1992 Alte Menist and Gulf War

1992  Alte Menist and Gulf War. Mowing Alte Menist cemetery, Iraq War and pacifism, Hannah and Elizabeth softball, three volunteer coaches, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ben’s Wayne sequel, a trip to Newton, Kansas; Berdella Miller, Meeting the Venezuelans again, a folk opera;  Andrew A. Miller (January 8, 1918 – December 5, 1992),  fiftieth wedding anniversary;  Andrew’s music career, Walnut Hills, Homestyle cassettes, a non-profit ministry, Andrew’s last days and funeral.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This stanza was one of my father Andrew’s favorite quotes from his American literature education at the Wise School near Charm, Ohio. So let’s talk about burial grounds, death and  life. In 1990, the two Mennonite congregations of Scottdale joined together to take ownership of the old Pennsville Mennonite (German name Alte Menist) Cemetery near Everson. By 1992, we placed a marker at the front and had a picnic and ceremony. About that same time a regular summer activity for our family was mowing the Alte Menist grass. I volunteered us to do this project because my schedule was irregular given my travels and an office in Indiana. This seemed a volunteer project we could do as a family, and Jakob, Hannah, Elizabeth and Gloria (until the poison ivy became too invasive) helped throughout the nineties until the kids left for college.

By 1993, I got a personalized Father’s Day card from Elizabeth and Hannah: “Levi, Even though you make us feed the comets [backyard poultry hens] and mow the cemetery, we love you.“ This burial ground was isolated and historic with the stones taking one to early 19^th century German script “gestorben” and Victorian English “consort” and “departed this earth.” Meanwhile, an earthly appeal for me was the annual appearance of the Yellow-billed Cuckoo flying along the pasture, Eastern Bluebirds sitting on the old stones, and a Baltimore Oriole pair weaving a hanging nest high up in the wild cherry trees.  I rarely saw these birds in the Scottdale borough.

 

During these times of mowing the Alte Menist cemetery, I sometimes thought of the Iraq War which had been fought in 1990-91. For one thing, unlike most of the cemeteries in our area, the two-century year old Alte Menist had only few veterans’ flags; most of the graves had simple and plain markers without flags and national symbols, hence the non-resistant Mennonite tradition it represented. The Iraq War actually marked another stage in my thinking regarding a Christian pacifist approach to war. I had grown up on two-kingdom non-resistance to war which was the belief of the Holmes County Amish and Mennonites and their ancestors. By the mid-sixties and seventies I had moved to joining this pacifism with a Politics of Jesus anti-war position, and had made common cause with the anti-war movement against the Vietnam War. By the eighties and the Central American Wars this position however had morphed into a pro-liberationist justice movement which gave tacit support to violent often Marxist guerilla groups or socialist oriented political parties (1987). By the nineties, the sympathy went to the various Middle Eastern Muslim belligerents.  

I, however, considered the Western democratic tradition led by the USA as basically a force for good in the world. It was not clear to me that pacifists had any unique insight on this war except to confess that they could not fight. I had returned to chastened two-kingdom pacifism similar to my Holmes County ancestors. Meanwhile, these political lefties turned on me and blamed me for the deaths in the Gulf war, even my friend Donald Kraybill who should have known better--given his Amish and Mennonite studies. I suppose I deserved some blame (my non-resistant ancestors can also be blamed for not stopping all the earlier wars since 1527!), but I felt the left-wing activists could as well have blamed themselves for not warning the Iraqis that there were consequences to invading a neighboring country. Some of my friends had signed up as citizen diplomats traveling to Iraq, assuring the Iraqis how friendly the Americans were and telling the Americans how liberal the Iraqis were. My Mennonite friends reported seeing some nudes in an art museum. But enough of these pacifist debates; they are probably mainly tedious to the outsider and probably should be to us insiders too.

Aside from mowing the cemetery, the other spring and summer activity of Hannah and Elizabeth during these years was softball; they played on the Southmoreland High School team. But I remember them best for the Barry’s Market team of the Scottdale Girls Softball League which was a program beginning with elementary school-age girls up through high school years. Hannah and her friend Beth Lehman were on the same team and they won their share of league and tournament championships; when Elizabeth came along she was also a good player, especially as a pitcher and fielder. The older girls drafted her onto their team, even though she belonged with a younger set. The coaches of those Barry’s Market teams were Pat Prewett, Dee Hardik, and Clyntell Black, three amazingly gentle souls who gave time, wins and goodwill to many girls for 36 years until they retired in 2010.

