1959 Brunks, Beeches and Birds

1959  Brunks, Beeches, and Birds. George R. Brunk family; responding to invitation and Roman J. Mullet; revivalists Rex Humbard, Oral Roberts, and Billy Graham; Holmesville renewal families: Howard and Sally Hovatter, Lewis and Ruth Beech, Sidney and Lois Corl;  bird watching, Waynedale biology teacher Alden Schaffter, considering new vocations; crow hunting. 

 The summer of 1959 brought revivals to Holmes County. The Brunk Tent Revival gave its mix of religious theater and Christian devotion and commitment to our community for about a month. The meetings were scheduled for three weeks in June, but were so well received and attended that a week was added to extend through the first week in July. The headliner George R. Brunk was a tall larger-than-life figure who had a deep bass voice, wide biblical knowledge, and entertaining stories. He spoke in a way which was especially suited to his popular audience of builders, entrepreneurs, farmers, craftsmen, housewives, teachers, and merchants. Twenty years later when I heard Brunk tell some of these same stereotypical jokes at an Allegheny Mennonite Conference meeting, I was embarrassed and cringed, but today I remembered that earlier time and place and Brunk’s main purpose. He reminded the Mennonites and Amish of Holmes County that we were sinners in the hands of a forgiving God.  

George R. Brunk was also interesting as a family character; his father George the first, I learned later, had been an outstanding conservative minister and bishop among the Virginia Mennonites. Brunk had a younger brother Lawrence who had financed the initial tent purchases with a successful poultry operation and then served as the campaign’s song leader and business manager. Called the Brunk Brothers, my parents had attended their meetings in 1951 in Orrville while my parents were still Amish. My father’s bookstore had a book called Revival Fires (1952) with photos of the two brothers, their families and the campaigns, including a full page photo of Lawrence’s flock of 5,000 chickens which had financed the launching of their project.

Then the two brothers had a falling-out, each going his own way. By 1959 the evangelist George R. Brunk brought his wife Margaret and family along with large semi-trucks, house trailers and the tents. It was almost circus-like including the sex appeal of four handsome unmarried sons helping in song leading, announcements, and other parts of the operation. By the end of the four weeks, we knew them by name: Gerald, George Rowland, Paul, and Conrad. There was also a daughter Barbara.

The meetings had wide appeal, even to the young. That summer my little brother James held daily revival meetings on the tree stump in our front lawn, preaching in as deep a Brunk voice as a seven-year-old could have. Attending were James’ two obedient little sisters Rhoda and Miriam (barely out of diapers) coming forward to his invitations, and escaping as soon as possible. The Brunk meetings brought together tremendous collection of churches, across the full spectrum of Mennonites and some Amish. The meetings were sponsored by 17 Mennonite churches in Holmes County, and Maple Grove Mission strongly supported them. We attended regularly, and by the end of the meetings, 27 pledge cards were sent to my father as pastor, noting decisions made for Christ with associations to Maple Grove Mission.

My card dated June 18, 1959, and signed by Roman J. Mullet was among them, and I remember the evening very well. Brunk preached and then an invitation was given softly singing “Just As I am without One Plea.” After several verses, Brunk asked those who had peace with God to raise our hands. I could not and I thought everyone around me was looking longingly over at me. We sat in the back quarter of the full tent, and I walked the long sawdust path to the large curtain strung in front. Behind the curtain, they assigned me to a young Amish counselor from Sugarcreek, Roman J. Mullet (1920-2004). We sat down on chairs facing each other with Roman counseling me and then praying with me. Roman checked on the card afterwards that my reason for coming was “confession of sin” and “backslider in heart.”

Throughout much of my adult life, I met Mennonites who spoke in regret or even anger for having responded to Brunk’s invitations. They remembered the psychological coercion at the meetings or that the meetings removed the Christian confession and commitment from a local church as was typical of our Mennonite churches. Or some associated Brunk with the restrictive norms of the 50s such as banning TVs and immodest clothing. All true of course.

Still, I never had many of those negative feelings. I was baptized as a Christian two years earlier, but I needed to confess my sins many times before that night and have backslid many times since. Furthermore, I felt better that night and the following weeks, and I may have lived a little better. My consultant Roman Mullet summarized it well on the back of my pledge card: “Thank the Lord for bringing him back to fellowship.”

I liked my one-night counselor Roman J. Mullet and it must have been mutual. He made it a summer relationship by even coming out to Maple Grove Mission for two weeks in July and taught my Summer Bible School class. Then I lost track of him entirely. I learned later that he was actually a minister in the Bethel Fellowship Amish Mennonite or Beachy church and during the sixties would go to El Salvador for a few years of mission service.

I don’t recall that I ever responded to other evangelistic invitations, but it was not for lack of opportunity. My father Andrew was what might be called a junkie for revival, healing, holiness, evangelistic and camp meetings; you name the renewal meeting of this type, I have probably attended. As children we would go with our father and aside from often hearing an unusual speaker, Andrew always treated us to ice cream on the way home.

A coda on the Brunk brothers was several years after the George R. Brunk’s Holmes County revival, his brother Lawrence again showed up in our community and my father attended, of course. My recall was that the tent was near Wilmot, and Lawrence Brunk had moved to a holiness theme with respondents praying all night until they received a second blessing or were sanctified. Not many people attended, but it may have paved the way for John Schrock’s homegrown Pentecostal revival at Berlin several years later.   

Aside from the Mennonite standard bearers already mentioned (1956), there were others who became nationally and internationally known. I remember in the 50s going to a meeting of the Rex Humbard family, using a tent on the fairgrounds at Wooster. The family sang beautifully; I think even Humbard’s parents were traveling with him at the time. Then two decades later in the seventies, I went to hear Humbard at the Civic Arena at Pittsburgh; that was actually a part of writing an article on Humbard’s ministry and enterprises. In between those two dates, Rex and his wife Maude Aimee had built the large round building Cathedral of Tomorrow in Akron, Ohio, and we would watch their New Year’s Eve concert on TV. By the 70s Rex Humbard was in financial trouble from having over expanded into businesses such as a girdle factory in Brooklyn and an office tower in Akron. The Mennonite editor said the Canadian Mennonites were sending money to Humbard and wanted some investigation; it was not a pretty picture, at least financially.  

In the early 60s I went with my father to hear Oral Roberts while he still traveling around the country with a tent near Youngstown. Roberts was a faith healer and a long healing line formed at the end of the preaching service. I can still hear Roberts, after hearing the person’s ailment, placing his two hands around the head of the person, and saying “in the naaame of Jeeeesus, be healed.” Assistants nearby would catch the supplicants as they fell backward or collapsed or sometimes they jumped about in ecstatic frenzy.

On the way home my father asked what I thought of it all, and I said probably those people who went as believers saw miracles and those people who went as skeptics did not see any miracles that evening. I was among the latter, but I knew my father was among the former and hoped for his back to get better. Later in life during the 1980s my father often watched the Oral Roberts weekly TV broadcast and got his mailings on abundant living and expecting a miracle. 

I somehow missed the most exotic faith healer in our northern Ohio region Ernest Angley, but my mother reminded me that Andrew took the family to an Angley service one time. By my mother’s telling,  Angley’s “all things are possible to him that believeth” was too much, even for Andrew’s tastes and they never returned. I suppose I could still catch Angley myself, and in this miracle business, extremism seems to have its virtues for success and longevity. I notice that the Angley ministry is still going strong (2011) at age 89. He bought Humbard’s old Cathedral of Tomorrow campus for his headquarters and has moved into healing people with HIV Aids.   

Of a more mainstream evangelistic nature, my parents became involved with the Billy Graham meetings when he was at the stadium in Columbus, Ohio, in 1964. My father and others from the Holmesville Federated Church attended training classes as counselors, and I think a few sang in the chorus. Which brings on a second revival which was occurring about this time that affected our family; it was in the Holmesville Federated Church. This came about because the pastor was Howard Hovatter and his wife Sally who soon became friends of our family.

Hovatter came out of the Wesleyan tradition, was a good singer and a charismatic leader; we might have called him a fly-by-night or schouft in Pennsylvania German. But whatever his reliability for long-term relationships, during his short tenure at Holmesville several families had a Christian spiritual renewal.

