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Mother’s Day Hodge Podge
A photocopy of this handwritten manuscript by my aunt Edith M. Dornbirer came to me via my brother, Eric, in 2005, but I didn’t realize what it was until I opened the envelope in April of this year. Eric came by the manuscript because he and Edith would often exchange and discuss their writings. Eric thinks he may have sat in on Edith’s presentation of this material.
Those who’ve been in NAPA long enough will remember Edith as the lady who special-ordered printing-related books and stocked booktables for us at a few of the Ohio conventions in the 1970’s.
She was also the aunt to whom I was closest. As Ruth and I read this manuscript we both agreed we could easily hear and visualize her giving it. My family lived briefly in her (and grandfather Dornbirer’s) house in Columbus, Ohio, when we first moved back from Tennessee near the end of World War II. We were frequent visitors in all the later years. Occasionally I helped out in her home-based religious book and supply business. This manuscript was written less than two years before her death in 1982, just short of her 79th birthday.
What I particularly treasure in this talk are the anecdotes from her childhood, some of which were entirely new to me. The 60th Reunion of the descendants of Isaac & Rebecca Zartman will meet this June, and I will print extra copies of this issue for those in attendance, many of whom knew Edith well.
I want to thank my cousins Peggy Kose and her son David for the copies of photos from the 1909 edition of The Zartman Family,
Loving Others in the Christian Home
or this might just as well be titled
Mother’s Day Hodge Podge
because I have tossed together this and that, not even in chronological
order, but all designed to make you feel like children feel as they are
growing up in this bewildering world.
[A talk given to a group called the Friendly Class at Christ Lutheran Church, Bexley, Ohio, May 11, 1980.]
by Edith M. Dornbirer
It seems to me that the richest gift God has given children in this life is the Christian home. Yet we take this heritage so much for granted that we seldom express our appreciation.
It is in our Christian homes that children first learn about God and his love for them. They experience that love through the care and affection of their parents. As a result, they grow up with a sense of acceptance and security.
I grew up in such a home so my material will be largely autobiographic. But I know that as I proceed, you will be recalling memories of the love you experienced in your Christian homes.
I was born in a parsonage of Zion Lutheran Church in Sandusky, Ohio, on the 15th day of the first month of the third year of this 20th century: January 15, 1903.
On that same date, but some years later, a little boy was born in a Baptist parsonage in the South. He was named after our great Reformer, Martin Luther. Martin Luther King, Jr., also grew up to become a great reformer.
He kept pointing out that although we had fought a war to free our black slaves, we have continued to remain two countries, divided by a color line even though we like to sing, “All one country we.”
King told us whites that we have always thought of ourselves as superior to blacks even though this is in violation of our Constitution, which plainly states that “all men are created equal.” King died a martyr to his cause, killed by an assassin. But he did succeed in pricking our national conscience to the point that we are moving, though slowly, in the direction of racial equality.
My grandfather, Jacob Dornbirer, was born in Switzerland, where he was brought up in the Swiss Reformed Church.
As a boy he loved to read about the Indians in America and when he was a young man he came to the U.S. on a visit to look at our Red Men. And he did see some of them in Wisconsin.
When he came south into Ohio he was befriended by a Lutheran pastor who persuaded him to remain in the United States and to enter our Lutheran Theological Seminary. When he had completed his training, Jacob was assigned to a rural area west of Sandusky where he ministered to immigrants from Germany. Services were held in the German language and the church was called the Evangelische Lutherische Kirche (Evangelical Lutheran Church). In time the congregation was able to build a small frame church.
When Jacob’s eldest son, my father1, reached high school age, he was sent to Capital University in Columbus, where he went through the Academy, then the College and then into the seminary.
My grandfather always drove fast horses. One day he was thrown out of his buggy onto the fast-moving wheel. Several ribs were fractured, his lung was punctured, and he died.
So my father had to rush home to Sandusky to make the funeral arrangements. His parents had had twelve children. His mother died when he was only forty. So my father found himself with a ready-made family of five children, for that many of the twelve were still living at home in the parsonage.
The church vestry felt obligated to these orphans so they offered my father the pastorate with the stipulation that he take care of those five until they were ready to leave home. One of them, his sister Mary, never left. Some of you may remember our Aunt Mary.
