Memories of the Quaker Past: Stories of Thirty-Seven Senior Quakers

By Xlibris US

The book consists of excerpts from interviews of senior members
of State College Friends Meeting. The narrators who lived
through the Great Depression tell of their difficult childhoodand yet in
most cases one they regarded as happy. Some of the conscientious objectors
during WWII tell of life in CPS camps; others speak of using nonviolent
methods with mental patients, while still others relate the story of the human
guinea experiments some of them participated in.
Of those who did relief work after the war overseas, probably the
most exciting tales are told by the four who worked with the Friends
Ambulance Unit in China. They happened to be located close to where the
Nationalists and the Communists were fighting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781469162560

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Christine Ayoub.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012902249

ISBN:    Hardcover      978-1-4691-6255-3

              Softcover        978-1-4691-6254-6

              eBook              978-1-4691-6256-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 04/25/2014

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Table of Contents

Narrators

List of Maps

Maps

Introduction

Lloyd Williams

Interviewed by Philip Martin

Bob Crauder

Interviewed by Christine Ayoub

Renée Crauder.

Interviewed by Marjorie Smith

Mark Shaw

Interviewed by Christine Ayoub

Mardy Shaw

Interviewed by Peg Doms

Roger Pennock

Interviewed by Christine Ayoub

Libby Pennock

Interviewed by Peg Doms

Elwood Way

Interviewed by Christine Ayoub

Emily Way

Interviewed by Christine Ayoub

Roger Way

Interviewed by Peg Doms

Mary Way

Interviewed by Peg Doms

Lu Evans

Interviewed by Peg Doms

Reed Smith

Interviewed by Christine Ayoub

Marjorie Smith

Interviewed by Peg Doms

Arthur Mekeel

Interviewed by Arthur Hungerford

Etta Mekeel

Interviewed by Marjorie Smith

Christine Ayoub

Interviewed by Marjorie Smith

Dean Tuttle

Interviewed by Reed Smith

Shirley Tuttle

Interviewed by Marjorie Smith

Russ Tuttle

Interviewed by Reed Smith

Carol Tuttle

Interviewed by Peg Doms

Ralph Rudd

Interviewed by Reed Smith

Carolyn Rudd

Interviewed by Marjorie Smith

Elton Atwater

Interviewed by Reed Smith

Betty Boardman

Interviewed by Marjorie Smith

Gary Fosmire

Interviewed by Christine Ayoub

Jane Jenks Small

Interviewed by Peg Doms

Alice Hoffman

Interviewed by Christine Ayoub

Phil Furnas

Interviewed by Peg Doms

Dick Taber

Interviewed by Gerda Rosenbaum

Doug Miller

Interviewed by Reed Smith

Grace Miller

Interviewed by Jane Jenks Small

Eleanor Ferguson

Interviewed by Peg Doms

Keith Doms

Interviewed by Arthur Hungerford

Peg Doms

Interviewed by Jane Jenks Small

Hanna Peck

Interviewed by Marjorie Smith

Ed Atkinson

Interviewed by Peg Doms

Bibliography

To the narrators who shared the story of their dedicated lives and to the devoted interviewers and transcribers who helped bring these lives to light.

Narrators

(in alphabetic order)

Ed Atkinson

Elton Atwater

Christine Ayoub

Betty Boardman

Bob Crauder

Renée Crauder

Keith Doms

Peg Doms

Lu Evans

Eleanor Ferguson

Gary Fosmire

Phil Furnas

Alice Hoffman

Arthur Mekeel

Etta Mekeel

Doug Miller

Grace Miller

Hanna Peck

Libby Pennock

Roger Pennock

Carolyn Rudd

Ralph Rudd

Mardy Shaw

Mark Shaw

Jane Jenks Small

Marjorie Smith

Reed Smith

Dick Taber

Carol Tuttle

Dean Tuttle

Russ Tuttle

Shirley Tuttle

Elwood Way

Emily Way

Mary Way

Roger Way

Lloyd Williams

List of Maps

China

East Asia (includes Japan)

