1981 Leaving Scottdale (for a while)

1981  Leaving Scottdale (for a while). Memorizing classic texts, Andrew and Mattie’s fortieth anniversary, theology discussions, David and Rose Hostetler, Carl Keener, West Overton Museum fall heritage musicals; Laurence Martin; birthdays, Florida trip and vacation, leaving western Pennsylvania, Guatemala, Mennonite Publishing House.

Although weak at memorization (1952), I’ve been grateful for the few texts I know by memory.  So I made a project for our children to commit some classic texts to memory.  My January 4 journal notes that we will learn by memory the following texts: The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12) in January, The Lord’s Prayer in Spanish in February and in German another month; Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy in March, and The Good Shepherd twenty third psalm in June. Others were added, and we would do this around the dinner table, and inevitably the children soon learned them better than I. When I look through my journal notes I see how much education is mentioned, which is understandable, I suppose given my work in Christian and congregational education. I was especially interested in the role of informal education by identity and community and also the formal education of conscious learning and schooling.  

We read books and listened to lectures of people such as Richard Fowler and Kenneth Stokes, the latter asking us to draw our childhood family table which I did with the note: “The childhood experience is explored in relation to the family table and its faith development. I see Paul and Mom being the two dominant people around this table and I colored myself green, brown, and orange because they probably influenced me the most. I suppose the main thing I recall is the degree to which all of life was colored by faith questions.”     

We explored the Christian and religious issues regarding life development and needs at various stages from childhood to retirement and end of life.  And there were the nineteenths century romantics such as Horace Bushnell: “A child shall grow up as a Christian and never know himself other than as a Christian.” This liberal view was not far from traditional Amish and Mennonite culture and church, but it needed to be in conversation with also making an adult Christian choice and believer’s baptism. I pondered these issues and tried to edit and publish accordingly at Mennonite Publishing House. I was humbled and yet honored when the Franconia Conference author and historian John L. Ruth sent me a letter, quoting the King James Version of Psalm 78 verse 72: “He fed them according to the integrity of his heart; and guided them by the skillfulness of his hands.”

Much of my learning approach, whether memorization or community learning went back to my own childhood which we recalled with our parents on March 14. My brothers Paul and David organized a fortieth anniversary dinner for Andrew and Mattie at Rhodie’s Banquet Room. There were poems and songs and tributes, and we sang my parents' favorite hymn: “All the Way My Savior Leads Me.” Our immediate family sang the Swiss yodeling “Blue Cheese” song with silly lyrics about giving the cheese to a mouse. Then there was a fortieth anniversary gift which the children built with a frolic; a large chicken coop for our parents’ Buff Orpingtons. John Roth, Jon Mast, and David’s son Kent had picked up the pre-cut walls and materials early in the morning and by noon it was up and roofed. Andrew was overjoyed and wrote us all about the new set-up with his rooster Butterball and his setting hens as well as those of other friends:  “one for Naomi Weaver, two for Paul and Carol, and one for David and Mary Groh with goose eggs! So it’s a zoo and a circus with Butterball performing to all visitors!” 

The whole family was moving closer during those days as Roy and Ruby and their son Andrew (Drew) moved to Millersburg in the fall of 1981. Roy and Paul had Dan Weaver build a new Miller Building at 105 North Clay Street along State Route 83, a two story brick building with first floor health and medical offices and on the second floor the law offices.    

At Scottdale, our theology discussion had moved to Christology and process theology. I remember the former Brazilian missionary David E. Hostetler had us reading several books on Christology, and he gave several sermons at the Kingview church on the historical Jesus. Hostetler was a good hearted neighbor and editor, and however controversial the topic or news story, he was a mediator and would look for common ground in any debate. It was not unusual after a conversation with David to get a phone call the next day asking forgiveness if he had offended you, or he tried to clarify some feeling or expression to make it more palatable. Besides being news editor of the denominational weekly Gospel Herald, David also edited a small weekly inspirational pamphlet called Purpose. One of the most charming author letters I had ever seen was one from a rejected writer, complementing editor Hostetler. The rejected author said Hostetler had written her the best and most gracious rejection letter she had ever received; she was even contemplating sending him another article, with the assurance that his response would be pleasing-- even in another rejection. 

David and Rosanna Hostetler were neighbors, and as good a neighbors as one might have desired. Devout Christians and internationalists, we enjoyed visiting with them on many topics, not least our Ohio roots (David) and Latin American experiences. When we went away, they looked after our place and animals, and when they went away we checked in with their place, especially their cat Chenille. Their youngest daughter Monica would provide child care for our children, and if we or they had extra overnight visitors, we would share guest rooms in our houses. Rose was also the manager of the Scottdale Provident Bookstore, and genuinely enjoyed reading and books. Gloria worked for her on weekends. David regularly and Rose sometimes helped lead TourMagination groups over the years, and I had the impression that their good-natured mediation instincts served them well when the owners Jan Gleysteen and Arnold Cressman were in conflict.

Meanwhile In April our theology group invited Carl Keener to come to Scottdale to talk to us about process theology whose main tenants as near as I could tell were, well, process, evolution and on-going growth. Other elements were a high view of human freedom and relativity. Keener’s contributions were interesting to me, perhaps as much from a biographical viewpoint, as they are from his philosophical views. Keener, a Penn State University biologist, was trying to put his religious and scientific world together, and one could only wish him well in the process (the very word). However, the degree to which he has simply copied the answers out of process theology books by John B. Cobb, Charles Hartshorne, and Alfred North Whitehead was not convincing. It seemed to me that for any ideological stream to gain traction among the Mennonites, it must also deal with two other fields --- the one is biblical theology and the other is Anabaptist history, and Keener had limited understanding or interest in either, hence could add little to Mennonite thought. 

Over the years, I came to appreciate Keener’s project considerably more when he would come to Laurelville and met with adoptive family youth, telling them his story of finding his biological father and birth brother. Also for many years, his inquisitive mind made him an enjoyable debating and conversation friend in a Lancaster book discussion group to which we both belonged.   

August was especially busy because our family went to the Mennonite’s General Assembly at Bowling Green, Ohio, August 11-16. I was in overload: an Allegheny Conference delegate, leading a youth writing workshop, and writing a major article on the event. But the big local part of August was our practicing for the presentations of The Heritage Singers and the Fall West Overton Museum heritage pageant. The leading spirit behind these annual productions was Laurence Martin who aside from his church and publication leadership at Mennonite Publishing House was a musician and natural organizer. I think he had a feeling for the small-town and regional pageant from back in his Ontario school days, and he hit full stride with annual Scottdale heritage plays from 1978 to the mid-nineties when he left town.

In the spring Martin would come around to our offices and mention what he was thinking for a theme; it might have been the beginning of airlines, the National Road, Stephen Foster, the Overholts, the Civil War, or music schools. Laurence wrote most of the copy himself, but he also co-opted others to help such as Martha Oliver, a playwright herself, and fellow-Mennonites such as Karen Moshier-Shenk, Steve Shenk, Lorne Peachey, and even the young poet Julie Spicher (later Kasdorf). Then Laurence would find music to fit the story, and there were some expected roles to fill. If there was a grand character, let’s say a George Washington or Susan B. Anthony, we expected our local dentist Edward Thorneblade or horticulturalist Martha Oliver on stage. And regularly Mark Twain with stentorian tones showed up; that would be Georg Banks. We knew Rob Allison and Rhonda Sturtz would sing to each other from opposite sides of the stage, eventually moving together, and the song would end with a big kiss. They were all young, theatrical, handsome and pretty, so no less enjoyable for being predictable.  