The congregation prospered and when it had outgrown the little rural church, Zion Lutheran Church was built of native limestone in downtown Sandusky.
So it was seven years before my father was free to marry the young lady in Perry County to whom he had become engaged while he was a student pastor there. Her name was Mary Estella Mechling and she was the only daughter of a prosperous Perry County farmer, Bernard Mechling. He was a Lutheran and lived in a spacious red brick house near Glenford, Ohio. This was where my mother grew up.
Her mother, Leah Zartman Mechling, came from a long line of members of the Reformed Church. But this was no problem in the home, for at that time the Reforms and the Lutherans worshiped together in a little brick church near Glenford, owned by the Reforms.
My grandmother Leah’s youngest brother, Rufus Calvin Zartman, became a nationally known evangelist in the Reformed denomination.
He also wrote this history of the Zartman family [not illustrated here] and had their lineage professionally traced back to 443 B.C.!2
Here is a picture [following page] of our family as we looked in 1910, the year this history was published. [Dec. 1909, actually.]
This is a picture [top of p. 9] of Grandfather Bernard Mechling, his wife Leah, my mother and her brother, Homer. Homer became the father of Gene Mechling, the well-known athlete at Capital University.
This [on p. 10] is a picture of the Homer Mechling family. Gene is this baby.
Grandmother Leah was Bernard’s second wife. His first wife died. She was the mother of another member of our parish, George Mechling.
Grandmother Leah also had a sister Angeline, but we always called her Angie. She and her husband, Ben Alspach, lived in Thornville, about five miles from Glenford. We children loved to visit their home because Aunt Angie was a born entertainer. She used to pull a white stocking over her left arm and tell us fabulous puppet stories.
Aunt Angie owned the first Victrola any of us had ever seen – one with a horn. It played a record about a ragman driving through the towns soliciting business:
Any rags, any rags, any rags, any bottles, any bones today?
It’s the same old story in the same old way. Any rags, Lady?
Behind the Alspach home was a deep, narrow, wooded valley called Jockey Hollow. We children loved to explore that valley in the daytime. But at night it was filled with hobgoblins and other fearsome creatures, so it was a brave child indeed who would enter that valley at night and I was not one of them!
But I did love to watch the fireflies hovering over the valley, flashing their bright tail-lights on and off against the black sky.
I was less than four years old when we left Sandusky, but I wanted to share two vivid recollections I have of those years because they illustrate the love and security in a Christian home.
There was a barn behind the parsonage where my father kept his horse and buggy. One day I was playing there by myself when I happened to look up and there were huge cobwebs hanging from the rafters, swaying in the breeze. I thought they were alive, and ran screaming into the house into the safety of my mother’s arms.
My parents had six children: two brothers older than I and two younger. Then, when I was ten, our little sister was born. She was named after our two grandmothers: Leah and Elizabeth.
As soon as any child had learned to walk by himself, my parents would give that child a little rocking chair for Christmas. (There was never a Santa Claus in our home. We knew that our gifts came from our parents, our relatives and friends.)
I still have my rocking chair but one arm is broken off because I continued to sit in it long after I had outgrown it. I would often drag my chair and a doll to our front curb in Sandusky, where I would sit and watch the world go by – something I still enjoy.
There was a Catholic parochial school beside our parsonage. One day a priest walked by, noticed I had fallen sound asleep in my chair; looked up at Aunt Mary sitting on the porch and, smiling, said, “All the world is mine.” And indeed I did feel that secure in my little world.
When I was several weeks old, I was carried across the drive from the parsonage to the chancel where my father baptized me. I was given the name Edith Magdalene. (I have always been grateful to my parents for tucking that Magdalene into the middle.)
My brothers knew that I disliked the name, so one of their favorite ways of teasing me was to come up behind me, yank my braids and yell, “Magdalena, pfeet, pfeet, brrrr!” They picked this up from a parrot in the neighborhood. These were the only words he knew and he repeated them endlessly. Sometimes he would even wake me up at night calling “Magdalena.”