East Asia (includes part of India)

The Middle East (includes part of India)

North Africa and the Middle East

Germany

Argentina & part of Paraguay

Eastern & central Pennsylvania

Maps

TX_China.jpgEast%20Asia%20(%232).jpgEast%20Asia%20(%231).jpgMiddle%20East.jpgNoth%20Africa%20%26%20Middle%20East.jpgMap.jpgTX_argentina.jpgTX_PA_Central%20%26%20East.jpg

Introduction

In 1996, the State College Friends Meeting initiated the Oral History Project; the purpose of the project was to preserve by audiotape and in print the personal memories of its seniors (those who were sixty years old or older). Shortly thereafter, Mae Smith Bixby started a similar project at Foxdale Village. Subsequently, the two projects were amalgamated. We have now conducted over two hundred interviews; about a third of these were interviews of Quakers. For this book, we have chosen thirty-seven interviews—all of them interviews of Quakers.

We feel that these life histories may serve as a very valuable research tool, especially considering the tumultuous epoch spanned by these lives. The narrators in our study were born between 1910 (they would have been 86 when we started our interviews in 1996) and 1940 (they would have been 66 when we conducted our last interviews). However, most of the narrators experienced the Great Depression in their childhood and came of age at the time of the Second World War. Social scientists increasingly appreciate the value of longitudinal studies—formal and informal—for increasing our appreciation of human development. In our oral histories, we have the added benefit of focusing on women’s lives as well as men’s. President Martina Horner of Radcliffe College, talking about the need for the Murray Research Center, A Center for the Study of Lives, says, Few studies examined lives over many years and stages of development, and those that did rarely used the same measurements. She went on to talk of the disturbing truth that so few of the existing studies included women participants, even when gender was an important factor.

It was not possible to include whole interviews because of their lengths. Instead, excerpts from the interviews have been selected. In this way, we have the narrators’ stories in their own words. Because some details have been left out and also because narrators do not always tell their life stories in sequence, a brief biography of each narrator is provided before the excerpts from his/her interview.

The choice of interviews to include was a difficult one. I made the decision to include these particular thirty-seven interviews more or less subjectively, i.e., I had no set criteria. It would have been nice to include excerpts from more of the seventy-five Quaker interviews. But because of space limitations, it would not have been possible to include enough excerpts from any one interview.

It was also difficult to decide in which order to place the (abridged) interviews. If they had fallen neatly into three or four categories, our task would have been easy. But they didn’t. Several were in Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps during the Second World War. Several did relief work overseas after the war, and several were teachers or researchers. But there were a number of narrators who were not included in any of these groups, and in fact, they did not fall into natural groups. I have kept the interviews of husband and wife together when they have both been interviewed. And I have tried to arrange the interviews so that each interview has something in common with the one that follows it.

Two of the interviews in this collection are rather special. One is an interview of my father, Lloyd Williams. He was interviewed in 1968, and it was that interview which made me aware of the importance of oral history. Subsequently, I suggested that we start an oral history project in the meeting—which we did. The other interview is one of Alice Hoffman. Alice, a long-time member of State College Meeting, is a prominent oral historian. She was very helpful in the launching of our project. She came to State College to conduct a workshop for committee members. Much of her interview deals with her time in State College.

I am responsible for writing the short biographies and choosing the excerpts. For the latter task, I was given help—especially by Lu Evans. Except for minor changes, the language is that of the narrator. However, for the sake of clarity, I have sometimes broken a very long sentence into two, or even more, sentences, or made other minor changes. Where words have been added, again for the sake of clarity, they are enclosed in square brackets ([ ]).

A story is always made more vivid with the addition of pictures. So we solicited pictures from the narrators; Lu Evans was most helpful in doing this. Other pictures were obtained from various sources, many of which are noted in the list of illustrations.

