1995 Mennonite Publishing Redux

1995  Publishing Redux. Mennonite Publishing House finances, Reuben Savanick, J. Robert Ramer, Nelson Waybill, Jack Scott, Awanda Pritts, Paul M. Schrock, Faith & Life Press, Congregational Publishing, John W. Sprunger, Faith & Life cooperation and conflicts, Gospel Herald ends, Neuenschwander Brothers, neo-conservatives, people and ideas, publishing issues, Good Books, Merle and Phyllis Good.

Soon after I returned to Mennonite Publishing House (MPH), it began to sink in with me that the institution may be, well, sinking financially. We were deeply in debt, over five million, and every year our treasurer Reuben Savanick would travel to Lancaster and the Farmers Bank folks for an extension to our borrowing and also to extend our line of credit. Every year until 2002, he came back with a positive report, but we were losing ground in our annual net revenue. At the time we remained hopeful. Next year, we would do better; we would have a new hymnal, an engaging curriculum, or a best-selling cookbook which would give us positive numbers. We were like the perennial farmer who always believed that the harvest would be better the following year; the drought would not last forever. We were a Christian ministry and vital to the Mennonite church. Still, a dark financial cloud was never far away; our region’s steel mills had been around for over one hundred years, but now they were empty and abandoned hulks.  

After another year of minus net revenue even small gains on paper, we had to ask, might we at some point run out of money? I think it was especially apparent one time when Reuben said that the last financial move a cash-strapped organization does is to not make payroll. One must pay the employees. The fact that Rueben said that let us know that he had given it some thought, and it reminded me, that that specter was around the edges. Actually, the over-indebtedness had been around the edges since the late seventies, when my old boss Paul M. Lederach used to call the alarm, but we considered him somewhat of a Cassandra anyway, so when Mennonite Publishing House was able to go for another two decades (in spite of building an underfunded warehouse), high indebtedness seemed the new normal. The financial issues regarding MPH are many faceted, of long standing since mid-century, and I am not the person to describe the financial story of Mennonite Publishing House; I won’t even mention numbers. I can best tell of the people and events around that story, and a big person in that story was Rueben Savanick.

Reuben was one of the most amazing people I met at Scottdale for his high level of commitment and competence in business, theology, and community. Reuben was a chemistry and physics teacher at Christopher Dock High school in Montgomery County where his wife Martha (Marty) Detweiler had grown up. Next, he went to the Mennonite seminary at Elkhart, and studied theology, and by 1979, he returned to Scottdale where he had grown up. He worked for our civic and industrial growth organization where he teamed up with Alma Stoner who became his associate during his MPH days. Soon, he was also leading the Westmoreland area deaf church which had earlier been led by his parents. Reuben was the son of Paul and Ferne Hernley Savanick who we had known well when we first moved to Scottdale.  They would lead the community deaf services on Saturday evening, and always included the Paul’s song “Jesus Loves Me.” During the early seventies, Gloria and I had Bible classes for the hearing children.

Soon Reuben joined Mennonite Publishing House as treasurer and pursued an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh. Reuben was joining a company where his grandfather Henry Hernley had worked in 1908 as a linotype operator; his mother Ferne Hernley had worked here as a youth in 1938. His father Paul worked here in the mid-50s, as did many other Hernley relatives. Reuben was uniquely fitted for his treasurer and vice-president work at Scottdale, bringing many leadership qualities in one person: I had seldom seen a person who seemed to have such a broad conceptual understanding, quite tender personal feelings, and also a micro-whiz ability on technology and numbers. When we went to electronic communications and or changed programs, Reuben took the lead. Positive, steady, and talented, Rueben had a tremendous commitment to the employees of Scottdale, and whatever else one may think of the institution; many of us had Reuben to thank for keeping the doors open and for keeping 100 people with employment. I know the terms are clichés, but a servant leader he was and a mensch.

Reuben’s best friend and colleague was our publisher J. Robert Ramer, one of the greatest enigmas with whom I ever worked during my professional life. Ramer had led a business and technical school faculty at Edmonton, Alberta, and was the son of the bishop and evangelist Clarence (C.J.) Ramer. He had served as chair of the MPH board for a number of years before taking this position. Robert was married to a Phyllis Showalter, a nurse from the large Harrisonburg Virginia, Showalter clan. In other words, Bob was well prepared professionally to be our CEO and also well-connected within the Mennonite subculture.  If Bob was intelligent, organizational, and pragmatic, he was also corporate. Leaders before him addressed every issue, problem and success in religious euphemisms or agency speak: “our publishing journey is going through a valley.” Something like that, but Bob did not. He addressed the denominational publishing business as practical organizational and financial issues. He was also politically conservative, which was quite unusual in the publishing setting in the post-sixties era. Bob was about the only person I knew at Scottdale who subscribed to the National Review, the journal which had been founded by the Catholic intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. I enjoyed conversations with Bob, and he loved to tell stories of his Canadian experience and what he called these Excited States.