The main Holmesville people involved in this revival were the Holmesville grocers Lewis and Ruth Beech, and the Holmes County game warden family Sidney and Lois Corl. The Corl family lived in Holmesville, and often visited us during the summer. Lois and my mother became friends, joining us for meals, and Sidney (Sid) and their little children even helping in the garden. Sid occasionally stayed around and joined our family circle on the back porch blicking peas (as in shelling) or tipping the ends off of green beans. Any man capable of such humble communal work, even if occasional or for ceremonial purposes, was highly regarded by my mother; a gesture which seemed never to occur to her husband. 

We boys took special interest in Sid, a veritable wild game protector and a good natured naturalist. A tall lean man, he was an open shirt friend to us boys, but he always had a clip neck tie hanging from the mirror of his dark green state car. When he had official duties, he would clip on his tie. One time when I was driving with him, I opened the glove compartment, and I saw a revolver. But mainly Sid was a friendly neighbor who took us along as we explored nature. My biology teacher Alden Schaffter had gotten me started in bird watching and Sid was not only a bird protector but a bird watcher, and being generous with us boys, would take us along on his bird watching.

In the Spring we spent evenings at dusk watching a Woodcock do his ritual mating dance near the swamp area on the west end of town. Sid might point out a Coot diving in the water, a little Green Heron doing a wobbly flight, and hear the pumping sound of the American Bittern, but what we were waiting for was the nasal beezp of the Woodcock. It was a distinct sound at intervals coming from a little brown bird about the size of a softball with a long bill. We listened to the beezps from the unseen bird until we heard a twittering whirring sound and then you could see the Woodcock making a circular flight up into the evening sky until he was so high you could only see him with the binoculars. Then at the climax of his flight the sound became thick warbling; next down he came, dropping to earth in a zigzag pattern, where he started the nasal beezps all over again. One time while the Woodcock was up in the air we moved closer to where we thought his mating dance began, and he dropped down only a few feet from us. He discreetly flew a short distance away and started his beezps dance right on schedule.

Whether we have lived in Holmes County or Bowling Green, Ohio; within the borough or on the outskirts of Scottdale, each year in March and April, I go out at dusk to a swampy area with a grassy clearing or even an upland meadow along a woodlot and listen for the Woodcock mating calls. Most years, I was rewarded, but the Woodcock dance shows have recently been harder to find; they are no longer as prevalent. According to the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the population has been declining about five percent a year since 1968 due to loss of habitat.

Sidney Corl also took us along doing his work during the day. In the spring we followed Sid down the trail behind the Holmes Sportsmen’s Clubs west of town and checked the colorful Wood Ducks and their nesting houses. Another time, we watched the Great Blue Heron nesting area in the Killbuck bottom half way between Holmesville and Millersburg, behind the Wengred farm, now a bike and buggy trail. 

Sid even took us out to Mohican State Forest near Loudonville explaining how that many large hemlocks grew on the north side of the small mountains of Mohican. Sid said the main habitat of the hemlocks was further north, but that the seeds had come along down with the glacier thousands of years ago. These remainders of the glacier thrived here on the north side of the hills where it was cooler all summer.  And we identified some spring warblers some of which I still see most years such as the Yellow Warbler and some of which I do not such as the bright orange and black and white stripped Blackburnian.

I was only vaguely aware of the creationism and evolution debates, but Sidney’s Christian conversion and now regular reading of the Bible did not seem to influence his views of God as creator and a long evolutionary process. But his Christian commitment did influence his vocational choice; he felt a calling to the Christian ministry, and soon was on his way to Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, to become a United Methodist pastor. Our brief years of nature wanderings, bird watching, and family friendships ended quickly, when Sidney and Lois had a large trailer built of plywood, kind of a homemade project. We helped them load the trailer; they hitched it to the back of a station wagon, and headed west. We missed them very much.

Aside from the spiritual connection to the Beeches, they also provided us some new recreation—water skiing. The Beech family lived along Odell Lake near Big Prairie Lakeville in Western Holmes County, and Lewis was an avid water skier. On Sunday afternoons he would pull us on his boat in flying over the water and jumping across the waves. The last I saw of the Hovatters was in 1963, when Howard stopped in to see me at the Miller Cabinet shop in Orrville; he wanted something to be fixed on his trailer.  The reason I remember it is because it was on November 22, the day President John F. Kennedy was shot. My mother told me she liked Sally Hovatter better than Howard, and the last she heard, the Hovatter marriage had ended in separation.  

Sidney Corl served 30 years as a pastor in the Oregon Idaho Conference of the United Methodist Church, dying relatively young at age 63 in 1994 at Rainier, Oregon, where his widow Lois Corl still lives (in 2011). However large and honorable Sid Corl’s life change was in becoming a pastor, it was his love of nature and vocation as a game warden that got me to thinking of other vocations for me as well, other than farming.

The other person who nudged me in this direction was Alden Schaffter, our biology teacher at Waynedale High School. Not intentionally, of course. Schaffter simply taught general science and biology in the most mundane way. Alden Schaffter would assign several pages or a chapter to read in the biology text each day and then by going down the rows, he asked each of us a question from the science or biology text. We had lab experiments such as dissecting a frog and seeing its beating heart and other organs, but mainly he asked us questions and gave us a daily mark. But we could also get extra credit by extra activities such as identifying birds. Schaffter even though utterly uncreative about teaching method did have some redeeming qualities; the most important one was that he loved his subject material, basic science and biology. I knew very little about either, but I did like the living creation and biology, and Schaffter got us to identify birds; I liked Mister Schaffter.

He, like Sidney Corl, enjoyed identifying birds and gave me a life-long enjoyment of seeing birds, even taking me along on a Christmas bird hike one year. On Saturdays Alden Schaffter would take us students for bird hikes; we would meet up at his house on Fredericksburg Road near US Route 250 at Guerne. We would look for birds in his lawn and at his feeder and then we would go in his car out to the Lakeville and also to a lake near Shreve. He had a big tripod and here I saw my first Common Loon, the Redhead and Canvasback ducks, Black ducks, and any number of other waterfowl. It was here that the idea was planted that I could become a biology teacher or maybe a game protector. I bought a book by Roger Tory Peterson Field Guide to Birds and a pair of binoculars. My sophomore year was my last year of vocational agriculture and Future Farmers of America.  

One other kind of bird watching occurred this summer, looking for crows. But this was hunting, of which I have never done much except as a child some small game when Grandfather Levi L. Schlabach came to our farm to hunt for rabbits and pheasants. Later, when my brother Roy took up fox hunting for a winter I joined him and his friends and listened to the music of the fox hounds. But this summer I tried crows, I suppose wanting to have shot at least one wild game animal, maybe even to mount one. I watched the crow flocks where they roosted, where they often gathered at various parts of the day, and how they moved around. I watched as they sent a lone sentinel crow ahead to check out a field or tree as to whether it was safe before the flock approached.

I learned that crows were quite intelligent in discovering if I was carrying a stick or armed with a gun. After numerous attempts and sitting in wait for a shot, one day after freshly mowing one of our hay fields in the forenoon, I brought the gun. I placed myself in a thicket near a dead tree which was near our hayfield at the bottom of the woods. I knew crows like to look for grubs and insects in freshly mowed hay fields, and thought in all likelihood, a sentinel would come ahead checking out the safety of the field before signaling for the rest to come, all of which they communicated by calls.

Sure enough, before long I heard a flock calling from behind me near the woods, and then a lone black crow flew above me onto the dead tree limb. I immediately put up the 20-gauge shot gun, aimed along the barrel, and pulled the trigger. The crow fell to the ground, and I picked it up. It was still warm but dead. I took it home and felt sad about the beautiful large black bird. That was the end of my hunting; I never had a desire to shoot another bird. I spent the rest of my life in bird watching.    

Brunk Revivals background comes from a Katie Florence Shank booklet Revival Fires (self published in Broadway, Virginia: 1952).  The 27 pledge cards of Maple Grove Mission related people who responded at the Brunk meetings are in the Andrew A. Miller collection at the Archives of the Mennonite Church, Goshen, Indiana. “Rex Humbard: North America’s TV Pastor” appeared in The Mennonite (September 18, 1973, pages  526-27); it was reprinted in the Mennonite Brethren Herald (October 5, 1973, pages 12-13). Roman J. Mullet information came from a Leroy Beachy of Berlin, Ohio, telephone conversation on February 10, 2011. Woodcock background is found on the website of the Pennsylvania Game Commission, “Woodcock,” Wildlife Note # 21 by Chuck Fergus. Sidney Corl information was provided through e-mail February 15, 2011, by Becky Delurey, administrative assistant to Bishop Hoshibatain of the Oregon Idaho Conference of the United Methodist Church.