The original committee for the Oral History Project consisted of Mae Smith Bixby, Bunny Moon, Christine Ayoub, Peg Doms, Jane Jenks Small, Marjorie Smith and Reed Smith (I have not mentioned two or three members who very soon left the committee). The first two—Mae and Bunny—made transcriptions of the interviews; the rest were interviewers. We were most fortunate in having two experienced individuals to do the transcriptions. It is a difficult—and sometimes tedious—task which requires both skill and patience. All but three of the interviews in this collection were conducted by original members of the committee.

At the beginning of each interview, along with the name of the narrator, is the name of the interviewer. In addition to the actual interview, the interviewer has numerous other tasks to perform—contacting the narrator, seeing to the equipment, having the interview proofread, and seeing that the transcribed interview is placed in the library, etc. I cannot speak too highly of the work of all the committee members. They were a dedicated group who did a painstaking job. Sadly, we have lost three of these members. Mae died in 2000, leaving Bunny as the only person to do the transcriptions. In 2006, Marjorie died, and in 2011 Reed died. They are sorely missed.

Finally, I should like to express my thanks for all the financial aid we have received. We received grants from the Publications Grants Committee and from the Bequest Granting Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The former grant was responsible for much of the funding of this publication. We also received a grant from the Reynolds Fund of Baltimore Yearly Meeting. In addition, we have received continuing financial support both from State College Friends Meeting and from the Residents Association of Foxdale Village.

I have had much support and encouragement from members of the meeting as well as from residents of Foxdale. Foremost among these has been my husband, who has watched patiently as I struggle with the computer and who bailed me out when I cried for help.

501905.png

LLOYD WILLIAMS

¹ (interviewed on July 29, 1970, by Philip Martin). Lloyd was born in Friendship, Kansas, in 1888. He was a birthright Friend. Lloyd was the son of Nathan Williams by his second wife, Amanda Truex. When he was five, his mother died, and he was brought up by Nathan’s first wife’s family on a farm in Indiana. In high school, he attended a Friends’ academy in Westfield, Indiana, and then did his undergraduate work at Haverford. In 1910, he went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship; he was there for three years studying mathematics. He then studied at the University of Chicago during the summer, and received his Ph.D. in 1920. While in Chicago, he met Anne Sykes; they were married in 1917. Starting in 1913, he taught at various institutions: Miami University, Gettysburg College, the College of William and Mary, Cornell University, and finally, McGill University, where he remained until his retirement in 1953. While in Montreal, Lloyd was very active in Friends’ concerns; he served on the board of the Canadian Friends Service Committee, for a time as clerk. For his part in the founding of the Canadian Mathematical Congress, he was awarded honorary degrees by four Canadian universities. His last years were spent in State College, where one of his daughters lived. He died in 1976.

"I was born a birthright member of the Society of Friends. In most yearly meetings, I would not have been, but in Kansas Yearly Meeting, of which we were members, a person was a birthright member if one parent was a Friend. So although my mother was not a Friend, I became a birthright member and have been a member, of course, ever since. In the rural meeting to which we belonged and which we attended, there was no pastor. It was an un-programmed meeting. There was singing—very poor singing, but nevertheless singing, congregational singing. They used to say that if it was a sin to pay pastors, Friends sinned less than other people because they paid them less, which, I suppose, is still true. I remember before I went to college, we had our meeting on Fourth Day, and the farmers would hitch their horses to the fence and stop their work and go in for meeting. Of course, I couldn’t go in the winter because I was at school, but in the summer, I used to go. There were only a few people there. It was all very quiet, and I enjoyed that.

