We’ve invited a series of guest writers to share about how CPE training has shaped their life and ministry. Join us at a celebration during the January 2020 School for Leadership Training. To learn more, visit /seminary/slt/

Read reflections by Anne Weaver and Shawn Gerber.

***

Melanie K. Lewis MDiv ‘14  is lead chaplain for Valley Health System’s six hospitals. 

Eastern Mennonite’s CPE program changed the trajectory of my career aspirations, entirely. I began seminary as a postulant for ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. Congregational ministry was where I saw myself, and that call had been affirmed by my sending parish and by my denomination.

 A summer unit of CPE, which I did between the first and second years of seminary, is required for ordination in my denomination. Like many Episcopal seminarians, I initially saw this as a requirement to “get through,” and one that wouldn’t have much to do with my ministry. I was like many people going into the training, in that I didn’t understand that CPE is not just concerned with learning to function in a clinical environment. I didn’t realize that it would be learning about myself and how God was connecting me to other people. I did my clinical rotations in a level II trauma center, and experienced a summer of trauma, crisis and death. I remember telling my husband at the end of that summer, “Being a hospital chaplain is amazing work, but I could never do it. It’s just too hard.”

Over time, however, I realized that God was calling me to this “too hard” ministry. Initially I resisted it, because people’s emotions affect me greatly; I couldn’t imagine putting myself in the way of peoples’ crises on a regular basis. I also didn’t appreciate so many of the hard questions that we had to ask ourselves through the training; after all, it’s not usually easy to see one’s faults. CPE was extremely humbling for me. I did take more units of CPE as I finished my Master of Divinity, however, eventually completing four.

Over time, I learned to know myself in ways that I would never have been able to do otherwise – to see my own neediness and anxiety and to recognize my various emotional triggers. In knowing these things, I was better able to to put them aside, and focus on the person/s in front of me, and to honor their needs. I also learned self-care that enabled me to be resilient, and God made me stronger through the many events that I experienced. CPE equipped me for the ministry of meeting people where they are in traumatic or critical situations, and walking with them, supporting them emotionally and spiritually, and sitting with them in their pain.

Today I am the lead chaplain of a six-hospital system. I simply would not be qualified for this job without my CPE training. I divide my time between my leadership and training duties, and supporting patients, families, and staff – mostly in the four Intensive Care Units of our main trauma center. Much of my pastoral care time is spent doing things like supporting those who have made the hard decision to remove life support from a loved one, or who have lost someone in a trauma.

 I am more grateful to Kenton and Penny than I can express. Their patience, insight and wisdom has challenged me in ways that helped me to grow in completely unexpected ways. As they move the program into its next 20 years, I have two hopes for CPE: that it can continue to grow, and that it can become more affordable. I would also recommend that at least half a unit be required for the Master of Divinity degree. Everyone engaged in ministry (or any work at all!) would benefit from the training provided through CPE.

Melanie Lewis was born in Germany to American parents. She and her younger brother grew up all over the U.S. and Europe, traveling as a result of their father’s Air Force career. The Lutheran Church was her foundational community; she was baptized at the family church in Norway, confirmed in Worms, and grew up serving her church in every way she could. 

As an undergraduate, she attended Sewanee: The University of the South, and was exposed to the Episcopal Church. As a result of that influence, she fell in love with the Episcopal Church, and became Episcopalian after her marriage to her husband Richard. Before experiencing a mid-life call to ministry, Melanie had an academic career, teaching comparative literature and medieval studies, and serving in university leadership. She graduated from EMS in 2014. In addition to her lead chaplaincy position for Valley Health System’s six hospitals, she also serves Christ Episcopal Church in Millwood, Virginia, where she preaches once a month. Melanie and Richard have a grown son and daughter, and live in Winchester, Virginia.

“Just having this little piece of the woods to come and kind of escape to was so valuable to me,” senior Bekah Mongold ˛ő˛šžąťĺ.Ěý

She’d come to ˛ÝÝŽÉçÇř from Mathias, West Virginia – “I am very much not a city girl, so living in Harrisonburg was like a culture shock to me,” she said – and the 13-acre woods nestled between the EMU’s Park Wood Apartments and track and the Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community (VMRC) reminded her of her rural home.

