1986 Arthur Avenue Neighbors

1986  Arthur Avenue Neighbors.  Laurelville family leisure camps with Merle and Phyllis Good; “Witness” controversy, Jacob, Hannah, Elizabeth, Arthur Avenue neighbors, Mildred and Web Stauffer, Bob Davis, Arnold and Patricia Gasborro, annual block parties, Fred and Rosanne Huzak, Denny and Carol Stoner, Charles (Chuck) Fausold tennis, Tinkey Nist and Charley Brown, Bob Davis' Stu, Café con Leche, Julio Macduff, Ophelia, Gloria’s student Mexico trip, a reflexologist guest.

Laurelville was family friendly, and summers were especially good to our family. My work was program and event centered, and during the winter we’d go our own ways at Connellsville, Scottdale and Laurelville, but in the summer Gloria and the kids would come out in the afternoons for swimming, playing, and sunning.  The family would also join on a few camps such as the years we did family leisure camp with Merle and Phyllis Pellman Good and their daughters Kate and Rebecca.  These were generally small groups which developed strong personal friendship, plus they had the comedy of Merle Good’s pleasant theatrics. We knew the Goods from visiting their Dutch Family Festival in the seventies and their publishing firm Good Books. But during these 1980s summers when they helped with Family Leisure Week, it was Merle and Phyllis simply being young parents who enjoyed singing, doing skits, praying, listening and taking hikes up on Sunset Hill.

About this time my friend John A. Hostetler was on a crusade to get the film director Peter Weir to stop making a police action thriller in which a Philadelphia cop finds refuge among Lancaster Amish. Hostetler felt this movie would increase tourism and become too invasive to the Amish community. Plus, the story was fiction. Merle Good took the position that although having a film crew in Lancaster may inconvenience some Amish, there was nothing inherently wrong with making a feature film involving Amish characters, and he had some confidence in the director Peter Weir’s capability. The debate was held on a number of fronts, but for Mennonites it took on a personal element when Hostetler and Good wrote point counter point articles in the weekly denominational magazine. Similar to Hostetler’s earlier Amish defense projects John A.  had proxies state his point of view in public forums, in this case Donald Kraybill with an article in the Mennonite Weekly Review, claiming the Amish reject fiction; hence a feature film such as “Witness” would be more problematic than Hostetler’s documentary film and presumably his field sociology.

This struck too close to home as I was writing fiction with Amish characters myself and because it simply made no sense, what with my knowing the Amish have more fiction in the monthly Family Life than about any other magazine I knew of.  So I wrote a long letter to Kraybill to which he responded about a year later, acknowledging that he was incorrect on the fiction count, recognizing that the Amish read and write a lot of fiction, although they may not approve of Weir’s kind.  This writing was just the beginning of Kraybill venturing into Amish studies, and since he has become the foremost international  scholar and author in the field. But back to Good and Hostetler; I suspect it was partly also a generational issue of an elderly Hostetler viewing his authority and definitions questioned.  Hostetler even wrote my brother Paul a letter complaining of how he had to don dark glasses and a hat to hide his identity as he visited Good’s information center called The People’s Place in Intercourse, Pennsylvania. But all of these public controversies were far away from our summer Laurelville family days with the Goods. Meanwhile our children were growing up, and I’ll give an accounting of each.

Jacob seemed to always have a few good school friends around him during these years. Several I remember are Chris Overly from town and Steve Clark who lived out near the Ruffsdale. I remember taking these boys to their houses and they visited frequently, sometimes staying overnight. Jacob and his friend Chris Allegra were becoming politically active at an early age, and when the M*A*S*H* star Mike Farrell came to western Pennsylvania stomping for Democratic candidate Bob Edgar a U.S. Senate seat, we joined in a day of electioneering. Steve Brubaker was Jacob’s age, and so Maynard Brubaker and I took leadership of our church’s boys club, doing lots of games, activities, and service projects. One fall (October 8, 1984) we took Jacob and Steve for a day of Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) work up near Meadville, Pennsylvania; Dennis Hertzler went along too. Jacob’s friends and other Kingview boys club aged kids from Kingview such as Zach Brown and the Siriannas came to club meetings too. Another memorable evening we went in to Pittsburgh to hear Stryper, a heavy metal Christian band (November 17, 85).