I wrote a scene in 1980 on the Mitchell Day parade in Masontown so named for John Mitchell (1870–1919), one-time president of the United Mine Workers when they won the eight-hour day and a minimum wage. So this year Gloria and I (with Elizabeth) decided to go down and see the actual event, parade and all. It was not the first time I described something before actually seeing it and discovering that my imagination had it about right—although I think I had also read about the parade in Cloud by Day by Muriel Earley Sheppard.

In 1981, I wrote an episode on Jonathan Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) and then played the main character. The crowd pleaser was Johnny Appleseed crawling out a hollow log in the morning, only to have a black bear coming out at the other end and making a quick exit. Our son Jacob was in the bear costume, and I wrote a part in for a Native American played by Mike Cressman in 1981. I did Johnny Appleseed again in 1987, this time with Jacob as the native American and our girls singing in a children’s group. Martha Oliver who worked with Laurence on many of these shows also organized a clogging dance unit for this show, and I remember Marty and Reuben Savanick who had recently moved back into the area being a part of it. One could name many, many other people Laurence drew into the event, such as Nevin Stiltenpole (banjo player), Jack Scott (acting coach), Linda Banks (singing and make-up) or Mervin Miller (producer).   

My birthday came about the same time as the Heritage Festival, and my artist friend Ivan Moon sent me a pink publishing memo on my birthday September 15, 1981, with the subject “BE CAREFUL. DON’T BREAK A LEG.” There was a warning about using the elevator rather than the stairs, and concluded “Actually, I love you as a brother in Christ. May your spiritual cup overflow. May you run and not be weary. May you walk and not faint.” I think Ivan had in mind the stage cliché, but I remember this greeting because it was probably the only one I got from him and, was on pink Mennonite Publishing House memo paper, the kind of sincere, original and half-baked greeting I might sent myself. But I didn’t which I regret.

Actually, birthdays, were always a mixed happy and guilty pleasure for me because I grew up in a family where birthdays were minor celebrations (almost an afterthought) and married into a family where they were important and remembered; the same was true of office mates. When I look at my files and see the many cards I got from Gloria’s family and office mates every year, and think how little I responded to other people’s birthdays, I realize how little reciprocity, I honored. I appreciated these annual proprieties but seemed never able to absorb the obligations myself. 

But birthdays were a good time for reflection and I wrote:

“The family celebrated 37 years with me last night. There’s certain casualness about the awareness of these increasing years. How one’s life changes and we respond is always a mystery. Especially in the Fall, am I aware of how death and barrenness are the beginnings of new life. I think in a spiritual way it is what Jesus meant when he said that unless a grain of seed is buried and dies, there can be no new life. In many ways, this giving of ourselves to our families, our work, those in need and the church is the source of our inspiration. We may at times suffer, but we learn to celebrate in knowing that in it joy will emerge.”

That September instead of the a Jersey shore vacation, we headed for Sarasota, Florida where we combined a visit to the Mennonite churches (Bayshore and I believe Bahia Vista, introducing the Foundation Series curriculum) with visits to Disney World and the Ringling Circus Museum. But the trip was memorable for its journey as well as the destination. The five of us flew on small Piedmont Airlines planes called hop-scotch flights with stops at Charlotte and Greensboro. Airlines were still serving food during those years, so we were well-fed and alas well-stopped, both going and returning; the kids actually seemed to enjoy it.

Another unplanned memory of this trip was that the Sarasota shore condos were selling time share units, even combing the beaches for buyers, offering ten to twenty-five silver dollars if prospective buyers came for an hour visit. So one afternoon Gloria and I (with Elizabeth) took the real estate visit, and when we returned Jacob and Hannah were contentedly, or so we thought, visiting with two police officers. But the officers took me aside and earnestly said I should never again leave our children un-attended on the beach; there were too many thieves and perverts (their term) around. They emphasized the innocence and intelligence of our children with the evil predators. Even though the rest of the sun bathers looked like a pretty tame crowd with the many elderly, along with Amish and Mennonite strollers, and even a few topless at one section, the police were right.  We were embarrassed; I was careless, and I tried to remember their counsel.

Dear reader, I know you are wondering why all the negative comments; how about becoming more upbeat about two weeks of Florida sunshine and eating a little alligator? Were not the shore walks enjoyable, the Ringling Museum freaks fascinating, the Pinecraft plain folks reassuring, and the Disney “Small World After All” enchanting? Yes, all true, but maybe you are forgetting that we’ve now lived in western Pennsylvania for over a decade, and I’ve acclimated somewhat. Even though I regularly reminded our children that we will not go native, it does seep in. Western Pennsylvanians know that for every proverbial silver lining there is cloud. It helps us to deal with disappointment; we knew life would be difficult; steel mills might close and, by the way, even that Disney “Small World After All“ tune did get irritating. 

Finally, I was reading populist critic Christopher Lasch about this time: his book The Culture of Narcissism (1979), and later The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (1991). Lasch's hopeful pessimism helped to save my soul and mind during the eighties and the nineties.

Anyway, I wanted to leave western Pennsylvania. The biggest family issue toward the end of 1981 was where we would go in 1982. I had checked the China Educational Exchange program earlier that year, but nothing materialized, and Gloria and I were especially looking for an overseas mission and service assignment in Latin America where we knew the language.  Maybe I felt a little like the young father from Grantsville, Maryland, who told me he felt he was wasting his bilingual and cultural talent on his dairy farm; hence he and his family left to milk cows in Panama, presumably in Spanish. I suppose it was in part the satisfaction of earlier living and service assignments in Cali, St. Louis and Botijas, which led us to pursuing it. I also had come to some sense of the Millers as a medieval family in which all should serve God as a miller, a cook, a merchant, a squire or a physician, but one of the family members should serve the church. And the latter-- even if by divine accident-- was my lot. Gloria and I felt that as a family, now may be a good time for our children to move; it would be harder to leave after the children were older and entering high school.

We sent a note of our interest in Christian mission and service and credentials to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), and by December Rich and Martha Sider of MCC Guatemala offered us an assignment for two years, teaching at the Mennonite Bible Institute in Guatemala City and being advisors on service projects which the Guatemalan church was developing. This assignment struck us with considerable interest that we might make a contribution. The letter concluded with a final paragraph on the political situation, “as we have said before no one should come to Guatemala unless they feel a sense of calling which goes beyond just wanting to do a few years of service.” The Siders wrote of their own children about the age of ours and dealing with the reality of violence and very conscious of guns, police and soldiers, along with the contradictions of normal family life with schooling, swimming, picnicking, and amusement parks. A few sentences here cannot do justice to the complexity and love with which they described their living, the country, and service situation.

 

Guatemala was in a civil war during much of the seventies with Marxist oriented guerillas on the one side and military juntas often leading the government. There were some disappearances and death squads and news of the low-intensity war was coming north, especially with Anastacio Somoza having been toppled in Nicaragua, and Fidel Castro firmly in control in Cuba. Central American countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras became proxy battle sites for the global cold war with many civilians and often poor peasants caught in the middle. In this conflict Mennonite Central Committee personnel were trying to work along with the Guatemalan church in peace, justice and service ministries, as the Siders said, “living with the contradictions and frustrations which it implies.” 