Prewett, a large stately woman, coached first base and would say to each batter: "Want to see you down here!" Many an evening Gloria and I joined our neighbors in the stands and cheered for our teams. About this time, I read Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America and developed a new appreciation for the role of voluntary associations in our society, in other words, civil society. The free churches, which de Tocqueville in the 1830s called the sects, were obviously such groups, but when I would think of volunteerism, three softball coaches would appear in my brain. I could spend the rest of this chapter naming the many other coaches and volunteers who made our community work (Michael Lashinsky daily manicuring the Loucks Park infield).

Ben’s Wayne sold well and continued to give me a number of public occasions for several years after publication.  In March of 1992, I was the featured speaker at a Bluffton College English and Speech Festival, especially for visiting high school students. The poet Jeff Gundy had organized the event, and several students did a dramatic interpretation of a chapter. By the Fall Good Books came out in a paperback edition and on November 7, 1992, I was again signing at Wooster’s Buckeye Book Fair. In March of the following year 1993 I appeared at the Bellaire (Ohio) Public Library and public school students; the town was right across the Ohio River from Wheeling. The Goods and the public response also got me working on a second novel of a young family in western Pennsylvania during the seventies. I called it “Duane’s Dream” and wrote several chapters, plotted out some of the story and main characters, but then I put it away. I’m not sure if I was simply too busy with other things, tired of the Ben’s Wayne controversy, or simply thought, to put it crassly, been there, done that. Many things, I did only once in my life.       

That fall I took a long road trip (November 12 - 15) to Newton, Kansas, where the Western District Conference Mennonite Historical Committee had invited me to give some talks on the Amish (as in Swiss) and the Mennonites and 1492. One of the meetings was an annual banquet of the Swiss Mennonite Historical Society where the members claimed to have Amish roots. I thought this was simply a post-“Witness” movie phenomenon where everyone wanted to claim the Amish. But these folks largely from Moundridge, Kansas, had a Swiss Volhynian background before Ukraine and then Kansas. They were quite interested in their Amish cousins, especially for the Swiss origins. This was all a new revelation to me because I had associated all these non-Pennsylvania or Kansas German Mennonites as having Dutch north German Polish background. We called them Russian Mennonites because they had lived in the Ukraine and part of the Russian Empire. Although I had been in Kansas quite often on publishing and historical business, this visit gave me an opportunity to travel to the small prairie towns of Goessel and Hillsboro where a sod house had been re-constructed, as it may have been in 1874 when the first Russian Mennonite immigrants arrived to the mid-western Plains.

The weekend ended with a 1492 address at the Kaufman Museum near Bethel College. The entire visit with these plains or prairie Mennonites gave me a new appreciation of how they saw themselves at the center of the Mennonite world, what with them also tying together with the many Russian Mennonites of Canada, especially the General Conference and Mennonite Brethren. And they had three little colleges within a few miles of each other: Bethel, Hesston, and Tabor.  The Kansas Mennonites were friendly, faithful and authentic to their understanding of Anabaptism. After two decades of working with them on many publishing and historical projects, I wanted to appreciate their ecumenical and I suppose liberal vision of all the Mennonites joining together. However, the Holdermans, Old Orders and conservatives out west were having none of this unity, and I probably gave more credibility to a more sectarian view east of the Mississippi which had emerged from a Pennsylvania German America. Both visions had some legitimacy, of course, and history would ultimately sort them out. As I post this in 2015, the sorting out is still going on.  

Our son Jakob had lived with Gloria’s mother Berdella during his last year of high school (90-91), but now by the next summer and fall, Berdella was distributing her husband Roy’s legacy of antiques and collections with earnest. Berdella was generous in giving things to the children, and then with the things she had left, she had the Dave Kaufman Auction folks sell at a Saturday sale. Daughter Carla and Maurice Stutzman were in the process of buying the Berdella and Roy R. home property at Bunker Hill, building an addition to the remodeled house where Berdella could live in a kind of dawdy-haus arrangement. Bonnie was nearby and came over to Berdella for dinner every afternoon. Berdella came down to Scottdale quite regularly too during these years, always generous to the grandchildren, and gamey for concerts or whatever was going on. One evening we went to hear the Spanish pianist Maria de la Rocha in Pittsburgh, and on Thanksgiving weekend, November 28, she joined us for an evening of the folk singer Joan Baez. Because we were not sure where we were going to live, we did not collect many of Roy’s antiques and things during those years, except for some old books and the clocks which Roy had already given us before he died.