The main time Jakob and I had music was when we would weekly drive up to Greensburg where he had violin lessons at about nine o’clock in the evening; Jacob as with all our children had a good musical ear and played the violin okay but it not as a first love. His real interest in music was more along the lines of jazz which we heard on WDUQ by a disc jockey called Tony Moad. We had many good visits on those weekly late-evening trips to and from Greensburg. 

My Greensburg trips with Hannah were monthly when we went for several years to visit John Wesner, the orthodontist. Hannah was an exceptionally fast learner, somewhat ahead of her class emotionally and academically, and often when we visited her elementary teachers, they spoke of her as much a peer as a student. Every time we’d meet our neighbor Nancy Clark, she told us it made her last year meaningful because she had Hannah Miller in class. During these years, I served as a home room parent, and I would visit her class along with another parent, and we would lead party and social games relating to the particular holiday.

For some reason, Gloria enrolled Hannah in some dance classes at Connellsville during these years, and I remember attending an embarrassing recital or two; as I recall Hannah posing for photos was a big part of the evening. Anyway, this charade lasted only a short time; Hannah was not especially suited for acrobatic dance, and better activities soon took precedence. She took up piano with the teacher our neighbor Marty Hawk, and was beginning a three-year run for spelling bee championships. As a sixth grader (1987), she won the Westmoreland County Spelling Bee, and then sang the Kermit the Frog’s solo “The Rainbow Connection” at the Southmoreland spring music program.       

At an early age, Hannah also began to work as a waitress at Laurelville which she continued to do throughout her junior and senior high school years. Many weekends she would ride with me to and from Laurelville, even before she had a driver’s license. If Hannah was brainy, she was also practical and she guarded her money carefully, as did Elizabeth. One of her English assignments was to write of her life thus far. She wrote her life story in a booklet with at least six pages describing here past and present life, but ended with a projection of her future. She wrote that she planned to attend college, marry a husband, have three children and become a chemist. 

Elizabeth started out slow at Scottdale; in the first grade she was placed in a low reading group. It may have been because when we returned from Venezuela she was the most bilingual of the three children, more conversant in Spanish than English. Gloria does not often show emotion, but when she found out about this placement, I thought I heard the clucks of an angry hen defending her chick. She went to visit the teacher Mrs. Shure who was very accommodating and said she would give Elizabeth special attention; sure enough, by mid-year Elizabeth was reading with the best of the class. 

Elizabeth was a third child mediator; this was true if the conflict was between siblings, parents, or parents and children. Although determined and self-disciplined, she always had a soft edge with all of us and listened to many points of view. We regularly had foreign exchange students from Johanna Hurtado to Spanish and Japanese kids; they inevitably gravitated to Elizabeth for counsel or perhaps space from the rest of us. Elizabeth seemed intuitively to sense some good and reasonable from all she heard and listened to various sides. During these years, we had neighbors Walter and Sue Kotecki whose daughter Erica often came down to our back lawn to play with Elizabeth.

I appreciated our neighbors along Arthur Avenue, even if they were what in the local parlance was called nebby, nosey, in everyone’s business. On balance, I figured this trait a small-town virtue; they were good-willed and watching over our house and children. Mildred and Web Stauffer lived next door above us; Web was born in the nineteenth century and a veteran of the First World War, and Mildred had worked in one of the local banks all her life. Both now retired and a brother and sister, they were well connected to the history of the community. Below us were the long-time Episcopal rector and his wife who sang opera arias while she played the piano. But they soon left town, almost overnight, amid rumors of the rector’s friendship with one of his parishioners The longest resident below us was Bob Davis, a single young man who was an outdoorsman and hunter; he had a welcome sign on his door noting there were loaded weapons inside. In his early years Bob had late night parties, and we heard rumbling and music until the early morning. But with time he settled down and, one could not think of a better neighbor than Bob Davis and his dog Stu.