In December we were mulling this decision, but then my father Andrew became involved which added another dimension. I began to get copies of Guatemala death squad news stories from family members, and when David Groh, the Millersburg pastor, visited my father’s music shop one morning, it became a prolonged listening session to my father’s anxieties for his grandchildren—should we go to Guatemala. When we attended the Miller family Christmas gathering, my father made frequent references to the dangers of Guatemala, and in the evening when we were leaving, Andrew prayed publically with the children asking for their protection and their parents’ wisdom in making a decision. That evening when we drove home National Public Radio (NPR) had a report on Guatemala, and the children listened to it after having heard their grandfather. I remember it well; we were driving across the West Virginia panhandle between Ohio and Pennsylvania. No one said anything for a while, but Jacob especially began expressing his fears.  

Gloria and I decided we would look at other options, and we soon discovered that Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, also had personnel in Central and South America, and specifically needed a representative in Venezuela. 

But back to leaving Scottdale. I suppose another element in leaving was Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) and its sameness and decline. After seven years (hence fulfilling my graduate school indebtedness) I was ready for a change of scene. We were publishing more Herald Press trade books and had built a new warehouse onto the old 1920s tile building at a cost about one million, but the money was not fully raised from the conferences; the net effect was that MPH indebtedness increased. There were constant economic pressures, and sometimes we went through cycles of austerity; one time we signed onto a packaged program called BAD, as in saving a Buck A Day; I still have a cup with a little Mafioso figure and script: “I’m a M.P.H. BAD guy.” I cannot write about Scottdale’s Mennonite publishing without knowing the end of the story several decades later, and you, dear reader, may know the same. Since the exodus of Mennonite institutions in the seventies (1972), I lived through four decades of Mennonite publishing, financial, institutional and cultural decline, even though I did not recognize it at the time.  

We thought we were innovative and creative, leaders of the denomination, and we were. But, in retrospect, I've also had the feeling that we were quite mismanaged, superficially arrogant, and bound to our past, the denominational equivalent of the western Pennsylvania’s steel industry. A constant lament was the lack of denominational loyalty among our congregations. But this theme may have blinded us to the reciprocity of covenant; how loyal were we perceived to be by our congregations?  

But most of this institutional decline was merely a vague intuition, certainly hidden from my view at the time, and ultimately it had little to do with my leaving. We enjoyed western Pennsylvania, and even planned to keep our property and lots on Arthur Avenue, so we could move back after two years. I think it was mainly that I felt that some personal and professional renewal would happen better in an international setting. If we had an opportunity to work and serve, we would take it. I was learning that in small institutions with lean finances, one might take a leave of absence or even change jobs for renewal, a practice I honored the rest of my life. 

I asked for a two-year leave, and as it turned out, our director Laurence Martin, soon found John Rodgers to replace me at Builder magazine. Rogers did very well as an editor, and as an African American additionally provided a degree of multiculturalism to the staff composition.If Scottdale was sameness, confining and depressing, it was mainly in the same sense that all of Denmark had become a prison for Hamlet; thinking had made it so.

The drawing entitled “The Miller Table” and quote appears in my journal entitled “1981 February” under an entry dated April 11, 1981. The John L. Ruth letter about my work was of March 23, 1981. Most of the rest of this comes from my journal and personal files. John Roth reported on the Andrew and Mattie chicken coop frolic in a letter of letter of April 20, 1981. Andrew wrote two letters on the frolic, and the one I quoted regarding setting eggs is of April 9, 1981. My 37^th birthday reflections I wrote to my brother Paul in a letter of September 17, 1981. The quotation and description of MCC’s Guatemala assignment comes from two letters by Rich and Martha Sider (December 4, 1981 and  January 6, 1982).    

1980 Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

1980   Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Raising rabbits and Adam Miedel; Paul M. Lederach’s projects, Cameron family, Foundation Series for Youth and Adults; youth culture; Laurelville Mennonite Church Center, Arnold W. Cressman, family leisure camp, Paul and Carol Miller, Builder, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, kidney stones, Clayton Swartzentruber, Ocean City vacations, teacher strike,  Dorothy Day and Rosanna Yoder.

After we decided to farm metaphorically, what with the interest rates having skyrocketed through the Carter years, we discovered that our neighbors Arnold and Patricia Gasbarro were ready to sell two open lots across the street. We bought the lots which amounted to a small borough field along Arthur Avenue and built a large fence around them. Inside we planted trees, a small orchard, some pines and spruce, and a large garden. I thought of putting a few animals in it eventually, but we began with rabbits for a children’s project. I bought some hutches from my friend Joe Yoder, built an additional one, and stocked them with white New Zealand does and a buck. We were in the rabbit business in part because I had discovered that a Scottdale family had a lab animals business, hence buying rabbits.

A good-natured elderly man named Adam Miedel would greet us at his garage near the main Hilltop Lab Animals business. So when the young rabbits reached about four to five pounds we would take them out to Hilltop Lab Animals, and Miedel paid the children several dollars a pound, more than we could get for meat. A decade later, I would discover Miedel had a grandson named Anson. Adam’s three sons Jim, Tom (Anson’s father), and Bill had taken over the business, and it grew steadily and became a supplier of quality research animals such as rats, mice and guinea pigs. 

Although the elder Miedel’s rabbits were a minuscule part of the business, they were of considerable interest to us. Until we left for Venezuela in 1982, Hannah and Jacob sold rabbits to Hilltop. Our rabbit business was run on the inherited Miller business plan of the parents paying for the feed and the children caring for them and getting the sales. It reminded me of our childhood projects (1951) and the times when we gathered wild elderberries in the summer along the railroad tracks which we sold by the pound to a J.M. Smuckers fruit supplier. Weekly, a truck came to Umstead’s garage in Holmesville and picked up our elderberries, making some money for us kids.

Meanwhile, in the publishing business my first employer Paul M. Lederach was leaving Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) after a long publication legacy of projects which he had started.  He started the Foundation Series for Children, and the next segment was the Foundation Series for Youth and Adults. Finally, there was the Believers Church Bible Commentary Series which he projected in conceptual form. On all of these cooperative projects, he was a primary spirit, mover and theoretician. Perhaps this involvement was about right because the institutional wisdom was that Lederach was better in theory than in practice. He was among a vital core of MPH related people who might be called public intellectuals; among others were Paul Erb, Daniel Hertzler, Helen Alderfer, Arnold Cressman and Richard Kauffman. Aside from the children’s curriculum, I eventually worked on all of Lederach’s projects in my professional life at Mennonite publishing. The Believers Church Bible Commentaries are still being released.

One other element of Mennonite publishing life was meeting local staff and families (often Methodist or Catholic) with whom we had life-long friendships such as the Debbie and Randy Cameron family. Debbie was a long-time office associate at Mennonite Publishing House and I played men’s Y basketball with Randy. Their son Matthew, one notes, continues the tradition in heading up food services at the Laurelville Mennonite Church Center.

   

By 1980, we were gearing up for the Foundation Series for Youth and Adults; this curriculum was a cooperative project of several Mennonite groups and the Brethren. Donald Miller of the Brethren Seminary, chair of the Editorial Council and Helmut Harder a theologian from Winnipeg were the primary leaders and there were the Brethren in Christ editors John Zercher (1916-1979) and E. Morris Sider, General Conference Mennonite Elizabeth Yoder, the Brethren church’s June Miller Gibble. I served as the Mennonite Church editor. Because I was the youngest one around the table, I was expected to take some leadership in regards to the youth development. The idea was that there should be a core curriculum for youth and adult believers’ churches (Mennonites and Brethren) in addition to the ecumenically developed International Bible Lessons or Uniform Series. 

