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Chapter 1
Lost Ground
Emma Stutzman plied her hoe between two rows of peas
in her large garden patch. The black soil warmed her bare
feet as she chopped at the small weeds poking their way
into the May sunlight. “Ich hasse die Rewwer Bodde Grund.
I hate this river bottom soil,” she mumbled to herself in
Pennsylvania German as she pushed back a strand of
brown hair from her forehead. “It must have been too wet
when we plowed it.” She whacked at a large clod with her
hoe. “The ground back home isn’t hard like this.”
The Stutzman’s dwelling lay not far from the English River
that ran through Kalona, Iowa. The rich gumbo soil on the
flood plain was easy enough to till when there was
adequate rain. But when it was dry, hoeing could be like
whacking at a rubber tractor tire. In contrast, the soil in
Emma’s native Kansas was sandy and light.
Emma straightened up to survey her vegetables. She
couldn’t really complain about the way things were growing.
The corn was pushing up shoots to join company with long
rows of carrots, beans, and potatoes.
“It’s time to get these tomatoes staked,” she said aloud to
herself. She made her way to the storage shed and found a
dozen collapsible tomato racks that her husband, Tobe,
had fabricated in his metal shop. She unfolded them and
pushed the four-cornered wire supports into the soil around
the foot-high tomato plants.
“And I must dust these potatoes,” Emma lamented as she
looked at the leafy vegetation. “Those potato bugs will soon
take over.”
“If it weren’t for this garden,” Emma mused, “I’m afraid I
wouldn’t be able to put food on the table. We just don’t
have the cash. But I must buy potatoes. There are none left
in the cellar. It’ll be more than a month before these are
ready to dig.”
She took a break from hoeing to harvest several hand-
fuls of radishes and onions. Then she cut off two heads of
lettuce and put them in her dishpan with the other cuttings.
These would make the salad for Sunday dinner.
Not since the Depression years could Emma remember
thinking so much about money. It was a constant worry.
Emma’s seven siblings seemed to be doing well. Three
years earlier, in 1953, each of them had received an
inheritance—a choice of forty acres of land or the same
value in cash. But to keep Tobe from getting his desperate
hands on Emma’s inheritance, Emma’s father deeded it to
her younger brother Raymond Nisly. Raymond lived on the
home farm next to Emma’s promised forty acres in Kansas,
so he agreed to farm Emma’s promised acreage in return
for a share of the crop.
Emma hoped that she and Tobe would be able to pass
on an inheritance to their children. But at the rate things
were going now, they would only pass on a debt. After
having grown up to believe that one should avoid debt
whenever possible, she felt deeply shamed by her
husband's recent bankruptcy proceedings.
Money problems didn’t seem to bother Tobe in the same
way. Even through the legal process, he’d expressed
optimism. Not long after he lost the ownership of Kalona
Products Company in May of 1955, he started a new
business. With the financial sponsorship of an Amish
neighbor named Harvey Bender, Tobe built a thirty-by-fifty
foot block building for a manufacturing shop. As a member
of the creditors’ committee of the bankrupt business,
Harvey helped Tobe equip the new shop and get started.
Not long afterward, Tobe talked Harvey into letting him
build thirty-by-thirty-six-foot living quarters onto the end of
the shop. Harvey agreed to put up the money, and Tobe
supplied most of the labor. All this happened after Harvey
had lost parts of four fingers in the shop’s metal punch
press. Emma marveled at the man’s trust and generosity.
Emma didn’t enjoy living in an unfinished house, but she
consoled herself that it would soon be done. Perhaps even
this week, Tobe would finish laying the linoleum in the
kitchen. And he had promised he would put up the ceiling
and install the inside doors soon. Until then, she’d need to
be content to look up at the rafters. And she would manage
with privacy curtains in the doorways.
Sometimes Emma felt a bit guilty about expecting Tobe to
get things done on the house when he desperately needed
to get his work done in the shop. If the metal parts weren’t
fabricated, they couldn’t be sold. And if Tobe didn’t have
time to make his sales calls, he wouldn’t get the orders he
needed.
