Growing Up Amish by Ira Wagler Read Free Book Online

don’t know why he had it. Or how it worked. It may have been a latent ability, a remnant of ancient practices, buried deep within the psyche of his Swiss-German heritage. I don’t think even he knew quite what it was or why he possessed it.
    All he knew was that he had the gift and he could use it.
    But when it came to passion and purpose, my father was committed to the one true calling of his heart. He wrote.
    For decades he was a scribe for The Budget , a weekly newsletter for the Amish and Mennonites, and he developed quite a fan base. By the time I was born, he was already widely known throughout the vast majority of Amish and Mennonite communities in North America—and even overseas. But after he cofounded Pathway Publishers in the late sixties and launched the monthly magazine Family Life , his name became legend. Aylmer had been well known before, but after the launch of Family Life , it became something akin to a pilgrimage destination for Amish families from other communities.
    Family Life was Dad’s baby. His dream. His impossible vision. A magazine published by the Amish, for the Amish. To fund it, he mortgaged the farm (despite my mother’s protests).
    He must have seemed insane. Such a thing had never been attempted before. But he plodded determinedly forward. He placed ads for subscriptions in The Budget , formatted and published the inaugural issue, and then sent it out free to thousands of Amish households across the United States and Canada. Amazingly enough, it worked. Subscriptions poured in, eventually reaching thirty thousand.
    Family Life was (and is) a very nice little magazine—if you like didactic stories in which the protagonist always repents after harboring heretical notions of leaving the Amish faith, or some such similar crisis. And the wayward son always returns in true humble repentance to court the plain but upstanding girl who is actually very beautiful inside, which, as we all know, is what really counts anyway. A glad light springs from her eyes as she modestly welcomes his return. Or maybe the glad light springs from his father’s eyes. I can’t remember. Whatever. The fiction was all pretty formulaic and predictable.
    To be fair, Family Life also published a lot of useful, practical stuff—farm tips and such. Yet as unrealistic as a lot of the magazine’s content was (and is), it was read with great gusto and satisfaction across a broad spectrum of Amishland.
    Naturally, a pocket of hard-core, conservative Amish people resented and resisted my father’s efforts. These people felt that one should read only the Bible. And maybe The Budget . Any other supplemental reading was deemed unnecessary and possibly sinful. Sad to say, those people still exist out there.
    Regardless of the response, when I was growing up I could never admit my last name to any person even remotely connected to the Amish without being asked if I knew David Wagler. I always admitted reluctantly that, yes, I knew him. Not because I was ashamed or anything, but because it just got really old really fast.
    The questions always continued: Are you related? Again, a grudging affirmative. More persistent and increasingly excited questions would invariably follow. Eventually the truth always emerged to rapturous exclamations of disbelief and accelerated heart palpitations. Seriously.
    Once, in the mid-1980s, my brother Nathan and I were staying in Sarasota, Florida, for a few months over the winter, and an elderly Mennonite man from Arthur, Illinois, drilled us with the usual litany of questions until he finally got us to admit who we were. After our confession, he leaned on his tricycle in stunned silence for a few moments. He seemed drained.
    I couldn’t resist, so I said playfully, “Just think, now you can go back home and tell everyone you met David Wagler’s sons.”
    He stood mute for another moment, still leaning faintly on his tricycle. I thought he might not