Society (1963) would go through four editions. He wrote me an affirming note and generally visited our family whenever he came to Scottdale to check on his tourist books: Amish, Mennonite and Hutterite Life. He was very helpful to me at the same time that he was quite negative of the Mennonite Publishing House where he and his wife Beulah had worked and left. The article brought me numerous contacts from Mennonite scholars and leaders and readers of the Century who asked for counsel and books. 

This writing came at about the very time that Herald Press, the book publishing division of Mennonite Publishing House and my employer, published a novel called Jonathan by Dan Neidermyer. The main protagonist was a young Amish man and the story brought a conservative protestant overlay to the Lancaster Amish experience. I was embarrassed and wrote to David Luthy that the novel was “crude in craft and a severe distortion” of the Amish. Its inaccurate descriptions set off the chair of the Historical Committee John A. Hostetler who orchestrated a letter writing campaign against the book, including the Amish. I wrote a long critique of it but never went public because I was in the same organization. In any case, Hostetler soon got the book banned. During this time my friend Ken Reed was writing about an Amish soldier and when Hostetler got a taste of it, he had Herald Press turn it into a Mennonite soldier. During the seventies and eighties, Hostetler ran a quite effective one-person screening agency on what was to be published regarding the Amish. 

Meanwhile, I was named office editor, or a kind of managing editor function of Builder and then editor, a role I carried for the next decade. Builder was a congregational education and leadership magazine. I wrote in my journal that the journalist Jack Anderson said he writes for the Kansas City milkman, and I edit for the Lancaster dairy farmer. If I romanticized the Lancaster Conference readers, it was in part because my colleagues seemed to have a special condescension toward them. Perhaps it was in coming out of a marginal Mennonite relationship, that I admired the largest conference in the Mennonite Church whose members had a certain traditional charm, steadfast ethics and humble piety. The publishing house leaders often criticized the Lancaster leaders for being gate keepers regarding which products to buy, especially its conservatives. We thought that what Lancaster Conference lacked was to become progressive and more liberal like the rest of us. Our special nemesis during the seventies was the chair of their Christian education board; a Pennsylvania German teacher named Noah Good whose name in Scottdale was regularly abbreviated as No Good. 

Builder’s bread and butter content was the youth and adult Bible teaching helps, but we also carried articles on education and congregational leadership. I was fascinated by Ivan Illich (1926-2002), the Deschooling Society (1971) guru of that period, and when I look at my journals from those years, I find numerous notes and clippings regarding Illich. When Illich came to Pittsburgh’s Carlow College to give a lecture one evening, Gloria and I attended. Gloria was at that time in a Spanish education program at Seton Hill, and Illich was steeped in Latin American background and a one-time priest. Much of his educational theory came from traveling throughout Latin American where he felt schools were unrealistic compared to apprenticeship. He had served as a dean of a Catholic school in Puerto Rico, and I was also fascinated because he had a language institute at Cuernavaca in Mexico.

If Illich was considered radical and progressive, in many ways he was a traditionalist who upheld mentoring and apprenticeship as ideals in education, claiming that a second language and dentistry, two difficult fields to learn, could be learned best by apprenticeship. I had of course learned Spanish without a class or school, and I thought Illich and the radical de-schoolers provided a provided a needed critique of public education and even church education such as Sunday school. John Holt with his romantic beliefs in the child learning was another critique of schools during these years. Still, in my life time, I have not seen a program emerge which can replace the schools whether public or private, today the major alternative being home schooling and the cyber schools.