"I will say what is not literally true, but figuratively true—that I have been a Friend for three hundred years. My first ancestor in America was named Robert William. He came from Wales. At that time, people just had their first names as in the Bible. It was in 1682 that he came to America. This was a year before William Penn came. Penn divided his grant into various parts, one of which was a Welsh tract, which lies somewhat west of Philadelphia, including well-known places like West Chester and Westtown. It was on this tract that [Robert William] originally settled. He bought two pieces of land, one [was] off considerably farther west of the other. The idea seems to have been that as the country developed, the part nearer down the river would become more valuable, and you could sell that and use the money to improve the other part. He said that he lived in a cave—he was still unmarried. However, he built a house later and was married. He allowed Friends to meet in his house. Later, they built a meetinghouse, and he built a new house in 1704, I think it was. On account of his hospitality to the meeting in the earlier period, they made a contribution to the building of the new house, which still stands and which I visited.

501942.png

Buttonwood, the house Friends helped Robert William build in Chester County.

"My brother Noah, who is now ninety-one years of age, became interested [in genealogy] and went back through the Quaker records of the monthly meetings, and he established a genealogy going back to Robert William. Also, he found this minute of the monthly meeting with regard to the house and the Friends’ contribution to it. I’ve forgotten just how much the contribution was, but it was important. But at any rate, it was interesting and enabled us to find the house.

"My wife and I went to the meeting which is a mile or so away from the house, and after the meeting, we asked people about it, and they said, ‘Of course, we know it. It’s the Williams house.’ And that Williamses had lived in it until comparatively recent times. However, that was another branch of the family. My branch of the family moved south. We suspect—I don’t think we entirely know—that this particular ancestor, descendant of Robert William, was a soldier in the Revolutionary War and was able to get a land grant in South Carolina by virtue of his service as a soldier. At any rate, he moved down there, that we know; later, on account of the Quaker objection to slavery, he and his family moved north again. They settled near Barnesville, Ohio, [in a part] of the Northwest Territory in which there had never been any slavery. Later, my father’s family moved west to Indiana and eventually to Kansas, where I was born in a small village, appropriately called Friendship.

"Our moving there was disastrous. My father’s first wife, who died before I was born, was a very devoted Friend, and she was unhappy in the part of Kansas where they were living because there was no Friends meeting there. So my father bought this farm near Friendship. But he had the misfortune to have acquired it at a time when there were floods in the river which was quite near, and this destroyed his crops for two or three successive years, and eventually, with a large family and illness, he lost his farm and moved down to Florida because my mother had tuberculosis. They thought that a climate such as that of Florida would be good for tuberculosis. She died when I was about five years old. [My father] taught school there. He was a farmer and also at odd times a schoolteacher. He had graduated from the Spiceland Academy, which was an academy in Spiceland, Indiana. There were six Friends academies in Indiana and Illinois, all of them except one in Indiana. This was before the period of public schools. I think the one that I attended in Westfield, Indiana, was started in about 1860. Public schools came, and people got free education. Friends did not make the effort to keep up their own schools, but they went to the public schools. They declined, and eventually, they were either abandoned or taken over as public schools.

"It’s interesting, at least to me. I attended this academy at Union High because I failed the examination which would have enabled me to go to the local high school. The story about that was this: I failed in the spring and then there was a special six-week course at the public high school, and I attended that, and I failed again. Now my family were related to the county superintendent of education, and they asked him why I had failed, especially as I got a very low mark in arithmetic, which was my best subject. And he said, ‘I wouldn’t pass anybody that young and so enable him to go to high school.’ The principal of the academy, Irvin Stanley, had been a classmate at Spiceland of my father, and he took an interest in me. So I attended there. It’s interesting to note that the tuition at that time was seventy-five cents a week. We had a thirty-six-week term, so it was twenty-seven dollars a year. There were about twenty students and two teachers, one teaching English and Latin, and another, the principal himself, teaching mathematics and whatever other science was taught—physical geography and a little physics.