Venezuelan people entered our lives that Fall when Marcella Sarmiento got married to Duane Mellinger of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; this event brought us in contact with her parents Luis and Patricia, as well as our old friends Ricardo Ochoa and Alexis Rivera. Ricardo stayed with us for a few weeks and was contemplating attending the University of Notre Dame. I remember I took him over to the campus and the only person I knew was John Howard Yoder. We dropped in on him at his office, and Yoder tried to be helpful even though he was in theology and Ricardo wanted economics. That Fall I was finishing up with Laurelville a folk opera project begun several years earlier and commissioned to be a part of the 1994 fiftieth anniversary celebration. We wanted to commission an original folk opera, somewhat in the spirit of the earlier Martyr’s Mirror Oratorio which was done by John Ruth and Alice Parker. Arnold Cressman helped along with Freeman Lehman of Kidron, Ohio, and we’d get together with Jay Martin and Glen Lehman of Pennsylvania. Eventually we selected Stephanie Martin of Ontario to compose the music and Phil Johnson Ruth to write the libretto, a fictional account of a Walton Hackman type character. On October 16 1993, it was performed at Laurelville’s annual meeting, but I had a historical meeting that same weekend in Metamora, Illinois, so I never saw it performed live. I tried to get it staged at one of the denominational assemblies during the nineties, but never succeeded. I think it only had one performance.    

During the summer of 1991, we had two extended Miller family events; we all got together at Sister Miriam and Veryl Kratzers for Jakob and his cousin Kent’s graduation from Central Christian High School on May 26. The next month we eight children and families (actually Roy and Ruby were unable to attend) did a fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration for our parents on June 29-30 at the Cow Palace near Shreve. It would be one of our last times together as a family although Andrew was not around much. It reminded me of his father Martin Miller skipping his son’s wedding revisited (chapter 1947) as he said he needed to sleep at Lookout Camp where the air was pure. During these years of Andrew slept up at Lookout during the summer, sometimes outside. Andrew said outdoor sleeping was a part of his Native American heritage from his grandmother Mary Schrock (chapter 1947). About this same time, my mother Mattie put in a private telephone line for herself.

     

As a youth, my father was Mart Andy (son of Martin) and he ended his life as Music Andy. In between he had been Andrew A. Miller (sometimes written A. A. Miller), and that is how I remember him best and have called him throughout this memoir. Although Andrew sang all his life, during the eighties he became a musician. He sang for the old and the young, for the sick and the mad. He had always been a soloist and a loner, but now he gave full vent to these passions, even if my mother sang along him in a quixotic musical career. As a conservative Mennonite minister back in the fifties, he had cried when I accidentally dropped a cement block on his mandolin one afternoon at Maple Grove Mission. It was one of the few times I remember my father crying. In those years, he had only one mandolin; now he could have a whole store full.

His main venue for singing was a weekly appearance at the Walnut Hills Retirement Community where Levi and Lillis Troyer were owners and our brother David was administrator. Often he and Mattie took the grandchildren along when they were in the area. But by May of 1989 my brother David decided to discontinue these performances, and Andrew responded by “happily resigning” at both the Nursing Home and Retirement Center. In a letter to his son, Andrew noted that he and Mattie would miss their many Walnut Hills supporters during the past ten years, but “we have thousands more, over a wide area, who give witness to our Spirit that we will all meet again in that Celestial City of Love and Light!” 

The biggest form of making his music available was with cassettes which he called Homestyle County Gospel. First was a 1987 cassette album 1-A, homestyle good news, called Sunny Side Up, vocal duet with guitar and accordion and featuring “Keep on the Sunny Side,” his theme song. A 1988 cassette album 2-A followed, called homestyle memories featured “Holmes County, Ohio,” an original song. The 1989 cassette album 4-H had homestyle songs or ballads featuring “Thank God for Mom and Dad,” a tribute to his parents, and a bird song called “Hello Robin.” Another memorable song “The Quakersville Party” had lyrics of a duck quacking and a fox squirrel making clucking and chucking sounds which went right back to his naturalist teacher Clarence Zuercher. Finally, the 1990 cassette album 5-H, had more songs and ballads and a photo of homestyle grandchildren with pets. Our daughters and our nieces used to remind us of their unusual pedigree as “Indian maidens” and “homestyle grandchildren.”   

On September 8, 1991, Andrew sent a “Homestyle Country Gospel Update” to “share-a-song” friends and sponsors noting that he had been selling the cassettes by mail order and through stores with a slight mark-up of 33 percent. But, he said, this was defeating the purpose of a non-profit charity because hundreds of cassettes had gone out--with notes of appreciation coming back and no negative feedback. Missionaries and church workers had taken free tapes as far as “Mexico, India, Africa, Norway, Australia, and Argentina.” Andrew was now ready to simply send them out for contributions (although suggesting $5 per cassette and perhaps $3, for handling and postage). In addition he appealed for free-will offerings and contributions because he was “experiencing an unanticipated demand for Homestyle Gospel cassettes from the poor, the blind, the handicapped, and the very old and from children.” He was also hearing from “radiant saints in wheel chairs and in beds of affliction.” When Andrew’s original compositions dealt with Lookout animals and birds, they seemed authentic and sometimes humorous. His universal themes of love and home seemed sentimental, but it was probably this very aesthetic which made them so meaningful to Andrew and his listeners.

