Bluffton was very much Mennonite-oriented, and still is. I was married in the Ebenezer Church there that’s west of Bluffton. When I was very small I have a very vivid memory of the fact that they took the sanctuary and redid it and made it bigger. They had taken it apart and they had services in the church on a Sunday morning and you could see all the rafters and there was no roof or anything that particular Sunday. Now that’s strange but that memory sticks with me. Then it was rebuilt.

At that church one Sunday a month they would preach in German. I was there but I had no clue what was going on but I kind of listened. Those songs were in German because there were older people that didn’t understand English very much and they wanted to hear everything in German.

I never really learned the German as you would have in Germany. I have a cousin that they speaks Swiss in the house all the time, and when I call her, or she will call me and invariably she will speak in Swiss and I respond in part, but very little. But, if I was in the house for a week I could fall right back into it.

I remember very distinctly, I had an aunt that was the youngest in my mother’s family and she was going to college in Columbus. She was quite active and she didn’t really appreciate talking Swiss. When she’d come home she wouldn’t be able to say the phrases. We always kind of thought she was a snob, but now I know she wasn’t a snob at all she just couldn’t remember it because she wasn’t practicing it. It’s like any language, you have to practice.