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).