1958 Pop and Choral Music

1958  Pop and Choral Music. An end of my Amish friends; swimming in the Salt Creek; beginning Waynedale High School, top forty music on Lloyd Dye’s bus; the Chuck Wagon Gang,  Miller brothers quartet, Maple Grove Mission music; Pleasant View Mennonite midweek service and chorus; high school chorus; Future Farmers of America and Terry Burkhalter; radio and milking; the Cuban Revolution and the Castros; Ruth Ann born on November 29 and enlarging the house.

During the summer of 1958 was a transition of ending relationships with most of my Amish neighbors and friends. I was leaving the Holmesville School where we all attended and heading for Waynedale High School where no Amish students attended. Some of my best friends from school were people such as Melvin Miller (minister and farmer living west of Holmesville), Ben Miller (may he rest in peace), and Eli Y. Hostetler (bishop and patriarch of a large family near Apple Creek). Larry Stallman, a rural farm boy and nephew of our principal, often ran with us too, and I remember that summer we had a summer afternoon picnic and swimming at Salt Creek near where it enters into the Killbuck. I don’t think I realized that it would be the end of an era, but it was. After that year, I had little contact with my Amish friends unless it was an incidental meeting at a store or an auction. We all had our own families, churches and vocations to tend to, and of course by the 70s I ended up over here in Pennsylvania.  

Swimming in Salt Creek was actually a good part of summer recreation. Salt Creek was a shallow creek, hence it only had certain spots where a decent swimming hole could be found, and these spots might wash out from one year to the next. Each summer we would find a place where the water was deep enough for swimming. Salt Creek flowed at the edge of our farm land, and one summer the best hole was up near the Arthur E. Parrot farm where the road heads up the hill where the Pierces used to live; their sons our age Harold and Charles (better known as Fuzz and Chuck) were friends. Another year the hole was at the railroad and traffic bridges at the end of the Rudy Coblentz lane (and some of the brave ones would jump off the bridge). Finally, one summer we swam all the way down near the Route 76 (now 83) bridge. My brothers and I were regulars in these swimming areas in the afternoons and evenings, often meeting some of the town boys and a few of the adventuresome girls who swam there too. It was cool and clear water, and you could see crayfish, minnows, chubs and even an occasional smallmouth bass as you swam under the water.  

The next four years I would get on the bus every morning at Holmesville and Lloyd Dye drove us to Waynedale High School which was located near Apple Creek, a full 40-minute drive away. The whole bus riding was new to me because we had always lived near town and walked to school. The bus ride provided about an hour a day of socializing, and I learned what others ate for breakfast. Most envied was the colorfully wrapped breakfast menu of Twinkies or Hostess cup cakes and a bottle of Coke. I meanwhile had to eat my mother’s fare at home: eggs, bacon, toast or sometimes a week of fried corn mush and applesauce, or other times plain old hot rolled oats with raisins.  

Lloyd Dye had a big radio speaker hanging like a spider web from the bus ceiling in front and I think in back too, and it blasted out the top forty tunes of Canton’s WHLO. This sound was another world for me and totally new music which I had never heard at home. The station throbbed with fast news and weather but mostly a hip disk jockey playing songs such as Connie Francis “Everyone is somebody’s Fool,” Elvis Presley “It’s Now or Never,” and a startling “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”

Lloyd was young, about thirty, I think, and maybe simply liked this music, and his passengers certainly did; if he changed the station there were howls and groans from the back, and he would switch to it immediately. Anyway, it was good crowd control too; you could not hear anything else except visiting with someone nearby. Actually, we were quite a well behaved bunch of students and the only time I remember problems was one couple who would enter into long, sustained and deep kisses, which I thought might end in fainting. After several minutes Lloyd would see them in the mirror, slam the brakes, and break up the embrace. After all that embarrassment, at least to the rest of us, a day or two later the lovers at it again with fervor. Then Lloyd would slam the brakes; the show was over, and life returned to normal. Probably for most of my cohorts to hear these oldies or classic rock, they remember Ed Sullivan shows, Waynedale sock hops or dances, but for me it all goes to Lloyd Dye’s Waynedale bus.

Although we had a radio in our house, we very seldom had it on, nor do I remember much listening to the radio—except in the barn. Maybe it was that we were a family of talkers, and everyone had something to say, and you needed all the volume or drama possible to get listeners. Paul was a good storyteller, and over meals we enjoyed listening to him describe personalities and happenings, whether two Ott brothers’ exploits in industrial arts class at Waynedale High School or a Bob’s eccentricities on Jacob Miller’s carpentry crew. I never met these people in person, but they might as well have been vivid oversized members of our family table stories.

Our family did have a few phonograph records for music, and the main time we listened to them was at bed time. The ones which I remember during the fifties were the close harmony singers such as the Louvin Brothers and especially a mixed quartet called the Chuck Wagon Gang. Simply accompanied by a guitar, they would sing in an unadorned voice gospel hymns and songs out of the shaped note singing school tradition such as “We are Climbing [Jacob’s Golden Ladder]” and “After the Sunrise.” You could hear the four clear voices with an amazing plaintive alto singer, and at the same time you heard the total blended harmony. Many a night I went to sleep with the comforting harmonies of “Amazing Grace,” “Come Unto Me,” or “Angels Rock Me to Sleep” on the record player. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night with the player’s needle still grinding in the middle of the record.

I later read a book on close harmony southern gospel music and this group consisted of members of the Dave and Carrie Parker Carter family (not to be confused with the more famous A.P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter) which found its way out of poverty by singing for a large Ft. Worth, Texas, radio station. Already discovered by CBS in the thirties and singing up to the fifties, their records were readily available on little 45 records and later on 33 long plays, as they still are today on CDs.  Originally, they also sang western ballads and folk songs, but it was their gospel songs which drew the most popular response. 

Although their Chuck Wagon Gang name (inherited from their flour and biscuit company sponsor) sounded Western cowboy, their music was clearly out of the shaped note singing school tradition. I know a lot of Mennonite families had recordings of choral music by church and college groups and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but somehow this kind of European formal music did not register as strongly with our family. As Dave Carter said the secret to his family’s musical success was its simplicity and that with some practice, you could emulate it.  

Well, emulate we did and about this time we began singing as the Miller brothers quartet. Male quartets were popular for hymn singings at our local Mennonite churches, and southern gospel men’s quartets would occasionally visit our area. I think the first one I heard was called the Rebels Quartet which sang their harmonies at a Foursquare Gospel Church in Wooster. Our family went and I had never heard a tenor so high and a bass so low, each with his own microphone. The thin tall bass singer London Parris led out on a song about the three Hebrews in Babylon: “They wouldn’t bend, they wouldn’t bow, they wouldn’t burn.” His low voice went so far down I thought I was hearing gravel stones at the bottom of a well, but he appeared so earnest and kind, my mother Mattie even forgave him when we spotted him puffing cigarettes behind the quartet’s big bus after the concert. 

Our Miller brothers quartet was somehow discovered by a local promoter Harry Weaver of Fredricksburg who was sponsoring Sunday afternoon gospel singings in the  area. Weaver would rent a school auditorium such as Mt. Eaton or Winesburg and headline the program with the Slabach Sisters of Dalton, Ohio. It turned out that the Slabach Sisters were actually second cousins (Andy Jake our Grandfather Martin Miller freundschaft, they were daughters of Roman and Annie Yoder Slabach). I later discovered Bonnie had married my Waynedale classmate Norman Lowe. They had records, and I believe sang on a radio program, in other words had some claims to fame. 

Our quartet branding may have been that we were brothers and had good harmony. My voice had just changed, and I could sing the melody, Roy sang a tenor baritone, Paul  bass, and David first tenor, or at least a first tenor equivalent. David still had his octive-high child’s voice and sang the alto women’s notes.

