1990 William Shakespeare

1990  William Shakespeare. Jakob, Shakespeare plays, films, Hartwood Acres summers,  small groups, Maynard and Jan Brubaker, Kim and Diane Miller, Luciano Pavarotti, driving and sleeping, Pittsburgh Pirates, Jakob at Central Christian, Miriam and Veryl Kratzer family, Scottdale Mennonites 1790-1990; Gloria’ Spain trip; Canadian Mennonite writers.

In 1990, our son Jakob wrote a paper on his father while a student at Central Christian High School in Kidron, Ohio. This paper is the first time I saw Jakob writing his name with a k rather than Jacob, so I will honor his change of spelling; he used the k the rest of his life. He wrote: “My father was a frugal man with the possible exceptions of his spending on books, cultural events, and traveling.” I’ve mentioned books already, but here I’ll mention some of the cultural events. In theater aside from high school plays, such as “Bye, Bye Birdie,” I think one of the first plays I enjoyed was Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” at Wooster’s Arena Fair, a summer stock company (pre-Ohio Light Opera). I never quite forgot it, the tragedy of two sons and a failed father Willy Loman. It was Willy’s brother Ben whose line stayed with me: "When I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich." It was so refreshingly crass and carried so much of the false hopes of the Lomans and what I thought was wrong with the world. I, of course, had a fling with the Broadway musical which I described in 1967.

By the time I got to Malone College, I had read and seen Shakespeare, including Chris Halverson and Malone’s in the round tent staging of “Taming of the Shrew.” I never left Shakespeare which was not hard to do; the plays remain quite accessible. In the eighties to mid-nineties, one of the summer events we enjoyed as a family was going the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival which staged three productions at the Stephen Foster Memorial Theater in Oakland. Aside from Shakespeare, some were more recent shows such as the crazy “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” in 1989. Among the Pittsburgh actors, especially in comedies such as “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” we often looked for a large and ingratiating actor Tim Hartman. He was like cotton candy at a carnival, enjoyable even while annoying. We later found out that he is a confessing Christian and as of this writing in 2012, still acting, regionally and on Broadway. Shakespeare was everywhere, and when we were in San Francisco in the summer of 1991, we took in the California Shakespeare Festival’s “Mid-Summer Night’s Dream,” mainly memorable, however, for being in an open amphitheater on a Sunday afternoon with warm sunshine (think of a happy Gloria in a tank top). As I write this chapter, we did a 2011 excursion to New York city and Shakespeare’s King Lear (with Derek Jacobi) at the BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) theater. 

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Then there were the many Shakespeare films, and one that stands out in this period was Henry V which came to Pittsburgh in 1990. I pulled Elizabeth and Hannah out of school one afternoon and we saw it in the old Fulton Theater in downtown Pittsburgh; this was while they still showed movies in the downtown theaters. It starred a young British director and actor Kenneth Branagh backed up by what would have made any short list of some of best contemporary British actors: Paul Scofield, Derek Jacobi, Alec McCowen, Judi Dench, and a young Emma Thompson and Christian Bale. It is also a coming of age drama in the context of a medieval holy war. I wrote in my journal that although one should never glorify war, and this movie does not, war still reveals the nobility and tragedy of people. We bought the CD, and I never forgot the haunting “Non Nobis, Domine" at the end of the Battle of Agincourt. The kids were generally, and I should say generously, open to going along on these cultural expeditions--whether music, drama or lecture. On September 28, 1989, Hannah (at the mature age of 14) went with me to a lecture of the feminist biblical scholar Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza at Seton Hill College.

Another enjoyable summer event was to take in one or two events at the Hartwood Acres summer outdoor concerts on Sunday evenings. We would drive up on Sunday afternoon, have a picnic dinner, then hear a concert often a Pittsburgh group such as the symphony, opera or Tamburitzans, and also traveling groups such as the Preservation Jazz Band from New Orleans, the same group I had heard one night in their hole-in-the-wall venue on Bourbon Street. During the mid-eighties while Laurelville friends Doug and Rita Berg lived near there, they would invite us to their house for refreshment or drink before we would go home. Rita died later during these years. Sometimes we would go with church friends or small group; I remember one time when we went with the Brubakers (Jan and Maynard) and Millers (Diane and Kim) and James Lederach joined us on his way home from a visit to his sister in Boston. He brought along some live lobsters which we boiled in a big make-shift cooker. Ever ready with equipment and tools, Maynard Brubaker had some kind of blow torch to provide the heat, and the operation attracted some attention. I remember an elderly man bemusedly saying he had seen a lot of unusual picnic spreads at Hartwood Acres, but this fresh lobster was a first.

