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).