1976 More with Less

1976  More with Less.  Choosing my work at Mennonite Publishing House, Mennonites in Toledo; Doyle Miller injury, Jim and Florence Mitchell family,  Allegheny Mennonite Conference, John C. Wenger, Robert Bear, The Reformed Mennonites, Mennonite Central Committee, the Bicentennial; Rosmary and Harold Moyer, More-with-Less cookbook, Gloria’s food co-op, a vegetarian diet; Mattie Miller diet and exercise, dandelion.  

When we returned from Bowling Green to Scottdale, I approached my work at Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) with new vigor and focus. I had chosen to return to this work for the Mennonite church, and looking though my journal, I see many references to how this second period of working at publishing needed to be approached consciously. It was recognition that I was no longer a counter-cultural youth but now an integral employee of a denominational publishing company. I had been named editor of Builder, an educational and leadership magazine for church leaders and teachers. My four years of apprenticeship as a student editor were over. I especially wanted to curb my auto-response to mainly critique and attempt to exploit the positive in my co-workers and readers. I did not to push other people but to wait my turn with my colleagues.

The MPH chapel committee invited me to address my fellow employees on “thoughts on being away for a year,” and I was appreciative to be again in a first-name community of workers. Although Bowling Green was a small regional university of 15,000 students, one’s number (as in social security number) took the most meaning at the university business office and as a basic identity. But I commented on various readings of texts and the hope that we search and affirm our common Anabaptist and biblical theological understanding s as we explore the new and the tentative.

But the biggest insight for me was simply that I had developed a new appreciation of our audience and readers. 

During the year we attended the Mennonite congregation in Toledo, and these people gave me a new appreciation for churches which studied our curriculum, both children and adults, and read our books. One of the classes was studying of Art Gish’s Beyond the Rat Race; another used the traditional Mennonite Bible study based on the interdenominational Uniform Series outlines. Even though the congregation during the year had the unhappy task of letting go a well-meaning but ineffective pastor, it was an explicitly Anabaptist, growing and caring congregation. Members were a mix of people from the large Archibold Mennonite community, students from a nearby medical college, and young suburbanites from Toledo. They gave renewed meaning to my work as an editor. 

Then in mid-January (16^th), we got tragic news from Goshen College where Gloria’s brother Doyle was studying. Doyle was hurt badly from a fall from a college dormitory balcony, and was in a hospital at Fort Wayne with a vertebrae injury and the prognosis of long-term paralysis. I remember on the next weekend of January, we drove out to Fort Wayne and visited him in the hospital. He was stretched out on a bed and could not move, except to talk. I stood at the doorway and saw his immobile body with only the lips moving as he talked to his mother Berdella standing over him. The view was of an athletic young man who played vigorous tennis and drove a fast cycle now reduced to an immobile body; his father Roy sat slumped in a chair looking twenty-five years older than when I had last seen him. It was too much for me; I tried to walk into the room with Gloria, but I got dizzy and lost my balance. Berdella saw what was happening and walked me to the next room where I fainted, collapsing into a lounge chair. Eventually, I went back into the room but I could only say a few words; it seemed so devastating, final, and unfair.

Six months later Doyle was in physical therapy, adjusting to life in a wheel chair, having regained enough strength to stand and do some functions such as peck out sentences on a keyboard as well as having strength to eat by himself and eventually even driving a vehicle. He was planning to resume his education, wanting to study engineering at Indiana University Purdue in Fort Wayne. But the biggest change in his life was that during his hospital stay, he met a male nurse named Jim Mitchell who worked at the St. Luke’s Hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana. This encounter opened a whole new chapter in Doyle’s life and in our extended family life; to this day we are linked with the Jim and Florence Mitchell family. Jim was an English teacher turned nurse and a 1960s romantic and idealist.

His mother Florence was a mid-American save-the world do-gooder who ran her extended household as a benign monarchy with Jim as her prime minister. The Mitchell kingdom often included foster children and other young people who needed attention or had troubles, and somehow Doyle was swept up in the environs of this family project, later contributing to it in important ways himself. Two other vital members of the family were Jim’s sister Ann and a foster child Michelle whom Jim later adopted. This unusual and generous family with all of its gifts and handicaps (Ann was virtually blind and Michelle special education) enlivened many a Roy R. and Berdella Miller family gathering. Jim would tell us of their distinct personalities and family cultures: Jim loved theater and films; Doyle watched hours of TV sports; Jim was emotional and wore his feelings with honor; Doyle was, as Jim once said in a letter, stoic as an Indian; Jim liked to talk and gives opinions; Doyle said little and voiced an opinion only when absolutely necessary. They were and still are a great team.