"I got through the academy in three years and then went off to North Dakota, where my father had then migrated and taught school. I began teaching this school the day I was sixteen. I couldn’t get a teacher’s certificate until I was eighteen, but they had a system they called giving of permits. Teachers were very scarce so they used rather unprepared ones as I was. But you couldn’t get more than one permit in a given calendar year. The schools there were very poor. Most places they’d have school two months in the autumn, and then in the winter, they wouldn’t have any school because it was very cold for the children to go to school, and then in the spring, they’d have another two months. That was the total education. I taught for two months in this school where I started to teach on October 3, 1904, and then I moved across into another county and taught another month and a half. Then my possibilities of teaching were exhausted. So then I went back to my grandfather², with whom I lived in Indiana, and had a postgraduate year, from Christmas on to the end of the year, doing a little more Latin and a little more mathematics and English.

"The fact that my father had gone to Spiceland Academy meant a good deal in my life because not only were he and Irvin Stanley students there, but also there was another graduate named Levi Edwards, who had become professor at Haverford College. So Irvin Stanley wrote to Levi Edwards and said that I had difficulty in going to college, I didn’t have much money, and asked if he could get a scholarship for me. He wrote back and sent examination questions. There were eleven colleges including Harvard [and Haverford] who admitted students by examination only. Now I noticed, but Irvin Stanley didn’t notice, that these questions were not the ones for that year, but for the year before. So I didn’t say anything about it, and they were sent in. Well, of course, when the college got the answer book, they realized the situation—that I hadn’t seen these questions before. So they passed me on the basis of those questions. I shouldn’t say they passed me because I failed in a good many subjects. I didn’t have a very good education, but I was quite good at mathematics, especially algebra, and Latin. So they said they would give me a scholarship, and I went on to Haverford in the autumn of 1905.

"I joined Philadelphia Yearly Meeting when I went to Haverford. The meeting there was quite inspiring. Of course, Rufus Jones³ was very active. He was a young man. I presume not quite forty at that time, a very eloquent person. Kenneth Boulding once said that Haverford Meeting was a Friends church of which Rufus Jones was the pastor. This, of course, was an exaggeration, but nevertheless had a grain of truth.

"A number of people in the community, knowing that Rufus would usually be there and would speak, came to the meeting, so it became in a small way a community church, although it was primarily Quaker. Of course. Rufus Jones was editor of the American Friend. There was a great deal of criticism of him and other liberal Friends because of the higher criticism. There’s a higher criticism and a lower criticism. The lower criticism we don’t hear much of. It means textual criticism, trying to make sure you have the correct text. Whereas the higher criticism might be called literary criticism. It didn’t assume necessarily the truth of every word of the Bible, but tried to find out what the truth was behind it. As Rufus was a scholar and approved of this, although he wasn’t blatant about it, there was a great deal of criticism of him, especially in the Middle West.

501962.png

Rufus Jones in the early 1900s

"Rufus was a person who had a great deal of dignity and didn’t allow himself to be insulted. I remember when I was a freshman and he taught us biblical literature one hour a week, one of my classmates yawned visibly and Rufus wouldn’t teach the class anymore until the students apologized. Perhaps he shouldn’t have punished the innocent with the guilty, but anyway it produced the desired results, and the lecture went on.

"He was asked at one Friends college to speak to the students, somewhere in the Middle West. The president introducing him was rather cynical about it and said he was afraid they would hear a lot of things that weren’t true. Well, Rufus continued the lecture, but afterwards, he said he wouldn’t lecture anymore unless the president apologized, which he had to do. So as I have said, he didn’t allow his dignity to be insulted.