The big musical event of the year 1990 was on Gloria’s birthday gift to me on September 15 at the Civic Arena, a concert by the tenor Luciano Pavarotti. By this time Pavarotti was a packaged act of set songs, white waving handkerchiefs, outstretched arms and high Cs. But he was still singing well with plaintive come hither clear tenor sounds. The big concert came about because he was going to sing in “Tosca” the year before with the Pittsburgh Opera but fell ill. So he promised to return to sing a special concert for everybody. At the end he sang his signature “Nessum Dorma,” from “Turandot;” we all waved our white handkerchiefs, and then they opened the Civic Arena ceiling to the night sky and gave us a fireworks show. It was the only time, I had seen the Civic Arena open its top from about 20 years earlier when we had seen a show there (I don’t recall the program) but I do recall they opened the half ceiling at the end into the night sky.   

If already in my mid-twenties I was forgetful and sleepy (which I was) by these years in my mid-forties I was worse, sometimes forgetting the dates and events. I remember Gloria and Elizabeth and I one time we drove up to Hartwood Acres and it was totally empty so we had our picnic and went back home. Another time we were going to see the baseball Pirates and were heading down the parkway near downtown with the pre-game show on KDKA, but we thought there should be more traffic on a game night, and about that time the announcer said “Welcome to Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium where the Pirates are finishing their warm-ups and ready to take on the Braves.” I forget what we did the rest of the evening, but Gloria and Elizabeth were forgiving. I think Hannah and Jakob were away that summer.

I was now doing a lot of driving with the car between Pennsylvania and Indiana, and there were numerous journal entries of driving off the road and hitting the guard rails from sleep. One snowy day in Indiana, I fell asleep on the toll road, drove it off of the road with my eyes closed and back on the road again although turned the other way with the eyes open. Another night in the early hours of the morning when I was returning from Illinois to Goshen, Indiana, and was just driving into the town when I skidded off Route 33 into a rail near Goshen’s Dunkin Donuts where minutes later I found out a police officer was having a coffee. The friendly Midwestern officer came out and asked if I had been drinking. I said no I had a sleeping problem; I was trying to get back to see my son Jakob who was then a student at Goshen College. This was in the Fall of 1991; the officer told me to drink coffee, stay alive and go see my son.  I realized that the biggest issue with sleeping and driving was like drinking and driving; I might cause an accident or death to someone else on the road. So often when I got sleepy I would simply drive off at a rest stop or even along the side of the road and take a nap. Several times, a state police would knock on my window and wonder if I was okay. I also tried to take the train, bus or plane when this could be justified, and when going with groups I fortunately had family members, especially Gloria, who had great staying awake abilities.     

Another cultural event was an annual summer Pittsburgh Pirate game, and I remember especially going to the Three Rivers Stadium which was large and oversized. Often times we took binoculars along to see the players and also to catch sight of the nearest fans. Sometimes there were only eight or ten thousand fans in the cavernous stadium.  Although the really lean years were to come in the 90s, it seemed to me Pittsburgh’s Pirates baseball team was always a second cousin to the Steelers. We would sit in the outfield where Gloria could get plenty of sun and the children and I could roam if the game got boring. One night when the old tennis players came out to Monroeville, Gloria (it was her birthday) and I went to see the old stars of the seventies such as Evonne Goolagong, Virginia Wade, Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors; I think maybe even Bjorn Borg was with them.

But back to family cultural events; Jakob was away at Central Christian High School during his last two years of school from the Fall of 1989 until his graduation in the Spring of 1991. During that time, he was having a cultural flowering in music and stage, playing the lead role of Atticus Finch in the play “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Jakob also played violin in the orchestra, and sang in the choir, and sang with his cousin Kent in a select group called the Varsity Singers. Those two years were some of the best and most fruitful of Jakob’s life. I remember when we drove him out to Kidron in the Fall of 1989, I was getting more depressed with each mile as we approached the Veryl and Miriam Kratzer homestead. On the other hand, I noticed that Jakob was becoming more animated and even cheerful-- which for Jakob was saying quite a bit. On the surface, one might not have expected this response, given Miriam’s discipline and strictness. But my sister Miriam was also a loving back-to-nature type who believed that she and Veryl could recreate a Laura Ingalls Wilder childhood for their five young ones. They made a few concessions to the twentieth century such as greater access to books and reading and stringed instruments. When her children needed a strings teacher she went out and recruited Brian Wiebe from Kansas who could also begin a symphony for the Central Christian High School where they attended.