At home I was active in the Allegheny Mennonite Conference leading Sunday school workshops and a program called TIP (Teacher Improvement Program) and helping Gloria in conference youth (MYF) events. That had taken me around to the various parts of the conference, and that summer the conference elected me as secretary of the Executive Committee. I enjoyed meeting the people and visiting some of the historic sites in Maryland, such as Grantsville and Greenwood and in Pennsylvania: Springs, Altoona, Belleville (Big Valley), Pittsburgh and of course Johnstown. 

That summer in August of 1976 was my first meeting of the Allegheny Mennonite Conference, and it was the 100-year anniversary of the conference, convening at the Blough meetinghouse in Johnstown. Here are my notes:

“The people of the Allegheny Conference seem amazing, in their own way. There is a strong sense of heritage and yet a certain outward thrust of mission as well. The people sing hymns which they have never sung before, as though they had sung them all their lives. A bass singer in front of me makes a somber face and sings a drumming sound which is in tune and also in the spirit of the song. The young people also sing with much vigor, and where they learned these songs I do not know for they are not in the Mennonite Hymnal and have not been sung for a generation.”  Nor were they in the scripture songs and choruses being mimeographed at that time; they were from the old Church and Sunday School Hymnal (1902) which I had sung as a child and Amish Mennonite youth. 

For three years, I served as secretary of the conference while John Kraybill, pastor of Springs and a Lancaster native, was the moderator. My editorial colleagues at Scottdale considered the Allegheny Conference a cultural backwater; I considered it a cultural treasure. 

The speaker for the conference’s anniversary meetings was John C. Wenger (often known as J.C.). I first met Wenger at Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) when we had assemblies on the total Anabaptist family such as the Amish, Mennonites, and the Hutterites, and Wenger came to describe these groups. I had heard of Wenger as an author and from my father who had listened to him when he made the conference rounds in the fifties; he was a contemporary of Harold S. Bender. His letters and memos were in several colors of ink, red, blue, green, and black, and he signed with a pen drawing of himself in a plain coat. He could tell fascinating and folksy stories, many of which were later gathered on video by MennoHof visitor center at Shipshewana, Indiana.

In order to get to know him better I went to pick him up at the airport, and he stayed at our home. Wenger gave MPH workers a good introduction to the Anabaptists, of course, in his own  pious way, but what I was not expecting was that he seemed by then a quite elderly man. Most of the time with me, we spoke in Pennsylvania German, and he introduced me to the Pennsylvania German poet Henry Harbaugh (1869-1943). Wenger would recite by memory Harbaugh hemweeh (homesickness) poems in dialect for a half hour at a time. I discovered at that point as I have many times since that in my being a kind of cultural throw-back in knowing the Pennsylvania German language and traditional Amish and Mennonite cultures, people would become sentimental around me or often telling me stories of their childhood.

One small group Wenger did not mention I learned to know quite well that year-- the Reformed Mennonites. Only a few hundred remained, but I had become acquainted with them when I read Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893). Tolstoy quoted extensively from the nineteenth century historian and writer Daniel Musser’s book Non-Resistance Asserted (1864), a book which influenced Tolstoy’s conversion to pacifism. The Reformed Mennonites were in the news because one of its members Robert Bear, a potato farmer near Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was excommunicated and placed in the ban. Bear then started a campaign against the church eventually hiring a public relations agency to assist him. With time, his distressed wife Gale sided with the church making it a terrible family tragedy as well. Bear sued the church elders claiming emotional damage and that avoidance hurt his potato business and asked for an injunction for the church to cease the ban.

At this point the constitutional lawyer William B. Ball of Harrisburg (who had defended the Amish in the 1972 Yoder vs. Wisconsin school case) became involved, defending the church’s right to practice its religion. I went to see some of the church leaders and wrote articles on the case for the church press, trying to interpret what was going on for the Mennonites. I talked to Bear on the phone and later tried to visit him, finding one of his farms late at night, but he was not at home, perhaps off on a speaking tour. The last I saw Bear was in the early nineties at Goshen College, when I got a call from the President’s office staff saying a man was in their office and refusing to leave until he could talk to the Mennonite bishop. The woman nervously wondered if she could send him over to me. I visited with him for a while, and learned that he wanted our type of Mennonites to repudiate the ban and shunning; he had an old rumpled copy of Menno Simons’ statement. Sadly, he appeared to be all alone, mentally and emotionally unhinged. He had given the last four decades of his life to this crusade against the Reformed Mennonites.