However, the more time that Mongold spent in Park Woods – not only for respite but also as part of her spring semester studies – the more she realized that not everything about the woods was as it should – or could – be. 

Mongold and five other students taking the spring environmental sustainability capstone course focused their research on the woods, and presented findings and proposals during the EMU Academic and Creative Excellence Festival in April.

“It makes me a little bit sad cause like I know when you when you just walk through, you think, ‘Oh, it’s so green! It’s so pretty!’ And then when you start noticing what is green, it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s maybe not quite as healthy as it should be,’” she said.

The urban forest offers space for immersing oneself in nature, seeking spiritual renewal, learning about the environment and running, hiking and playing. But as Mongold and her classmates learned, it also encapsulates the sometimes-problematic interactions of social and ecological systems.

A live project

Assessing the ecological needs of the wood’s flora and fauna and the broader community was a “live project,” applied social sciences professor Jenni Holsinger said, that involved “real research and real problems that come along with the research process.” 

Mongold and fellow senior Nidhi Vinod assessed forest management needs and possibilities in Park Woods, while Ethan Mathews and John Dudley focused on water management, and Victoria Barnes and Xander Silva mapped the stakeholders.

Park Woods is plagued with the invasive bush honeysuckle, plus emerald ash borer, which has caused the death of nearly all of the ash trees there. It also faces frequent flooding from rainfall runoff from elevated surroundings; a diversion dike along its southeast edge retains water in order to prevent flooding of and the dispersion of sediments into the Harrisonburg creek Blacks Run.

Along with the dead ash trees, that flooding threatens or destroys parts of the Park Woods walking path, a winding trail that, along with the fire circle, the pavilion, and, in years past, Park Cabin, is responsible for attracting many of the woods’ stakeholders: VMRC residents, nearby community members, Eastern Mennonite School students, and EMU alumni and student groups. One alumni group, Friends of Park Woods, was organized a few years ago by Paul Lehman and Professor Emeritus Kenton Brubaker and has done much to bring attention to the plight of the woods. 

Moving forward

The capstone students pointed to possible interventions in Park Woods, including community volunteers and even goats to remove invasive plant species. 

For water management, defining waterways and constructing a wet pond would make the woods both more healthy and attractive, said Mathews, with the pond in particular becoming “a nice place for anybody to come enjoy.”

Even with a limited budget, Barnes said, small improvements – in signage, for example – would promote student use of the woods. And adding bathrooms in Park Cabin would benefit guests, as well.

Intervening, though, takes balance, said Silva. 

“I think the biggest thing I learned was finding the line between maximum utility of a space and keeping it a natural ecosystem,” he said. “There are a lot of things that we could do here that would make it a lot more appealing for students and just humans in general, but I also think there are a lot of things that are really special about this place that we really shouldn’t change. … you kind of have to step back and say this space has its own ideas of what it wants to do, and that has to be taken into account.”

“I would like to come back in 10 years and seeing more than just honeysuckle and ivy,” Mongold ˛ő˛šžąťĺ.Ěý

That may be doable – but other hopes are less likely.

“I would really like to see some ash trees through here,” she added, “but I don’t think that’s possible.”

“It is an honor that you’ve come to visit us,” Martin said, clasping the hands of 98-year-old Amos J. Yoder.

“Oh, don’t make too much of it,” said Yoder with a grin.

Much was made of Yoder’s visit, the first time he had set foot on campus since graduating in 1954. He may be EMU’s oldest living graduate.

There was a reason Yoder left campus right after commencement and crossed four states quickly heading west, according to daughter Rebecca Barbo, who lives in nearby Dayton.

While at EMC, Yoder was trading letters back and forth with an Amish woman named Sara Miller. “It was the confirmed bachelor courting the confirmed bachelorette,” said Rebecca. “She was a trained nurse. It was quite unusual at that time among the Amish to be single at her age, but she was her own woman.”