Paul would do the public talking and Roy handled the music, and we got a number of invitations to sing at churches, clubs, and banquets. It was all worship and small-time entertainment and went on for several years until Paul and Roy left home for college and voluntary service—and David’s voice changed. Our signature song was “How Great Thou Art,” which was relatively popular among Christians during those years. We also sang a novelty number called the “Hornet Song” with musical stories of unwilling subjects such as Cannanites and Jonah getting divine urges, hence becoming “willing to go.” My own favorite was the seafaring ballad called “Jesus Savior Pilot Me.”    

Maple Grove Mission which my father was now promoting as “your friendly church” had eclectic music selections tending toward an increasing flavor of American revivalist songs such as those written by the blind hymn writer Francis (Fanny) Crosby (“Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine” and “To God be the Glory”). And sometimes the music even left the religious fields altogether. An eccentric Holmesville hermit and poet Amos Olinger often played the piano during offerings, and Olinger was as likely to play “She’ll be coming round the mountain” as “Shall we gather at the river.”   

The English four-part a capella hymn singing most Mennonite congregations used from the Church Hymnal (1927) was somewhat marginal to my growing up. My father used to say these hymns were too depressing; who wants to sing “Before Jehovah’s Aweful Throne,” the emphasis on awful as terrible and bad. The exception about this time came when my brother Paul got a driver’s license, and we started going to the Pleasant View Mennonite Church’s monthly hymn sings on Sunday evenings and also the mid-week service. Paul and Roy sang in the Pleasant View chorus and soon took me along, and I think it was also encouraged by my parents in hopes that we would socialize with other Mennonite young people. 

This mid-week service would consist of brief opening, all singing together, a brief Scripture reading, then we would go to prayer groups based on age levels and gender. I would go into the boys groups which would be led by Albert Coblentz or Paul Yoder. Albert was about fifteen years older than the rest of us and a good role model, and Paul Yoder had the benefit of a year of study at Eastern Mennonite College. Albert was also my eighth grade summer Bible School teacher at Pleasant view and always a good friend.

Albert or Bert would solicit and mention prayer requests which included an alcoholic father whose poor wife and children came to church, Emmanuel Erb in PAX service in Paraguay (building the Trans-Chaco Highway), and then accidents, missionaries, and various sick people. Then Albert would look for volunteers who would pray for one specific request. We would kneel down and after our fairly short individual prayers, Albert would end with a long prayer, reviewing the requests and adding some items of his own, all in a fairly earnest fashion. 

But there were dissenters to these sessions where presumably everyone had his eyes closed in prayer. One would hear punctuations of loud flatulence, either by someone cupping his hand under his elbow, making kind of a bellow, or by the real deal of cutting cheese. By the smell or by peeking one could generally trace the origins to a minister’s son and his best friend. Meanwhile, Albert would go right on praying with sacred decorum, now amid some tittering of laughter. If Allen Miller or Aden Kauffman should read this, all forgiven, amigos; in retrospect your sounds and scents provided an earthly grounding to our heavenly pleading.

But as noted, Paul Yoder and his sister Anna, with a year or two of Eastern Mennonite College in Virginia, had picked up good choral music tastes, and also Paul was an outstanding first tenor. So our mid-week Pleasant View Church evenings ended with the young people going up to the balcony and singing choral songs, especially using the hymnal called Songs of the Church. These were slightly more challenging than our Mennonite Church Hymnal. We would stand or sit in parts such as the tenors or basses and it was good practice in sight reading the shaped notes. The chorus leader was generally a friendly young minister called Levi Hershberger; but we all called him Junior. 

Beyond these practice sessions, the Pleasant View chorus sometimes sang at hymn sings or at special occasions and only the best singers were selected; Paul and Roy would sing, but I generally did not make the cut. Still, I greatly benefitted from those singing sessions and learning to sight read the tenor and bass notes. When I got to Waynedale High School, I felt like some opera singer in my ability to sight read and harmonize compared to most of my peers, especially the boys, many of whom could barely sing the melody, let alone read sheet music.

One night our Waynedale High School chorus directed by Frank Sessions sang at the Parent Teacher Association meeting (this was actually in 1961), and a Grace Burkhalter (mother of Sheldon and Terry) got up to the podium and said she was going to introduce the pastor of her church which turned out to be Kidron Mennonite Church. So pastor Bill Detweiler, the speaker of a radio broadcast the Calvary Hour gave an inspirational little speech on teaching and learning with a sprinkling of biblical and American cultural wisdom. I mention this because it was the first that I saw Mennonites in public life in quite this way. Although I knew the Mennonites and Amish ran eastern Holmes County, up in Holmesville, we were pretty sectarian and kept to ourselves. 

I first met Terry Burkhalter when he was president of our Future Farmers of America (FFA) chapter. I enjoyed my vocational agriculture class which went for two periods, and was an excellent transition between my rural farm life and Waynedale’s more worldly high school culture. For those two periods we were together as farm boys discussing hogs, dairying, crops and parliamentary procedure. My parents allowed me to buy a blue and gold jacket with my name and the FFA logo on back, and I had a little sign put on the end of our lane: “A future farmer lives here.”  Our teacher William Boyer took us on field trips to the Ohio Agriculture Experiment station (now OARDC), and we visited each other’s farms to see our operations.

One of my first FFA trips was to a convention in Columbus where we saw our own Terry Burkhalter up on the podium being named state farmer of the year. Terry also had one of the largest yields of corn of our area, about 150 bushels per acre, and the DeKalb folks gave him a nice award. The Burkhalters had a farm not far from Kidron, and Terry seemed to excel in everything FFA. In addition, Terry’s father Lester was once named an Ohio Farmer of the Year but what really made him a small-town legend was for having chased an agricultural agent off of his farm with a pitch fork. Forty years later, Terry explained to me that the Burkhalter farm was well within its legal wheat or corn allotment, but on principle his father was not going to have the government regulator tromp around on his land. 

At home both Roy and Paul were now working away from home, and I was the farmer, doing the morning and evening milking. We had bought Surge milkers for our small herd, and we milked with the sucking sounds of the cups on the cow teats while the radio was on Wooster’s WWST which in the mornings was strong in the farm market reports, the news on the hour, and one gospel song, often by the baritone bass Tennessee Ernie Ford. We still sold hogs, and I listened for the hog and cattle prices for the various farm auctions which were given from the preceding day. And there was the national and international news, which I was just beginning to take an interest in about this time.

We also were beginning to get the Wooster Daily Record which carried UPI reports on an island in the Caribbean Sea having a change of government led by young guerilla commanders named Fidel and Raul Castro. The Castro brothers and an Argentine doctor turned revolutionary Che Guevara had led two years of fighting in the Sierra Madre Mountains to gain popular support with promises to do away with the dictatorship, corruption and to set up representative government. 

By the summer of 1958 they were gaining increasing support and winning battles town by town so that by year-end the dictator Fulgencio Batista was fleeing the island, and eight days later the Castro armies entered the capital city of Havana in triumph. The American government recognized a new provisional government within days, and newspaper reports had the crowds welcoming the new leaders with jubilation in the streets and auto horns honking. However, corrupt the Batista regime, most of those crowds probably did not expect that over fifty years later as I write this the Castro brothers would still be ruling the island with few freedoms and  much equality of poverty. 

I of course did not follow all the details of these changes in Cuba, but I became aware of Castro soon when it became apparent that he was introducing a one-party government led by the Communist Party and heavily supported by the Soviet Union. The other thing about Fidel Castro was his familiar photo in the Wooster Daily Record; he had a beard and mustache and looked like a young Holderman Mennonite bishop.

Meanwhile, closer to home our family was growing, and by November 29 Mattie gave birth to her eighth child and youngest daughter Ruth Ann. Mother and daughter went to live with grandparents Levi L. and Susan Schlabachs for a few weeks because we had whooping cough. We had spent the summer and fall building an addition to our house, both in a big full basement room where we boys could take showers and our mother could do laundry. 

On the main floor we added an ample living room with a big double-pane picture window toward the front lawn and road and a master bedroom. We had earlier turned the little parental bedroom into a bathroom, our first one indoors. Our employer Jacob Miller helped with the plans and some of the work, and my uncle Melvin on leave from one of his military tours, came up and helped too. My father Andrew was still on the mend from his broken vertebrae. Most of the work was done by brothers Roy and Paul.   