Somewhat more colorful neighbors lived in a large brick house across Arthur Avenue in the Arnold and Patricia Gasbarro family and their children Christine and Vincent. Aside from their business ventures, Arnold worked as a mine inspector for the U.S. Department of Labor, but I’m mention two elements which made for the family’s distinction. First, I remember their vigorous debates (elevated terms here) which sometimes went well into the night on summer evenings and with the windows open--quite public. One heard spouses giving vivid descriptions of each others’ family origins, and father and son debates were held in the open garage while fixing motors. Sometimes a concluding argument was punctuated with the ping or thud as a flying tool hitting a wall. Often the next day or whenever we saw one of the Gasbarros, they would apologize for the late-night discussions, noting the unreasonableness of the opposing side.

During these years I was exposed to a lot of mediation and conflict intervention training, and I sometimes thought of our neighbors. But I never considered myself capable of intervening nor of calling in intervention. First, I was intuitively a debater myself, and even after many workshops and seminars, not good at mediation. Second, I thought that probably another party trying to intervene would simply have united the Gasbarros against the third party, thus simply escalating the discussion to another arena.

And I confess, dear reader, the above paragraphs by themselves give a distorted view of our  neighbors. The Gasbarros were not only debaters and emotive story tellers, but here is their second characteristic: good-natured and generous neighbors to us. Arthur Avenue had no parking space, and we often parked our second vehicle on their lot, as did our visitors. On a sub-zero winter morning, they would jump start our vehicles, and they would lend, borrow or exchange any tools. Simply put, if we ever needed help, they were first responders of unusual loyalty. I was away a lot at night and on trips, and I found some consolation in the thought that  we had four friendly giants across the street who would have made short shrift of any intruder to our home.

I saw another side of Arnold on June 2, 1985, at Christine Andre’s wedding at the Byzantine Catholic Church out along the Mt. Pleasant Road; Arnold read the Scripture text; to my recall it was the Love Chapter of 1 Corinthians. He and Pat served a great meal and drinks at the Scottdale Firemen’s Hall afterwards. Arnold Gasbarro died on March 6, 2003, and we went to the funeral home, visiting with the family and, sure enough, we walked into a family debate with Arnold’s body and casket as the backdrop. It all felt authentic to Arthur Avenue, and I thought probably a generous God in heaven and now Arnold were looking down with some humor at our earthly drama.   

The Gasbarros did not come to our block parties which drew mainly from the other side of Arthur on Loucks Avenue, headed up by Tinkey Nist and the Koteckis, Huzaks, and Stoners. Each summer or fall since Sue Kotecki and Rosanne Huzak started the block parties in the seventies, a family would host, generally providing the main entré and drinks, and everyone brought dishes. Often there was a bingo game and various door prizes; sometimes it was seasonal and we did pumpkin carving; another time we had lawn mower races with both a riding and push category. Fred Huzak early on recorded these events on his video camera, and sometime played them back to us; the Huzaks also sometimes hosted a winter neighborhood indoor picnic. When Fred retired from Lennox Glass in Mt. Pleasant, he took a cross country coast to coast bike trip, and the resulting video became an evening neighborhood gathering. All of these community events helped us to see each other in a personable light, whatever our differences in background, vocation and religious affiliation. 

I’ll mention several other neighbors. Denny and Carole Stoner lived behind us on Loucks where they raised their three daughters and often we could hear them visit on the back patio much as I’m sure they heard us down below. Denny always called down a neighborly greeting, and we had a special connection because he and his brothers (Jim and Wally) played basketball at the old downtown Y cracker-box gym and also later at the Southmoreland gymnasium. These were men’s pick-up nights and many enjoyable evenings of exercise in the winter. Carole Stoner was also athletic and played tennis with Gloria in the women’s league. The additional connection with Denny was that he and his brothers had grown up on Market Street beside the Mennonite Meetinghouse and had been good friends of the Mennonite minister John L. Horst’s family, especially their son John during his school years. During the eighties John Horst, now a professor at Eastern Mennonite University, and family would come back to Scottdale and Laurelville for various music or family camps.