"He had no problems in Haverford, but he had problems with Philadelphia Friends who didn’t approve of him. But he felt he’d triumphed because their sons were at Haverford and heard him speak in meeting and took his courses and were very much influenced by him. He knew a great deal of poetry, and he interspersed choice passages in his sermons. Today in the Friends’ unprogrammed meeting, usually nobody speaks more than about five minutes. I suppose Rufus would have said that you couldn’t say anything worth saying in five minutes. It took him probably about half an hour, and everybody listened intently. I might mention this fact: modern Friends are not used to that Quaker singsong, which was prevalent fifty years ago and before. It had more or less gone out, at least at Haverford in my time. But one day, we had a visiting minister who spoke at some length, and he went into this Quaker singsong which the students were not used to and hadn’t heard, and it struck everybody as funny, and they all burst into laughter in the middle of the meeting. My friend Alfred Lowry, who was a very strict Friend, even wore plain clothes, said that he pinched himself as hard as he could in order to restrain himself from laughing. The president, Isaac Sharpless, I think, reprimanded us later about it. And we no doubt were ashamed of it, but we just couldn’t restrain ourselves. It was something we hadn’t heard before.

dreamstimeMerton.jpg

View of Oxford showing the chapel of Merton College

"On the whole, the speaking in Haverford Meeting at that time was of fairly high quality, but occasionally, we had something happen that was amusing. Allen C. Thomas, a well-known Friend who was a professor of history, often spoke. He could be, against his will, amusing. One day he was talking about a trip he had taken to Europe, and he said that as he came back on the boat, some were sitting, and some were standing, and some were both sitting and standing.

"We attended meeting on Fifth Day and First Day. It was compulsory. I think it was a matter of honor as regards the First Day meeting but at the Fifth Day meeting attendance was taken. I occasionally attended what’s called the Old Haverford Meeting, which was some distance from there, a very quiet country meeting. I liked the very quiet meetings, quiet small meetings. The same way when I was at Oxford. There was in the Merton College chapel a service of about ten minutes at ten o’clock at night. I used to attend that. At Merton College, attendance at the chapel was compulsory unless you were a nonconformist, in which case you could sign the roll call. I think it was perhaps at eight o’clock. That was to ensure that we didn’t lie in bed too long. If people were negligent and went in their pajamas, there was usually someone present to disallow the signature.

"Only a comparatively small proportion of students at Haverford were Friends. The college at that time had about a hundred and fifty students. Perhaps forty percent or something like that were members of the Society of Friends. The standard of scholarship in the faculty was very high. They didn’t choose people either because they were Friends or because they weren’t. I would think the large majority of the faculty were not Friends, although a number of them attended the meeting.

501974.png

John Wilhelm Rowntree

"John Wilhelm Rowntree was a great friend of Rufus Jones, and it was they that planned the history of the Society of Friends which later came out in the so-called Braithwaite histories. But unfortunately, John Wilhelm Rowntree didn’t live long enough to complete this, or even take any part in it, as far as I know. But Rufus wrote some of the volumes, one particularly on Quakerism in colonial America. I always felt Rufus could take the writings of somebody, a somewhat-dull Quaker journalist, and could put more life into it than was actually there.

"I was [at Haverford] for two years and then, partly from lack of money and partly from the fact that I wanted to make sure of being eligible for a Rhodes Scholarship from North Dakota, I stayed out a year and went back for my junior year and graduated in 1910. I think it was in 1903 that Mr. Rhodes’s will was published. I read about this and determined to try for a Rhodes Scholarship, and I won this in 1910. So the fact that I failed the examination to get into high school really was the reason I got the Rhodes Scholarship!

"At Haverford, I studied mostly classics. I had an idea that there was a hierarchy of studies, that you studied Latin and Greek first, and then from that, you passed on to English, history, science, and other things. Well, it’s not a bad idea, but it’s not one that would be suited to everybody. But anyway that is what I practiced. But I was better in mathematics than I was in classics; also I realized that classics were more or less going out as a subject, that classics are not suitable for teaching. So although my preparation in mathematics was not very good, I still went on and took the mathematical moderations and the final examination in mathematics. Mathematical moderations was the examination you take at the end of the first year at Oxford. Again I was very fortunate. I always go back to my good fortune in various ways. I was very poor at applied mathematics, and in that year at Oxford, you could pass the examination without doing very much in applied mathematics.

