Friday, April 17, 2015

1991 Southmoreland and White Water Rafting

1991 Southmoreland and White Water Rafting. School board, a culture of conflict, a difficult vote, Bill Porter, John F. Kenney; biennial Mennonite Assemblies, Eugene, Oregon, San Francisco vacation, Berkley People’s Park, white water rafting, Miller family exceptionalism, Kenneth Reed, Roy L. Schlabach (1915-1991).

My first term on the Board of Directors of the Southmoreland School District was from 1989 to 1993. When I did my study of the nineteenth-century Mennonites, I discovered that the first trustees of a common school in East Huntington Township in the 1830s were two Overholts and a Stauffer. I considered myself a spiritual descendent of these people, and when I joined the board in 1989, I thought I was in a long line of honorable people. After our first meeting, the Scottdale weekly The Independent Observer covered our meeting on the front page. On the inside was an editorial which began by the editor (Charles Brittain) saying that his parents always told him that if you can’t say anything nice about people, don’t say anything. Then there was a big blank space on the page. Welcome to the world of Southmoreland school politics--not all of which was honorable.

That first meeting was what my parents would have called an eye-opener; I called it a culture of conflict. I was no stranger to debate and opposing views, but here I thought I was visiting Northern Ireland on the first and second Thursday of each month. If you said yes, I’ll say no. If you nominate her; I’ll nominate him. And we’ll remember each grievance from five months to five years ago. You hired or sacked the football coach; you can fill in the blanks here of a Popp, Thompson or Schrecengost, not to mention the coaches you passed over, and now we’ll get even. Citizens would regularly show up for our meetings for the theater of it; others were appalled and tried to ignore what was going on.   

I sometimes had to squeeze myself that we were in the same district during the day and evenings. We had volatile board meetings in the evenings, and then in the mornings I would take daughter Elizabeth to school where there were civil teachers and bright faced little kids learning science, reading stories, solving math problems, and recycling. They were also planning an overnighter to Laurelville Mennonite Church Center. The discontinuity of conflict going on at meetings and our actual school life of study, music and play was disorienting but became the new normal. On the one side were the sons of Italy headed by Francis Zaffina and Anthony (Tony) Lizza and on the other were the township Germans headed by Alvin Stoker and Charles (Chuck) Moore. Whatever labels I’m giving here, ethnicity was a minor factor; it had more to do with power in making decisions. The composition of the sides would change and with time independent types were elected such as Thomas Seaman, Cheryl Shipley, and Michael Street  tended to diffuse the sides for a period of time. Joseph Eckman was an interesting case study for me because we both joined the board in 1989. For many years the popular mayor of Everson, Eckman was the ultimate local pol and whether we agreed or disagreed we remained friends over the years.

Personnel approvals were big issues. Some on the board members saw themselves as a kind of one-person placement agency looking for allies, what I used to call the wisdom of five votes, to see that relatives and friends get jobs. One board member openly said one of his main goals was on to see that each of his children (including an in-law) get jobs at the district. He was quite successful, and actually they turned out to be good hires. The difference between an operating and a policy board was often blurred and nepotism was assumed. I tried to make independent decisions, not choosing one of the sides when I ran for office, hence not allowing my name to be listed with others with whom I may have been natural allies. But it was never easy; parents had strong feelings about their children, neighbors and relatives; it was quite understandable.

On personnel, I generally followed the recommendations of the administrative staff who had interviewed the candidates. This process brought a level of objectivity which was needed if hiring is to be based on merit rather than family and other loyalties. But hiring is never an exact science and sometimes the choices were especially difficult. A young woman who grew up in our neighborhood was a candidate for a teaching position, but was not among the top candidates recommended by the administrators; I no longer recall the reasons. Our superintendent Kenney put considerable emphasis on the college g.p.a. (grade point average).