Emma had never met anyone who matched Tobe’s
energy and drive. He built the business at the same time
that he was building the house. Between shop
management, sales trips, and house construction, Tobe
was busy from early morning till late at night. The children
and Emma helped in the shop whenever they could. On
most days, the three older children worked in the shop after
school. At urgent times, Tobe kept them home on school
days to help get products out the door. At this point, he
couldn’t afford full-time employees.
Emma wondered if life would ever be normal in the
Stutzman household. Would Tobe ever be content to live
like other people? Would he settle for a regular job with a
steady income and a relaxed family life? At times she felt
like she was riding in a buggy hitched to an ill-tamed horse.
After Tobe had dragged the family from Kansas to Iowa in
1951 to take up metal fabricating, Emma had hinted to him
that someone else might better manage the shop finances.
She’d suggested that he pay more attention to the counsel
of his investors. She’d urged him to pay back his
outstanding loans before borrowing even more. In the end,
he hadn’t paid much attention to her suggestions—as
though to say that women didn’t understand business.
How Emma longed for Tobe to change his course now, in
the face of the deepening debt! Why couldn’t he be content
to be a farmer like her brothers back in Kansas, or to take
on a day job with an hourly wage? What was she to do
when he gave no heed to her counsel? She sensed that
Tobe was driven by a compelling ambition that she could
not fully comprehend.
Emma worried that if the business didn’t turn around
soon, they could lose their right to stay in the house. She
shuddered to recall their eviction from a property in July
1954, when they couldn’t come up with the balloon
mortgage payment. Emma never could have imagined that
she’d have to sign legal papers delivered by a sheriff.
The family had moved five times since coming to Iowa
from Kansas five years ago. Most of the landowners gave
them cheap rent or allowed them to pay with some kind of
work. But moving frequently meant that it was difficult to
develop a really productive garden. There was no time to
build up the soil or get plants like asparagus growing. It
also meant that the children had attended three different
country schools—Prairie Dale, Evergreen, and Pleasant
Hill—and finally the town school in Kalona. At least Mary
Edna was out of school now, having finished the eighth
grade just last Tuesday.
Since participation in the Amish church districts depend-
ed on one’s place of residence, their moves had also
meant a change in church attendance. Each district had its
own different bishop, with his idiosyncrasies and differing
ways of interpreting the Ordnung, or church discipline, the
guidelines for Christian conduct. Emma felt rootless,
numbed by transplant shock. She wished they could live
back home in the house they had built in Kansas.
Tobe felt differently. As long as they had a roof over-
head, he was satisfied. And he was always optimistic that
things would eventually turn out for the better. Rather than
argue or try to change her husband of fifteen years, Emma
determined to concentrate on keeping food on the table.
Even though Tobe at times lost money by the shovelful,
she would do her part to save by the spoonful. “That’s
where a good garden makes all the difference,” she mused
as she leaned her hoe against the garden fence and
walked toward the house, with her vegetables in hand.
Emma put the vegetables onto the kitchen counter and
stepped into the living room, where Mary Edna was ironing.
The three-year-old twins, Ervin and Erma, were playing on
the floor nearby. Eight-year-old Edith, slowed by a mental
handicap, was mumbling to herself in a nearby chair.
“Thanks for watching the children,” Emma said to Mary
Edna. “It’s good to have you home from school.”
“Dad says he wants me to help the boys weld up some
hangers today,” Mary Edna replied. “I’ll do that as soon as I
get done with this ironing.”
Emma washed and trimmed the vegetables and put them
into the refrigerator. Then she stepped into the shop,
where Perry and Glenn were working. “What are you
working on?” she asked.
“Dad asked us to weld up these seven bundles of steel
while he went to town,” Perry said. Although Perry was only
going into the eighth grade, he stood much taller than
Emma’s five-foot, two-inch frame. With the way he was
growing, Emma expected that he would reach the six-foot,
one-inch height of his dad before long.