If radical education ideas were in the air, so were some family and community ideas. On February 2-4, we visited the Bruderhof, the Society of Brothers in Farmington where we were hosted by a kindly Brit named John Hinde. We had visited at open house events earlier with the Alderfers, read some of their literature, and we had read The Joyful Community by Benjamin Zabolcki. For a weekend, we entered a world of unadorned full-voiced singing, low media with no television and radio, and good manual work where everyone was equal. A part of the equality and selflessness was that if you were especially interested in something, the chances were that you would not do that project. I expressed no special interesting in anything and enjoyed my day in the wood shop, sanding pieces which would eventually become a part of Community Playthings, their main source of income. Gloria inadvertently expressed interest in their school and educational program but was barely shown a classroom; she was assigned to the kitchen, peeling potatoes all day. Needless to say, after that visit, communal living, at least Bruderhof style, was never an active option for Gloria. Still, the communal meals were memorable with all sitting at long tables with a string quartet playing or a short story being read. One night, a person read Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” after dinner; I never forgot it.   

We moved many times during those first years at Scottdale, most of it somewhat communal during those years. Our first six months we lived in the MPH apartments on the third floor, and we would smell the aromas of garlic spices from the Haddads who lived down the hall. Across the hall, lived Chris Keiser who knew where all the best blackberry and elderberry bushes were in East Huntington Township and would occasionally take us along. From the apartments, we moved to Ben and Rosie Charles house a block down on 823 Market Street. This was an inexpensive efficiency apartment with a common entrance and shared bathroom which allowed us to save money for Gloria’s schooling and also save toward eventually buying a property ourselves. Both Charles were employed at Mennonite Publishing House, and in off-hours Ben and Rosie although childless befriended neighborhood children and youth, often playing with them and taking some along to Sunday school. Rosie was also an outstanding Scrabble player, several times being the MPH champion.

But what I especially remember about the Charles is their devout Christian life. Every night at ten o’clock, we would hear Ben and Rosie read a devotional and pray earnestly for co-workers, neighbors, friends (and renters). Then Ben would come click, click, click with a cane up the stairs for his evening bath. Although Gloria and I could not match nor I suppose believe in all of the Charles’ devotion, we did respect their scruples and goodwill. For some reason, we left our washing go till Sunday evenings when we wanted to go to the Laundromat. Not wanting to offend the Charles, we put our dirty wash into pillows which one of us threw from the upstairs window, and the other one caught them and put them into the car. Then we went to the Laundromat and a movie, and returned late at night after the Charles had retired.

There were plenty of movies to see that summer with the release of movies such as “American Graffiti” which I earlier described as my old high school movie (1960) and the O’Neal family father and daughter “Paper Moon.” But the movie I was waiting for opened on June 15, 1973, Friday: “Happy as the Grass is Green” at the Fulton Theater in Lancaster. My friends Merle and Phyllis Good had raised money and formed a company to make a movie of Merle’s novel by that name. It was a story of a New York hippy who comes to Lancaster and finds some spiritual awakening among the Mennonites in that setting. I wrote a cheeky review of it for Christian Living, making a big issue of the fact that the traditional Lancaster Mennonite would not go see the movie. In retrospect, this obvious fact seems gratuitous; the movie is a complement to the traditional Lancaster Mennonite community. The movie was quite well done; they later changed the name to Hazel’s People.

By the spring of 1973, Gloria was pregnant, and Jacob was born on August 1, at McGee Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. It was a life changing experience for me. I wrote for one of my yearly goals of 1973 to help participate in childbirth with dignity and to be a good father. Much of the spring and summer was spent in anticipation of this birth, especially since we planned a Lamaze birth which also involved the father. Gloria carried her pregnancy well, and one Sunday our pastor Ed Alderfer came to her and told her she was especially attractive as a pregnant woman. Dear reader, I know, I know, to mention this compliment probably evokes barefoot and pregnant images but that was not Alderfer’s intent; she simply radiated health and vigor, hence an attractive young woman. She kept on in her regular activities in swimming, studies and gardening, and throughout this entire time Gloria was taking classes at Seton Hill University. She graduated in 1973 cum laude in Spanish, after doing her student teaching at Mt. Pleasant High School in the Fall of 1972. I went to birthing classes with Gloria, read books, and even with my general biology and farm background learning much about the human birth.