Bob was intellectual and pragmatic, he was also paranoid and had few close friends at Scottdale, partly because that was the nature of his personality and no doubt re-enforced by survival instincts. He kept many of the employees at arms’ length because if they had come closer, they may have been dangerous. Many long-term employees saw Bob as an interloper with insufficient appreciation for them, MPH traditions, and southwestern Pennsylvania culture. Bob’s paranoia was combined with strength of character such that he was able to keep a strong publication board in obedience to him and also took on the traditional MPH establishment, most of which was still hanging around MPH. Among the left-overs was Nelson Waybill, who many viewed as being next in line to lead the organization. Since Waybill was not selected, he became a de facto passive-aggressive opposition party within the organization.  

Probably in most organizations, Waybill would have left after losing the top job or would have been asked to resign. Reuben’s uncle Ralph Hernley had done this a generation earlier when Ben Cutrell was selected for the top job. But for whatever reason, Waybill decided to stay another decade. Waybill’s employment was further complicated because his wife Marjorie, a fellow-employee, was also the best children’s editor among the Mennonites. With a new Jubilee children’s curriculum in the works, Marjorie could pretty well dictate her conditions for employment—and her husband’s.   

Another top finance person for the Mennonite Publishing House leadership was Jack Scott, the head of the Provident Bookstores. Scott was a one-time theater major who could give a stand-up talk on any topic with various levels of drama, gesture and volume. On hearing his lengthy soliloquies and advertisements, one could not help but think of Shakespeare’s advice to the players, against over-acting, that “in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.” Scott was a member of the MPH old guard from the Cuttrell administration, but Ramer had incorporated him into his publishing leadership. Jack also had earned an MBA at the University of Pittsburgh, and was eloquent about spread sheets, year-end financial reports and the values and of the Provident Bookstores. So with two MBAs and one ex-business dean there was no lack of business understanding at MPH. But I also learned during those years that one can understand finance and business language and still reach various conclusions. For example Jack Scott seemed to have such an overwhelming sense of the importance of the church’s publications and the Mennonite heritage and witness that he seemed to project a divine inevitability for MPH. His dexterity with numbers and speech only added to the surreal atmosphere of MPH being too important to fail.   

Two other persons sat around the publisher’s table during these years, Paul M. Schrock and Awanda Pritts. Awanda Pritts was a protégé of Reuben Savanick and headed up the human resources or personnel department, bringing a strong practical and local wisdom to the group. Although a quick study, she only joined the leadership group after Nelson Waybill retired in the late nineties; hence she left less of an imprint on the organization than some of the others. Paul Schrock at Herald Press, the book division, came out of the editorial end of publishing, but Paul had a strong entrepreneurial sense in promoting new titles such as the More-with-Less Cookbook, as well as selling photos for many years and dealing in various real estate, photography and home building projects. He had been with MPH since the sixties, and by the mid-nineties, Paul was worn out from over-work in the earlier decades. He suffered from physical ailments, had an emotional break-down, and was waiting for retirement at age sixty-five.

I tried to make my own contribution with Congregational Publishing and wanting to make changes, sometimes in a hurry. I inherited a staff of about a dozen whom my predecessor Laurence Martin had nurtured in a good way, but we could not sustain that number of people. We had to reduce staff which was painful. Second, we had a sometimes cooperative relationship with Faith & Life Resources, the Kansas Mennonite publisher with which we were merging. A number of cooperative projects were working well with them and simply needed modest changes or nurturing. The Jubilee children’s curriculum produced by an Anabaptist consortium was among those, and I chaired its council for a number of years.

Our editorial contribution Marjorie Waybill retired, and we brought in Rose Stutzman and her family came from Puerto Rico. I think the Stutzmans were the last family to move to Scottdale to work at MPH. Our Adult Bible Study was in crisis because the editor David Hiebert was publishing well-meaning but sophomoric writers for readers whom he used to call the “pillars of the church.” The readers did not catch the humor, however, and the confidence level was low and sales declining. I simply pulled this publication over to my own desk, and signed on engaging, sophisticated, but trusted writers such as Sue Clemmer Steiner of Ontario or Leonard Beachy from Indiana. Choosing appropriate writers, I had learned was half of editing, and the cohort I brought in continued writing for the next decade with the aging publication thriving.