Glenn was about sixteen months younger, shorter, and
less stocky than his older brother. And he found it more
difficult to concentrate on the task at hand. At least the
boys were out of school for the summer now, so they
wouldn’t have to miss classes to get the shop work done.
Emma surveyed the shop with its saw, press, bender,
roller, welder, and other heavy tools. She was amazed that
Tobe had managed to assemble all of this equipment so
soon after losing everything in the bankruptcy case. During
his trips to Chicago and elsewhere, he often took the
opportunity to buy good used equipment. Although Harvey
Bender owned the things now, Tobe expected to pay for
them when he got back on his feet.
She glanced at the stock of tin hog feeders and feed
scoops that Tobe had recently made. Soon, she hoped,
they could be sold for a bit of income.
Emma was preparing supper when Tobe got back to the
shop. He helped finish the last of the bending and welding
for the day, filling an order for hangers from a company in
the nearby town of Fairfield. The Fairfield company used
the hangers to make garment bags for closet storage. The
bags were large enough to protect a dozen full-sized
garments.
As soon as the quota of hangers was finished for that
day, Tobe worked on his latest idea, a rack to display
gloves for retail sales. He called Emma into the shop as he
put the finishing touches on the prototype. “I’m going to
take this with me the next time I go to Chicago,” he said.
“I've been to a lot of places that could use a better way to
display their gloves.”
Emma nodded politely and then went back into the
house. More than anything else, Tobe loved to exercise his
inventive mind by creating new products. If the buyers were
as excited as he, the new shop would soon turn a profit. But
Emma wasn’t convinced that would happen anytime soon.
This is chapter 1 of Emma: A Widow Among the Amish.
Copyright (C) 2007 by Herald Press, Scottdale, PA, 15683.
All rights reserved. The reader may download or print one
copy for personal use only. This chapter is not to be
photocopied.
Emma is available for $16.95 from Herald Press at 1-800-
245-7894 or www.mph.org
Lost Ground
Emma Stutzman plied her hoe between two rows of peas
in her large garden patch. The black soil warmed her bare
feet as she chopped at the small weeds poking their way
into the May sunlight. “Ich hasse die Rewwer Bodde Grund.
I hate this river bottom soil,” she mumbled to herself in
Pennsylvania German as she pushed back a strand of
brown hair from her forehead. “It must have been too wet
when we plowed it.” She whacked at a large clod with her
hoe. “The ground back home isn’t hard like this.”
The Stutzman’s dwelling lay not far from the English River
that ran through Kalona, Iowa. The rich gumbo soil on the
flood plain was easy enough to till when there was
adequate rain. But when it was dry, hoeing could be like
whacking at a rubber tractor tire. In contrast, the soil in
Emma’s native Kansas was sandy and light.
Emma straightened up to survey her vegetables. She
couldn’t really complain about the way things were growing.
The corn was pushing up shoots to join company with long
rows of carrots, beans, and potatoes.
“It’s time to get these tomatoes staked,” she said aloud to
herself. She made her way to the storage shed and found a
dozen collapsible tomato racks that her husband, Tobe,
had fabricated in his metal shop. She unfolded them and
pushed the four-cornered wire supports into the soil around
the foot-high tomato plants.
“And I must dust these potatoes,” Emma lamented as she
looked at the leafy vegetation. “Those potato bugs will soon
take over.”
“If it weren’t for this garden,” Emma mused, “I’m afraid I
wouldn’t be able to put food on the table. We just don’t
have the cash. But I must buy potatoes. There are none left
in the cellar. It’ll be more than a month before these are
ready to dig.”
She took a break from hoeing to harvest several hand-
fuls of radishes and onions. Then she cut off two heads of
lettuce and put them in her dishpan with the other cuttings.
These would make the salad for Sunday dinner.
Not since the Depression years could Emma remember
thinking so much about money. It was a constant worry.
Emma’s seven siblings seemed to be doing well. Three
years earlier, in 1953, each of them had received an
inheritance—a choice of forty acres of land or the same
value in cash. But to keep Tobe from getting his desperate
hands on Emma’s inheritance, Emma’s father deeded it to
her younger brother Raymond Nisly. Raymond lived on the
home farm next to Emma’s promised forty acres in Kansas,
so he agreed to farm Emma’s promised acreage in return
for a share of the crop.