Otherwise, Miriam and Veryl ran a fairly austere household where the Bible stories, books, singing and recordings were welcomed but other worldly influences such as radio and television were not. I remember Jakob had a subscription to Rolling Stone magazine, which he told me Miriam allowed on the front porch but not inside the house. Yet Jakob seemed to thrive under this regime and conditions, and one of his favorite stories was when Miriam showed home movies one night renting an old reel film projector from the Wayne County Library and showed black and white Laurel and Hardy films. He even claimed the morning and evening farm chores could be enjoyable. He loved the table conversations; the Kratzers were story tellers. At Christmas when he came home we often sang together as a family, Jakob’s favorite selection at that time was Mendelssohn’s “Cast Thy Burden Upon the Lord” which they were singing in one of his Central Christian ensembles. We sang it, and it became one of my favorite hymns, especially when Jakob later had many sad and melancholy days.    

In a communal sense of culture, our small group was important to us over the years. The idea of small groups emerged in the seventies when the Mennonites were emphasizing a greater degree of Anabaptist accountability and Christian fraternal relations. The small groups were somewhat fluid from year to year and based on church teaching that we should all be part of one. I remember we were in groups with Joe and Rene Brenneman, Rodney (Jerry) and Jean Cavanaugh, Terry and Sandy Burkhalter, and Susie Bontrager. After we came back from Venezuela in the mid-eighties, we were in a small group with Kim and Diane Miller and Maynard and Jan Brubaker for at least a decade, and I consider this group still going, although mainly in my imagination. Kim and Diane had just married in the summer of 1984, and we knew his parents well, Mervin and Arlene.

One regular event for the small group was to cut a Christmas tree in early December and we would go up on top of Three Mile Hill near Freeman Falls east of Mt. Pleasant and cut a tree and bring it down until those trees got too big. As late as last year I was still getting my trees up there but now they were 30-40 feet tall, and I would cut them down and only use the top part. Others would occasionally join this small group because they were friends such as James Lederach while he was still single in the eighties. Also, Mark and Gina Peachey, Beth and Kenneth Newcomer and Dennis Hertzler honored us with occasional visits. By far the longest members and constants were the Brubakers and the Millers. I remember when I was considering taking the job at the Historical Committee and moving to Goshen, Indiana, we had them all at our place for consultation. We tried to give the positives and negatives of moving, and when we were finished we all agreed that it would be better not to move. But still by the summer of 1990, I had taken the job, and we thought the family would move eventually. But this is a story for another year.

Three other major cultural events would occur in 1990 which I will simply mention. The one was in Scottdale, the second in Spain and the third in Canada. The year 1990 marked the 200^th year since the arrival of the Mennonites to Scottdale in 1790. A committee consisting of Jennifer Hiebert, Ruth Horsch, Rosanna Hostetler, James M. Lederach, Winifred Paul, John Sharp, Rita Yoder, and Virgil Yoder worked on appropriate celebrations well in advance of the occasion. Winifred Paul chaired the committee and compiled a 135-page genealogy of the Mennonite community called Along the Banks of Jacobs Creek. During the anniversary, articles on the family history appeared in local newspaper Independent Observer, tours were given, historical displays were placed in the merchants’ windows along main street, a weekend symposium was held (October 27-29 with guest scholar Beulah Stauffer Hostetler), and a large stone marker was placed at the Alte Menist Cemetery in Pennsville (this actually happened on June 7, 1992).

My main contribution was writing an article on nineteenth century rise and fall of the Mennonites in the area and to plan a symposium. I think my original contribution was giving more of the social and cultural ethos which appeared in the Karl Overholt diary and to revisit the Edward Yoder interpretation that the Mennonites were insufficiently modern (adopting English language and Sunday schools) to attract their own young people. My own reading of the period was that the modernizing impulse (personified by Abraham Overholt) may in fact have sped up the demise of the Mennonites. None of this interpretation is to subtract from the original work which Yoder did, and his study still stands as the basic reference of the period. I suppose the longest term personal consequence which came out of the year was a self-appointment of our family as the sextons of the Alte Menist Cemetery, which after two decades and this writing we are still doing.    