"I was fortunate because the subjects that interested me the most in mathematics were the theory of numbers and the theory of invariance, two rather special subjects. So later when I went to the University of Chicago to study, I found that one of the professors there, Professor Leonard Dickson, had been doing research in the application of a theory of invariance to a theory of numbers, combining these two subjects together. So I asked him for a Ph.D. subject and worked on that. They gave me credit for my three years at Oxford. Of course, at Oxford, I did nothing except mathematics for the whole period of three years. So that although there was no research or thesis, nevertheless the training otherwise was pretty well equivalent to the Ph.D. course, except for the research, which is of course important.

"When I graduated from Oxford, I thought that teaching in high school would be the thing for me because I felt that the American high schools were not very good, and I’d like to take a very small part in improving them. I had a friend who also was a Rhodes Scholar the same year, Christopher Morley. His father was head of the department of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. So he wrote to his father. Different universities came to the father to find young people who wanted positions. One of these was Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I got a cablegram one day from the president saying that I had been elected to an assistant professorship of mathematics and astronomy at Miami. The usual salary for a young Ph.D. at that time was a thousand dollars a year. Now it’s more like eight thousand. Mr. Hugh was the president, and he thought a Rhodes Scholar was better than a Ph.D. apparently. He gave me twelve hundred.

"In the summers, I went to the University of Chicago and took courses there. The University of Chicago, as far as mathematics was concerned, was really better in the summer than it was in the winter because they got distinguished men from outside during the summer. After a few summers, I got my doctor’s degree. I think it was in 1920. In the meantime, I had been married. My wife, Anne Sykes, as she then was, was a member of a New England family. Her mother had come from Brookline, and her father had graduated from Harvard at the head of his class in 1877.

"For a number of years, I was not in any place where there was a Friends meeting. I taught several years at Miami University, at Gettysburg College, and at the College of William and Mary. But when I went to Cornell, there was a very small meeting. I think this certainly is not something to be said in my favor that I said, when I went to Montreal, that I wasn’t going to try to get mixed up with Friends anymore because it’s too discouraging.

Williiamsfamily.jpg

Lloyd and Anne Williams with their two daughters, Christine

(later Christine Ayoub) in her mother’s arms and Hester. The picture was taken shortly before the family moved to Montreal.

"It happened that Eugene Forcey, now a very prominent Canadian, had been a Rhodes Scholar from Quebec at Oxford. He was impressed with Friends and became a member during his student days. He came back to be on the staff at McGill, and in his enthusiasm, he organized a small meeting. But the number of people was few. I remember one time when I was the only person, and I sat there for the hour. The growth of the Montreal Meeting was very slow. Sometimes I wondered whether it would be permanent, but it’s reached the stage now⁴ where it will be.

"One of the things that helped it, I think, was the lecture series which we started, with the idea of having prominent people, some Friends and some non-Friends, come and give a lecture. We had a program of perhaps five lectures a winter, say two non-Friends and three Friends or vice versa. Among the prominent Friends who came and lectured for us were Henry Cadbury, Frank Aydelotte, Roscoe Pound, the famous dean of the Harvard Law School. He was a Friend from Nebraska, but I don’t think he identified himself very much with Friends, but he remained a Friend. When I started this lecture series with the cooperation and enthusiasm of the meeting, I went to see Frank Aydelotte, who was then director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,—I think I may have seen Rufus [Jones] or written to him before—and he said ‘If Rufus and other prominent Friends approve of this, I do too, and I’ll recommend that the Friends General Conference give it some financial support,’ which they did for a number of years. Not much, I think perhaps three hundred or three hundred and fifty dollars a year.