By the mid-seventies I wanted out of youth culture, wanting to be a father with a growing family, but now I plunged back into youth education for professional reasons. I took a graduate course (filled with high school teachers) on adolescence at the University of Pittsburgh and did a case study of the son of one of our MPH workers. In June I went to a national youth congress sponsored by a publishing enterprise called Group on the campus of Indiana University at Bloomington. This large event of several thousand denominational youth (largely Methodists and Presbyterians) seemed to parallel what had earlier been denominational youth assemblies. Group also provided a periodical and Sunday school and other Christian study curriculum. About this same time on the more conservative side of youth work, summer Jesus festivals sprang up, and our family went to Jesus 80 at the Agape farm near Mt. Union, Pennsylvania one Saturday; here thousands of youth were spread on a hillside, and we watched and listened to band after band with names such as Petra, GLAD and Steve Taylor.

The latter was an upstart musical satire and comedy act, writing lyrics against the excesses of the TV evangelists and appealing to social justice themes. As I write this, I see a Steve Taylor directed the movie based on Donald Miller's best-selling book, Blue Like Jazz, so he must still be going. We started watching the Robin Williams science fiction TV show “Mork and Mindy,” and by the end of the year, Gloria and I went to hear the rock band “Kansas” at the Civic Arena. Kansas’ somewhat unusual violinist caught my attention—as did the young man standing beside me who soon after arriving opened his pants zipper fly and popped out a can of beer which he shared with his friends.

What this youth culture foray reminded me was how much Evangelicals nurtured a kind of parallel religious universe for their teens in schools, music, books and films.  Several years later, Maynard Brubaker and I took our boys club to hear a heavy metal concert by a Christian group called Stryper. One can easily mock these aesthetics as pale and sanitized versions of the real thing, but I viewed them as authentic attempts by conservative Christians to maintain some separation from what we traditionally called the world. Meanwhile, non-musically, the local Mennonite youth asked me to coach their YMCA league church basketball team (mixed boys and girls) but mainly Mike Cressman. This occasional wandering into the youth world fit me much better than the weekly grind of serving as counselor for the Mennonite youth fellowship.

Where I was tying in on a regular basis was at the nearby Laurelville Mennonite Church Center—thanks especially to the director Arnold Cressman. Already in 1976 Cressman had Gloria and me serving on the 35^th anniversary committee (that we were barely Laurelville members did not seem to interest him). And in January of 1979, Cressman pulled me in as a resource for the Laurelville board retreat on the theme “Laurelville’s Ministry in the 80s,” I was little more than to give a veneer of youthful authenticity to what Cressman really wanted to dream about -- the Hebrew concept of shalom. I chaired the program committee in the early 80s. And when Cressman resigned, he pushed me to apply as director; this would have been as a kind of stand-in for him. But I knew that I was unqualified and in any case emotionally incapable of doing Cressman's shalom bidding, however good and well-intentioned it may have been.

But I liked the idea that Laurelville had a wide array of fifteen to twenty programs a year, some of which failed to materialize. Topics varied from believers’ baptism for believers’ children to war taxes to house church retreats. Arnold used to tell me as he appreciatively scanned the projections that even if some fail, you are still a winner; you only needed an over fifty percent record in Cressman’s economy. I used this formula to legitimize any failures later when I became program director at Laurelville. Cressman was an innovative Mennonite pastor, entrepreneur, and English major. He enjoyed reciting Victorian poetry as well as the Martin Luther King “I Had a Dream” speech. And he got on well with our family-- as brothers Paul, Roy and David and their families all eventually joined the association. Aside from anything related to shalom, Arnold’s favorite proverb was “Where there is no vision, the people perish.“

By August of 1980 Paul and Carol and Gloria and I led our first family leisure camp, and the following year the publicity flyer announcing that the “Ohio Millers were back by popular request.” Gloria led folk and hymn singing, and we played singing games such as “Alice’s Camel” and “Let’s Go on a Bear Hunt.” Then the kids would go with the counselors to the craft shop and other activities. For about an hour and a half we parents would have roundtable discussions on themes such as health and exercise (Gloria), family finances (Paul), alternate celebrations (Carol), and raising Mennonite children (Levi). Alas, when I look at my notes and think of my naiveté and hopefulness, I am embarrassed.

Still, I was making a case for parenting as the last bastion of amateurism; our ancestors did it on folk and biblical wisdom and I was hoping we could too. In an age of human potential specialists and guides, I appealed to Emersonian optimism: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Maybe that’s Emerson slightly out of context, but when I looked back on my grandparents (yes, dear reader, their flaws too), they did not see family as a problem to be solved or a legal arrangement to be perfected. Family was simply and profoundly a paradox of covenants to be lived and even celebrated, a little like the goodness of the sun and the rain. My foils of course were the human potential and self-help specialists who saw the human condition as a problem to be solved and perfected, and hence added to our modern mal-contentedness, hence often destroying families. In fact, most of my life education was an attempt to live as an amateur, but that is the topic of another time.   

My brother Paul was the charismatic spirit behind these family weeks attracting a number of families and always sparking good discussion with his opinions which generally had a trajectory of professional and legal expertise and ending with Amish and Mennonite applications. He would talk about the stock market and mutual funds, and then about the importance of investing locally, that would be Holmes County, Ohio. After the event, several participants mentioned finding some fresh eggs or law office pens delivered at their door step. At this point Paul and Carol were doing quite a bit of traveling, having lived in England for a while during law school, and later attending Mennonite World Conference sessions in France.  Those were enjoyable summer weeks, and we made a number of family friendships.

  

I suppose going back to our Malone days, Paul and Carol and Gloria and I did a number of things together; our kids were about the same age, so we did some vacations and writing projects. In this case, Paul drew in his Millersburg farming tenants Paul and Mary Conrad also with young kids on the way. We were feeling some largesse regarding family size, what with the population pessimists discouraging more than two offspring. With Elizabeth and Laura (Paul and Carol’s third child) on hand, we wrote an article on children as gifts and encouraging the traditional Hebrew and Christian view of having children. We exchanged some notes, met for consultation, and the resulting article was “Be Fruitful and Increase.” It caught some attention (spirited response letters) and also was reprinted in a book called Parents in Today’s Society.  On April 20, Gloria and I were invited to give a message on the “meanings of children” at the Kingview Mennonite Church.

Our children were never far away from many projects, and one of the educators I admired from my Builder work and from our children’s television diet was the Presbyterian minister Fred Rogers who grew up in nearby Latrobe. Rogers was a gentle soul and had a television program called Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and he granted me an interview at his office and invited our family to watch a filming at the television studios. We went into the studio and they gave us free access to see his stages, puppets (King Friday and Henrietta Pussycat), and the train to enter into the land of make believe. While we were there they were doing a children’s opera. Rogers’ amateurism with his cardigan sweater and every child is important attitude was appealing.

I saw the same attributes important in Sunday school teachers whose institution was having its 200^th anniversary in 1980. As editor of the Builder, I was looked to provide some context for this institution in the church. I used Builder as my main avenue of expression during those years, writing most of its monthly positions. The “position” was really an editorial although Paul Lederach had decided that a magazine did not need an editorial but that a position was needed. I’m not sure what his reasons were, but the nomenclature remained. The children’s editor was generally a member of the General Conference Mennonites and for most of my tenure this editor was Anne Neufeld Rupp who later became a pastor in Middlebury, Indiana. I did a lot of travel during those years because we had regular publishing meetings for the Builder staff in Chicago and meetings of the Foundation Series editorial groups about every quarter. So there were many meetings in Chicago and I was a regular at the Four Horseman Hotel and a Travel Lodge near the O’Hare Airport.