Some of the board members were lobbying for her and I wanted to vote for her too because I knew she was of good character from an outstanding Christian family. At the same time I wanted to honor the process, the educational and objective criteria, at least according to our staff evaluations. I ended up voting for the recommended candidate which turned out to be a close decision when we tested our views in an executive session. Irrespective of what the public vote was (probably 9-0), word soon was out to the family on the discussion in the executive session and our good neighbors were in deep pain—the candidate, her parents and extended family. I was too.

I would see the family members, and one time I mentioned to the Father that I was sorry and tried to explain my vote. My neighbor had always reminded me of a person the British Victorians used to call a Gentleman and a Christian. Several months passed, and one evening as we met on the street, he came up over to me, took my hand and said something to the effect: It’s over, Levi. It’s over. He never brought it up again, and we resumed our neighborly relationships. I should probably not bring it up either but I do only as a regret. Later his daughter was hired and has been a good teacher for the district. I still believe I did the right thing in supporting the recommended candidates and honoring the nature of a meritocracy rather than family fiefdoms. Still, of the hundreds of board votes, if I had one to take back over the past several decades that is probably the one I would recall. The experience gave me an appreciation for the difficulty of these decisions on a personal basis, especially when there were a number of qualified local candidates, but only one can be chosen. Because I had fewer family and social ties in the community, I may not have felt these concerns as did some board members.

Personnel was tied to another major issue--budget because education is a labor intensive project, and three fourth of our budgets were made up of staff salaries. Over half of our budget, at that time about sixteen million, came from state aid which our district needed. But if we increased staff or gave raises, we also needed to raise local taxes. I learned that a favorite board action was to vote for increases to staff and spending during the year but not to vote for the budget or tax increases to balance the budget. I never forgot how that on the first year, I voted for the budget and also a modest tax increase, and one of the board members who had voted against both came over and shook my hand.

It was not clear to me if he was thanking me for making a difficult decision (balancing the budget) or if he was congratulating me my political naiveté. Still, I never paid much attention to this conventional political wisdom; Michael Street who was on the board during those years voted for about every staff recommendation and tax increase and was quite easily re-elected during the terms he served on the board.  During my life time, the state mandated much more education and support for the handicapped but often underfunded these mandates. Generally, I thought Southmoreland voters were pretty sharp and wise in sniffing out the real issues regarding school board affairs in spite of the political theater.

But on budget we had an advantage over many school districts because our business manager was Bill Porter. A Scottdale native, Porter had strong business acumen running our finance office and the district’s transportation, achieving a sterling record with local and state audits. Porter thought and planned strategically but was a tiger in protecting a several million fund balance. Porter was the opposite foil to our superintendent John F. Kenney, although both were young, bright and ambitious. Superintendent Kenney was on an upward career track and tried to bring us a measure of professionalism and worldly élan. He used to talk of Southmoreland as a world class school district and instituted Japanese language instruction (a Sony plant was nearby). All well and admirable, but to the locals he also too obviously presented himself as a world class superintendent, leaving the office early while accumulating vacation days. We knew he would eventually move on to a larger and wealthier district which he did by the late-nineties; many even welcomed his leaving. Still, we were fortunate to have him for a decade.  

Porter was with us for the long haul, arriving at the office at seven in the morning returning home late in the evening, scrupulously honest and direct of speech; his financial reports at board meetings often punctuated by cheerful profanities. When he saw corruption or shady practices he blew the whistle, and over the years also attracted a band of detractors. But by the mid-nineties he had hit his professional stride and by his retirement in 2012, Porter had seen the district through major renovations of the a new high school, football stadium, elementary and middle school and a maintenance building, plus a healthy six-million dollar fund balance. He somehow kept Southmoreland in the third lowest tier of local taxes in Westmoreland County, giving space while our superintendents and teachers kept the students among the third highest tier in the county’s academic achievement, not a bad record for a district which straddled the line into Fayette County. As of this posting in 2015, our Southmoreland schools were honored with many academic and “over-achieving” regional, state, and national awards, but that is a later story.