A part of birth by dignity was the assumption that child birth is natural and that one should do as much of it oneself as possible with lots of father involvement. Some of this was natural and understandable but some was also ludicrous, especially when it took a turn of making natural childbirth an enemy of the attending doctor. I’ll never forget the testimonials we had at the end of the classes when a father and mother and newborn appeared, and the father did most of the talking. He told how he had fought off the attending physician and in his telling delivered the baby himself, naturally, of course.  

Our birth was so different because Gloria had a TJA factor in her blood which gave the physicians some concern that there not be complications, or that her blood and the fetus mix during the pregnancy. They selected a day for the delivery, induced labor in the morning and it was late that evening before Jacob was born. After 16 hours in labor, all romantic thoughts of focusing on a seashore, rhythmic breathing, and an easy delivery were far gone, at least from me. I was simply thankful for a strong Gloria and a good doctor (Richard Depp) who could use episiotomies, forceps, epidurals, all those things which an ideal natural birth assumed unnecessary.

I was mainly thankful Gloria and Jacob were alive, even though both seemed exhausted, Gloria from long labor and Jacob jaundiced. They took him to the preemie section and put him under a light where he looked like a yellow giant among the little three-pounders. But I hesitate to say too much about the birth. I felt that I had done nothing, and that childbirth was ultimately a woman’s story, a difficult, painful, and heroic project. Jacob was great gift from a woman I loved and a generous God. Sometime after midnight, I left the McGee Women’s Hospital and slowly wound my way back to Scottdale on Route 51. I opened the windows, sang loudly, and smoked a cigar--in celebration and also to stay awake.     

Soon after Jacob’s birth, I attended the Mennonite Youth Convention (MYF) in August 1973 at Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan. But my heart was not in it. I had already looked at an offer to edit the youth magazine With but had walked away from it, in part because of the suggestion that we might move to Newton, Kansas, but mainly because I was tired of being identified with youth. As my good secretary Joyce Millslagle told me in 2011: you and Gloria were considered the token hippies and youth. One of the effects of being a new father was that I wanted to separate myself from the sixties youth culture. I was now almost thirty, and I did not care if the kids trusted me or not. I wanted to think of myself as an old young father. The next year 1974, I wrote in my journal: “How glad I am that this is the last year of baby-sitting with the MYF. I’d rather sit at home and have Jacob lick my face and read the Kreutzer Sonata or sing a song than try to help (if indeed that is possible) some kids come to terms with acne, orgasms, and grades. I don’t deny the importance of the role; it is only that for a certain time there is a mission, and the youth bag is not my mission now. I look forward to resigning after Gloria goes on the beach party in June.”

Gloria was now pregnant with Hannah, and the MYFers years later remembered how she dug a hole in the sand for her pregnant belly. Gloria and I were part of the counselor team for the local MYF, the ultimate sixties youth group.  At this point in time the Scottdale MYF was quite large with some bohemian-type school friends joining them for the ride; they were considered to be the avant-garde of the future of society and certainly of the Mennonite world. They were bright, intelligent, and rebellious. The youth were totally running MYF and voted in their own sponsors; I remember well when my friend Kim Miller called me and said the MYF had voted for us. I had the clear impression that he believed we should feel so lucky to meet with such a select group.

On the contrary, I felt burdened and embarrassed by their arrogance, and believed we were chosen simply as the youngest available couple with the longest hair. At this point the MYF students scorned their high school teachers, and especially the principal who apparently had been an officer in the United States military. The MYF students had regular confrontations over curriculum, hair length, flag salute, American foreign policy and dress codes, but it seemed to me these conflicts had more to do with youthful arrogance than Christian conscience. Although I admired them on one level; I also saw them as being out in the cold without any coats on. Their parents worked at MPH, were very busy, and quite isolated from western Pennsylvania cultural, political, and educational life, hence with little influence.