Emma hoped that she and Tobe would be able to pass
on an inheritance to their children. But at the rate things
were going now, they would only pass on a debt. After
having grown up to believe that one should avoid debt
whenever possible, she felt deeply shamed by her
husband's recent bankruptcy proceedings.
Money problems didn’t seem to bother Tobe in the same
way. Even through the legal process, he’d expressed
optimism. Not long after he lost the ownership of Kalona
Products Company in May of 1955, he started a new
business. With the financial sponsorship of an Amish
neighbor named Harvey Bender, Tobe built a thirty-by-fifty
foot block building for a manufacturing shop. As a member
of the creditors’ committee of the bankrupt business,
Harvey helped Tobe equip the new shop and get started.
Not long afterward, Tobe talked Harvey into letting him
build thirty-by-thirty-six-foot living quarters onto the end of
the shop. Harvey agreed to put up the money, and Tobe
supplied most of the labor. All this happened after Harvey
had lost parts of four fingers in the shop’s metal punch
press. Emma marveled at the man’s trust and generosity.
Emma didn’t enjoy living in an unfinished house, but she
consoled herself that it would soon be done. Perhaps even
this week, Tobe would finish laying the linoleum in the
kitchen. And he had promised he would put up the ceiling
and install the inside doors soon. Until then, she’d need to
be content to look up at the rafters. And she would manage
with privacy curtains in the doorways.
Sometimes Emma felt a bit guilty about expecting Tobe to
get things done on the house when he desperately needed
to get his work done in the shop. If the metal parts weren’t
fabricated, they couldn’t be sold. And if Tobe didn’t have
time to make his sales calls, he wouldn’t get the orders he
needed.
Emma had never met anyone who matched Tobe’s
energy and drive. He built the business at the same time
that he was building the house. Between shop
management, sales trips, and house construction, Tobe
was busy from early morning till late at night. The children
and Emma helped in the shop whenever they could. On
most days, the three older children worked in the shop after
school. At urgent times, Tobe kept them home on school
days to help get products out the door. At this point, he
couldn’t afford full-time employees.
Emma wondered if life would ever be normal in the
Stutzman household. Would Tobe ever be content to live
like other people? Would he settle for a regular job with a
steady income and a relaxed family life? At times she felt
like she was riding in a buggy hitched to an ill-tamed horse.
After Tobe had dragged the family from Kansas to Iowa in
1951 to take up metal fabricating, Emma had hinted to him
that someone else might better manage the shop finances.
She’d suggested that he pay more attention to the counsel
of his investors. She’d urged him to pay back his
outstanding loans before borrowing even more. In the end,
he hadn’t paid much attention to her suggestions—as
though to say that women didn’t understand business.
How Emma longed for Tobe to change his course now, in
the face of the deepening debt! Why couldn’t he be content
to be a farmer like her brothers back in Kansas, or to take
on a day job with an hourly wage? What was she to do
when he gave no heed to her counsel? She sensed that
Tobe was driven by a compelling ambition that she could
not fully comprehend.
Emma worried that if the business didn’t turn around
soon, they could lose their right to stay in the house. She
shuddered to recall their eviction from a property in July
1954, when they couldn’t come up with the balloon
mortgage payment. Emma never could have imagined that
she’d have to sign legal papers delivered by a sheriff.
The family had moved five times since coming to Iowa
from Kansas five years ago. Most of the landowners gave
them cheap rent or allowed them to pay with some kind of
work. But moving frequently meant that it was difficult to
develop a really productive garden. There was no time to
build up the soil or get plants like asparagus growing. It
also meant that the children had attended three different
country schools—Prairie Dale, Evergreen, and Pleasant
Hill—and finally the town school in Kalona. At least Mary
Edna was out of school now, having finished the eighth
grade just last Tuesday.