Most of this chapter comes from memory and conversations with the immediate family. Background on the Chuck Wagon Gang comes from James R. Goff, Jr., Close Harmony, a history of Southern Gospel (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002, pages 131-135).  My brother David found a 1960-62 live recording of our Miller Brothers Quartet singing at one of  Harry Weaver’s Sunday afternoon singings with the songs: “How Great Thou Art,” “New Name in Glory” and “Jesus Savior Pilot Me.”  Some of the Burkhalter information comes from a February 2, 2011, telephone conversation with Terry Burkhalter of Harrisonburg, Virginia. 

1957 Baptism and Murder

1957  Baptism and Murder. Paul begins construction work at 15, Andrew falls, fractures vertebra, diminished parental role; Jacob. S. and Elizabeth Miller; the murder of Paul Coblentz May 20;  instruction class and baptism by Harry Stutzman; Grandma Martha Miller’s death in April; Grade 8 teacher Henry Troyer; Principal Roy Stallman, the English language.

Our family friend, the poet Lorie Gooding wrote a prayer poem for the new year 1957 which ended with the stanza:

Give to us, Lord, true courage

To serve thee without any fear;

To honor and love and adore Thee

All the days of this glad New Year.

The glad year had its share of courage and fear. We’ll begin with the courage it took for my oldest brother Paul at age 15 to start working for Jacob S. Miller in carpentry and home building. On one level Paul was simply honoring cultural expectations of a growing Amish Mennonite family with seven children now needing extra cash and income. In addition, our community expected that a youth apprentice and work at a useful trade as soon as possible. But even in this context, it was considerable effort for a youth of modest physical size and strength to get up at six in the morning and do outside carpentry work, what we called roughing up houses. And Paul was too young for an Ohio driver’s license, so that summer it became a mother and son project. 

Mattie would drive the car for about eight miles to Mt. Hope in order for Paul to catch a ride with Jacob Miller’s carpentry crew, and then she would go pick him up in the evenings. I sometimes went along and remember the early fog as my mother would drive along slowly. But most of the time, I stayed at home milking the cows and doing the chores; this role had now fallen to me easily because I enjoyed working with the animals.

Paul’s step outside the family farm established a pattern and relationship with Jacob S. Miller which all of us brothers Paul, Roy and I would follow for the next decade. My younger brother David also worked for Jake briefly but not near as long as the rest of us did. Paul’s influence was a pattern which we would follow later on anything from buying a car to college choice, vocations, money management, investments or choosing our mates.

If this almost father-like concern for younger siblings and the rest of the family is typical for eldest brothers, I think the role may also have sought out Paul because of some unhappy events in my father’s life. During these years, Andrew vacated his paternal seat, and I’ll describe how this came about. During the summer my father became immobilized by a roofing accident, and lost his ability to work. For the first time we had no income beyond the benevolence of our 80- acre farm, meaning plenty to eat but not much cash. During all of our farming years, my father had always worked outside the farm for cash income whether it was in roofing, spouting, laying bricks or blocks, or selling and installing iron railings for porches and steps. 

Then one evening the news came that Andrew had touched the TV antennae of Waive and Vera Boyd’s house, been electrocuted by a shock and had fallen to the ground below. I remember visiting my father in the Pomerene Hospital in Millersburg with his body in traction, attached and pulled by cables and pulleys from the bed posts; he had fractured some vertebrae in his back when he fell. When he came home from the hospital he wore a body cast around his midsection and trunk. I remember it was a warm summer, and we had a wooden back scratcher with which we children used to give him some relief from the itchiness.

Now my father, who I had believed could do anything, could do nothing. Meanwhile, Paul worked outside the home in providing financial support for the family; Roy was good with the tractor, farm machinery, crop farming, and fixing mechanical things around the house and farm; and I took care of the small dairy. Our mother Mattie provided much of the emotional support for the children and managed the finances. But my father did not only lose physical strength, but he also was diminishing his mental and rational resources while seeking increasing emotional help from unseen spirits. During this time, Andrew moved from a fairly high volitional and discipleship type of Christianity to a mystical and paraphysical Christian religion which was unusual to our family and community. We had enclosed the front porch with windows which he turned into an office and bedroom (with blinds pulled), and during that warm summer Andrew communed with the spirits speaking in unknown tongues (glossalalia) and seeking divine healing for his back.

Christianity is always a mixture of the human and the transcendent, the unseen and the rational ethical commitments with various groups emphasizing one or the other. Both of these elements are in the Biblical stories and certainly both were in the Amish Mennonite community. By most measures, however, our Anabaptist communities weighed in the direction of the rational and commitment of the will and community. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” we quoted the Apostle. I know the rest of the text also talks of God working in and through us, but we began with our human effort. 

The degree to which my father moved to a mystical and Pentecostal Christianity was simply a direction which his children and his wife Mattie could not follow. One might suppose that given his physical condition and no additional medical help in sight, it is quite understandable. Why not appeal to supernatural sources, and there is a healing stream in the Scriptures and Christian history. Anyway, Andrew disappeared, often not showing up for meals and shut up in a dark room, comforted by angels and rebuking demons. He got lots of literature from free-lance evangelists in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Waco Texas.

I’m not sure whether our father rupturing his vertebrae was the only element in his vacating his paternal chair, but I do know that by the early sixties, he had disappeared for me.  And a number of stand-ins seemed ready to pick up on his leadership role. There was the eldest son Paul who seemed emotionally ready and level-headed quite beyond his years.  Paul would leave high school at age sixteen that winter and worked full-time with Jacob Miller and Clarence Summers, hence a key provider for our family during those lean years. And brother Roy did the same a summer later. I think later in life some of us (including our poor bewildered spouses) may have outgrown and even resented Paul’s leadership, irrespective of how functionally he came to the role. In due time most of us either came to terms with this arrangement, with mixtures of appreciation, accommodation, humor and even rejection. 

But looking back after five decades, I don’t think Paul sought this role as much as having it thrust upon him at an early age. And he was not the only one who had additional parent roles given to them. There was my mother Mattie who was the stable leader of home and farm during Andrew’s absence; her stature and influence greatly increased. And there was our employer Jacob S. Miller. 

Jacob S. and Elizabeth Miller of Mt. Hope were already family friends to my parents before we went to work with Jake and Clarence Summers who was the other partner in home construction. Clarence lived in Kidron and focused on the financial and brick and block (masonry) part of the projects and Jake with more of the carpentry. Jake was a hard worker, somewhat small in stature, but strong in muscle and determination. He was soft spoken and generous in attitude with his employees whether we were fast or slow or how much we differed from him.

He went to bed early, ate an early breakfast and passed on lunch, working right through it, but he had no such expectations of any of the rest of us. Jake was punctual, devout, and totally honest. The only time we ever questioned his integrity was when he told us that he and Elizabeth only had sex three times in their lives—for their three children Dean, Ann, and Gary. His father was Stephen and because Jacob was a common name, many people knew him primarily as Steffy’s Jake. He was an unusual employer and friend to our family, and we all benefitted from our association with him. I also enjoyed his wife Elizabeth, a tall, direct plain-spoken woman, totally loyal to Jake, her family and the Mennonites. Her only outside loves were for the evangelist Billy Graham and his singer George Beverly Shea.

The big fears in Lorie Gooding’s glad year were the nights after Paul Coblentz was murdered. One morning when Paul and Mattie went to Mt. Hope, they saw lots of sheriff cars parked near the Mose Coblentz farmhouse between Benton and Mt. Hope. Later that day, word soon spread of two young men having wrecked a stolen pick-up truck along Route 241; the two men struck out on foot across the field with weapons and saw light in the Coblentz window; the family was still up at about ten, getting ready for threshing wheat the following day. The two men tried to rob Paul and Dora Coblentz who lived in a basement house near their parents. Dora hovered over their 17-month old child while Paul tried to escape seeking help. He was shot in the head twice at close range and killed near the doorway.

