1971 Scottdale, Pennsylvania

1971   Scottdale, Pennsylvania, industrial and professional culture of Mennonite Publishing House, Kenneth Reed, Leo Tolstoy, Clayton F. Yake, Helen Alderfer, Conrads and Savanicks, Orie Cutrell, Washington D.C. Vietnam War protest, “Coming Home to Holmes County,” Thanksgiving weekend in Philadelphia.

Living in Scottdale and working at Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) in the early seventies was a bigger culture change than I expected. Although Scottdale and western Pennsylvania were only three hours removed from Holmes County in eastern Ohio where I grew up, it was clearly a different region. I had grown up in a Midwestern agricultural community, and now I was living in eastern coal, coke and steel country with bee-hive ovens still visible along the rail road tracks (earlier description of Scottdale in 1948). One would drive down the parkway from Monroeville into Pittsburgh, and the steel mills were still billowing out smoke along the river. In the immediate context of my MPH work, the industrial and professional culture came together in an unusual way. MPH was in a large building which had grown up to cover a block in the residential section on the hill of the town. Within the building were the printing presses, the bindery, the mailing rooms, warehouse and even a wood and mechanical shop. There was an old industrial elevator to go from the basement to the third floor.

This large tile and brick industrial building mainly shaped the culture of even the editorial offices. Everyone started early, as if we were going to the mill, with people arriving at their offices at 7:30 when a bell rang. A bell sounded at 9:49 for a one-minute prayer break, another bell for a 10-minute coffee break and then a bell for returning to work at 10 o’clock. I remember on my first morning at coffee break, the publisher Ben Cutrell came to me after the 10 o’clock bell rang, noting that I could take my cup of coffee back to the office, if I wished. He was not being intrusive; he was simply trying to honor the communal MPH culture. If the printing and shipping people felt that the editorial people were insufficiently aware of their schedules, the feelings were mutual. The office workers were very aware of schedules and that the majority workers were printing and production people.

The attempt was to keep the shop and professional cultures all together in one communal family was perhaps personified by Ellrose Zook who came in the 1930s to work in the presses as a youth and was retiring as executive editor when I arrived in 1971. I had worked at the Wooster Daily Record and at the Canton Repository which had their own presses and trucks in the same building with the editorial offices so I knew some of the company issues. But here a theological and institutional commitment called for a greater degree of unity and uniformity, at least that was the attempt.

Another learning was the Mennonite institutional culture, the Mennonite church heritage and the many workers’ sense of calling to serve the church. My fellow-workers had internalized an identity that they were leading what was then called the old Mennonite church in its various forms. The local congregational expression of Mennonitism, I had experienced, but here I met it with a high density on the denominational level with offices such as youth, stewardship and congregational life were located here, and more on that next year (1972). The fact that the Mennonites are a small denomination did not diminish the feeling, it may even have intensified its uniqueness; we were a select group, even if a small group. The Mennonite institutional life brought me into contact with personalities of my age, one of the most meaningful that first year was Ken Reed.

I met Ken Reed at night; he was easy to meet because although there were 100 employees at Mennonite Publishing House during the day, the few who worked at night were easy to find each other. Ken Reed’s office was across from the Library, and I often went down to the Library to read in the evenings. Gloria and I lived in Paul and Alta Mae Erb’s apartment for the first six months of our lives at Scottdale. I remember we were both reading Leo Tolstoy, so we discussed War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and our identification with characters such as Natasha and the Rostovs and Levin and Kitty. About this time my mother in law Berdella gave me the biography Tolstoy by Henri Troyat which read like a novel, and I soon read it from cover to cover. I know that’s basic back-cover ad copy, but it’s also true.

I think we were attracted to Tolstoy’s sheer talent (we were English majors and had fiction in back of our minds) and his embrace of Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence and his anarchy. We were young, aspiring writers, and outsiders ourselves. I was writing chapters of a novel of a voluntary service worker in Puerto Rico. But I think the biggest thing about Tolstoy which attracted me at least was that he was basically a Slavophil, one interested in the Russian soul and skeptical of the Western modernism. I came back from Puerto Rico, and one of my first writings, was on Mennonite nationalism, fortunately never published. But I was interested in exploring the uniquely Mennonite soul, and that is what Ken was doing. 