This period also saw a re-establishment of Andrew’s relations with his 1940 and 50s Amish and Mennonite past. The local Amish church district lifted the ban on him, and he spent a considerable amount of time visiting with childhood friends and relatives. He often drove Amish people to various parts of the United States and Canada. To his grandchildren, he was generous with his feelings and refreshments (especially at Dairy Queens). Mattie was now retired from bus driving and they spent many hours together. But more than anything, when we visited, he loved discussions and meaning. He loved a discussion on God’s universalism of human redemption (which ne now favored, no doubt influenced by wanting to meet his Indian doctor in heaven) and the particularity of Christian salvation. He lamented the decline of the Mennonite periodical Gospel Herald from the time of Daniel Kauffman in his youth (whom he also favored) to what he saw as the church’s public preoccupation with sexual sins, now called misconduct. Whether we agreed or disagreed was not that important, he wanted to matter, to have meaning, and specifically Christian meaning.

By the end of the eighties, his heart gave out, and he became sick and weakened. During his sickness, he regaled us with his memories of his parents and ancestors and his sublime hope of meeting his Creator and his childhood friends in Paradise. He sought forgiveness from any he may have ever hurt whether his family members or neighbors. My brother Roy called me one day and said that you can know that Dad is in better mental health when you come into his room and he’s reading Ben’s Wayne. But his physical, mental and emotional health continued to go downhill. He would see visions of angels at one moment and a little later he was sure that the doctors were trying to poison him. He called me one night from his hospital bed in Canton, Ohio, and wanted all the children to gather around to give us a blessing. He said he could not sleep. I told him he had blessed us many times, but I felt no need for a ceremony. His last weeks on earth were not easy, but that is a story for those who were close at hand, my mother, Aunt Clara, and brothers and sisters nearby, to tell. Death is always cruel and fearsome and perhaps to Andrew it was especially so.

  

Andrew died on December 6, 1992. During an afternoon and evening of visitation about one thousand people, as near as I could tell all from the Wayne Holmes County area, came to the Millersburg Mennonite meetinghouse to say good bye and visit with our large extended family. At the funeral on December 9, at the Martins Creek Meetinghouse, his son James spoke on “In memory of our father” which was seven pages of Scripture quotations, “God’s revealed truth concerning the largest destiny of man: life, and signally for us today—death.” The grandchildren sang “Comfort Ye, My People,” and “All the Way My Savior Leads me,” the latter my father’s favorite song. Joe Hershberger-Kirk sang Andrew’s song “God Is Love.”

The Millersburg pastors Bob and Enid Schloneger led the service and members of Andrew’s small group served as ushers: Doran Hershberger, Sturges Miller, Paul Roth, Lee Steiner, Paul Thomas and Elmer Yoder. Sister Ruth organized a page of grandchildren remembrances, and the grandsons carried his coffin.  Andrew was buried in the Martins Creek Mennonite Cemetery a few miles from the place where he was born.  At the end of the day, we went home with Mattie, and my brother Roy (who had led singing that day) drove into the Holmesville drive-way, and I went out to meet him. I can still see him opening the car door and greeting me with “Boy, am I glad that’s over.” But the specter of sickness and death continued in our family; that summer brother James was diagnosed as having a cancerous growth in his colon.

Most of this comes from memory, personal files, my 1992 date book, and journals of the period. The Henry Wadsworth Longfellow stanza which my father Andrew Miller often quoted is from “The Psalm of Life.” The section on pacifism and Iraq comes from “Why I Sat Out the Gulf War,” Gospel Herald (May 5, 1992, 1-3). Donald Kraybill (and Leo Driedger) blaming non-resistant pacifists and specifically me for the Iraq War deaths come from Mennonite Peacemaking: from Quietism to Activism (1994, 271). Regarding girls’ softball coaches, on January 15, 2013, Elizabeth and Hannah e-mailed me and Dee Hardik gave telephone information. Much of the last year of Andrew comes from “Andrew A. Miller 1918-1992” I wrote the week before Andrew’s death and sent to my brothers and sisters on the first anniversary of his death. Andrew’s departure from Walnut Hills was recorded in a letter from my brother David on May 24, 1989. Roy’s call concerning Andrew reading Ben’s Wayne was in a letter to my publishers, Merle Good, April 15, 1991. A copy of my brother James’ “In memory of our father” is in my Andrew A. Miller funeral December 9, 1992, file.