Unfortunately for me some of these meetings would be cut short; I was heading home doubled over in pain on the plane seat. From the early seventies and for the next thirty years, kidney stones were a regular part of my life, often coming to me during meetings. Our family doctor James Brubaker tried to determine the reason for my stones, and he never had an explanation except that I should drink extra liquids at meetings.  He noted that generally I got the stones when I may have been stressed and nervous at meetings and dehydrating, hence building up little stones which had difficulty in passing through my urinal tract.

Eventually, my brother Roy supplied me with little bottles of Roxicet pain killing tablets, a supply of which I always kept in my travel bag and still have. This seemed the best solution until the stones passed within a few days—which they always did. One of the most memorable times I got stones was several years later in a theater in Caracas during the last act of “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” It was about midnight during the Christmas season, and we knocked at a back half-door of a nearby druggist. He gave me some morphine to get home—telling Gloria to drive an hour’s distance away. The next day, my fellow church member Patricia Sarmiento visited me and prescribed prayer and corn silk tassel tea. I did her prescription plus the morphine, and sure enough within a day or two the stones passed.

In September we went to the shore, often Ocean City for a week; this fall vacation became a pattern; the water was warm; the boardwalk was still open but not as crowded; the kids took off school; and the lodging was a reduced price. I suppose it started in part because we took our honeymoon there in September, and like some migratory birds returned to our mating grounds. But it was also that Ocean City was about as close as we could get to the eastern shore, the boardwalk and atmosphere was child and family friendly. Gloria liked the beach and anything related to the sun. I enjoyed the time for bird watching and simply walking on the beach and smoking a cigar in the salty air.

After Ocean City we drove up to the Methacton Mennonite Church near Norristown, Pennsylvania where Clayton Swartzentruber was the minister and had invited me to meet with his congregation concerning Sunday school and Christian education. This small congregation which was begun in pre-revolutionary war America was a fascinating combination of historical architecture and members with a generous sense of Christian mission. I had known Swartzenturber as an entrepreneurial educator who helped begin Mennonite high schools in Ohio, Oregon, and Ontario. By the eighties, he was developing a therapeutic graduate school program for public school teachers. Swartzentruber had an instinct for trends and one could not have found a better match than teachers needing graduate credits and also wanting to feel good about themselves.

Our family regularly pulled our children out of school for September vacations but also at other times we took them traveling or visiting, and our Southmoreland teachers were always generous about this absenteeism. But this September when we returned from vacation, all the community children were absent from classes. The Southmoreland teachers were out on strike. This strike was quite an emotional jolt to our community as parents needed to make child care plans for little children, and others were concerned about their seniors having sufficient days for graduation. Most of the teachers lived right in the community, and we knew people such as Joe Hawk and Nancy Clark who were good neighbors. One night the school board called a community meeting to present its point of view and discuss the issues, and six hundred people attended a three-hour meeting punctuated with jeering and hurrahs at the various speeches, many of them against the teachers.

At this meeting, I would see school board members whom I had known only as names in the newspaper: Dale Fuller, Richard Grabiak, Daryl Lockinger, Alvin Stoker, and Francis Zaffina. From the community, the most memorable speaker was Jake Zelmore, a large bearded auctioneer, junk dealer, and musician who used his considerable rhetorical skills and volume to rouse the crowd. Jake and his family (son Rob was later on the school board with me) became friendly acquaintances over the years. The Independent Observer’s reporter said: “The concluding statement was conciliatory and pleading. It was made by Levi Miller of Arthur Avenue, Scottdale. He asked both sides not to use ‘bad motives or put each other down.’” The meeting left a long and vexing impression on me; I was scandalized that our professional teachers had called a strike, and I was equally scandalized by the almost mob-like passions the strike had evoked from the citizenry.   

The strike reminded me that I still saw virtue in the traditional Amish and Mennonite reluctance to support labor union activity, especially strikes. This same traditional nonresistance emerged in peacemaking activities when that spring the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) convened a conference at Goshen College on the possibility of the re-instatement of the draft and possible Mennonite responses. The nonresistant peace and service of the Civilian Public Service forties and alternative service of the fifties was seen as hopelessly compromised with a corrupt government at these meetings. 

Later in September, the Publishing House named me its delegate to the New Call to Peacemaking conference at a conference center in Green Lake Wisconsin. The latter had special interest because it was called by Quakers, Brethren, and Mennonites, and one of the key leaders was a man named Norval Hadley of the Oregon Evangelical Quakers. What struck me is how much at both meetings a professional cadre of peacemakers had emerged who had specific political coalitions, groups and causes we were to support.

I convened one of our small groups where activists came with pre-packaged resolutions and I noticed the same activity at the MCC assembly, I began to wonder whether the church was being co-opted as a political appendage of a larger political cause, rather than the church itself being the central vehicle of God’s redemptive purposes.  One of the key-note speakers Dale Brown of the Brethren complemented the Mennonites for having politically come of age in their language and approaches, presumably a half century late, having finally caught up to the liberal Brethren and Quakers. 

One person in agreement would have been my friend and neighbor Jan Gleysteen who with his wife Barbara came to our house and joined us in watching the November presidential election returns. Gleysteen was greatly disappointed when the early returns had Reagan winning in a landslide; he and Barb soon left for home. I was depressed not because I was a Carter or Reagan enthusiast, but because it seemed to me that so many of my Scottdale Mennonite friends had reduced the complexity of biblical beliefs and Jesus teaching in a straight line to American liberal politics and the Democratic Party.

This Christian political formula seemed too simple, easy and impersonal, and I spent the advent season reflecting on two women: Dorothy Day and Rosanna Yoder, also known as Rosanna of the Amish. Day suffered a heart attack and died on November 29, 1980 at Maryhouse in New York City. She began the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933, and I enjoyed her writings and considered her Christian anarchism and personalism a Christian light along with Peter Maurin the French Catholic who worked with her.  She began houses of hospitality for the poor and rose every morning at six o’clock to pray to a personal God. Whether the issue was racial equality, nuclear disarmament, world hunger, or a Dostoyevsky novel, it was always dealt with on a personal basis. I loved her memoir The Long Loneliness and often visited Maryhouse when I went to New York.

  

Rosanna Yoder lived her entire life in the Kishacoquillas or Big Valley of Pennsylvania, a Catholic orphan adopted by an Amish family and growing up to make her own contribution to the Christian faith in a personal way. Her son tells the family and church story of farming and raising fine horses, feeding the poor, providing wood for needy families, and being nonresistant Christians to warfare. I concluded: “Perhaps the lives of these two women, living in quite different centuries and cultures but sharing a common faith in and obedience to Jesus Christ can remind us that wherever we live or whatever our circumstances we can respond to the Christian gospel.”   By year’s end Jacob, Hannah, Elizabeth and I went to the local “Nutcracker” in Greensburg, and Gloria joined us for the round of church advent and Christmas programs and family gatherings in Ohio.   