The couple married in June 1954 in Iowa. Yoder began a long teaching career in the midwest, the couple raised six children, and he just never managed to make it back to Virginia.

Rebecca says her father always carried fond memories of his time in Harrisonburg. “He’s an intellectual, always thinking about something, so being here and having the chance to study and learn was really important to him.

“When I was growing up, he would tell us these stories about coming here and going to school, and it was almost other-worldly, the way he described it, with this sort of ethereal beauty. It was a very important place to him. I knew that when I was able to convince him to come and visit me that we would have to come back.”

Last week, Yoder traveled from his home in Grove City, Minnesota, to visit Rebecca and her husband, who recently returned from nearly 20 years living overseas.

“Up until last summer, Dad was living alone, milking his goats every day,” she said. Rebecca’s mother had died in 2013. “Can you imagine? In the Minnesota winter? So he moved in with my brother and since my brother has a new grandbaby on the east coast he wanted to visit, I said, ‘This is perfect timing. Dad, come and see me.’”

One of four Amish students in the class of 1954

Yoder and his daughter were greeted by a delegation of EMU alumni relations representatives and former classmates, including Doris A. Bomberger and her husband James ’55, Ruth L. Burkholder, Kenton K. Brubaker, and Martin.

“Have you noticed anything’s changed?” asked Laban Peachey, who was dean of students in 1954 when the campus consisted of an awkward-looking “Ad Building” with mismatched additions on each end, Lehman Auditorium, the lower levels of Northlawn which was under construction, an exercise hall (now storage building) north of Northlawn, and a brick observatory on the top of a barren hill. Park Woods cabin was the student recreation area.

“It’s not too familiar anymore,” Yoder remarked, smiling.

When Yoder came to what was then still Eastern Mennonite College in 1949, he was 33 years old. It wasn’t just his age that set him apart.

Martin, his former classmate, says he remembers Yoder on campus because he was one of four Amish students. Although Yoder appears in the 1954 class photo, the Amish aversion to being photographed is reflected in the absence of his individual portrait among the senior class in Shenandoah, the college yearbook. (The 1954 class had 52 students, 48 of whom were Mennonite,  including two Japanese students, Itoko Maeda and Taizo Tanimoto, and Harrisonburg native Margaret “Peggy” Webb, the first African-American graduate of EMC).

Six years of service with MCC in the 1940s

Unlike most of his classmates, Yoder was also old enough to have his life completely disrupted by World War II.  He was born in an Amish farming community near Weatherford, Oklahoma, and expected to live there for the rest of his life.

But in 1941, at age 25 and still unmarried, Yoder was drafted.

To accommodate conscientious objectors like Yoder and nearly 12,000 others, the U.S. government created the Civilian Public Service (CPS), an alternative to military service that provided draftees the opportunity to work on tasks “of national importance.” Many of these projects were agriculture or natural resources-related, though some served in public health or relief work. (For a story about EMU alumni who worked in mental hospitals under CPS, click .)

The majority of CPS participants were Mennonite and Brethren, and most of the camps were operated by agencies linked to the “peace church” tradition: Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), Brethren Service Committee and American Friends Service Committee.

Yoder served in Colorado Springs for four years with two MCC-operated units attached to the Soil Conservation Service. When he was discharged in late 1945, war-torn Europe was awash with a flood of refugees.

“I was given the opportunity by MCC to enter relief work and I decided maybe I could help somewhere,” Yoder said, “so I volunteered and was sent to Paraguay for two years.”

MCC purchased two large tracts of land, on which eventually settled more than 4,800 refugees within what became the Volendam and Neuland colonies. This added to the sizable population of Mennonites that had been living in Paraguay since 1928.

After his service with MCC in Paraguay, having plenty of practice speaking German with refugees, Yoder arrived on campus to continue his language studies.

A life of teaching and farming

In 1954, newly graduated and newly wed, Yoder spent 13 years teaching in Iowa in Amish schools. Rebecca, who was taught in a one-room schoolhouse by her father, says one of his professional goals was to improve and reform the Amish school system. Most teachers only had an eighth-grade education, she said, and her father brought not only pedagogical training but also life experience to the sheltered classrooms he taught in.