This romantic back to the roots was all in the air, a Broadway musical was converted into a movie called “Fiddler on the Roof,” and blacks, Hispanics, and every ethnic and socio religious group seemed to be exploring its roots. A generation earlier, a group of Mennonite graduate students living in Europe did this exploration in more of a theological, academic and historical sense, and we discovered their writings that spring in pamphlets which they issued called Concern (1952). I subscribed to the series (subscriptions were handled in Scottdale), only to discover that by that time the series had ended. Ken Reed was writing some fiction on an Amish or Mennonite soldier. Ken had grown up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, went to the Mennonite schools, and after living in Japan had traveled west across the Soviet Union to Europe and then home—to Lancaster. And he would talk of a young couple Merle and Phyllis Pellman Good who were writing and producing plays over in Lancaster.  

Ken was about our age too so we did a lot of things from dinners, to travels and participating in a small group together. He joined Gloria and me when we went swimming at the Hernley’s pond that summer, and often the local VISTA anti-poverty volunteers Michael and Andrea Timberlake went along. And we played tennis in the Clayton F. Yake Tennis Club, a fairly select experience in itself. I think Clayton Yake (1889-1974), mainly known as C.F., might appreciate the capital letters and formality I’m giving to this weekly event. He led us in folk and camp songs as warm up to playing, and sometimes assigned fifteen minutes of cleaning the leaves off of the Laurelville courts. Although small in stature, Yake exuded authority by force of will and with his starched all-white tennis gear; he projected the court manners of a displaced British gentleman among some young colonials.

An engaging personality, Yake held considerable interest to me for the success of his two publications in the first half of the century, the Herald Bible School Series and the Youth Christian Companion, both high sales publications which gave a distinctly Christian shape to a generation of children and youth. I got the sense Yake had become mainly an irritation and nuisance to some of the older workers who had been around him and lived through his unwanted (by Yake) retirement, already back in 1954. But we tried to humor him, and played along with his weekly tennis drama. One of the unspoken rules was that his hitting partners needed to return the ball right back to the now slow-moving Yake. To violate this rule was to subject yourself to a five-minute time-out lecture on tennis etiquette.

Although Yake could no longer move, see or hear well, he insisted on driving one of the cars from Scottdale to Laurelville, looking like an old elf peering out over the top of the steering wheel.  Hence, another part of the competition was to see who could fill up the non-Yake driven car first, leaving unsuspecting newcomers or latecomers to risk their lives with him. I believe he eventually had his drivers’ license revoked, and Clayton and Martha moved to Landis Homes in Lancaster. Dear reader, aging is not easy, and we met Clayton Yake late in life. More than anything, I admired him for his earlier editorial achievements. We often had enjoyable meetings with Clayton and Martha Yake because Ken Reed lived in their upstairs apartment, and Ken liked Martha, a beautiful gentle woman, very much.

Helen Alderfer shared an office with Ken Reed, and was editor of the junior high paper called On the Line, but she was also a poet and interested in everything from gardening to international development. That first summer Helen and her husband Ed invited us to make a garden at their home in Kingview which we did because we lived in an apartment. Helen was a generation older than I was and was benignly worldly wise regarding everything from classical music to western Pennsylvania culture (I think she had taught in the local schools at one point) and had a number of Scottdale borough friends. She read widely and was conversant about many current events without being extremely opinionated, although she was generally on the liberal side of things which was her inclination. Helen was nosey and gossipy and enjoyed local and MPH and Mennonite stories, at the same time that she was extremely private about her own family.

The Alderfers had just returned from a year at Winston Salem, North Carolina, when we arrived at Scottdale, so in some ways we were both integrating into the community. Ed was also a gardener and a good tennis player, and we often played together in the early mornings. He was also the pastor of our church, the Kingview Mennonite Church where he was especially good at the counseling and visiting. Ed and Helen were a great contribution to the community, and Helen was a professional mentor to me during the seventies; I admired especially her competency as an editor at the same time that she carried on many private interests. I’ll say more about them later.  For over a decade our lives intersected in many ways. Then she and Ed left unhappily, I believe, while we were in Venezuela in the early eighties. I noticed in her poetry book The Mill Grinds Fine (2009), she references other communities where she lived, none to Scottdale.

