After my last issue, titled Vigilance and Vigilantes, I did get some reaction from a few people who are still active in preserving the Yarrow Mennonite story. I thank them now for communicating with the old man. There comments and recollections brought home the fact that my family was not the only one with community relationship problems then.
From the late twenties through the forties and into the fifties in what I have icalled the Village Theocracy of my youth the strains and conflicts between the generations that are always in evidence seemed even more extreme in that place.
They were more difficult because of the congregational effort to remain separate, apart, different and unworldly—a really tough job for first generation kids like the old man, always exposed to the surrounding community culture, if only through the public school. They were further exacerbated by the approach and start of World War II.
I was still with my family in the hop harvest, living in one of the Golding Farm cabins at Sardis when Hitler invaded Poland at the beginning of September 1939. Later that month I started bussing to Chilliwack Central School with all the other Yarrow kids. There we suffered the slings and arrows of being squareheads. Many of my bus mates still reverted to their Low German on the way to and from home and Sardis kids picked up on the way from Yarrow complained about that to the teachers. I can still visualize my classmate, Peter Ewert (later an eminent horticulturist), and me waiting for our bus after school, when Ivan Wells, a particularly aggressive logger’s son from Sardis, came up to Pete, saying, “Well, squarehead, wanna fight?” Pete answered, true to his non-violent heritage, “No thank you, not today”. Well, we were only twelve years old!
A visit to the Elmer Wiens yarrow.ca web pages also reminded the old man that he is not kidding when he calls this website The Old Man’s Post. It took me a whole evening to go through that site’s list of deaths to read the short biographies of just those whose names I thought I remembered from my Yarrow days in the thirties and early forties. I found that far too many of the kids I associated with in grades 1 to 6 in Carl Wilson’s elementary school at Yarrow until 1939 are listed among those obituaries, though I remembered them as stronger, more athletic, more popular and more aggressive than I ever managed to be.
After reading the Johannes and Tina Harder story and reading the current views of those who responded to my review, I was particularly struck by the fact that the young children of MB Church members who were shunned at congregational meetings, were also shunned by other children at school. If that instruction went out to my school acquaintances, I never became aware of it. Perhaps that was because I was basically a loner by nature and had simply refused to attend most church functions by the mid thirties.
What does surprise me, however, is that none of the church elders or preachers or Sunday school or German school teachers, including Preacher Harder, ever followed up on my spiritual welfare or lack of it. Many of the boys I knew experienced conversions, temporary or otherwise, though I never observed much change in their behaviour after the event. That reminds me of a comment from my older brother when he was manager of the Haas Hop Company at Sardis in the fifties and sixties. As foreman and manager he had hired many Yarrow employees for various seasonal field work jobs in which they used company tools and supplies. A percentage of that seemed to disappear as workers borrowed the stuff for personal use at their homes. Not infrequently, when MB members were converted, they approached him in his office to beg forgiveness for taking things that didn’t belong to them. They got the forgiveness but he didn’t recall once that any of them offered to make restitution.
So much for nostalgia! It is altogether too much with us old men, when our association with the current world and community events becomes almost non-existent. I am hoping that with this issue, I can leave those Yarrow days behind, and concentrate more on what is going on around me rather than re-live those long ago days, both the good ones and the not so good ones.
From the late twenties through the forties and into the fifties in what I have icalled the Village Theocracy of my youth the strains and conflicts between the generations that are always in evidence seemed even more extreme in that place.
They were more difficult because of the congregational effort to remain separate, apart, different and unworldly—a really tough job for first generation kids like the old man, always exposed to the surrounding community culture, if only through the public school. They were further exacerbated by the approach and start of World War II.
I was still with my family in the hop harvest, living in one of the Golding Farm cabins at Sardis when Hitler invaded Poland at the beginning of September 1939. Later that month I started bussing to Chilliwack Central School with all the other Yarrow kids. There we suffered the slings and arrows of being squareheads. Many of my bus mates still reverted to their Low German on the way to and from home and Sardis kids picked up on the way from Yarrow complained about that to the teachers. I can still visualize my classmate, Peter Ewert (later an eminent horticulturist), and me waiting for our bus after school, when Ivan Wells, a particularly aggressive logger’s son from Sardis, came up to Pete, saying, “Well, squarehead, wanna fight?” Pete answered, true to his non-violent heritage, “No thank you, not today”. Well, we were only twelve years old!
A visit to the Elmer Wiens yarrow.ca web pages also reminded the old man that he is not kidding when he calls this website The Old Man’s Post. It took me a whole evening to go through that site’s list of deaths to read the short biographies of just those whose names I thought I remembered from my Yarrow days in the thirties and early forties. I found that far too many of the kids I associated with in grades 1 to 6 in Carl Wilson’s elementary school at Yarrow until 1939 are listed among those obituaries, though I remembered them as stronger, more athletic, more popular and more aggressive than I ever managed to be.
After reading the Johannes and Tina Harder story and reading the current views of those who responded to my review, I was particularly struck by the fact that the young children of MB Church members who were shunned at congregational meetings, were also shunned by other children at school. If that instruction went out to my school acquaintances, I never became aware of it. Perhaps that was because I was basically a loner by nature and had simply refused to attend most church functions by the mid thirties.
What does surprise me, however, is that none of the church elders or preachers or Sunday school or German school teachers, including Preacher Harder, ever followed up on my spiritual welfare or lack of it. Many of the boys I knew experienced conversions, temporary or otherwise, though I never observed much change in their behaviour after the event. That reminds me of a comment from my older brother when he was manager of the Haas Hop Company at Sardis in the fifties and sixties. As foreman and manager he had hired many Yarrow employees for various seasonal field work jobs in which they used company tools and supplies. A percentage of that seemed to disappear as workers borrowed the stuff for personal use at their homes. Not infrequently, when MB members were converted, they approached him in his office to beg forgiveness for taking things that didn’t belong to them. They got the forgiveness but he didn’t recall once that any of them offered to make restitution.
So much for nostalgia! It is altogether too much with us old men, when our association with the current world and community events becomes almost non-existent. I am hoping that with this issue, I can leave those Yarrow days behind, and concentrate more on what is going on around me rather than re-live those long ago days, both the good ones and the not so good ones.
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