Several nights later we went to the Mose Coblentz place for the wake. A large crowd had gathered around the house, and cars and buggies were parked all along the lane and roads. It was dark and there were only gas lanterns, and I remember following my parents, shaking hands with people in the front room and then ushered into a back room where the dead body lay in an open coffin for viewing with only the white face revealed by the lantern’s light. Visiting the Coblentz family was sad, but fear was my main emotion in the nights that followed before we knew what had happened to the men who had killed Paul Coblentz. 

Were these men still hiding somewhere near one of our farms? Even after Eugene Peters and Michael Doumoulin were apprehended in an Illinois hunting cabin, the fear remained for a twelve-year old. This was the first murder I was aware of in Holmes County, and it became a summer of fear.  I would look out the upstairs window, and I could not sleep, wondering if some wandering intruders may show up at our farm.

Peters and Doumoulin were brought back to the Holmes County jail, and in the trial Peters was convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair; Doumoulin sentenced to life in prison. About this same time, our Holmesville School which sometimes showed movies during the noon hour showed a black and white documentary of the Ohio State Penitentiary and the electric chair. A local Mennonite pastor Paul Hummel took Amish ministers and Coblentz family members to visit Peters in the prison, and the Amish and Mennonites sent letters to the governor pleading that he give the condemned man clemency which he did. Coblentz told Peters that he hoped God would forgive him. Later the case was lifted up for the nonresistance of the Amish and Mennonites in not wanting the state to kill a man in their name.

In September I took a big step in the Christian life. I was baptized along with brothers Paul and Roy by Bishop Harry Stutzman at Maple Grove Mission; actually there were eight of us Millers from three families. Freeman (1944 - 1964) and Dorothy (1943 - 1999), both now gone to their eternal reward, were children of Abe and Katie Miller of Berlin. Dorothy married David Yoder and, as we used to say, served on the mission field with Wycliffe Translators in Ecuador. This had to be one of the choicest mission assignments what with all of the faithful having read the book Through Gates of Splendor, the story of the five American young people who lost their lives trying to establish contact with the  native Ecuadorians, the Waorani people, then known to us as the Auca Indians. I must have heard this missionary story a thousand times in sermons and talks. 

Sadly, Freeman was hugely overweight, had blood clots, and died young. Freeman’s death took on esoteric interest in our community because at the time of his death a Pentecostal movement was emerging in Berlin (sometimes called the Johnny Schrock church). Oral tradition had some of these Pentecostals going to Freeman’s grave site and were trying to raise him from the dead.

Three other members of the baptismal class were the children of Eli J. Millers who lived near Beechville: Monroe, Mary, and Barbara. There were three Eli Millers at Maple Grove Mission in the fifties, and this one was called Mexican Joe’s Eli; the others were Eli J. and Eli M.  In any case, we lost track of these Millers; they did not attend Maple Grove Mission very long. My father Andrew wrote in the bulletin regarding our baptism: “We trust they will all remain faithful to God, and find joy in his service.”

Although this was a spiritual experience, it was also quite physical, and it was all mixed together. First there were about six weeks of an instruction classes getting us ready with the basic beliefs of the Christian faith and of the Mennonites; the Dortrecht Confession of Faith. One night we went into two groups the boys in the one and the girls in another one. I don’t know what Mary Stutzman told the girls, but Harry told us boys about our sexual organs, hormones and having wet dreams (and not to worry about them), and that we should remain as virgins until marriage. I often met people as an adult who said they were sexual innocents or mis-informed about sex or that it was never discussed in their family, church or community. 

I confess I did not know what they were talking about. I learned a good deal about sex from our animals mating and birthing, then there was our bathing at home in which I would glimpse my mother and father, certainly no exhibitionists, but also quite unashamed about their naked bodies. Finally, there was this kind of sacred teaching by our bishop which was quite common. Sex was generally considered natural as with the animals, often somewhat humorous as in our ribald jokes, and also to be directed and controlled by institutions such as marriage, baptism, instructions and the biblical stories (think King David and Bathsheba and the Song of Songs).    

 I got a new suit for the baptism, what we called a plain coat. We went to Freedlander’s in Wooster and bought a dark suit, and took the coat up to a Brethren in Christ seamstress in Sippo not far from Massillon to remove the lapels and convert it into a frock or a straight cut. It was the only altered straight cut coat I ever owned after we joined the Mennonites. Second, there was the physical act of our all kneeling on the floor. I remember the hard wooden floor, Harry asking if I “was truly sorry for my past sins, and willing to renounce Satan, the world, and all works of darkness, and my own carnal will and sinful desires.” On hearing me say, “I am” and then promising to submit to Christ until death, Harry folded his hands into a cup, my father pouring water into his cupped hands and then Harry rubbed the water on my hair, drops flowing down the side of my face.

After going down the row like that with all of us, Harry then started over. He took my right hand saying: “In the name of Christ and his church, I give you my hand.” “Arise!” he commanded pulling me up to my feet and continuing: “and as Christ was raised up by the glory of the Father, even so thou also shalt walk in the newness of life.” There was more about needing to stay faithful till death, and I “would be acknowledged as a member of the body of Christ and a brother in the church.” I now stood face to face with Harry, a short plump man with a little goatee beard on his chin, and I a gangling thin smooth-faced boy giving each other the right hand of fellowship and concluding with the kiss of peace, better known in our church as the holy kiss. We literally kissed each other on the cheek and Harry said briskly: “God bless you.”

This was all pretty heady and solemn stuff for a boy of who had just passed his thirteenth birthday on September 15 and was baptized a week later on September 22. Later in life I discovered that for an adult believers church such as the Mennonites I may have been baptized too early. This may be the case, and theoretically at least I’m committed to adult baptism for Mennonites. But I never really regretted my baptism, its commitments and grace, except perhaps for a few occasions when I thought I might be an agnostic. I thought I knew what I was doing and what Christ had done for me, and I was baptized with my two best friends Paul and Roy who supported me in the Christian faith the rest of my life. Anyway, it was a scary summer with our neighbor Paul Coblentz murdered, and we needed all the help and consolation we could get. 

Another important occurrence this year was my Grandmother Martha Miller’s death in April. For all practical purposes, this was the end of the Martin and Martha Miller family in our lives during my growing up years. We had joined the Mennonites, lived at the other end of the county, and were now active in the Maple Grove Mission, and they had their own gardens to till. We did not get together for family reunions, and lived in different worlds. The one exception here was my father’s sister Ida and her husband Henry Yoder who attended Maple Grove. We knew them very well during those years and did many things together, but when Maple Gove ended we never saw them again. We remained Mennonite and their family largely became part of the Berlin Christian Fellowship and various Pentecostal churches, or as we used to say “scattered to the four winds.”

In September I began my final years at Holmesville School, grade 8 with teacher Henry Troyer from Walnut Creek. Troyer already in his mid-years loved sports and was quite emotional and affectionate. I had my first love of history in his class when we studied Ohio history and we did projects of Indian customs, dress, and artifacts. We built a clay and paper mache Native American settlement and the Wooster Daily Record ran a photo in October of 1957, which has us in full Indian headdress and bow and arrows. In the photo beside me are Roy Snyder, Nancy McCluggage, Jackie Burkhart, Susie Mast, and Ben Miller.  If Mister Troyer was quite expressive in appreciation, he could also become quite angry. Henry would go to sleep after lunch, and if someone woke him up or was walking while he was sleeping, he would fly into a rage and shout at us. We would tip-toe around so as not wake him or arouse his anger.

I first ran into his emotional outbursts in sports. Henry was the basketball coach, and wanted me to play on the team. I could not partly because I was now the main farmer in charge of milking our cows (conflicting with practice and games), and I suppose some was also the negativity my father carried regarding sports. In any case, after a loss of the team one night, when I was already in the seventh grade, Henry visited our house after dark, and gave my father and mother an angry outburst for not allowing me to play and that they were the reason why his team lost that night. I would have liked to play earlier, but after hearing this outburst from the next room, I lost all interest. 

Fortunately, Henry’s hot temper whether from sleeping or basketball was short-lived and soon forgotten. Aside from basketball, Henry loved softball too and one time he had my father’s old teacher Clarence Zuercher’s school come and play us in softball. Another time the Amish vocational school near Mt. Hope (called Possum College) came to play us; Monroe Weaver, a neighbor west of Homerville was the teacher. We lost to both of them. At the end of the game with Zuercher's school, the teacher, now an elderly man, threw his hat in the air and did a somersault.    