Since participation in the Amish church districts depend-
ed on one’s place of residence, their moves had also
meant a change in church attendance. Each district had its
own different bishop, with his idiosyncrasies and differing
ways of interpreting the Ordnung, or church discipline, the
guidelines for Christian conduct. Emma felt rootless,
numbed by transplant shock. She wished they could live
back home in the house they had built in Kansas.
Tobe felt differently. As long as they had a roof over-
head, he was satisfied. And he was always optimistic that
things would eventually turn out for the better. Rather than
argue or try to change her husband of fifteen years, Emma
determined to concentrate on keeping food on the table.
Even though Tobe at times lost money by the shovelful,
she would do her part to save by the spoonful. “That’s
where a good garden makes all the difference,” she mused
as she leaned her hoe against the garden fence and
walked toward the house, with her vegetables in hand.
Emma put the vegetables onto the kitchen counter and
stepped into the living room, where Mary Edna was ironing.
The three-year-old twins, Ervin and Erma, were playing on
the floor nearby. Eight-year-old Edith, slowed by a mental
handicap, was mumbling to herself in a nearby chair.
“Thanks for watching the children,” Emma said to Mary
Edna. “It’s good to have you home from school.”
“Dad says he wants me to help the boys weld up some
hangers today,” Mary Edna replied. “I’ll do that as soon as I
get done with this ironing.”
Emma washed and trimmed the vegetables and put them
into the refrigerator. Then she stepped into the shop,
where Perry and Glenn were working. “What are you
working on?” she asked.
“Dad asked us to weld up these seven bundles of steel
while he went to town,” Perry said. Although Perry was only
going into the eighth grade, he stood much taller than
Emma’s five-foot, two-inch frame. With the way he was
growing, Emma expected that he would reach the six-foot,
one-inch height of his dad before long.
Glenn was about sixteen months younger, shorter, and
less stocky than his older brother. And he found it more
difficult to concentrate on the task at hand. At least the
boys were out of school for the summer now, so they
wouldn’t have to miss classes to get the shop work done.
Emma surveyed the shop with its saw, press, bender,
roller, welder, and other heavy tools. She was amazed that
Tobe had managed to assemble all of this equipment so
soon after losing everything in the bankruptcy case. During
his trips to Chicago and elsewhere, he often took the
opportunity to buy good used equipment. Although Harvey
Bender owned the things now, Tobe expected to pay for
them when he got back on his feet.
She glanced at the stock of tin hog feeders and feed
scoops that Tobe had recently made. Soon, she hoped,
they could be sold for a bit of income.
Emma was preparing supper when Tobe got back to the
shop. He helped finish the last of the bending and welding
for the day, filling an order for hangers from a company in
the nearby town of Fairfield. The Fairfield company used
the hangers to make garment bags for closet storage. The
bags were large enough to protect a dozen full-sized
garments.
As soon as the quota of hangers was finished for that
day, Tobe worked on his latest idea, a rack to display
gloves for retail sales. He called Emma into the shop as he
put the finishing touches on the prototype. “I’m going to
take this with me the next time I go to Chicago,” he said.
“I've been to a lot of places that could use a better way to
display their gloves.”
Emma nodded politely and then went back into the
house. More than anything else, Tobe loved to exercise his
inventive mind by creating new products. If the buyers were
as excited as he, the new shop would soon turn a profit. But
Emma wasn’t convinced that would happen anytime soon.
This is chapter 1 of Emma: A Widow Among the Amish.
Copyright (C) 2007 by Herald Press, Scottdale, PA, 15683.
All rights reserved. The reader may download or print one
copy for personal use only. This chapter is not to be
photocopied.
Emma is available for $16.95 from Herald Press at 1-800-
245-7894 or www.mph.org
| Book Excerpt |
| Emma A Widow Among the Amish By Ervin Stutzman |
| A true story woven by strands of faith, family and community. Emma raises six children after the sudden death of her husband, Tobias. In the aftermath, Emma copes with her husband's significant business failures. |
| Copyright 2008 OurFaith Digest |