During the end of 1973, the Scottdale borough was gearing up to celebrate its centennial in 1974; committees planned a huge parade, a pageant, time capsule, Scottdale 100 Years book, and a centennial ball. Of over one hundred people serving on the Scottdale centennial committees; there was one Mennonite, H. Ralph Hernley. I had to think of the Berlin centennial where Gloria was queen. I had grown up in a community where Mennonite parents were a mediating agency between their children and school officials by virtue of also being teachers, business people, major land owners and school board members. Here the parents seemed just as confrontational, isolated and innocent as their children. I decided at that point that if I would become a parent of a student, I would develop credible relationships with the schools and community. 

Most of this chapter comes from my journal, Notes on Life,” personal files and memory of the times. 

1972 Howard and Edna Zehr

1972  Howard and Edna Zehr, Mennonite Church General Conference, Daniel Kauffman,  Mennonite Book and Tract Society, Mennonite Publishing House (MPH), Mennonite Historical Library,  Mennonite Central Committee, The Mennonite Commission for Christian Education, Mennonite Community Association, Tourmagination, Mennonite Federal Credit Union, Mennonite Business Associates, Mennonite Youth Fellowship (MYF), Laurelville Mennonite Church Center, Arnold W. Cressman, John Howard Yoder, primitive camping, acapella singing and church membership, political activism, Ladon Sheats, Merle and Phyllis Pellman Good and a Boston vacation.

On one of our first Sundays of worship at Scottdale Mennonite Church, Howard and Edna Zehr invited Gloria and me to their house for lunch.  Howard Zehr (1916-1977) had just returned from conference travels, and Edna had not expected lunch guests. She sent Howard and me to the neighboring town of Connellsville to get a Kentucky Fried Chicken lunch, and during the ride Zehr named all the Holmes County, Ohio, Mennonite bishops. When we returned, Edna lit candles on both sides of the bucket of Colonel Sanders’ chicken, rolls and cold slaw; she said she liked candles. I remember this friendly somewhat unusual welcome vividly because it was our first Sunday at Scottdale.

We learned that Howard Zehr was the executive secretary of the Mennonite Church General Conference with offices in the Mennonite Publishing House building. The parallel agency today (factoring in a merger) would be the Mennonite Church USA’s executive board with offices in Elkhart, Indiana. A year later, the Zehrs moved away because in 1971, the Mennonite Church re-organized itself, and the executive secretary’s office moved to Lombard, Illinois. In many ways, the Zehrs personified the Mennonite institutions I discovered at Scottdale in the early seventies, soon gone with the exception of publishing.

Although Scottdale was still a denominational hub in the early seventies, the pattern was marked.  Mennonite offices opened at Scottdale and then moved away during most of the 20^th century. I’ll note the organizations I found in Scottdale, and if you are not interested in Mennonite organizations, you may want to simply skip the next three pages.  

Daniel Kauffman was an institution. If one would have been looking for a mailing address and a name for Mennonite Church General Conference, it would still have been Scottdale, Pennsylvania, and the name Daniel Kauffman (1865 - 1944). He was the chief denominational organizer in 1898 and arrived at Scottdale in 1909 where Mennonite Publishing House provided him a base to continue the project. Kauffman was also editor of the influential weekly Gospel Herald from its 1908 beginning until his death in 1944.

The Mennonite Book and Tract Society preceded Kauffman, beginning in 1892 and publishing  tracts, books, children and adult Sunday school materials, and some periodicals such as Beams of Light. Its office was considered wherever the secretary-treasurer was located, and Scottdale’s Abram D. Martin (married to Ada Loucks) was the treasurer from 1905 to 1908 when it sold its assets to the Mennonite Publishing House. The big enchilada, of course, was Mennonite Publishing House (MPH), organized as a denominational agency in 1908. An organizing committee representing nine Mennonite conferences arranged a buy-out of the Gospel Witness Company (1905), the Mennonite Book and Tract Society (noted above) and John F. Funk’s troubled Mennonite Publishing Company of Elkhart, Indiana. Much of the rest of my life would intersect with MPH.