Several other elements were more difficult to address. John (J.W.) Sprunger, our marketing manager, had been released as the publisher at Faith & Life and was a source of some conflict between our two organizations. On the other hand JW had a direct and favorable line with our executive Bob Ramer, re-enforcing our publisher’s paranoia and JW’s job security.  The Faith & Life Press, although much smaller, was financially at the very other end of MPH; in the early 90s, it had considerable fund balance and savings but these were rapidly being depleted,  especially on youth products with small returns. Because Faith & Life controlled the creation of these youth products, and we were the biggest partner, we were getting large bills for the creation of youth curriculum in a small market. I simply pulled MPH out, and we produced our own no frills youth Sunday school curriculum for a few years. This move created a fierce conflict and wasted energy; it was a mistake. When the money ran out, Faith & Life sacked its free-spending publishing staff, and I should have been more patient and waited it out.

Finally, there was the denominational weekly Gospel Herald which the editor Lorne Peachey was spinning off as a separate entity with its own board. This move was partly a merger mandate to create a periodical for the two denominations, but it was also a survival impulse by Peachey and denominational executives. Because of our indebtedness, MPH had a high overhead which no one wanted to own. This overhead aversion was especially felt by the bookstores and the magazine personnel. The latter needed only an editor, a computer, and an office and could outsource the printing. In any case when the Gospel Herald staff and publication got a chance to get out, they bolted. I probably would have done the same, but this half-million dollar loss in cash flow and income made it harder to manage what remained of MPH. I suppose I also thought that the editor Lorne Peachey may have had something to do with our high overhead, what with the large deficits he ran up with earlier MPH magazines. 

If the MPH financial fund balance was low, the intellectual fund balance was even lower, stuck in a post-sixties Mennonite liberalism and attached to remnants of liberation theology, as the carrier of Anabaptism. Conservative thought was considered well thoughtless, and what most bothered me was there was the lack of an intellectual muscle to defend traditional Anabaptist Mennonite and Christian thought and values upon which our congregations lived and grew. What I found at MPH were mainly thoughtless and unexamined platitudes best personified by our local comic shtick called the Neuenschwander Brothers. The MPH staffers Ron Meyers and Merrill Miller did an appropriation of the Smothers Brothers, the leftist political act CBS had cancelled in the early seventies. Taking on a folksy rural Mennonite persona, the Meyers Miller duo would throw barbs at the sleepy Ronald Reagan, stupid Republicans, and idiot Newt Gingerich and by implication the majority Mennonites who overwhelmingly voted for them. I must have heard the military intelligence joke a hundred times (really, military intelligence?). Please laugh. It was not that our politicians did not deserve satire; it was that reducing religion and culture to a partisan political ideology had become embarrassing.

I tried to provide some leadership in having a Mennonite conversation with neo-conservative thought. In 1996, Robert Ramer and I attended a “Culture in Crisis and the Renewal of Civil Life” conference at nearby St. Vincent College with civil society speakers such as James Q. Wilson, Glenn C. Loury, Linda Chavez, Midge Decter, and Gertrude Himmelfarb. It seemed to me regarding the important role of community and family, the neo-conservatives were on a common cause with traditional Mennonites and Amish. We had sessions with Ron Arnett, a Brethren communications professor who was now teaching at Duquesne University, as well as Ann Rogers the religion editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette; she was a graduate of Gordon-Conwell, an evangelical school in Boston. Other times, we hosted Mennonites such as Shirley and Stuart  Showalter from Goshen College; Richard Kauffman from Christianity Today and later The Christian Century, and Daryl Byler and William Janzen from the Mennonite Central Committee offices from Washington and Ottawa. I also arranged  conversations among some Lancaster leaders (Richard Thomas hosted us at the Lancaster Mennonite High School) with James Nuechterlein the managing editor of First Things and another day with the Don E. Eberly of the civil society and fatherhood initiative (fathers as seatbelts) projects.  It seemed to me that we lived off of ideas and we needed a broader and richer diet than what I called the Liturgical Left. An additional project during those years was to develop a Mennonite Publishing House: Editorial Theological Identity statement which would give editors some guides on changing issues at the time such as biblical interpretation and human gender and God language issues.

We all worked hard, and I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night or early in the morning, worrying about the future of this company which I had rejoined. We were up against several big changes in our society and in our printing and publishing industry. There was the challenge of replacing aging printing equipment. We were one of the few remaining denominational publishers which still owned its own printing presses, but our equipment was becoming antiquated and we did not have access to capital to replace it. Second and even bigger, the digital revolution in electronic communication was with us and we knew it whether with accounting systems or in ways of communication and reading. Our MPH culture was print and paper oriented, and the transition was steep, even if already in the seventies we had home-grown savants such as Mervin Miller and Joe Yoder converting to computer technologies.