Finally, before I leave the Holmesville School there is Roy Stallman, the principal. If ever I felt an educator gave special attention to our family’s well-being, it was Mister Stallman. But then I suppose many of the Holmesville families felt the same way. Roy Stallman was a teacher in Holmesville schools for 45 years. From 1953 until he retired in 1972, he was principal of the Holmesville Elementary School which was during most of my brothers and sisters’ school spans. Even tempered, serious, and positive, he encouraged us in our studies and provided a safe environment. He selected several of us from the seventh and eighth grade to serve as crossing guards at the school entrance onto the streets, and gave us affirmation for good safety work.  

He arranged field trips to the Cleveland and Columbus Zoo for those who won ribbons in spelling or gained other academic achievements. During the noon hour he sometimes showed films and in the winter played records and organized square dancing in the gymnasium. He was respectful of our cultural and religious diversity such as the Amish and Mennonite children who were selective in not participating in some of these activities. But perhaps the main reason I liked him was that I knew my parents also respected him as a Christian and a community leader. During the summer months, he did some house painting, as I recall.  

I realize today that my admiration of Roy Stallman was part of my assimilation into more of the cultural mainstream of American life. About this time, I for the first time became self-conscious about my Pennsylvania German or Dutch accented English, and made an effort to speak more English at home or in other settings. Our family had always been bilingual with the Dutch or Pennsylvania German spoken at home and English in the school and community, but about now I decided I should speak English better. 

I don’t think it was that some English speaking neighbors made fun of us Amish and Mennonites for speaking with a Dutch accent, although that did happen at times. Both at school and the community the Pennsylvania German was so common that it was simply assumed as a part of the cultural woodwork. Maybe it was that one of my teachers, I think maybe it was Elsie Snyder, told me that if I spoke more English, I might do better in English class. Maybe it was in part that I now thought I would go on to high school. Whatever the reason, I remember making a conscious choice to use more English and that somehow the English language was important to my future.   

The full verse: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12). The Paul Coblentz murder appears in John C. Miller’s book Tragedies along County Road 235 (Walnut Creek: Carlisle Printing, 2000). Regarding Freeman and Dorothy Miller of our baptismal class, Paul Kline gave me information in a telephone conversation on January 19, 2011. The exact words of the 1950s Mennonite baptismal ritual come from Mennonite Church Polity, which included Confession of Faith and Ministers Manual (Scottdale: Mennonite Publishing House, 1944, pages 105-108). A profile of Holmesville School principal Roy Stallman appears in his son David A. Stallman’s book Our Home Town Holmesville, Ohio (self-published, 5809 Bentley Gardens Land, Wilmington, NC 28409, 2001, pages 103-105).  

1956 Operettas and Poetry

1956  Religion, Operettas and Poetry at School. Finish Grade 6 Mrs. Foster to Grade 7 Mrs. Snyder; religion in school, the 1963 Supreme Court school prayer ruling; after lunch reading of Caddie Woodlawn; chorus from India at the Federated church; annual spring operettas; verses in School Memories book; Jackie Burkhart; Sister Miriam born April 16; the Mennonite tent evangelists Augsburger, Brunk, Jantzi and Mattie’s Christian service.

I finished grade six with Mrs. Louise Foster as teacher and started Grade seven with Mrs. Elsie Snyder. Of all the elementary school teachers, I had Mrs. Snyder stood out as the most explicitly religious, in a conservative Protestant sense. Each morning we began with the flag salute, “My country tis of thee,” and  then a Bible reading and prayer, the “Our Father” Lord’s Prayer. The Bible reading was from the King James Version, specifically. I recall occasionally she made a little speeches about the evils of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) which had been  released in 1952, the translation project sponsored by the National Council of Churches. Discussion and denunciation of The Revised Standard Version, now a full protestant Bible, and first major update from the King James Version for half a century, was in the air during those years.

Bible translations crossed my father’s radar because of our having a bookstore, and Andrew’s vivid interest in the Bible.  Already when it was first released, Andrew was quite even-handed about the new translation. Noting the noisy arguments, he counseled against making quick judgments but to allow history and time to determine the Revised Standard translation’s value. My own childhood interest in translations was much less noble, what with some bias to the King James Version’s earthy references to “him that pisseth against the wall.”  A boyhood diversion during long sermons was to look up the pisseth verses such as 2 Kings 9:8 verse and pass it to a friend. Later in my life as a church and curriculum editor, selecting Bible translations was often part of my life. But back to the Mrs. Snyder and religion.

Noting Elsie Snyder’s explicit piety, is not to say that the other teachers were not religious and Christian, they simply that they did not talk about their faith in quite as explicit a way. Most of this religion in the school was of a benign character, protected by the free exercise of religion in the United States constitution, but this approach was soon to change. During most of my adult life I lived with the US Supreme court ruling declaring that school sponsored prayer and Bible reading are unconstitutional. The Abington Township School District v. Schempp decision (1963) decision came from a school district north of Philadelphia where a Unitarian Universalist parent  Edward Schempp objected to a prescribed Bible reading of 10 verses each morning in his son Ellery’s classes.

At that time, Pennsylvania state law included a statute compelling school districts to perform Bible readings in the mornings before class. The court ruled that state sanctioned prayer and Bible reading violated the first amendment that government shall not establish religion. The court not only ruled against a state prescribed prayer and Bible reading, it also ruled against the expression of religious piety in the public schools. Justice William J. Brennan's majority opinion noted the common practice of public prayers and some religious sentiment in government life and the specific prohibition of establishing a state church. But he argued for updating a more expansive interpretation which the court felt was appropriate for an increasingly pluralistic twentieth-century America. For example, he noted the problem of which scripture should be singled out whether the Protestant King James, the Catholic Vulgate, or the Hebrew Talmud.

It was a strong ruling by the majority, and only Justice Potter Stewart filed a dissent in the case, noting the long practice of religious expression in public life in the United States, such as Senate prayers, and some permeability regarding religion and public life. Several years ago I attended a Westmoreland County law meeting with my friend James Lederach in which New York University professor Stephen D. Solomon spoke on the history of the case based on his book entitled Ellery’s Protest: How One Young Man Defied Tradition and Sparked the Battle over School Prayer (University of Michigan Press, 2007). 

During the questions, a student quoted Potter Stewart: “If religious exercises are held to be an impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed in an artificial and state-created disadvantage. And a refusal to permit religious exercises thus is seen, not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism, or at least, as governmental support of the beliefs of those who think that religious exercises should be conducted only in private.” 

Although the 1963 ruling made good sense in striking down prescribed prayers and religious activities in schools, it seemed to me it went too far especially as it was interpreted in subsequent decades. Hence, I often ran into this ruling as a school board member when our district was nervous about the possibility of a law suit about such practices of having a Bible club in school or having ministers or priests pray at public school events such as Commencement. The practical end of the ruling was to eliminate ministers, priests and rabbis, which has led to the nationalization of school ceremonies. Without religious ceremonies, we have simply added to the military color guard and national emblems of opening and closing ceremonies.

In the daily life of schools the elimination of the religious standards has led to a coarsening of morality (to pure functionalism) and the emergence of an exotic religiosity. In our school, some zealous students now did voluntary morning prayers around the flag pole, and other students started a Bible club. The net effect was to reduce the role of the Christian religion in the public schools to the equivalent of a butterfly, Wicca, or ski club. Whatever was gained in ensuring that Christianity does not become America’s state religion (a worthy goal), there were also losses in a religiously naked public square. That the two biggest 20^th century experiments in secularism turned to religious nationalism (the Third Reich and the Soviet Union) were hardly re-assuring.   

But it was not the morning Bible reading which I remember most; I after all, got a lot of Bible reading at home and at church, but the books which Mrs. Snyder read after our noon recess. I’ll mention the context; I would often return from noon recess all wet under a sweat-drenched shirt as we played rabbit or softball in the fall and spring and basketball and dodge ball in the gymnasium in the winter. We played vigorously and hard and then it was refreshing to simply start the afternoon with a story, and this is what Mrs. Foster did, a chapter each day.