Most of this material comes from my memory and personal files. Arnold Cressman’s vision verse was the King James Version of Proverbs 29:18. Our family reflections on having children is from “Be Fruitful and Increase,” Gospel Herald (May 6, 1980,  369-371, 375). Reprinted as “To Have or Not to Have” in Parents in Today’s Society edited by Laurence Martin, (Mennonite Publishing House, 1980, 34-41). My response to the Mennonite peace assemblies is from “Who Speaks for the Church?” Gospel Herald (May 13, 1980, 390-391). The August 27, 1980, Independent Observer had a photo of our son Jacob lining up for the school year at Central Grade School with Gloria, Hannah and Elizabeth (in a stroller) seeing him off on the first day. The Southmoreland teacher strike was reported in “Hundreds at Open Forum: Strike sparks Southmoreland,” The Independent-Observer (October, 15, 1980, 1, 16). The reflections on Dorothy Day and Rosanna of the Amish appeared in “Dorothy Day and Rosanna McGonegal Yoder,” Allegheny Conference News (February, 1981, 2).  Julia Spicher Kasdorf notes that that the Irish Catholic origins of Yoder may be a fictional construct in her introduction to the restored text of Rosanna of the Amish (Herald Press, 1940, 2008, 11-23).  

1979 Steeler Football

1979   Steeler Football. Pittsburgh Steelers, Pirates and championships, Russ Grimm, Family Cluster, Edmonton, Alberta, three-week Bible School, David and Annie Donaldson; Miriam and Veryl Kratzer communalism,  Art and Peggy Gish, a Good Friday anti-war demonstration,  Elizabeth’s birth, July 25, Gloria’s aerobics; Mennonite assembly at Waterloo, Ontario; Roy R. Miller and Wilbur Yoder; funeral of Levi L. Schlabach, Abe Hostetler’s America, Scottdale reading groups, children’s literature and movies.

In November of 1978, Gloria and I led a Mennonite youth leadership retreat at Camp Harmony near Davidsville; it was a lively weekend with lots of singing, talent and leadership. But it was scheduled to end with a Sunday afternoon session, and I soon discovered that everyone was mad about ending Sunday afternoon. The Pittsburgh Steelers were playing that afternoon. I should have known better; during the seventies, the Pittsburgh Steelers became a cultural phenomenon for winning Super Bowls and evoking unusual loyalty. It began with that Immaculate Reception catch by Franco Harris in 1972 when the Steelers beat the Oakland Raiders in the American Conference playoffs. I had grown up with some awareness of Wayne County League high school football (the Waynedale Golden Bears) and the Cleveland Browns, but the attachment of the western Pennsylvanians to their Steeler football team during the seventies was organic, enthusiastic, and all-encompassing.

All the games were sold out, church meetings were scheduled around the Steeler games, and during Super Bowl week our students wore black and gold like some parochial school uniforms. When the Steelers opened pre-season camp at the nearby St. Vincent College, large crowds gathered on the hillside to see their favorite players. By the end of the decade, Steeler fans were all over the United States, and one could legitimately talk of a Steeler nation. Much has been written about the Steeler phenomenon and the love between Pittsburgh and its team, how it emerged during the region’s industrial and manufacturing decline. Pittsburgh expatriates were now living in the South and West, and I will not add to this literature.

Mennonites traditionally were not strong football partisans, but we eventually made contact with linebacker Loren Toews (of Mennonite background) and brought him in as an inspirational speaker to the Allegheny Mennonite youth. I think it was Mike Cressman who did this. Interestingly, our closest family relationship to professional football was my brother Roy, then a Medina, Ohio, physician whose patients included Cleveland Browns families, one being Jeri Sipe, wife of the Browns’ quarterback Brian Sipe. I recall a Sunday we had lunch at Roy and Ruby’s when the two teams played each other later in the afternoon. At the lunch prayer, Roy prayed for a Browns’ victory, which scandalized our children and then evolved into a long-time family joke—probably Roy’s purpose with the prayer anyway. I don’t recall which team won that Sunday. But by Christmas the Jeri and Brian Sipe family were back in Southern California, while in January of 1979 the Steelers were winning their fourth Super Bowl championship beating the Dallas Cowboys 35-31. I remember flying home from a meeting on the West Coast, and the stewardess gave us regular updates—which she got from the cockpit.

And if the Steelers were not sufficient entertainment, that Fall the baseball Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series behind great hitting of the good-natured Willie Stargell. A home-town favorite, Stargell would walk up to the home plate and twirl his bat as though it were a baton—then he would hit a home run. It was an unusual sports decade and in Scottdale, we even got into the spirit when our Southmoreland High School football team won the conference title (here called a section) in 1976. Our locals were led by Russ Grimm who went on the play for the University of Pittsburgh and then a Hall of Fame career with the Washington Redskins. However, the football gods must have decided that one championship was enough for Southmoreland High School because it was the last championship we won even as I write this, often during the four decades losing by huge unmerciful margins.

In February we were heading to Edmonton, Alberta, for three weeks of a winter Bible school. This western Canada experience emerged out of our participating in a week-long training event during the 1978 summer called Family Cluster which was a program to provide community in congregations. The idea was that as families were becoming more diverse, isolated and fragmented, hence congregations should attempt to provide more family-like settings for community. The idea of course was noble, the activities enjoyable, and we tried to add some Christian elements to it, even if the theory was self-indulgently seventies. The background reading was Virginia Satir’s book called Peoplemaking. Satir had turned narcissism into a virtue with the corollary that all evil and uncooperative attitudes of families were by caused low self-esteem.

I may have become too old (even a scold) during these years, reacting to the excesses of the sexual revolution. Already in the early seventies, when I became aware of John W. Miller’s manuscript which became A Christian Approach to Sexuality, I sponsored its publication, and I began to write a number of articles on monogamy, at the same time that my own Mennonite publisher was releasing a whole spate of divorce friendly books. Our Scottdale Kingview congregation suffered through a divorce and remarriage soap opera (although I think it was tragic for the innocent children). I stoically adopted what might be called the Samuel Johnson position which I wrote in my journal: “It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure.”  Palliate is to abate or reduce the violence of disease.

Other memorable Family Cluster participants were David and Anne Donaldson from Alberta, back-to-nature folks, what might today be called crunchy conservatives. David, who had little knowledge of the Mennonites or Amish before meeting Annie of Pennsylvania, enthusiastically taught us Pennsylvania German folk tunes and dances.  The one I especially remember was: Hack die Katz sei Schwanz op./Hack ihn doch net ganz op./Los und bissele schtumbe stehe,/No kann es zu Saame gehe. (Chop the cat’s tail off,/But don’t cut it all off./If a little stump can show/That allows seed to grow.) 

Our Family Cluster expertise led to an invitation to Alberta for three weeks of visiting the churches regarding Family Cluster and participating in the Bible school. This was a three-week revival of what a generation earlier had been an agrarian based winter Bible school. I taught a class on Jeremiah (based on a study guide Mennonite Publishing House had released by Ernest Martin) and Clarence J. (better known as C.J.) Ramer taught a class on Old Testament prophesies which were fulfilled in the New Testament. David and Annie Donaldson were the spirit behind much of this experiment, and David also led a music class in which he took us through the paces of shaped notes music, and we sang in a chorus. David’s favorite hymn with which we would begin every session was “O That I Had a Thousand Voices.” Johann Mentzer wrote the lyrics three hundred years earlier during the afternoon after his house had burned down in the morning. The stanzas includes praise to God “who all things wisely does and well!/ My grateful heart would then be free/ To tell what God has done for me.”