During summers off from teaching in the Amish schools, he attended Iowa State University for five sessions and earned a master’s degree in education.

“Then I decided to have a little change,” he said, “and I found employment with the Hutterites at Birch Creek Colony in Montana. That was something of an undertaking. I had to learn to think like a Hutterite and that takes some doing, me being an Amishman. But it worked out and we got along just fine.”

Yoder and his family moved to Glacier Colony, a Hutterite community near the Canadian border, the following year, followed by a return to Amish schools in Iowa and Ohio. He retired from teaching in 1972 and moved to Minnesota, where he still resides.

His educational experience at EMC was “one of the high points of my life,” Yoder recalled, as he leaned on his cane in the president’s reception room at the campus center, surrounded by eager listeners. “It did influence me. Very much.”

“A classroom this size is now a rarity at EMU,” observed , who was a student in SC-106 when it was brand-new and who studied under each of the professors on the panel. “Smaller classes are the norm now.” Lehman, who chaired the that moved to the science center in 1981, retired earlier this year. He earned his PhD in applied experimental psychology at Virginia Tech University.

Most of the professors on the panel arrived at EMU, fresh out of graduate school, around the time the state-of-the-art building, with its domed planetarium, opened in 1968. All six were EMU alumni. The science center had not yet been named for , longtime biology professor and pre-med advisor who retired in 1985 and died in 2006.

“The highlight of my career was working with all these people,” said Joe Mast, looking fondly at the row of colleagues to his right. “We formed quite a community.”

The six professors were a good fit for a small college, where they had to teach a variety of courses. But they were also a product of a college where they were encouraged to delve into a variety of subjects. Many of them were on faculty teams that taught “IDS” (interdisciplinary studies) courses that were required of all students in the 1970s.

, who earned his PhD in plant ecology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, taught almost every science-related course, at one time or another, that didn’t have “human anatomy” or “physiology” in its title. “I even taught a nutrition course,” he said. Over the years he became an expert on ornithology, the study of birds. For 25 years he was the curator of the in the science center.

Kenton Brubaker, with a PhD in horticulture from Ohio State University, branched out to , biochemistry, genetics, ecology and agriculture. “I taught a course on cell biology, which was new to me but very exciting,” he said. “Years later I saw a former student who got a PhD in cell biology from Harvard. He said my course started his quest in the field.”

“None of my nutrition students got a Harvard PhD in nutrition,” retorted Mellinger.

One of Brubaker’s primary interests was international agriculture, fostered by a three-year teaching term in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1960s with . Another interest that he pursued, beginning in the early 1970s, was environmental studies and conservation. He and Mellinger helped start a campus organization called that continues to this day.

Brubaker, the oldest of the retiree group, joined the EMU faculty in 1959. The others came during the 1960s and early 1970s.

The Suter Science panel discussion, coinciding with the , attracted alumni who had studied in the building and sat in the professors’ classes.

Millard Showalter, who earned an EdD from the University of Virginia, taught in the mathematical sciences department. He followed five simple teaching principles: be enthusiastic, use humor, always be prepared for class, use praise, and demonstrate a sincere interest in each student.

In his “Math and the Liberal Arts” course, he had a standing invitation for students to earn an automatic “A” by showing how they could take a plain sheet of paper and fold it eight times. For years, no one met the challenge. Showalter felt it was not humanly possible to fold a paper that many times. Finally, a student showed up one day with a tiny lump of paper that he had folded eight times. The student was – and Showalter looked to his left on the panel – Lehman, who worked part-time at a machine shop and used a mechanized press to aid him.

Glenn Kauffman, with a PhD in physical organic chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, marveled at the equipment improvements in his department over the years. “It’s amazing that we never had a major fire in the chemistry labs in the early years,” he said. “And the organic chemistry lab used to be the smelliest place in the building.”

Kauffman is most proud of “developing a culture of research” among his students. He devoted much of his own time – in addition to a full teaching load – to conducting research with students. Sometimes the research was in collaboration with James Madison University, across town, with grants from the National Science Foundation.