"Six or seven years ago, we bought a house, which didn’t need very much change to make it appropriate for our purposes. We’ve continued to meet there. You have many college communities where Friends meetings have grown. A contribution of importance at that time was the young people, young Germans and Austrians who were living in England at the time of the Nazi ascendancy—in June of 1940, when France fell. The English people felt that these young students constituted a wooden horse. So they shipped them off to the colonies, Canada or Australia. These were very fine young men, but they were put in a so-called concentration camp. Friends took an interest in them and visited them in the camp. When they wanted to go to college, they were admitted either to McGill or Toronto. Of course, not all these boys were interested in Friends, but a number of them were. That was just one contribution to the growth of our meeting.

Now, at that time, there were three yearly meetings in Canada. The common interest was relief work; the influence of the United States and the American Friends Service Committee induced us in Canada to organize the Canadian Friends Service Committee. The union of the [three] yearly meetings into the Canadian Yearly Meeting has been very important. It has led to growth, not very large growth, but still I think a permanent one. There was a small defection of one meeting of more or less fundamentalist Friends, who said they couldn’t join in with Hicksites, which we were. They did work with us in the Canadian Friends Service Committee, which did lots of good work.

1.   Lloyd’s full name was William Lloyd Garrison Willams; he was named after the famous abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison. He and his wife, Anne, moved to State College in 1965. He had been appointed clerk emeritus of the Montreal Meeting. In State College, he was made a permanent member of the meeting’s Committee on Ministry and Worship. He died before this Oral History Project was started. We have included this interview because it was what inspired his daughter, Christine Ayoub, to initiate the program. Christine’s interview is included in the collection.

2.   Actually, this was Nathan’s first wife’s father, who had taken Lloyd in when Lloyd’s mother died.

3.   Rufus Jones was the first clerk of the American Friends Service Committee.

4.   Unfortunately, Lloyd’s optimism wasn’t justified. The house which several members of the meeting had pooled their resources to purchase has been sold. Meeting for worship now takes place in an upper floor of an apartment building.

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BOB CRAUDER

¹ (interviewed on November 17, 2003, by Christine Ayoub). Bob was born in Indiana to Quaker parents. He received an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania after completing his undergraduate course at the University of Chicago. He then spent three years in China with the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU). On his return home, he was married to Renée. Together they went to Burma, where Bob worked with the Agency for International Development (AID). The succeeding five years were spent in Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus. He was employed by the UN and worked with Palestinian refugees. Back in the United States, he was a financial officer at West Chester State College first and then chief financial officer at Wilberforce University. The Crauders’ final assignment overseas was to Bangladesh, where they spent six years. Since retiring, he has been business manager at Pendle Hill for two or three years and treasurer of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting for about ten years. The Crauders have two children. Bob and Renée now live at Foxdale Village².

"I was born and raised in the small town of New Castle, Indiana. We lived through the Depression years, which were quite serious. I remember my dad and me fishing in the local park, where you had to pay twenty-five cents to fish, and we didn’t catch anything. I remember crying myself to sleep that night because we’d wasted twenty-five cents. Later, when I went to business school for graduate work, I papered my room with my father’s defunct stock certificates. They were beautiful. There were gold mines and railroads that had all gone defunct.

"The Friends meeting in New Castle is very different from the Friends meeting in Radnor, where we transferred our membership [later]. That meeting in Indiana had a preacher and a choir, complete with choir robes and an organ. Sadly, during World War II, there was a flag in the corner of the church with stars for all the men and women in the military who were members of the church, but none for the one pacifist, who was ostracized from the meeting. His mother was ostracized from the meeting too.

"In 1943, I graduated from high school at the age of eighteen. I was drafted and went to Fort Benjamin Harrison for my physical to go into the army. I was surprised at the induction place when somebody asked me something about my being a Quaker and if I had a problem with joining the army. I said, ‘No, of course I don’t have a problem with that.’ At that time, the hatred for the Japanese was so intense that there was just no question about it. I had heard nothing in the Friends church in New Castle about pacifism.

"It was my understanding that most of the meetings in Pennsylvania were quite split ‘between pacifism and nonpacifism in World War II. Whereas that was definitely