Another couple who made a significant impact on us was the Paul and Nancy Hernley Conrad family. Paul was a psychiatrist, and Nancy a counselor. One Sunday we had a meeting at Laurelville on simplicity and clutter which most of us addressed in the counter-culture simple living mood of the times--trying to do without a car or something of that order. Paul Conrad said he did not work on Sundays; he said he needed a day of rest. I know it’s basic Christian teaching, but it never quite registered until he said it; he said even in graduate school he did not work on papers but took the day off. I never forgot it and tried to follow that the rest of my life to this day. 

For that meeting Gloria and I created and sang a folk-style song on simplicity called “God save us from the tyranny of things.” It ended with “we can do without all those thing-a-ma-gigs;” it was one of the few times we got a standing ovation. But we never sang it again. Nancy Hernley Conrad got us involved with Deaf Church which was led by her sister Ferne and brother-in-law Paul Savanick. A sturdy leader, Paul would highlight many a meeting with his expressive signing of Jesus' love for everyone. For several years Gloria and I taught Bible lessons to the hearing kids at the monthly Deaf Church meetings which always ended with a meal and fellowship; they were inspiring gatherings and these deaf meetings were the beginnings of several generations of friendship with the Savanick family.  

Another family which caught my interest at Scottdale that first year was the Orie and Polly Cutrells. I knew them mainly through their son Jim Cutrell who was a mutual friend of Ken Reed and a very good photographer. We were all in our twenties, and I think he was in our small group. But at a certain point Jim had a religious experience in which our Lord Jesus Christ called for him to put down his camera and to live the peasant life of a protestant monk. He raised rabbits and gardened and to this day, I have very seldom seen him. I admired him and missed him. His father Orie was around MPH during those years and unmistakable for his speed--or lack of it; he had shifted into slow gear. He worked in shipping and receiving, and it was as though he had deliberately slowed down the operation, sometimes making cynical comments about the entire MPH operation.

I discovered that Orie was a brother to the publisher Ben, and his wife Pauline (Polly and an illustrator) was a sister to Ben’s wife, Dorothy Stutzman. It seemed as if because of family connections, Orie was untouchable in regards to work performance and attitude. The word was that in his younger years Orie had been a good printer, but then he and Polly had left for an international mission assignment, and it had not worked out, returning early. When they had returned, Orie’s printing job was now taken by another person. Orie became disenchanted with it all and put himself into a kind of shameless slow gear and no fear, presumably of MPH management. Ironically, for all the conversation of a fraternal egalitarian organization, MPH always seemed to have a sharp divide between management and staff, as if constantly talking about an unattainable ideal, actually made it worse.  In any case with time, all three of the Cutrells (Orie, Pauline, and Jim) retired from public life and activity and may have fulfilled if somewhat extremely what the Epistle writer exhorted us to lead: quiet and peaceable lives.   

One of the things we missed in Puerto Rico was the Vietnam protest demonstrations during the late sixties. So at the first opportunity, on April 24, 1971, Gloria and I went to Washington to demonstrate against the War in Vietnam. An estimated crowd of 500,000 gathered on the Washington Mall to march, hear speeches and wave placards. Gloria and I went the night before staying at the Mennonites’ International Guest House where my brother David and Brenda were hosts. At the guest house, I made a sign with the script: “All War is Sin” (I think I may have copied that from some of the Mennonite Central Committee people). A Kenyan came down that evening to the nine o’clock tea, and when he saw it, he laughed and laughed. I told him we were going to the Vietnam demonstration the next day and asked him what was wrong with it. It’s good, he said, of course, all war is sin, and he laughed some more. I got the impression from him that I might as well have made a sign which said that we are all cast out of the Garden and that all work is tiring and all childbearing painful. But at the mall, our sign fit in fine with the rest, everyone was there for their own reasons, some angry, some satirical, some serious and some funny.