But our very innovation and self-assured isolation may have made it more difficult for us to adapt to standardized electronic systems as these programs emerged on the market. Although we did not know it at the time, we were approaching the end of independent bookstores, even chains, as we know them, and we took pride in the Provident stores. And there was increased Mennonite denominational pluralism. Denominational publishing, and I include here the whole Protestant Church Owned Publishers Association (PCPA) crowd, was probably one of the slowest industries in adjusting to the pluralism and the changing faces of our local congregations, our customers. Rather than adapt to the changing tastes, theologies, and themes of our congregations (they after all had choices in buying), we were still complaining about their lack of loyalty.   

Finally, our Scottdale community increasingly had a culture gap with the rest of the North American Mennonite and Amish communities; Scottdale and Mennonite Publishing retained an industrial mid-twentieth century ethos, culture and style. We lived along side Fayette County, the poorest per capita income region in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile by the end of the century, the Lancaster (Pennsylvania), Holmes (Ohio), Waterloo, (Ontario), and Rockingham (Virginia) counties, as well as the suburban Mennonites, had moved to a post-industrial affluent culture. Even on multi-culturalism and minorities, the expanding Hispanic population moved to economic growth regions, not to southwestern Pennsylvania. When a Mennonite Central Committee group called Damascus Road came and gave us a neo-Marxist interpretation of race in America, it seemed more theoretical and even comical than relevant. The program did little of practical good and made little sense to a region of unemployed steel workers. A wealthy culture seemed to have greater appreciation for the vocabulary of what was called white privilege.

The nineties were during the Clinton growth economy years, and I’ll never forget when my sister Ruth Roth came to Scottdale and quite innocently asked why the church did not give us new or at least up-dated offices and facilities—the way they had back home at Goshen, Indiana. None of these issues I’ve mentioned in the past few paragraphs may have been decisive, but the cumulative effect made it a steep climb to approach the next century successfully. There is a tide in the affairs of people, and although we can accelerate or inhibit that tide, we could not reverse a three-decade trend of institutional decline. Our MPH leadership and staff were quite talented, deeply committed, and had a long background in church publishing; with lesser leadership, the Scottdale publishing project probably would have ended a decade earlier.

In the meantime, there was the spectacle that other publishers may actually be doing worse. In July of 1996, Good Books of Intercourse, Pennsylvania, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Our friends Merle and Phyllis Good were overextended financially through borrowing and promissory notes, and now some elderly persons were in danger of losing their life savings and retirement. Sad stories of financial loss surfaced, and in adopting a re-organization plan, some of the creditors wanted to divest quickly; and others wanted to allow the re-organization plan to take its course. A flurry of letters and documents came from both sides, but a reorganization plan was ultimately accepted with the Merle and Phyllis Good still in charge but with tighter spending controls.

In the meantime, Merle Good, especially, seemed to have gathered a good number of opponents during his climb as publisher, writer and theatrical promoter. The bankruptcy became a forum for his opponents, to put it colloquially, to bring him down. After the bankruptcy, our own MPH weekly Gospel Herald and then the Lancaster’s Intelligencer Journal did major stories of the Goods’ failures; the Lancaster Conference had a public hearing and listening committee. I remember visiting Merle during this period when I was in Lancaster, and he showed up at an out-of-the-way restaurant in disguise with dark glasses; his first question was whether I was coming as a friend or a spy for MPH. I was coming as a friend, but I could understand his misgivings; the Goods had been a not always friendly competitor with MPH, and Scottdale people had considerable Schadenfreude over the Goods’ troubles.

The tipping point for the Goods was probably that their own board members who had the largest financial investment in the company stuck with them. I recall I talked to attorney Elvin Kraybill soon after this transpired, and he said he hoped the creditors will not liquidate quickly and take huge losses. With tighter economic controls, he was confident the operation could be profitable.  Sure enough, by the end of the decade the Goods were discharged from the US bankruptcy court, and the debtors were on the way to being repaid. Gloria and I sometimes stayed with the Goods overnight when we went to Lancaster, and one Saturday night during this time we stayed with them, walking to the East Chestnut Street Mennonite meetinghouse for Sunday worship and leaving immediately at the end. The Goods had resigned all positions in the congregation, conference and Mennonite World Conference. It was all painful for everyone, and I hoped our Scottdale company and staff would never need to go through such an ordeal.  

Most of this chapter comes from memory, date books, and personal files and journals of 1996. The Jack Scott description from Hamlet is in Act III, Scene ii. The story on the Good Books appeared “A Good Deal Turns Sour for Mennonite Investors,” Intelligencer Journal (November 5, 1996, front page and inside).