But why, dear reader, was I spending so much time on this small fringe group and a practice which makes no sense to democratic ideas of tolerance and inclusiveness? I suppose I ask myself the same question forty years later, and certainly it does look different now that Bear had become mentally deranged. I realize that high accountability churches are subject to abuse same as are high tolerance churches, and I could not live within such church perimeters; it is not my calling. Still, I respect, even admire, groups which maintain a high level of church accountability and unity, such as the various Anabaptist groups who understand this church order as a basic part of their Christian and biblical identity.

In any case, in March I took the Bear shunning case to the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Peace Section thinking they may want to file a friend of the court brief on behalf of the church. Or perhaps even as a related group, MCC may be able to mediate; the unseemliness of using the secular courts to resolve a church dispute seemed obvious. The committee members listened patiently but were not optimistic about helping out, and I had the clear impression that it had bigger agenda. 

We had just finished a larger meeting, an annual MCC Peace Assembly in Washington DC, This year 1976 was the American bicentennial year, and the Mennonites were worried about what we called civil religion. Several hundred people gathered for the meetings which included worship of spirited hymn singing (“God of Grace and God of Glory”) and speakers from various points of view, among them Christianity Today editor Harold Linsell, Our Star- Spangled Faith author Don Kraybill, Sojourners editor Jim Wallis, The Mennonite editor Lois Barrett, African American scholar Vincent Harding, feminist scholar Rosemary Radford Reuther and the U.S. Senate chaplain Edward L.R. Elson.

The intent was to reaffirm the Mennonite churches historic peace position, and in this case to make some distinction between church and the state, especially the American state. The patron saints of these meetings were nineteen sixties activists such as Peter Ediger, Dennis Koehn, and Doug Hostetler for whom the American state and its military were basically a force of evil in the world. Jim Wallis presented this point of view questioning whether Christians should be upholding the West. Perhaps, he said, we should be about encouraging the fall of the West. By the West, he was referring to the major clash of civilizations between the Western democracies led by the United States and the Marxist-led countries led by the Soviet Union. A James Hess of the Lancaster Conference and Sanford Shetler of the Allegheny Conference would show up at these meetings challenging the degree to which the American empire was properly characterized as evil and suggesting that the leftist critics may have been unwitting supporters of equally military—and much worse totalitarian regimes.  Whatever their differences in their view of the American empire, both shared a commitment to Christian pacifism and nonresistance as the church’s teaching.      

But the national climate seemed to be looking better during this year, as the disgraced President Richard Nixon was banished to exile in California. Gerald Ford had taken over the presidency and his mid-western family (including outspoken wife Betty) and football athleticism (Chevy Chase’ notwithstanding) seemed to bring a normalcy to the nation’s psyche. I remember being in Winnipeg for Builder meetings when I watched the TV one evening and saw that Ford had pardoned Nixon; I was glad it was over. And then it got even better. The Democrats nominated a Georgia governor and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter in the summer, and he was elected as President in November. He was a born again Baptist, squeaky clean in ethics and even wanted to carry his own bags. Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter seemed to further signal an end of a very turbulent time for the country and world; little did I know that high inflation, Iran embassy hostages, Central American wars, and gas lines were just around the corner.

A memorable visit that summer came from Harold and Rosemary Moyer from North Newton Kansas, who were traveling from Kansas to the eastern Pennsylvania and then going to Waterloo, Ontario, before returning home, all the way staying at Mennonite homes. We were delighted to host the Moyers and of course they wanted to visit Mennonite Publishing House. Moyer composed and wrote harmonization for over a dozen hymn texts which found their way into the Mennonite repertoire, at least two of which were favorites of mine “I Sought the Lord,” and “My Shepherd will Supply My Need.”  This hosting of overnight guests during our first year in our 903 Arthur Avenue house became a pattern for Gloria and our family, actually a continuation of a common practice among traditional Mennonites. And this same year it was institutionalized by Leon and Nancy Stauffer of Lancaster in a travel booklet called Mennonite Your Way. our house was listed in every edition up to the present one of 2012.