Joseph Mast juggled his interests in , , astronomy and . His PhD from the University of Virginia was in astronomy, but he was also trained in the other areas. He was an early student and then early instructor in computers. For 20 years he was director of EMU’s M.T. Brackbill Planetarium, enjoying his interaction with school children who came to his planetarium shows.

“My favorite course was astronomy,” he said. “When students would excitedly find Orion in the sky – that was great.”

And when, a decade later, that cornfield on the east side of campus sprouted a science building, capped with a prominent white dome to accommodate a then-state-of-the-art planetarium, those chemicals were carted down to the new laboratory supply closets, in the characteristic spirit of Mennonite thrift.

And when, many years later, Spicher returned to EMU to work as the chemical hygiene officer, he began a process of general inventory and cleanup of the no-longer-new laboratory supply closets, cluttered over the years by Mennonite thrift and other forces of entropy. And it was then with a sense of nostalgia that Spicher discovered some of those very bottles procured 50 years earlier when Spicher was an undergrad, and the Suter Science Center (where the bottles had sat just-in-case, like twist-ties in the kitchen drawer) was still a cornfield.

But it was alarm, not nostalgia, that arose when Spicher came across an old bottle of picric acid – a chemical useful for staining tissue when diluted with sufficient water concentration. When insufficiently diluted, however, picric acid forms explosive crystals. (A close chemical relative to TNT, picric acid played a major role in artillery science through World War I.) Spicher backed away, well aware that uncorking a crystallized bottle of old picric acid could cost him his fingers, or more. Mennonite thrift in the Suter Science Center had taken a potentially treacherous turn.

A Northern Virginia bomb squad was called in. The fire department sent personnel for some explosives training. A hole was dug behind the science center, a fuse was lit, and the picric acid bomb, unwittingly improvised in the chemical closet, was disarmed. In the end, says Spicher, the bang was small, but it pays to be careful with the stuff.

UNDERCOVER POET
Daniel B. Suter ’40, for whom the science center was named, joined the science faculty at what was then Eastern Mennonite College (EMC) in 1948. By the time the new building opened 20 years later, his students in the program enjoyed medical school acceptance rates far above the national average. So valuable was Suter’s recommendation that, according to faculty legend, a medical school candidate who had never even attended EMU tried to finagle a letter from Suter.

Suter’s office was in the science center basement, adjacent to the secretary’s office and the lunchroom, where the faculty regularly ate together while skimming the newspapers, telling jokes, chattering and generally enjoying one another’s company. For years, on their birthdays, personalized poems would appear on the lunch table, written by a mysterious poet who published under Salvelinus fontinalis (“Brook trout” in the jargon of scientists).

From a poem on the 64th birthday of Wilmer Lehman ’57, who joined the mathematics faculty in 1959:

Forty years teaching
Is that what he said
How many functions
Are left in his head?

A teacher of Math
And The Liberal Arts
With much dedication
Gave his students some smarts.

Eventually, it came out that Salvelinus fontinalis was the pen name of Bob Yoder ’57, an enthusiastic fisher of S. fontinalis. Yoder, who taught in the biology department for more than 30 years, was the resident jokester of the science center lunch bunch; upon his death in 2005, a volume of his collected poems was distributed to his colleagues.

WOMEN NEED RESTROOMS TOO!
The Suter Science Center reflected its day and age when it opened in 1968. Science was mostly a man’s world then. There were no women on the permanent science faculty, and the college didn’t bother to put in a women’s restroom on the downstairs level; the secretary (always a woman, in those days) and female students had to go upstairs. Before long, agitation against the basic unfairness of this situation began and EMU kept pace with the changing world around it by establishing restroom equality throughout the building.

Because energy was cheap back when the building was built, insulation wasn’t much of a priority. When Lehman began to notice light streaming in large gaps that had opened up between the window frames and the block walls in his math classroom, physical plant staff came over to work at some retroactive solution. Still, the classrooms were a nice improvement over the “E Building,” a former egg processing plant on the south side of Mount Clinton Pike that housed the math department before the science center was built.

