At that time, the school that I went to was a two-room school. Now we’re talking in the 60s because President Kennedy died, he was shot, and so I mean that really is pretty modern and yet I was going to school with kids that had no electric.

We were on a bus route for probably an hourly route. Kindergarten through twelve was all on one bus. In Northern Michigan there could be 10 feet of snow at times.
There was a time one year, Dad came home one time after going between churches and told the people that he had seen a bear. They said, “No, it must have been a dog,” or whatever. “We haven’t had bears around here for years,” and then gradually somebody else spotted this and they found paw prints and stuff. We literally couldn’t go out and play at recess because this bear was out there and so they would keep you in at recess. I was in third, fourth and fifth grade at that time.

That’s what I did up there, and there were probably only four or five kids in each grade. So, there were probably three grades in each room. Even now if I tell people it sounds like Walton’s Mountain almost. It was very primitive for the time and Dad put a lot of miles on going between those three churches.

Then after that we moved in the middle of my fifth grade year. We came down and moved to Archbold, Ohio. Dad accepted that call because the schools in Michigan weren’t accredited and my sister was very good in school and had her visions on going to college. However, she needed to be graduated from an accredited high school in order to get in anywhere good, since she had such good grades. The move was as much for that as it was for anything else, although it was time to move on.

I can think of stories I left out about the three churches already but it’s alright. Archbold was a very different town because it was probably 90% Mennonite. It was the most difficult place to move into and it was the most difficult place to move out of. The Mennonites are very clannish and they don’t necessarily just take you in and accept you.

They were very strict. If you were going to come in and try to change their ways they were not the least bit interested in having anything to do with you.

I mean, in Archbold they didn’t care whether or not the government said you could pray or have church services. You prayed. If you didn’t want to pray every morning you at least shut up, and each holiday they had a religious service. They had a number of ministers come in and there would be a religious service. You didn’t have to participate but you would sit there and you would shut up, and there really was never any problem. Everybody went and was just accepted. Everybody knew the songs and they used…

But once you broke in, once you made friends and once they realized you weren’t there to change their ways or proselyte them or whatever they were a very giving and a very loving community, and they were a very close-knit community and they took care of their people.

I was in fifth grade through junior high. My sister finished high school there. But then, to leave that community once they had accepted you, that was very difficult because you knew you were going to have to start over someplace else, and it was very hard to leave. We’d made friends that were going to be lifelong friends to this day. We go back there to funerals or we stay in touch, or Dad’s had funerals for people in the last couple years that they wanted him to do it. Things like that.