Mennonite Historical Library was a happy discovery for me at the MPH; during my years it was generally called “the workers’ library.” This institution’s beginnings can be traced to Mennonite historian and writer John Horsch’s (1867-1941) arrival at Scottdale in 1908. Soon after Horsch’s death, many of his titles were added to the Mennonite Historical Library of Goshen College, with the Scottdale contribution called The Horsch Collection, about 1,250 titles. But a very helpful Mennonite library remained at Scottdale.

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), I discovered, was here for fifteen years. After Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Mennonite groups in North American organized themselves as Mennonite Central Committee in 1920 to provide a famine relief program. Levi Mumaw (1879-1935), the treasurer of Mennonite Publishing House, was elected as the first executive secretary-treasurer of MCC, an office which he held until his death. The administration of all MCC work was through Mumaw’s office till 1935 when it moved to his successor Orie O. Miller’s office at Akron, Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County. Old-timers in Scottdale, however, were as likely to remembered Mumaw as an outstanding song leader as for his business acumen.  

The Mennonite Commission for Christian Education had an office at Mennonite Publishing House was on the third floor in a section across the hall from the Congregational Literature Division where I worked. Founded in 1937, it had been led by Arnold W. Cressman since 1959. The Commission staff worked closely with us curriculum editors of Mennonite Publishing House in the creation, marketing and servicing of Sunday school materials, curriculum and church supplies. This commission was dissolved in 1971 and replaced with a new agency called Mennonite Board of Congregational Ministries with offices in Goshen, Indiana. Of all the re-locations of church agencies away from Scottdale, I found little evidence of a negative response, except this one.    

Somehow I missed seeing the infamous chart, but I heard numerous references to it. A graphic displayed locations such as Scottdale, Goshen, Elkhart, Philadelphia, Lancaster, and Chicago, as options where church offices should be located. They were rated by categories such as transportation (airport), Mennonite community and congregations, schools, and economy.  In all these categories, Scottdale came in dead last. Some locals were bemused and even amused; others such as Paul M. Lederach and Arnold W. Cressman, were deeply offended, feeling our institutions had been weakened and the community slighted.

Mennonite Community Association was personified by Ralph and Elizabeth Hernley’s farm in East Huntington Township. The Hernleys sold off several-acre parcels to relatives and publishing people such as the Savanicks, Conrads, Hertzlers, Schrocks, Yoders, and Cutrells. This rural-feeling community, complete with pond and sheep, was to support a movement organized in 1946 as Mennonite Community Association. Sociologist Grant Stoltzfus moved to Scottdale to serve as editor of the association’s monthly magazine called Mennonite Community beginning in January of 1947.  By the sixties many Mennonite leaders considered their rural heritage to be, well the term was baggage, presumably excess. In 1954 the Mennonite Community was absorbed into a new periodical, Christian Living. The organization disbanded.

Mennonite Federal Credit Union began in 1955 when Mennonite Publishing House employees and members of the Scottdale congregations organized with the first member Mervin Miller, the MPH personnel director. This credit union grew and by 1983 changed its charter to serve all Mennonite Church members in the state of Pennsylvania, and by 1998, the headquarters moved to Lancaster, with a branch remaining in Scottdale. More expansions throughout the United States and mergers eventually made this credit union the banking arm of the Mennonite Mutual Aid Association which in 2009 changed its name to Everence Financial Services. 

  

Tourmagination was an educational travel agency founded in 1970 by Jan and Barbara Gleysteen and Arnold W. and Rhoda Cressman to share the Anabaptist heritage story in Europe. I’ll say more about this agency and its energetic founders who by the 90s had a vigorous falling out and sold the company. Currently the program is owned by Wilmer and Janet Martin of Ontario, and they have led tours in over 50 countries.