Over his four decades of teaching, Lehman taught just about every class that was offered by EMU. One of the memories that stands out was the time a student answered a test question with an unexplained Bible reference. Lehman was tickled when he looked up Psalm 139:6 – Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.

Another long-time mathematics professor, Millard Showalter ’62 loved to encourage creative approaches to problem solving, and thus, routinely offered his Math in the Liberal Arts students an alternative and deceptively simple-sounding way to earn an A in the class: fold an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper in half eight times. The challenge was a fun illustration of exponents; making that eighth crease was like trying to fold 256 sheets of paper at once.

RESOURCEFUL GALEN LEHMAN
For years, Showalter’s students tried and failed, until Galen Lehman ’73 marched triumphantly into class one morning, with a look in his eyes that told Showalter his game was up. It had been easy, really. Lehman was supporting his college habit with a job at the Kreider Machine Shop over the hill from campus, where he had access to a 200-ton hydraulic machine press entirely capable of folding 256 sheets of paper.

Lehman also earned an A honestly in the class and went on to become Dr. Galen Lehman, chair of the EMU department and the longest-serving member of today’s faculty. When Lehman joined the faculty, the department was inconveniently housed on the fringes of campus in the same E building that the mathematics folks had previously escaped. Looking for a more respectable location, Lehman settled on an unfinished, dirt-floored crawl space beneath the science center’s planetarium that had been presciently excavated to someday accommodate this very sort of future growth.

Around 1980, Lehman spearheaded the renovation of the space into what still serves as the psychology department. He personally poured the concrete floor, built a large table still in use in the seminar room, and, while breaking through a block wall to run some plumbing, discovered an empty whisky bottle in the wall cavity, likely hidden by a worker during the building’s original construction.

EARRING STUNTS & MORE WITH DEAD ANIMALS

But let’s return to Showalter’s paper-folding assignment. Outmaneuvered by Lehman and his machine press, Showalter learned a lesson that science center faculty have been learning over and over since the building opened: never underestimate the dedication and creativity undergraduates will apply to various capers, tricks and other antics. The famous “Head Room” – SC 104, its walls lined with the mounted heads of various mammals – has been the scene of repeated pranks, often involving the dandying-up of these animal heads with different eyewear, headwear, jewelry and other fashion accessories.

Some of the faculty found this amusing. D. Ralph Hostetter, a professor of biology from the very earliest days of the Eastern Mennonite School until his retirement in 1966, did not. After retiring from teaching, Hostetter curated the natural history museum, now housing more than 6,000 artifacts and specimens (and now bearing his name). With hardly any acquisitions budget to speak of, he paid for most of the stuffed heads out of his own pocket. A highly meticulous man, he simply didn’t find it funny to discover the dik-dik (a tiny African antelope) wearing glasses and earrings.

For years, the sheer size and weight of the 300-lb. American bison specimen on display at the Hostetter Museum of Natural History seemed sufficient to keep it in place in the science center, though this too was an underestimation of the undergraduate determination to prank. In 2007, a posse from Oakwood made off with the stuffed bison and attempted to hoist it up to the three-story residence hall’s roof. When things went awry mid-hoist, however, both the bison and a 19-year-old freshman fell from the roof. The student was airlifted to the University of Virginia medical center with a concussion and fractured hip.

The freshman healed and the bison was none the worse for the experience. Now he stands in his old position at the entrance to the science center on a thick concrete platform, anchored with tamper-resistant bolts.

MASKED PRANKSTERS
On another occasion, while lecturing in the Head Room, physics and mathematics professor John Horst ’60 raised one of the sliding blackboards to discover the one behind it had been covered by a high-resolution enlargement of a Playboy centerfold. After the class regained its composure, Horst made a mental note to check for sliding blackboard surprises thenceforth.

That was not the most memorable sliding blackboard surprise of his career, however. For years, Horst and several colleagues team-taught a general humanities class covering art, music and literature in history. The large classes were held in SC 106, the biggest classroom on campus; it also saw frequent use as a recital hall, theater and general performance space before other buildings specifically designed for those purposes were built.