Now I’ll tell you how I came by that name. About two months before I was born, my father’s dear friend and former roommate at Capital came to visit us. He was a nice-looking, amiable man and we all loved him. He had no children but he brought his wife along. She was fat, talkative, and bossy. Her name was Magdalene. She told my mother, “If that baby is a girl, I’m going to be the sponsor and she’s to be named after me.” And so it was.
All of my brothers and my sister had sponsors who were favorite relatives who always remembered them with gifts on special occasions. Through all the years, my sponsor gave me just one gift – her name.
The day came when my father received a call to become the manager of the small, struggling, debt-ridden synodical publishing house in Columbus – a call which he accepted. The little business grew and eventually a red brick building was erected at 55 E. Main St., called the Lutheran Book Concern at that time, but now the central building of the Augsburg Press.
The day we moved from Sandusky, my brother Rufus and I stood on the sidewalk in front of the parsonage and watched the movers pack our household goods into their horse-drawn van until it was crammed so full that there was no space left for our little chairs. So the movers hung them on a rope on the back of the van. As it pulled away, my brother and I, with tears in our eyes, waved goodbye forever, as we thought, to our chairs.
So it was our first experience of a miracle when we walked into our house in Columbus and there were our little chairs patiently waiting for us!
My father came to Columbus several months before he moved his family from Sandusky. He bought a lot in the country at 1784 Bryden Road and designed the house in which I am still living. We moved in just in time for Christmas, 1907.
Every Sunday, in all kinds of weather, we walked to the little college chapel at Drexel and Main. To get there, we had to walk east on Main Street for nearly a mile over roughly paved brick.
Capital University students, all males at that time, were required to attend church in the little chapel, called Christ Church. They sat in the rear pews all the way across the back. Some of them would sneak off to the other churches where they had girlfriends. (The Luther League was the matrimonial bureau of that day.)
In addition to the students and most of the faculty members, the congregation was largely composed of farmers who cultivated their land in and around the area now called Bexley.
Every family had its own pew; a large family like ours had two pews. We sat about halfway back on the west side. I recall that Martha Stellhorn’s grandparents sat in the same section but toward the front. Paul Mackenson, Professor of German at Capital, and his newly-acquired bride sat a few pews in front of us. Of course they had to sit very close.
The church building had two rooms. The sanctuary had a high pulpit against the north wall with a stairway on each side. Below and in front of the pulpit was the altar table. At the northeast corner was the organ and choir loft, which had a ruffled velvet curtain suspended from a brass rail separating the choir from the congregation.
There was a balcony at the rear of the church. When we had our Christmas Eve Children’s Service, a large shining star would move from the balcony on an invisible wire until it reached the chancel, dramatically announcing the arrival of the Wise Men.
The second room of the building was behind the pulpit, a long narrow room extending the full width of the church. This was the utility room for the part-time janitor, the vestry for the pastor, and the classroom for the youngest children, taught by our beloved spinster, Mame Helsel.
There was no basement under the church, but a space had been dug out at the northeast corner just large enough to accommodate a coal furnace which in cold weather warmed the sanctuary, more or less; mostly less. East of the church was a rail fence where the farmers hitched their horses.
We had catechetical instruction and Vacation Bible School in Recitation Hall on campus.
The Ladies Aid and the Vestry usually met in private homes. The Ladies Aid had a big money-making project going for them. They prepared and served the Alumni Banquet during Commencement Week – at first in Loy Auditorium, later in the lower hall of this church.
The day that this church was dedicated, Capital students who wished to attend the dedication were excused from classes. We marched in a procession from the old church to the new, lustily singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
And now, as loving Christian families, we continue our walk together into our future.
May God bless you all and keep you in his love.
[Edith’s postscript on this manuscript:] Prepared and presented by Edith M. Dornbirer to the Friendly Class at Christ Lutheran Church, Bexley [Ohio], for Mother’s Day, May 11, 1980, in Rms. 204 and 204A.
1. August H. Dornbirer, my maternal grandfather.
2. The source of this genealogical assertion is retold in Rufus C. Zartman’s The Zartman Family, 1692-1942 (Revised), p. 33, and is attributed to the “Institute of American Genealogy,” but no other supporting evidence is attested.
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