Mennonite Business Associates (MBA) began in 1973 and was one of the organizations which merged into what is today known by the acronym MEDA.  The MBA organization was envisioned as a populist and family business organization led by persons such as Scottdale-based H. Ralph Hernley and Jonathan J. (J.J.) Hostetler.  The organizational meeting was held with some fanfare at Laurelville with Senator Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon as speaker. Within a few years MBA merged with the older (1969) Church Industry and Business Association (CIBA), and eventually both became part of the international business and development agency MEDA or Mennonite Economic Development Association.

The denominational youth office, led by Art Smoker, was best known for coordinating local Mennonite Youth Fellowship (MYF) groups and large biennial youth conventions. In the Fall of 1971, our small group helped Art and Nova Smoker load a U Haul truck and head for Goshen, Indiana. It was getting late in the evening, and we started throwing small things haphazardly into their van in order to get finished. The Smokers were eager to leave town in the morning. Nova, a newly minted teacher, found our schools quite traditional, and Art reminded us that our industrial cultural ethos was quite a comedown from his New England graduate school days. The youth office joined with the Mennonite Board of Congregational Ministries to Goshen, Indiana, in 1971. These organizations are all gone now, with Mennonite publishing leaving town this past summer (2011) when I am writing, but when we moved here in 1970, they all seemed quite near at hand.

Another institution which became quite important to us was the Laurelville Mennonite Church Center, largely because of its executive director Arnold Cressman. Also the head of several of the institutions named above, Cressman was an entrepreneur, a minister and an English major. He was always generous to Gloria and me, and in many ways mentored me into the Mennonite culture of the seventies. He was the leading spirit in upgrading the Laurelville campus in the sixties and also in giving Laurelville a distinctly Anabaptist focus. He secured a meeting of the Believers’ Church Conference at Laurelville in May of 1972, and told me to watch for John Howard Yoder. This conference was a meeting of mainly Brethren, Baptists, and Mennonites, and a few other related denominations but the key spirit of this meeting seemed to be John Howard Yoder. The new meetinghouse had just been completed at Laurelville, and Yoder seemed to fill it with his tall stature, huge intellect, and acerbic personality. I don’t recall his formal presentation, but I recall his actively challenging the assumptions in the discussions. The  young people my age tried to hang around him between sessions or to and from the dining hall.

Although standoffish and not easily pegged by identity, Yoder’s disheveled hairy appearance and knapsack-on-his-back-look gave him easy entre to the youth culture of the time. Even his Germanic directness and lack of social skills had a certain aesthetic appeal, especially to the counter culture and academic crowd. I had read his Nevertheless, the Varieties of Christian Pacifism, and The Original Revolution as soon as they came off the press in 1971, and to this day find them among his defining publications, however complex and far ranging his thought became, he generally looped back to these themes of pacifism and the nature of the church.

This meeting was at a time when Yoder was still known mainly among the Mennonites; his The Politics of Jesus which thrust him onto the national and international theological stage would not be published until December of 1972. After the May Laurelville meeting, I wrote him a “dear brother John” letter, noting that he was the main reason I attended the conference, reflecting on his presentation, and concluding that he made me proud to be a part of the Mennonite brotherhood. Then came the clincher: “Perhaps you are the Mennonite phallus.” However, inappropriate, sexist, and even foolish it was to use this erotic metaphor, several decades later we sadly learned it was more than a figure of speech.

The other part of Laurelville Gloria and I did that summer was lead two weeks of what was called primitive camp; this was a kind of survival camp living in tents along a stream up in the Laurelville woods. I had taught junior high Sunday school class and some of the locals (Amy Alderfer, Dan Brilhart, Anthony Horsch and Emily Miller come to mind) attended along with my youngest sister Ruth Ann. We made our own food over an open fire and did lots of nature hikes, singing, and showers under a waterfall. Our assistant Barry King then a young man in his teens was the chief scout and adventurer for the camp, and I believe he later became a pilot and was killed in a plane accident. We did talent shows sang songs, raced crayfish, and played a game called rhythm of passing the shoes until late at night. If the first week of camping was memorably successful and enjoyable; the second week was memorably bad as it rained half of the week with flooding, several of the campers became wet and depressed.