We stayed near Salem, at the home of the Tofield congregation’s pastor Harold and his wife Viola Stalter Boettger, and on weekends discovered other parts of Alberta. One weekend David and Annie took us up north to a frozen and wild village called Smith where there was a small Mennonite church with an unusually opinionated but good-hearted pastor and hog farmer; I think his name was Willis Yoder. David and Anne and their young son were homesteading nearby, living in a small cabin he had built and they had a horse and buggy and a few other animals. David in fairly inhospitable territory was trying to go Amish. We passed a moose along the highway on the way, and it was National Geographic beautiful countryside.

I was fascinated by the sincere and warm faith of these rural people who lived in a cold and long winter. Most of the three weeks we were there, it was a dry cold of thirty to forty degrees below zero. Another weekend we traveled to Edmonton where we visited museums, went skiing, and spoke at the Holyrood church on Sunday morning. There we met J. Robert Ramer who was the son of Clarence (my senior teacher at the Bible school) and who would later come south to serve as the Mennonite publisher at Scottdale.  In many settings, our family would sing the traditional canon Dona Nobis Pacem (Grant us peace) which seemed to be a crowd favorite with little Hannah and Jacob leading out. We had sung it at Gloria’s sister Carla and Maurice Stutzman’s wedding, and also the next summer (July 5, 1979) when sister Ruth and John Roth got married at Martin Creek Mennonite fellowship hall.

I think I was especially fascinated by the Donaldsons, because they reminded me of my sister Miriam and her husband Veryl with whom we were discussing buying land and beginning a little communal farm. One day, we drove all over East Huntington and Mt. Pleasant Township  looking at some farms, but eventually Miriam and Veryl could not wait any longer and tried out a commune with the authors and activists Art and Peggy Gish near Athens, Ohio. I helped move them down with a big dog riding on top of the truck load. Occasionally we got reports from them that not all was well, what with Art Gish’s stubborn and individualistic personality hardly lending to community living. During the summer, my brother Paul and mother Mattie made a fraternal visit and helped in the garden, only to discover that the best strawberries were sold and the over-ripe seconds served to our little relatives (the Kratzer children) at the communal table. My mother viewed this as an egregious slight of her grandchildren. In her telling, Art Gish’s idea of a good meal was what could be found in the dumpster of the Athens supermarkets.

The Kratzers and their little children Amos and Esther became good friends with a Brethren family Cordell and Marlene Bowman who later ended up in the nearby commune at Farmington, the Bruderhof. Miriam and Veryl did not, for which we as a family were all thankful. After about a year of Gish community, I went down and helped move the Kratzers back to Wayne County where they eventually settled into dairy farming and worship with the extended Kratzer clan and the Sonnenberg Mennonites. On the return trip, the Kratzer dog was on top of the truck load again, plus some little puppies, a few goats and chickens. I remember the trip well because as we slowly drove through the small Ohio towns, children waved and smiled as they heard friendly bleating, barking and cackling coming from the top of our vehicle.

In many ways, the Kratzers were living out my own hopes for the viability of small scale agrarian communalism. I was reading publications like E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and his  catholic primer called A Guide to the Perplexed, as well as Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, especially her regular journal entries from the Tivoli farm in upstate New York. About this same time Arnold Cressman of Laurelville led what he called Grebel (as in Conrad) Company fireside theology retreats, and Gloria and I joined a December 8 discussion group with Richard and Joyce Thomas and a Weber couple of Lancaster on Walter Bruggeman’s monograph The Land. I think the latter, especially helped me to think of the land and farming as a biblical metaphor for blessing. The Beautitudes would have the meek, the humble ones, inheriting the earth. In any case, for the rest of my life farming was more of an image than a reality.

If pacifist rural communalism attracted us, we were equally intrigued by urban anti-war efforts. During Passion Week, Vincent Scotti (later took on the name Eirene), Kathy Jennings, and some other anti-war people organized various activities. On Good Friday, April 13, 1979, our family was in Pittsburgh, along with our neighbors Ivan and Naomi Moon, and here are my journal notes: “This morning we went to Pittsburgh to spend a Good Friday Prayer Vigil with some Christian peacemakers in front of the Rockwell International headquarters. We found the group standing behind a banner on the 800 Grant Street block with the Passion Week message that Rockwell was Judas and dealt in blood money. The distinct banner, I discovered, had been made by a WQED FM (the Pittsburgh classical music station) art director.

“Rockwell was the site of the prayer and mourning because yesterday it built three bombs and owned the plant at Rocky Flats, Colorado, which builds components for nuclear weapons. I was aware that Rockwell was a major supplier of nuclear armaments and whether they built two or three a day does not strike me as extremely crucial to my concern.

“The participants consisted of 23 healthy young people, most under the age of 30. Among them was Ladon Sheats who had the day before participated in an ‘action’ for which he was arrested, along with five others. They had chained themselves to the doors up on the fiftieth floor and had asked that they not be removed. Ladon sent greetings to his friends at Scottdale, and mentioned that he was on parole after having served six months in jail for pouring blood on the White House.

“The three hours of silence gave me time to think, such as I had not recently done. I thought of death. I thought of the trident submarine which was launched to eventually kill people. I thought of the plans made by well-intentioned people at Rockwell to build weapons and preserve security, as they understand it. I thought of Hiroshima and the death that weapons cause. I thought of Christ’s death and how my presence with these people put it into a different perspective. Passers-by stared at us and surely thought we were mad.

“I thought of standing as my legs became tired. I thought of standing with my father at farm sales and machinery auctions. I thought of standing in line at the military induction center at Columbus, Ohio, back in 1968. I thought of standing and watching Sandy Koufax throw a one-hitter for three hours at the old Busch Stadium. I thought of standing at revival meetings. I swayed back and forth as Hannah slept in my arms and on my shoulders; I appreciated my legs. At least I still had my legs. I could stand.

“At about three o’clock, a young woman read from Isaiah 60 in which the dream is expressed of a nation without war and living in health and peace. Another young man spent most of the afternoon reading silently in his New Testament. An article by Jim Wallis of Sojourners on the power of prayer is passed around for us to read. Christ is my hope and peace.”

We headed to a nearby restaurant for coffee and visiting. People were especially impressed by our children and by Gloria’s bump; Gloria was pregnant.  Elizabeth was born after a long day at just before midnight, 11:45 p.m. on July 25, 1979. I wrote in my journal:

“There was the early joy of knowing that a new life was coming. Next there were the worries, will the child be normal, not a mongoloid [like my uncle Levi]? Will the baby not be sensitized by the TJA factor in Gloria’s blood? Finally, one thinks of the delivery and that it will be difficult for Gloria. In the morning you get up early and go to the hospital where you are nervous under the outward calm for you want Gloria to be relaxed. You wonder if the doctor will go with a natural delivery or will go for a Cesarean birth.  You see the other two babies that day and they are healthy and you think the averages are against you. If the two would not have been healthy, you would have used that as evidence against you.

“Overall, it has been a pessimistic day, because you do not want to get your hopes too high. Then comes the actual delivery and the cry of the little one. Elizabeth is well and Gloria is feeling and looking good. You ask yourself, how could you ask all those questions. You knew everything would be alright. You are happy in holding the baby and watching her drink. You go home and eat.”  

Elizabeth was a healthy baby but jaundiced, as were all Gloria’s babies. So for a few days, Elizabeth stayed under a purple light in the nursery. Jacob, Hannah and I went to the window of the Mt. Pleasant Frick Hospital and they brought her for us to see before she came home. In celebration before she came home, we bought a new large (at least to us) queen-sized bed so we’d have more room for our expanding family. Our neighbors and friends, the Hawks (Steve), Hieberts (James), Savanicks (Nathan), Schwabs (Maggie), Scotts (Debby), and Shenks (Jill), all had babies about that same time.  