Food became a significant issue during this year, and the big event at Mennonite publishing was Herald Press’ release of the More-with-Less cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre. I met her husband Paul at mission education meetings in which he represented Mennonite Central Committee, and he often talked his wife’s project. When the first printing was ready to come off the press, Doris came out to Scottdale to see the first copies. The book had an intuitive feel for the traditional food and Mennonite experience of Emma Showalter (Mennonite Community Cookbook), but now turned this tradition into the next generation of Mennonite post-World War II expertise and experience—international service. Janzen Longacre embodied an authentic response to world food needs and good eating. More-with-Less was a run-away best seller and by the time I came on as director of Herald Press in 2001, we did a 25^th anniversary edition; over 800,000 copies were in print worldwide.

Gloria’s response was to start a More-with-Less oriented food co-op, and within a few years our basement was filled with monthly shipments of all kinds of whole wheat pastas and varieties of lentils, tofu, and carob. At this stage many of these products were not available from our area supermarkets. The co-op was quite participatory, and members would come and weigh out their orders and take what they needed. We also had Holmes County Baby Swiss and Jarlsberg Cheese; I’m not sure how the latter made the list, except that one member and our friend Mervin Miller liked it. There were annual co-op dinners featuring the More-with-Less dishes and reports on the organization (that would be Gloria). My main contribution to the co-op was in helping unload the deliveries, memorable for being so early in the mornings. The big truck would often arrive at our place sometime after midnight and about five o’clock in the morning when I got up, I would find the driver asleep in the front seat. I helped unload many a shipment in the dark by our house. The co-op grew to about 100 members and eventually moved to the Scottdale Mennonite meetinghouse. Gloria managed it until we left for Venezuela in 1982.

About this same time Gloria went vegetarian; it was high fiber and low calories in her eating and cooking. She simply stopped eating red meat, and it may have already started when we ate her pet pig back in Puerto Rico (1969). In any case, there was little public announcement, much like the rest of her life, she simply did it, and continues to this day. I liked her vegetarian dishes and have thrived on them for four decades, although I readily eat meat when it is served at other tables. One change the vegetarian diet brought was that we were no longer invited out much and when we were there were nervous inquiries regarding the menu. Still, this drop-off in invites may have had less to do with vegetarianism than simply that we were no longer the newest young family in town. Meantime, I regularly roasted a turkey (often on an open spit) on holidays or special occasions, and enjoy doing breakfast dishes. Otherwise, I’m a total klutz at cooking, and when some of my male friends developed mid-life bread-baking and cooking enthusiasms, the urges totally eluded me. 

My mother Mattie probably made the biggest change in diet and eating in the mid-seventies. She grew up with a Swiss Germanic farm family where they eat big meals of meats, vegetables, starches and desserts. She continued that same diet with us when we were a farm family in the forties to the sixties. Then in the seventies my mother changed to a lean diet, and all at once at the big family gatherings, the meats remained, but there was a big increase in vegetables and salads, green leafy ones of various kinds, and a much smaller table of desserts and starches. To compliment her new diet, Mattie bought a bicycle, actually an adult Schwinn tricycle with a large wire cage in back in which the grandchildren could ride. She drove it up the Holmesville Fredricksburg road regularly for exercise. I still have Mother’s letters recounting her daily routines; now including references to having just completed her daily bicycle ride of a mile with daughter Ruth and the dogs Reno and Teddy running along beside.

Four foods or dishes however survived Mattie’s leaner diet and exercise changes in the seventies and are still featured at family gatherings much to the delight of her grandchildren and great-grand children (I’m writing in 2012). That would be apple sauce, date pudding, noodles, and bread (all home-made, of course). Andrew seemed to take Mattie’s food and diet changes in good spirits, as long as he had his two daily basics for breakfast—fresh eggs (from his own hens) and coffee. One other dish which Andrew requested (demanded might be equally appropriate) was an annual spring serving of dandelion, a green leafy weed readily available in any lawn, served with vinegar, milk, bacon and hardboiled eggs. In Andrew’s telling, dandelion was a royal dish and a cure-all tonic which his mother Martha served every Spring, keeping all the Millers healthy. I still eat it every year.  

Most of the sources come from my 1976 journals and personal files. For the section on Robert Bear, Steven Nolt sent me an e-mail (March 6, 2012) updating Bear’s on-going difficulties, including Elizabethtown College (site of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies) needing to get a restraining order in 2007 to keep Bear off campus. Gloria told the food co-op story in “Living More with Less: A Food Co-op” by Gloria Miller, Women’s Missionary and Service Commission (WMSC) Voice (November 1980, 8). Mattie Miller’s recipe for dandelion salad appears in the Scottdale Community Cookbook (Scottdale Fall Festival Committee, 1999, 49-50).