Before and after that summer, Gloria and I did a lot of hiking on the Laurelville trails on weekends, sometimes joining the animals, or so we thought, going au naturel as we got up into the isolated parts of the woods and stream. Another time we came along Jacobs Creek and approached the dining hall; I have no idea what group was meeting there, but we heard a cappella singing. We stood there along Jacobs Creek for as long as they sang several songs. It was an epiphany, this sound as our music and our people. During the summer of 72, we joined the Kingview Mennonite Church, and the Sunday we joined, the congregation sang the hymn: “My Shepherd Will Supply Thy Need,” which is based on the Twenty-Third Psalm. The Kingview and Scottdale Mennonite Church became a stable religious base for us for the next four decades. I recall the old Kingview 1970s meetinghouse in the summer when it was warm and the windows were opened. I regularly slept through the sermon with a sleeping child on my lap, waking up to our pastor Edwin Alderfer droning on and a Song Sparrow singing outside the window. I thought I was in heaven.   

But if the church was my base that summer, my outside activity was to try to become a political activist. I remember an image of Faster Donkeys which had appeared in a graduate student paper Arena; the message was we should get involved before someone gets beat up along the highway from Jerusalem to Jericho. In other words Good Samaritans might structure the world so people do not get beat up and robbed. I had read Arthur Gish’s book on the The New Left and Christian Radicalism (Eerdmans, 1970), and it seemed clear on which side of the political map to enter. My brother James had read it and was deeply convicted and convinced. 

And I remember an Anabaptist seminar with Leonard Gross, Arnold Cressman and Jan Gleysteen at Laurelville in which I asked where this Anabaptist awakening was happening today. The answer was, look around you, friend, the peasants are in another uprising; check out the youth culture and Martin Luther King.

I became a letter writer, even becoming belligerent to the Pennsylvania senior senator Hugh Scott, assuring him: “I will do my best to see that you are defeated the next time you run for your U.S. Senate seat.” Signed by ”Discouraged, Levi Miller.” Senator Richard Schweicker had done better in his votes and got commendations. To the president Richard Nixon, I wrote on Vietnam and ended: “I urge you to stop the killing.” Signed by “An earthling brother, Levi Miller” And God bless you too, Kurt Vonnegut. Well, there were more letters to follow, but you get the spirit of it.  

In the meantime, Ladon Sheats, a one-time IBM executive who had become a devout convert to left-wing political Christianity, visited us at Scottdale for several days. Sheats was at Koinonia Partners in Americus, Georgia, at that time, a gentle soul who looked you deep in the eyes and shared of his search for God and his quest for peace. And how’s it going on your journey?, he would ask. One of our local youth Jan Yoder heard the call and went to Koinonia. For my part I told Sheats I hoped to have him meet with my brothers Paul and Roy, thinking they were bigger fish than I. Sheats spoke about the Mennonite and Brethren Lamb’s War camp meeting in August; it was actually at my father’s old Indiana Amish friend Elam Hochstetler’s farm. His son Walter had become an Anabaptist radical and changed his name to Michael Friedmann for a while. The conversion fever of a revival meeting (getting your conscience raised) was quite appropriate

I was seeing a part of my editorial position as an advocacy mission. If my brothers Paul and Roy could be saved from their professional law and medical careers into active peacemaking, presumably becoming full-time religious and political agitators, this would be a conversion indeed, commensurate to Sheats’ IBM conversion. The meeting with Paul and Roy, however, never took place, and I lost track of Sheats except to meet him various times later at peace demonstrations. I never doubted his sincerity, and by the eighties he had joined a Catholic Worker group called Jonah House, living in and out of jail until he died in 2002. One of his friends remembered him as a “beloved child with whom God was well-pleased.”     