During those years I often chaired the curriculum committee and watched the steady increase in state mandated testing. Whatever value of this testing had as a point of reference; I was always ambivalent about it.  It seemed to me that at a minimum American education taught the basic reading, writing and mathematical skills and then allowed, even stimulated, students to follow their passions in whatever subject area and skills, vocations or professions that would lead. The best American schools have been generous in allowing non-traditional students to graduate whether handicapped, genius, morons, bored, or simply too large for the seat. If you had a work ethic and moral character, as far as I was concerned, too many tests be damned.

Southmoreland was fortunate in having teachers who taught in this way, and many of our students did well in life, coming from strong families with moral standards, humane values and Christian community. So whatever the faults of our school board members, and I was not without faults myself, I was always quite honored to be among my fellow school board directors. We provided personnel, policy and finances so a new generation, rich or poor, could pursue their educational and life dreams. And when our daughter Hannah was a senior (1992), she sat on the board with me as student representative; later Elizabeth would do the same (1996).

During alternate summers I often attended the biennial Mennonite conventions which were generally held in various university campuses of North America. Because I worked at Mennonite institutions, these summer events seemed to be the regular rhythms of getting a mood for the church, even for the ones which I did not attend. I missed a major youth convention at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, in the 60s and an adult meeting in Turner, Oregon (1969), and yet my friends Arnold Cressman and Art Smoker so often referred to these meetings and the radical youth that I felt I had attended. Apparently a new youth culture (our Mennonite version of the national counter culture) ran the Junaluska convention and some of these same youths confronted the traditional bishops at the Turner, Oregon, meeting.

By the time I attended my first youth convention in 19
73 on the Calvin College campus, Grand Rapids, Michigan, it seemed like a fairly tame affair. A guitar strumming band led songs such as Jerry Derstine’s yearning new spiritual “Jesus, Rock of Ages,” (1973). A young Franconia musical (and philosophical) pastor Richard A. Kauffman also had them singing acapella hymns and The Mennonite Hymnal’s 606, “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow,” at the early stages of becoming a denominational anthem. I was writing for a lot for the Mennonite journals during those years, and would occasionally report on these meetings or lead workshops. But the main thing was simply being there, meeting people, and worshipping God at places called Waterloo, Ontario (1979), Bowling Green, Ohio (1981), Ames, Iowa (1985), West Lafayette, Indiana (1987), and Normal, Illinois (1989). I missed the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, meeting in 1983 because we were in Venezuela, but my colleagues talked about it like the Second Coming (which I had missed). The General Conference Mennonites met with our group often called the old Mennonites or Mennonite Church, hence part of merging which culminated two decades later.

By the summer of 1991 this assembly, as the meeting was called, met at in Eugene, Oregon, and I tied my work with the Historical Committee and the Mennonite Church Historical Association onto the assembly with a dinner meeting at which the speaker was Sam Steiner on “confessions of a lapsed radical.” Steiner had been a draft resister who ended up in Canada but now was ensconced in the Mennonite institutions of Canada and the US; he was a member of the Historical Committee to which I was responsible. These dinner meetings were quite well attended with over one hundred people coming and helped nurture historical interest among the membership. Two years later we did the same when the assembly was in Philadelphia in 1993; we had the historian Albert N. Keim speaking on the evolution of the Anabaptist Vision. Keim was writing a biography of Harold S. Bender and also the Historical Committee chair.

But I think the reflection on the sixties was especially on my mind, and we then tied our trip to family vacation and headed for San Francisco. As a family we headed down the legendary US highway 101 which ran along the Pacific Ocean from Washington to Southern California for a week of vacation; I remembered this highway as a favorite of the flower-painted vans two decades earlier.  We made it a leisurely trip stopping for a day (August 5) to go white water rafting on the Rogue River near Grants Pass, Oregon. Compared to rafting on the Youghiogheny River near Ohiopyle, this stretch seemed rather peaceful, and we passed a beautiful day. We often saw an Osprey floating in the sky overhead and whistling at us.