During the first two weeks of June, Gloria took a group of her Connellsville High School Spanish students to Spain, and she took our family along as well. We spent about half the time in Madrid visiting the museums and historical sites. In visiting the cathedrals and royal palace during the Spanish Hapsburg Empire, one was especially aware of Spain’s once mighty and now diminished role in the world. For me, this was all the more evident because during the trip I  read David Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (1987). While there the Spanish daily, El Pais (June 13, 1990, 18), had an opinion column by Kennedy noting the clear decline of the Soviet Union or Russia. In Kennedy’s telling the USA was in the balance and could eventually go in the same direction if one considers its center cities, foreign cars, unstable families, and poor public schools.  For the second week, we spent time at Málaga on the Costa del Sol catching some rest and plenty of sun. Jakob and I rented a motor scooter one day and visited the Alhambra, the fine Moorish architectural remnant of Arab Spain. 

We also took some drama of Normalville (a region of Connellsville’s school district) along on the Spanish trip when a youthful romance went sour. On one of the last nights at Málaga, one of the girls drowned her sorrows but not her anger in drink, and issued torrid accusations about her boyfriend, now a former boyfriend who had taken up with another girl. She went out on the hotel balcony and threatened to jump off; everyone was frightened and Gloria helped keep watch, hence got no sleep that whole night. Meantime early in that same morning, I heard a knock on the door and her ex-boyfriend, and now the villain, said he could not sleep either and wanted counsel. His complaint which I’m summarizing here was that his former girlfriend, however beautiful she was, had sexual appetites which he could not satisfy. He wondered if that was not sufficient reason to end a romance, setting himself up as a victim. I had no idea what counsel to give, much less what the truth was in any of these confessions—physically and sexually, he seemed quite capable as a muscular wrestler. Gloria's main hope at this point was to get everyone back to Normalville alive, if not totally well. I noted in my journal that “All in all, it [the trip] has been a good experience” but perhaps I should also note that this was my last trip as one of Gloria’s chaperones. 

Finally, Canada. Canadian Mennonite literature had been flourishing for several decades, but I discovered it full force at Winnipeg, Manitoba, where I was invited to read from Ben’s Wayne at Mennonite World Conference July 24-29. 1990. Here were the likes of Di Brandt, David Waltner-Toews, Sarah Klassen, Rudy Wiebe, and Al Reimer. There were also galleries with Mennonite art, paintings and sculpture. These writers and painters, especially the poets, were enthusiastic and impassioned, and leading the pack was the young poet Di Brandt; she wrote well, and the fact that she was beautiful, brilliant and strong probably did not hurt. And beyond the poetry and fiction, there was an audience. Whenever the readings were scheduled, there was a roomful of people in full expectation to hear something earthy, sublime and fierce. I had never seen anything quite like this of how the Canadian Mennonites had developed both a literature and perhaps even more importantly an audience: a buying, reading and listening audience. I suppose because it was of a church meeting, I read from the chapter of the Amish church service with the Lob Lied (Praise Hymn) sung slowly, the ministers droning, and Wayne getting drowsy. My reading had humble and modest tones compared to Di Brandt’s lovely and eloquent ferocity. But the moderator Al Reimer was enthusiastic, saying in a world of noise, watch for understatement and the audience responded warmly to my reading. 

I was back to another reality as we were leaving the Winnipeg airport and an elevator door opened with a wheel chair pushed speedily to the gate by Paul N. Kraybill, the mastermind behind the conference. It turned out that in the chair was Mennonite World Conference president Ross T. Bender with his wife Ruth alongside; Bender was sick. Not long afterwards I would visit not Bender but Paul N. Kraybill himself at a nursing home in Goshen, Indiana. He was dying of cancer and had a scene of the Kraybill Lancaster, Pennsylvania, farmstead behind his bed. I had attended many a meeting with both of these elders when they were energetic and strong, but now death and human mortality were calling. Still Winnipeg with its fiery and talented prairie writers (and enthusiastic audiences) reminded me that while we live on this earth, life is to be fully experienced, even its art. If the literature is good, it may even last like Shakespeare’s King Lear or the questions Di Brandt asked her mother. 

Most of this chapter comes from memory and from my date book, personal files and journal from the period, especially the year 1990; I have a journal of the Spain trip and also of Mennonite World Conference. The 1989 “Henry V” movie is in “A Film ‘Henry’ to Rival Olivier’s,” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (February 6, 1990, 23).  The Pavarotti concert is described in “Pavarotti Scores with ‘Consolation’ concert at Civic Arena,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (September 17, 1990, 11).  The article on the 19^th century Mennonites was published as “The Growth and Decline of the Mennonites near Scottdale, Pennsylvania: 1790-1890” in Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage (October 1990, 2-15). The story on the placement of the stone appears in John E. Sharp’s “In Retrospect: The Setting of a Stone,” Allegheny Conference News (September 1992, 7).