In the summer my tennis exercise was going Wednesday evenings with neighbor Charles (Chuck) Fausold up to Hidden Valley on their men’s tennis night. Sometimes the pharmacist George Hoffman went along, and we played round robins until dark on the courts which was even more enjoyable when one of the Pritts brothers (Ronnie, Randy, or Roger) was a partner. They were always competitive and always polite. They were sons of the Alverta and Clifford N. Pritts of Champion and associated with the Connellsville school system, hence knew Chuck and also my wife Gloria. Chuck and Betty Fausold had a house near Hidden Valley and we sometimes stopped in, but most of the time after the men’s tennis, we all went down to the Hidden Valley bar for a sandwich, popcorn and drinks. The evening's tennis winner provided a pitcher of beer.

Hidden Valley guests and condo owners would often join us on these tennis evenings, and I would sometimes meet someone who discovered I worked at Laurelville, often called "the Mennonite camp,” and I would hear a camp story. A typical one was of a one-time youth having attended Laurelville on a Young Life weekend. These were big youth weekend events in which Reid Carpenter would bring busloads of Pittsburgh youth to Laurelville. The names of Carpenter’s organization and leadership changed over the years, but the spirit of the event remained remarkably constant over the decades; many Pittsburgh youth began a vital and personal encounter or commitment with Jesus Christ during these weekends.

So that was our neighborhood, and most has been positive, except our dogs. First, let’s note the positive about the dogs in town; these would be our neighbor dogs. Tinkey and Ron Nist behind us on Loucks had Charley Brown, a short-haired large brown-black mixed breed dog for as long as we lived on Arthur Avenue--about 30 years. Charley even outlived Tinkey’s husband Ronald. When a Charley Brown got old or died, Tinkey simply replaced him with a similar looking Charley Brown who generally stayed in the house with Tinkey unless he was riding around town in the front seat of her truck cab, looking out at as if he were the mayor of Scottdale, which I believe Tinkey considered him to be. Tinkey generally talked to Charley in formal English calling him Sir Charles the Second, Third or Fourth, as though he were fully conversant in Elizabethan English, and as of this writing in 2012, they both (Tinkey and Sir Charles) still live on Loucks Avenue.

Below Tinkey Nist on Loucks was the Hovanec family Beagle who with father and sons went hunting rabbits and small game each Fall and Winter. Coming up the Arthur Avenue was Bob Davis and his dog Stu (both already introduced); Bob had other dogs, but Stu was the most memorable. Stu lived outside in a dog house bedded with straw most of the time, and in the winter sub-freezing weather Bob put an extension chord and heat lamp in the dog house. One night the straw caught fire, and we were awakened by the fire department truck in the street below us, lights flashing and Stu running around, fortunately loose and alive.

Then there were the Miller dogs; our first one on returning from Venezuela was a big mutt colored like coffee with milk, hence Café con Leche. A good-natured stray with big energy and a big voice, we kept Café con Leche for a few weeks, but I knew we could not maintain him. I had picked him up near Laurelville as a stray, so one morning I took him back along the road near Laurelville, not far from where we had found him and left him there again. Dear reader, yes, I knew about animal shelters, the humane society and all those well-meaning agencies. But my belief was that Café con Leche found another home or if not was happier as a wild dog than cooped up in a house or a shelter.

Next came Julio Macduff, a purebred Shetland Sheepdog (Sheltie) which we bought as a puppy from my Holmes County cousin Emma Schlabach Miller; their family was breeding Shelties. We loved Julio, his spirit, loyalty, energy and proud demeanor. But Julio could not control himself from running and barking at cars. Outside he would happily chase cars from the bottom of our Arthur Avenue block to the top of the hill. I tried to train him, scolding him and even spanking him. When that failed, I tried driving past our house and pouring buckets of water at him from the vehicles; another time I took a broom inside the vehicle and whacked at him, trying to associate bad times with car chasing. So it is not for lack of effort at training, but Julio was undeterred by these efforts. He would come up to me after these ordeals with his head and tail held high, eagerly awaiting the chase of the next car--as though water or a broom had simply added to the experience. We also tried to keep him behind the fence and inside the house, but he kept on barking at cars.