For me, the event was a good bit youth folk festival. It was a beautiful windy Spring day, and we felt mellow and imagined a new world-- and we sang. It’s what I remember most, the music. Peter Paul and Mary sang the Dylan standard “Where Have all the Flowers Gone.” And then we all joined with them in singing “All We are Saying is Give Peace a Chance.” If our motivation was religious and Christian, it was also cultural. I had never seen before or since such a youth movement which seemed to be for peace and what was then called the greening of America.

The major demonstrations also were a literary phenomenon with accounts such as “The Armies of the Night” by Norman Mailer, which I had read in its shortened version in Harpers magazine. In fact that magazine itself caught my attention with the Jewish Midge Decter and Southerner Willie Morris editing the journal in the sixties and leaving in the early seventies. I think what I liked about Harpers at this point was that Morris and Decter were generally liberal but respectful of their Southern and Jewish background and upbringing. Morris was edged out at Harper’s in 1971 in what was viewed as the commercial Philistine owners against the pure good-writing editors. Although a woman of the left, Decter sometime around that time wrote a Harpers article I never forgot on the spoiled children of the sixties, seeing much of the protest regarding drugs, work and sex in this light. I might add she would eventually become one of the leaders of the neo-conservatism movement which would come to full flower in the 80s.

I did my own contribution to that new journalism during the summer of 1971, I wrote “Coming Home to Holmes County.” which was published in the November issue of the Mennonite monthly Christian Living. During the spring and summer I made weekend visits to Holmes County’s Amish and Mennonites. I entered the story as an active voice, commenting on my own growing up and exploring how the area had changed during the past decade. It had elements of the Southern and Jewish writers who had moved into more cosmopolitan contexts and were trying to retain their particular cultural and religious background. It took the major movements of sixties youth culture, return to the earth, and related them into the Holmes County Amish and Mennonite culture.

Looking back, in many ways it was prescient of the coming trends of Holmes County tourism and Amish parochial schools, both of which were at the very beginnings then, and forty years later are cultural givens. And within that mix of an encroaching American society, it looked to the Amish to provide the gold standard against which to measure the rest of the Anabaptist community.  The philosophical insights of the family physician and friend Daniel Miller of Walnut Creek and the folk wisdom of my grandfather Levi L. Schlabach, both of whom I interviewed for the article, have been life-time guides. Having at least felt I had left a people I had known earlier, I wanted to search my own heritage, which I concluded at the end was ultimately also human and Christian. Forty years later, it still strikes me as an important way to live, although over the years I’ve become more generous to the middle class and working people within American society.

But I also wanted some distance and freedom, as did Gloria who had immediately enrolled at Seton Hill College in Greensburg when we returned home from Puerto Rico. For Thanksgiving weekend, we went to Philadelphia in a kind of youthful independence, instead of going home to the Millers for the usual family gatherings. We stayed at the mid-town Holiday Inn, visiting museums and libraries during the day and movies at night. What I remember especially is visiting the Museum of Art which had the Diego Rivera’s fresco of the “Liberation of the Peon” which fit right into Gloria’s Spanish studies and our romantic views of egalitarianism and art as social commentary.  

But somewhat to my surprise this same museum had a special exhibit of colonial Pennsylvania German furniture and art. We went up into the rare book section of the Philadelphia Public Library and here was a special display of books with Fraktur drawings of proportional and colorful tulips and birds. Sometimes embedded among them were quotes of Biblical wisdom, and many had family trees of grandparents, parents, and children. The exhibit noted that it was in honor of the 200^th anniversary of Christopher Dock (ca 1698-1771), the colonial Mennonite schoolmaster. That Fall the Franconia Mennonites with John L. Ruth did an oratorio and made a movie on the pious and gentle school teacher Christopher Dock called “The Quiet in the Land.” If we missed our Holmes County families that holiday weekend, in many ways we also were finding them in new ways in Philadelphia.   

Most of this chapters comes from my personal files and notes in my little black date booklet which Mennonite Publishing House distributed every year. “Coming Home to Holmes County” appeared in the monthly Christian Living (November, 1971, 20-28).