Our sunny family white water rafting must have gone to my head because the next August (the 12th, a Wednesday, I remember it well), I decided that we would do an end of the summer rafting trip down the Youghiogheny with only Levi Miller as the guide. Within days, Jakob was leaving for Eastern Mennonite University; Hannah and Elizabeth were starting their twelfth and eighth grades at Southmoreland, and Gloria was back to Connellsville High School Spanish classes. But if the Rogue was sunny, slow and low, the Yough was cloudy, fast and high; it was fierce. It had rained most of the night before, but I knew we could handle it.

When we got to Ohiopyle, the park ranger said we could not get on the river for several hours because it was too high and fierce, so we headed off to the old brick restaurant store at the corner to eat and read the paper; Hannah stayed in the car and tried to sleep; she said she had bad vibrations of our adventure. Finally, sometime at mid-morning the park ranger reluctantly said we might go in but warned us to be very careful; there had been a drowning several days earlier. I told him I had guided our family on the Rogue River last year and had gone with several earlier guided tours on the Yough. We put in our raft right below Ohiopyle and met about a dozen rapids with large boulders and falls in the seven-mile Lower Yough to the Brunner Run take out.

Most of these rapids are in the class III and IV range, with names like Cucumber, Dimple, and Double Hydraulic.The water was high and fast and at the first loop, both Gloria and I were thrown out of the raft. We went under, and when I got up, Gloria was still under water and the children screaming for their mother. Gloria soon was back up, and we all got into the raft. At the next rapid and large rocks, again Gloria and I went overboard, and now it was more than adventure; it was raw fear. Jakob fell out too and screamed to me that we were dying and he was going no further; he headed for the shore. It was raining and dangerous, but I did not feel that we could leave the raft; furthermore we did not know where to go cross-country. We finally talked Jakob into getting back into the raft and thought we had passed the biggest and fiercest rapids.

After a few hour’s of fright and falls, we arrived at the Bruner Run take out where a bus took us back to Ohiopyle. We had not met anyone else on the river—and mid-summer is usually very busy rafting; no one else was that foolish. I had lost my glasses and we had black and blue marks on our hips and limbs from hitting large rocks. We were shivering and shaking from the chill but more from the nervous tension.  The next day August 13 entry in my journal said: “Yesterday was not one of my best days; I may have come close to killing members of the family. At least, that was the fear. Jacob seemed especially distraught, and I had to fear for our well-being. This is my last attempt at this kind of family outing.” I concluded that it was too dangerous, and that water rafting clearly is a sport best done with a professional guide. It was the last white water rafting trip we ever took.

But I ask myself why did I put our family at risk in this extreme adventure, believing we could do what even the seasoned summer river rats did not venture. Surely, I did not want Gloria and our children to perish. In retrospect, I believe one factor may have been some irrational belief in Miller exceptionalism, that what other mortal families could not do, we could. It began with a father and mother who improvised at Maple Grove Mission for ten years and then seemed to create projects of music, camps, mini-bikes and bus driving well beyond the age of their peers. Even in their failures, I thought they were special. It had to do with brothers who did not finish high school but graduated with some distinction from law school and medical college. It had to do with children who entered a Spanish Venezuelan school with only English but within a year  were at the head of their classes, speaking Spanish. It had to do with Gloria who seemed to have an unerring sense of decency and strength while focusing on meaningful work and leisure.

All healthy families probably embody an element of this belief that they are special, but it was only a decade later and amid great tragedy that I learned of our family’s common humanity. But for now, this adventure mainly re-inforced our ability to survive, even overcome. That evening with black and blue limbs and broken glasses, we went out to celebrate at the Mexican Cozumel Resturant in Greensburg, and a month later for my birthday, Gloria gave me a large Youghiogheny River guide poster which still hangs on our office wall as I write this. She and the children also gave me a book entitled Youghiogheny (pronounced Yock-a-GEN-ee) Appalachian River by Tim Palmer; inside is written “Birthday gift September 15, 1992, 48th birthday on a commemorative ride down the Youghiogheny when we almost lost our rafts and possibly our lives.”       