Hidden all the way behind several layers of sliding blackboards in SC 106 was a chemical hood, a relatively large space where professors could safely demonstrate various experiments and reactions. For some time, Todd Weaver ’87 had been aware that the chemical hood could also be accessed from behind, through a storage room, and early in the second semester of his senior-year humanities class, he and a classmate “hatched a brilliant plan,” as he remembers it.

Wearing nothing but boxer shorts and monster masks, and armed with loaded super-soakers, Weaver and his accomplice climbed into the chemical hood from the storage room and waited for class to begin, hidden behind the blackboard. Horst was lecturing in front of the class when the two sprang into action. One by one, the sections of blackboard begin sliding up, eventually revealing the water gun bandits crammed in the chemical hood.

“We caused total chaos,” says Weaver, now a dentist active in EMU’s alumni association. They sprayed at least two of the professors in the room, and unloaded their super-soakers on their classmates as they fled up the auditorium’s two aisles. “The goal was to empty the water by the time we reached the back of SC 106 and sprint out the doors and run for the dorm,” says Weaver, who lived in Oakwood and therefore stands proudly in a long and distinguished tradition of campus mischief.

In what turned out to be a serious lapse of judgment, however, Weaver had let a few other friends in on the plan. And when Weaver and his accomplice reached the back of the room, their prank complete except for the get-away, they found the doors barred with two-by-fours.

“I will never forget Doug Geib ’87 with a big smile on his face unwilling to unbar the door. I was screaming [at him] to give in and let us out, but he only laughed,” Weaver remembers.

Language and literature professor Carroll D. Yoder ’62, one of Horst’s co-teachers in the room that morning, marched slowly up the steps and unmasked the pranksters, who could do nothing but stand with heads hanging, trapped with empty squirt guns at the back the room in their underwear. Ashamed, they walked back to Oakwood, changed clothes, and returned to catch the end of the humanities class. (Horst got one last hurrah. When Weaver approached Horst and asked humbly for one extra point to make a much-coveted “A” for the term, which was needed to maximize his chance of dental school admission, Horst made him squirm in his office for some long moments and then declared he would receive one more point in recognition of his “energetic class participation.”)

EXPERIMENTING, LIVING, BANKING IN THE CENTER
One damp Saturday morning an undergraduate chemistry major named Terry Jantzi ’87 was running an experiment that sent a bunch of sulfur dioxide through the lab hood. Normally it would have drifted off into the blue Virginia sky. But the cool, humid weather caused the sulfur dioxide to condense into a heavy fog that spread across the intramural soccer field – think “acid rain” recalls professor emeritus Glenn M. Kauffman, class of ’60, Janzti’s chemistry prof at the time. Folks at an auction near the dormitories thought the science center was on fire.

That same Terry Jantzi is now Dr. Jantzi, professor of practice associated with EMU’s peacebuilding and development program.

There was the time in 1976 that Millard Showalter’s Modern Geometry students got so jazzed about the non-Euclidian material he was teaching that they showed up to the final day of class wearing T-shirts that read “Millard’s Magnificent Mathematicians.” They arranged for a photo, and after class, went up to chapel and set together at the front, as proud as a bunch of athletes after winning a tournament.

Kauffman recalls his department colleague Gary L. Stucky putting money into a satellite dish on the science center roof in the early 1990s. This enabled him to watch concurrently three different TV channels late into the night in a prep room near SC-106, where he liked to pass his time outside of regular work hours. In the early 1990s, too, a dietetics program headed by Janet Harder ’73 moved into the science center and she also spent long hours at the workplace. By the late 1990s, Stucky and Harder were married, re-settling in his home state of Kansas.

The Park View Federal Credit Union began in 1969, in the Suter Science Center offices of professors Robert Lehman ’50 (physical sciences) and Joe Mast ‘64 (math and computer science), offering financial services to members in the days before easy access to credit. Many of their science center colleagues were the very earliest members. John Horst still has a single-digit account number at the credit union, and says that the credit union’s assets were said to be approaching $1 million by 1980, when it moved off of campus. (Kauffman remains the proud holder of an account number in the low double digits.)