You could put your head down on the desk and rest, and hear and see the story in your mind. One book she read was Caddie Woodlawn, about a frontier girl in Wisconsin, living in about the 1860s. Caddie was a tomboy who went swimming with the boys, developed friendships with the neighboring Indians, and loved to do things outside in nature. I later learned that Carol Ryrie Brink's Caddie was based on her grandmother’s life and the book was a John Newberry Medal winner in 1936. But whether it was the quality of the literature or simply the luxury of having a half hour to rest after noon recess, Mrs. Foster’s oral reading made it a memorable time.

It was also about this time that I had my first introduction to international expressions of Christianity. A choir from India, probably sponsored by the Methodist foreign mission offices, travelled through the United States and stopped at the Federated (Presbyterian-Methodist) Church in Holmesville. Our family went to the concert and loved the singing; this was Indian sounding music with Christian lyrics, and we were enchanted with the strange sound; these were not simply Western tunes in the Hindi language but veritable Indian melodies which I had never heard before. The day after the concert, some of the choir members visited my father‘s bookstore, and we received a 33 long-playing record of the group which we played constantly.

“U tally bat ban; u tally bat ban; u tally bat ban; wannee, banaban, u tally bat ban.” To this day, I have no idea what the words meant, and our pronunciation was probably so far removed from the original, that even an Indian reading this would have no idea what might have been sung. But it was beautiful to us, and these were real Indians who I had only seen in the World Book encyclopedia, and they reminded me of an exotic land far away, of the Christian faith being universal. That concert gave meaning to India, and years later in college when I read E.M. Forester’s A Passage to India, I still heard that choir in the background.    

Another unusual world we experienced at the Holmesville School was on stage along the side of the gymnasium. Every spring our school would do a musical. We called them operettas, directed by our music teacher Mrs. Emerson Dilgard. Mrs. Dilgard visited our school once a week, and we looked forward to these annual musical and dramatic events when we would perform for our parents and neighbors. The music often had melodies from the classical tradition such as one we did on the bears and the bees with lyrics to the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák’s piano cycle the “Humoresques.”  We dressed as bears and bees, stepping across the stage singing:  

When the Bears get very funny,

And they steal the golden honey.

To their lairs they softly creep away.

Quickly then the bees will chase them

And the bears will have to face

For their mischief, they will pay.

Another operetta we did was a who-done-it thriller featuring the world’s renowned detective Tip-toe Pete:

When Tip-toe Pete comes down the street,

There’s always something brewing.

I kept a Wooster Daily Record photo of one the seventh and eighth graders did in April of 1957 called “The Dream Ranch.” There I am in full western cowboy hat, bandana and guitar and my brother Roy and Harry (Junior) Hostetler alongside. Center stage is a tall ranching dude Billy Hites holding a gun and greeting some eastern (surely urbane) visitors: Peggy Painter, Emily Shaw and Alice Ramseyer.

If the operettas had classical tunes which our children and grandchildren generations later played at piano and violin recitals, and Mrs. Snyder read us good literature from the Bible and books, not all our writing was as elevated. School life and writings had earthy elements which are recorded in a little book “School Memories” of Prairie Local Elementary (Holmesville) 1956-57. The booklet has photos of our principal Roy Stallman, our teacher Elsie Snyder, classmates, and then some "autographs" which turn out to be ribald, humorous verse. Almost all of these begin with “Dear Levi” or the Pennsylvania German: “Ve Gates Levi” and end with “your pal” and the name which I will spare both you and my classmates. This is a sampling of my school friends’ good wishes:  

When you get married 

And live in the city

Don't forget to remind your wife

to give the baby titty.

Roses are red

Violets are blue.

God made me beautiful

What happened to you?

Geese in the millpond

Ducks in the ocean.

Levi can't get married 

Till Jackie gets a notion.

When you have a girlfriend

And think she's sweet.

Take off her shoes 

And smell her feet.

Out behind the chicken house

Down on my knees

I just about died laughing

To see Levi and Jackie squeeze. 

Down by the river

Carved on a rock.

Are these little words:

For-Get-Me-Not.  

The night was gray

The sky was blue

When down the alley

A shit wagon flew.

A crack was hit 

A cry was heard

Levi was killed

By the flying turd.

That last one was written by my good brother Roy. Sometimes at the bottom of the page, a PS is attached to these notes with “Yours till the bull gives shaving cream.” Or some variation of this friendly thought: the bull may also be a cow and the shaving cream may be cottage cheese. And we’ll identify Jackie. I was romantically linked to Jackie Burkhart during this year, and as I recall so were a number of my friends (Billy, Melvin, Larry, Roy). The Burkhart family had moved into our school district west of Holmesville, and Jackie was new, attractive and friendly. Anyway, Jackie somehow survived all this attention, may even have enjoyed some of it, and did not seem to hold it against our family over the years. Jackie and her husband Keith Woodruff have been friends of our family doctors: Roy and Hannah.  

In the meantime, our family was growing, and little Miriam was born on April 16. Now, there were seven of us; Paul was approaching his teens and we boys were old enough to know the origins of babies. Sometimes we even speculated as to whether Miriam was the last one. Our mother Mattie ever the pragmatic one however would only address this question in the most mystical terms. However many children God would give her, she would be thankful, she often said. If that explanation seemed unnecessarily opaque to me at the time, it was surely as authentic as anything my mother said in her life. 

During these years, various tent revivals visited our community. In June of 1955, we attended the young Myron Augsburger’s tent meetings sponsored by an organization called Christian Layman’s Evangelistic Association, and several years later (1959) George R. Brunk (1911-2002) and his family rolled into Holmes County with large semi-trucks and mobile homes. The Brunk and Augsburger tents were at the bottom field of the Joe Miller farm hill just west of Berlin. The other evangelist who visited was Andrew Jantzi from Alden, New York, and his tent was pitched at Bunker Hill. He also brought along the lovely music of the Gingerich Sisters of Hartville, Ohio. 

These evangelists gave invitations for people to make public confessions, called decisions for Christ (more on these later), but during a campaign there would also be a special meeting for persons to dedicate their lives in Christian service. The ultimate in this kind of Christian service was to go the Amazon region of Brazil to convert the natives, but there were all kinds of lesser service whether IW alternative service to the military, voluntary service with a mission agency, Sunday school teaching, or helping at a mission station in Coshocton or our Maple Grove Mission.

But these evangelists were also sturdy Mennonite fathers, and at the dedication service they would tell a story of a mother with seven little children behind her who came up to the evangelist, confessing that she had no calling and could not see herself going to the Amazon to convert the natives, at least not in the near future. So the evangelist asked the mother, “Well, now sister, how many children do you have?” And her answer was seven and another one on the way. “Ah,” the evangelist said, “then you do have your calling. You raise those eight children in the Lord, and you’ll have done as much Christian service as any missionary, teacher or preacher.” Whether it was Brunk, Jantzi, or Augsburger or all of them who told this story or some variation of it, I don’t remember, but I do know I heard it various times, and I remember my mother Mattie repeating it as gospel truth.      

As a post-script I met George R. Brunk years later at Laurelville Mennonite Church Center when Brunk, now in his eighth decade, and some of the younger leaders were debating over church controversies. I was sympathetic with the elder Brunk, if for no other reason than that he seemed like an old King Lear raging on a heath, and we all knew how tragic the play would end. Anyway, I went up to Brunk and told him the above story and how much it meant to my mother Mattie, and my appreciation for his honoring her Christian service. 

Brunk acknowledged this comment as graciously as he could, but I had the clear impression from his response that he felt I was another young Turk insulting him with faint praise and wanting to remind him of his earlier hay seed revivalism. Brunk was now a retired seminary dean and was trying to straighten us out regarding the nature of Christ, the Trinity and Anabaptist biblical interpretation. But whatever the misunderstandings, my appreciation was heartfelt; I always thought we as Mattie’s children were the happy beneficiaries of a woman who saw her home and family as Christian service.  

Much of this comes from my memory, and the Seventh Grade “School Memory” book of verses was in a school file which my mother kept of these years. The basic facts and dates of the 1963 Supreme Court decision regarding prayer and Bible reading in the public schools was gathered from Wikopedia. Andrew A. Miller’s comments on the Revised Standard Version appeared in Herald der Wahrheit, January 1, 1953, page 2. The photos and story of the Holmesville School operetta “The Dream Ranch” appeared in the Wooster Daily Record, April 22, 1957.