But back to our trip to California. We passed a herd of elk and also passed along the giant Redwood trees, drove through one of them, in fact, and then on to northern San Francisco where we were welcomed, so it seemed, by a quilt fair at the Marin Center in San Rafael in the northern Bay Area. Here we saw a huge exhibit of Pennsylvania Amish and Mennonite quilts, and I would see my friend Merle Good and Rachel Thomas Pellman describe the Lancaster County quilt on a video. We had just seen Merle and Phyllis at Oregon and Rachel and her husband Ken and their boys happened to be at the Crater Lake the same time we visited there.   

But San Francisco was the destination where we spent a week at the Metro Hotel on 319 Divisadero Street. One night we ate at a restaurant on Pier 39 where we watched a herd of California Sea Lions who had made a home there. They had begun visiting since a year ago and had become a major tourist attraction. With comical looking faces, the seals flapped like ducks, barked like dogs and swam gracefully as they dove in the water.  On the way back to the hotel we stopped at the City Lights Bookstore which was founded by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beats. I bought Jakob a copy of Walt Whitman’s poems and bought a copy of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl which the poet had read here in 1956. I’ve visited San Francisco several times since then and the City Lights bookstore is generally a part of my visit. In 1998, I bought a copy of Karl Marx and Frederick Engel’s  The Communist Manifesto, 150 years after the first English publication in 1848.

But the highlight of San Francisco was visiting Berkley, the site of the student protests which made headlines in the sixties; specifically we visited the People’s Park off Telegraph Avenue where the University of California was building volleyball courts—amid protests. The park was filled with the homeless, the drug addicts, and the insane. Among this poor population were communists, students, and reformers who were trying to organize a parade. I wrote in my journal that it is tragic that the free speech movement, flowers-in-your-hair romanticism would have now ended with a small-time crime and homeless environment. Our daughters Hannah and Elizabeth were quite afraid. The panhandlers along Telegraph Avenue shouted obscenities and growled and barked like wild animals; one looked and sounded just like a wolf. It struck me that most of these people may have needed a hospital, a job or a family, more than a park. In any case, I decided that if I would be making a contribution to the cause, it would be to the university to claim its legitimacy as primarily an education center and not a social service agency.

I tried to understand the reasons for the homeless and the sick in Berkley, having come to the conclusion that society as government structures and agencies were often cruel and will not and could not take the place of families, churches and personal care. In any case Hannah was in tears of fright from the experience, and I finally came to view it all as a zoo, possibly a dangerous one, into which I should never even have led our family. Ironically, here the roles were reversed and our two-parent with children family must have appeared as mid-western exotics on display in the People’s Park zoo. I could not do anything constructive. I sometimes give panhandlers money, but here I felt it would only re-enforce their bad habits of howling like wolves at our frightened children.

I suppose the sixties have been a life-long fascination, some would claim a fetish, with the excesses of this period of my youth which has led to this choice of vacation. On Sunday morning we experienced another variation of this retrospective when we joined our old Scottdale friend Kenneth Reed worshipping at a Presbyterian church where he and his family were attending and then lunch at this suburban home in San Jose. Ken, Gloria and I had also traveled a long distance from the bohemian days when we had run around together in Scottdale in the early seventies. I remember one time, we took Ken along to visit my Amish uncle Roy L. Schlabach, and Roy asked Ken whether he wore a beard by Christian conviction or as a hippie fashion statement. Uncle Roy was my mother’s favorite relative; he died October 29, 1991.


Most of this comes from my memory, personal files and journals of the years around 1991. Elements of the section on the Southmoreland school board come from a written presentation I gave to Mennonite Publishing House employees on February 6, 1992, in Southmoreland school director file of 1992. Sam Steiner’s “Confessions of a Lapsed Radical,” appeared in the Mennonite Historical Bulletin (October, 1991, 6-10). California trip background comes largely from my journal entitled “Trip to Spain, June 5-14, 1990” and “Eugene Oregon to San Francisco, 1991.” People’s Park information appeared in “7 Arrested at People’s Park” in San Francisco Chronicle (August 12, 1991). 

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