Within two weeks, we were traveling to the Mennonite Church denominational assembly meeting (August 11-16) at the University of Waterloo campus in Ontario, on the way stopping at Niagara Falls overnight. It seemed early to be traveling four hundred miles, but both Gloria and Elizabeth were healthy, and I don’t recall anything untoward happening during the trip. We even took the Lady of the Mist boat trip in hats and rain coats under the Falls. At the assembly, Elizabeth became something of a celebrity mainly because Merle and Phyllis Good were also there with their newborn Rebecca and both little ones made the newspaper. When people met us, the first line was, is this Rebecca or Elizabeth?

Gloria was unusually fit, giving aerobics classes before her pregnancy, and by the Fall she was again at the YMCA giving classes. Elizabeth often went along to these sessions, watching or sleeping in an infant seat much to the amazement of the other participants. And that Fall our neighbor Charles Fausold, the principal at the Connellsville High School, invited Gloria as a guest instructor of aerobics to the girls physical education students. We have the photo which appeared in the in Connellsville Courier of Gloria high stepping in what it called the “new form of physical fitness.” The following year (1980) Gloria learning a new program called JOY, and  she continued to teach JOY aerobics until it interfered too much with her high school Spanish teaching in the mid-eighties. 

One event we did not get to that summer was on the very week Elizabeth was born, the honoring of Berlin, Ohio’s favorite sons Roy R. Miller and Wilbur Yoder. During the Berlin Pioneer Days on the weekend of July 27-29, the Berlin community surprised Gloria’s father and neighbor Wilbur Yoder with a “This is your life” pageant. Both men had parallel four-decade careers with the East Homes schools. Roy graduated from Berlin High School in 1924 and Wilbur in 1925, and both studied at Kent Normal (now Kent State University). Both taught at one room schools in the late 1920s, Roy at Troyer Ridge (where one of his students was my mother Mattie Schlabach), and Wilbur taught at North Bunker Hill. Eventually, both were teaching and coaching at Berlin High School, and, Roy became the executive head of Berlin and East Holmes after Berlin and Walnut Creek consolidated into Hiland. Wilbur in addition to his teaching became a legendary basketball and baseball coach.  

Roy and Berdella and Wilbur and Laura raised their families living side by side at Bunker Hill as good neighbors and friends and sharing a pond. In many ways, as efficient, wise, and modest Pennsylvania Germans, the two men personified the ideals of the community, the one a Mennonite and the other a Lutheran. The program even included verses by the local poet Delbert Harman who gave them the penultimate honor in his “Ballad of Wilbur and Roy.” “If tonight I were at the White House,/and Carter would ask, ‘What is it boy?’/I’d say, ‘Fire the Cabinet again,/ And replace them with Wilbur and Roy.’” Harman then ended his verse with the ultimate honor--Wilbur and Roy teaching in heaven. 

Many past teachers, students, administrators, and athletes who had studied with Roy and Wilbur attended, and all their children attended—except, of course, Gloria about to give birth to Elizabeth. Roy and Berdella’s family was increasing as Carla, now a nurse and recently graduated from Goshen College, had married Maurice Stutzman, a medical student at Ohio State University on April 20.  

On November 11, my grandfather Levi (L.L.) Schlabach died and I went up the funeral. I got up early in the morning and Gloria took me to Interstate Route 70 at Smithton. I hitch-hiked to Cambridge, Ohio, and then north on Interstate 77 until New Philadelphia or Dover where my father picked me up. My father quite proudly introduced me to everyone at the funeral as just having hitch-hiked in from Scottdale, as though I had just flown in from London. 

The Pleasant View Mennonite meetinghouse was filled with family and Amish and Mennonite neighbors and friends, and what I remember especially was L.L.’s old Amish neighbor and minister Abe Hostetler and his sermon. Abe spoke of God’s comfort to the family, of mercy of the Christian hope of the resurrection through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And then he talked about God’s providence of caring for his people, and he wandered into American history, at least the meaning of history. He said he had been thinking of why Columbus discovered America. He said that he believed that God knew there were suffering and persecuted people in Europe and that God would provide a place for them to live. In typically modest tones, Abe said he could not give this for fact, but he had been thinking of it for a long time, and he was grateful to God for this place to live.

Perhaps because I was quite critical of America, especially with the Vietnam War and a disgraced President Nixon as background, that I remember it so well. Abe Hostetler was making a confessional statement of what the American empire had provided for religious minorities. If America took a liking to the Amish in the last several decades, the Amish have had an appreciation for America, a place where sectarian religious groups can associate to worship, set rules for membership, operate family farms and businesses, and educate their children. I thought of America’s diversity and generosity by the generous rides I was given to and from Holmes County, Ohio, in huge Mack diesels and painted VW buses: truck drivers and hippies.  

In the meantime, I enjoyed reading and discussing literature, and soon after I returned from graduate school I started a literature reading group in which we would gather in the winter at various houses and read a work. The emphasis was on simply enjoying the oral reading of plays, poetry, and or a short story, without much comment except for an introduction. Among the works we read at a setting were: “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” “Candide,” “The Seagull,” “Death of a Salesman,” and “King Lear.” The latter was introduced by an elderly Paul Erb who claimed that Lear was better read than staged. After these winter readings ended in several years, a theology discussion group emerged which was headed by Richard Kauffman and David E. Hostetler. In 1979, we spent a good number of monthly evenings on Hans Küng’s book On Being a Christian, including some correspondence with the author.

On a family level our literature and theater tastes changed as the children came. When we first moved to Scottdale, we’d go to the old Nixon Theater (since torn down) where we saw traveling Broadway shows such as “Hair” and “Godspell.” By the end of the decade our theater habits changed, and now we would often go to the Lovelace Theater which did marionette plays featuring a Toby the Dog, and classic tales such as “Jack and the Beanstock” and “Little Red Riding Hood.”  A transition to these children’s shows may have been when we were in Ontario for the Mennonite assembly and went out to nearby Stratford one afternoon. We took a sleeping three-week old Elizabeth along to “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” and the usher of the Festival Stage seemed ambivalent at best about our protocol. Elizabeth woke up sometime during the third act, and Gloria quietly breast-fed her. As a little girl, Jacob and I often called her Elizabethan—although I don’t think the nickname’s origins were in this theater.

Aside from Elsie Egermeier’s Bible stories, we read Richard Adam’s heroic rabbit tale Watership Down (1972), and later saw the movie when it came out–actually we saw it in February 1979 in Edmonton, Alberta.  Another memorable movie I saw with Jacob and Hannah was Francis Ford Cappola’s The Black Stallion at Monroeville; I’ll never forget the beautiful Black running free along the African (I believe Morocco) sea shore, but I remember it also because Roy R. went along with us to see it. I think it was the only time Roy went with us to a movie. Elizabeth, Gloria and Berdella stayed at home, the latter two still playing the word game Scrabble when we returned home late that evening.   

Most of this chapter comes from my personal files and journal entries of this year and the memories of family members. “O That I Had a Thousand Voices,” is number 10 in the The Mennonite Hymnal (Scottdale: Mennonite Publishing House, 1967). Gloria’s aerobics program “Joy at the YMCA” was described in The Independent-Observer (September 10, 1980). A full page of the Roy R. Miller and Wilbur Yoder “This Is Your Life” honor is found in the Holmes County Farmer Hub, (August 2, 1979, 11).