Julio’s barking eventually attracted the attention of our magistrate to whom I could only respond as guilty. After paying several hundred dollars in fines, we regretfully decided that Julio was a country dog, so we sent him out to Kidron, Ohio to my sister Miriam and Veryl Kratzer. There Julio ran along the lane and the road for about a year, barking to his heart’s content, and then one evening Miriam called and said there was the sad news. Julio's end came when he got too close after the milk truck’s wheels. Next we got a female Sheltie, who was not a car chaser like Julio. We named her Ophelia and tried to breed her and raise puppies but to no avail. Ophelia loved to sun herself on the warm pavement in front of the house and was hit and killed by a car. After Julio and Ophelia’s untimely deaths, by 1989 we decided cats and back-yard poultry would be our pets, and they must await a later chapter. To all our Arthur Avenue neighbors, I confess I was not a good neighbor in regards to dogs. I grew up with farm dogs and never made the transition to borough living as I should have.  

Finally, during June Gloria arranged a Connellsville High School student trip to Mexico, and our whole family plus Gloria’s sister Bonnie went as a mix of chaperones and family trip. We developed our own itinerary with travel through the MTS (Menno Travel Service) agency, but a month before departure the Mexican government cancelled our hotel reservations, reserving all the Mexico City rooms for the World Cup visitors in the city that month. So we decided to try home stays, a kind of Mennonite Your Way in Mexico City; I got in touch with Guillermo and Eva Zuñiga, asking if homes might be available to host students four nights. A physician and church leader, Zuñiga found families who provided homes and transportation; we offered them the equivalent of our hotel budget. We visited the Aztec cultural sites, viewed the social realism murals, and attended the Ballet Folklorico, but I’ll not list everything here. Afterwards, the students talked of the family members they met as a highlight of the trip, including exchanging letters with their host families afterwards.

We also visited Guadalajara and then Puerto Vallarta on the coast where we ended with several days of sunshine, parasailing and morning exercise at the nearby John Newcomb Tennis Center. The Connellsville High School kids found a local night club where they would dance into the night. One evening our family and some of the kids left the hotel strip along the shore and visited the dusty streets of downtown Puerto Vallarta, attending a local movie theater which was showing a grainy copy of “Witness” dubbed in Spanish. The Mexican audience cheered when Harrison Ford decked the Lancaster ruffians who were bothering the Amish. I mention this movie in part because I was now fully aware of how my people the Amish had become an international phenomenon.

Closer to home our family continued to host people off and on who found us through the Mennonite Your Way listing. One unusual guest during this time was Raymond Mummert who practiced a traditional reflexology, which assumes that the foot is like a plant root supplying health and basic information to the rest of the organism. I had become acquaintd with this health approach when I had visited the Holmes County, Ohio, Amish folk healer John A. Yoder. For the night’s lodging and breakfast (instead of money), Mummert offered us health examinations, and I suppose entertainment, by making footprints of ink on a paper which he then analyzed. His analysis for me was: back out of line, lower disc problems, colon problems, liver (unspecified issues), heart trouble, and bad pancreas. His prescription was to get on a cleansing program, also noting that I had too much insulin which was burning my brains out. Fortunately, Mummert found Gloria and the children’s feet to be in better health.

Most of this chapter comes from personal files and memories. Background on the “Witness” movie controversy can be found in John A. Hostetler, "Marketing the Amish Soul,"
Gospel Herald (June 26 1984, 452-53) and  Merle Good, "Reflections on the Witness Controversy," Gospel Herald (March 5, 1985,
162-164). Numerous letters followed in the publication. Copies of Reflexologist Raymond Mummert’s foot analysis and diagnosis are in my 1984 Ideas and Activities file.