Of a more social relationship to peacemaking was a young couple Peter and Leslie Knapp who Gloria and I got to know and did things together. The Knapps were from Rochester New York, and Peter was doing alternative voluntary service in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, we had a presidential peace candidate for whom to advocate, the South Dakota Senator George McGovern. I followed a group called Evangelicals for McGovern and tried to do my part locally, even going to a Democratic party  meeting at the Scottdale Sons of Italy. Among the speakers were the Pennsylvania legislator James J. Manderino, Congressman John Dent and some local officials. There was applause and considerable interest in the local and state elections but when someone mentioned McGovern, there was no applause and some mumbling hostility. It was my first introduction to Western Pennsylvania’s Democrats, generally liberal on FDR-type economic and labor laws but conservative on cultural issues and foreign policy.

I tried to do my own part by having the Mennonite Publishing House organize a candidate’s forum one afternoon in an end-of-day chapel from 3:30 to 4:00. One of those who attended was the local music teacher and Scottdale mayor Fredrick Eberharter, better known as Plute. The candidates passed out their little cards at the back door as the workers left, and someone mentioned that they were missing some of the employees who were going out the front entrance. Doesn’t matter, said Eberharter, loud enough so everyone could hear, these people don’t vote anyway. 

But I was not deterred, and I remember telling my father-in-law Roy R. Miller about my activities, and Scottdale’s advanced (as in left-wing) positions one weekend when we were visiting Gloria’s home. Roy went back in his museum and pulled out a book entitled Lewis Wetzel, Indian Fighter: The Life and Times of a Frontier Hero, by C.B. Allmand. Roy kind of chuckled and showed me the title page. Scottdale, Pa., Copyright 1932. Press of Mennonite Publishing House.

But a late summer activity probably had more influence on my life when we took a fast vacation to Boston from August 9-15, 1972. On the way we visited Lancaster County, where we saw one of Merle and Phyllis Goods’ plays and met the Goods; Paul Erb of Scottdale was there too. I think our Scottdale friend Ken Reed directed the play, “These People Mine,” and it was later performed at the Mennonite World Conference in Brazil. This was our first meeting of the Goods who were then in graduate studies in New York and also running a summer theater called Dutch Family Festival. I admired Merle and Phyllis for their tremendous talent and energy, modesty and persistent commitment to the church. We became life-long friends. 

Then we went on to Boston overnight and arrived in the morning where we camped out and slept during the day at the beach. Sunshine on the beach, I had discovered, was Gloria’s idea of paradise. Later we visited some of the historic sites of Boston such as the North Church and went out to Concord and Walden Pond. On Saturday evening we went down to Newport, Rhode Island for a concert in one of the old mansions; it was called The Breakers.  We loved Boston for its mix of American literary history and museums and stayed as long as possible, driving back with Richard And Mary Jane Crockett, and taking turns driving all night. By morning we arrived back in Scottdale, and I went to the office that same morning. Such is the energy of youth.

Most of these institutional dates and names are available from GAMEO, the on-line Mennonite Encyclopedia. On Sunday September 25, 2011, Lorne Peachey told me about the 1971 comparative chart regarding various locations for Mennonite institutions. The reasons for Mennonite Publishing House originally being in Scottdale comes from John A Hostetler God Uses Ink (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1958, pages 89-93). The “Faster Donkeys” image was by William Janzen in the Arena magazine (March 1969). For many years, I have incorrectly attributed it to Arena’s editor John Rempel . The appreciation for Ladon Sheats by Ched Meyers appears on his  blog of www.ChedMyers.org. Joseph Springer of Goshen College’s Mennonite Historical Library helped me to locate the date of the 1932 Lewis Wetzel book printed at Scottdale; my father-in-law Roy R. Miller gave me his copy, but I have not been able to locate it recently.