Kenton Brubaker’s two-digit account number – between Kauffman’s and Horst’s – at the credit union gives him away as another early denizen of the science center. A 1954 grad of EMU, Brubaker returned as a horticulture and botany professor well before the science center was built. Up in the old science department, in the Ad Building basement, Brubaker secured grant funding to buy a gas flow analyzer capable of detecting Carbon-14 beta particles. With Brubaker’s help, another colleague, Merle Jacobs, used the tool to examine the low reproductive fitness of homozygous ebony Drosophila fruit flies. The resulting paper – “Beta-Alanine Utilization of Ebony and Non-ebony Drosophila melanogaster” [Science 139 (1963): 1282-1283] – was likely the first science research published in a major journal by EMU faculty.

Jacobs soon left for a job at Goshen College, and Brubaker was in the first wave of professors to work and teach in the new science center. The greenhouse had an automatic ventilation system – a big deal at the time. The planetarium was another big-ticket item. The whole building was exciting and new and fantastic. No sooner had the science department moved in then did Kauffman begin writing grants for other exciting gadgetry. A gas chromatograph and a UV-visible spectrophotometer were among the early acquisitions, allowing for undergraduate chemistry research that has continued ever since. (Students now enjoy research opportunities in a variety of science fields, usually collaborating with faculty.)

AHHH, THE MEMORIES, THE LEGACIES!

By the time Todd Weaver, of SC 106 chemical hood ambush fame, arrived on campus to pursue pre-medical studies, Daniel Suter was approaching the very end of his years on the EMU faculty. On his first visit to Suter’s office for an advising appointment, Weaver learned that Suter had also been Weaver’s father’s pre-med adviser years earlier, and they had corresponded for years while Weaver’s father was in medical school.

Between his graduation and the start of dental school, Weaver got married to Anne Kaufman ’88. Suter – then recently retired – and his wife, Grace were in attendance, and presented the Weavers with an end table.

Suter passed in away in 2006. The next year, Weaver was elected president of the Mennonite Medical Association; joining him in the leadership of the organization was Janice Showalter, the daughter of Daniel and Grace Suter.

“Life feels like it circles sometimes, especially in a community like EMU,” says Weaver.

The end table that the Suters gave him has moved with the Weavers from house to house since dental school. It remains a treasured possession that has been relocated every time in the family car rather than the moving truck, and it largely owes its prominence to the many people and memories that have and continue to inhabit the Suter Science Center.

— Andrew Jenner ’04

Willis Jenkins, assistant professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School

Willis Jenkins, assistant professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Conn., will speak on “Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology,” 4 p.m. Friday, Nov. 21 in the Suter Science Center auditorium.

Dr. Shelly L. Thomas, assistant professor of biology at EMU, and Dr. Kenton K. Brubaker, professor emeritus of biology at EMU, will respond to Jenkins’ presentation.

Jenkins received a BA degree from Wheaton (Ill.) College and MA and PhD degrees from the University of Virginia. His research focuses on environmental ethics, religion and sustainable development, and moral theologies. He has taught at UVa. and at a rural campus of Uganda Christian University.

Jenkins has significant international experience in community development initiatives, was co-founder of the Episcopal Young Adult Service Corps, and served on the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on World Mission, 2000 to 2006.

He has published articles in the Journal of Religion, Environmental Ethics, Anglican Theological Review, Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion and the Journal of Lutheran Ethics.

“Our speaker will describe several major problems in environmental ethics, some of the ways that theological traditions approach those problems and how traditions may be changing in this contemporary encounter of faith and sustainability,” said Roman J. Miller, Suter Endowed Professor of Biology at EMU.

The seminar, co-sponsored by the Shenandoah Anabaptist Scientific Society, is open to the public free of charge. Refreshments will be served 15 minutes prior to the presentation.

For more information, contact Dr. Miller, 540-432-4412 or email millerrj@emu.edu.

How can EMU fan the flames of creativity and learning that are already happening on campus and put “flesh” on the words from Micah 6:8 that are key to the university