Skinny Lennie

Skinny Lennie drove the van to New York that fateful summer. Lennie was somewhat of a campus exhibitionist. During performances by the Backdoormen in Assembly Hall or the Spouter Inn, he was wont to show up dressed in a trench coat and a jock strap and during the band's performances of "Evil" or "Rainy Day Women" he would rush onto stage and fling wide his trench coat to reveal the word "EROS", painted on his bony chest with red lipstick. The band tolerated his performance but it always looked like the dour frontman, Stevie Stoltzfus, was ready to boot him off the stage, sort of like what happened at Woodstock a year later when Pete Townshend of the Who kicked Abbie Hoffman, another irritating skinny performance artist, into the crowd.

The Backdoormen was a blues group comprised of Goshen College students including the son and nephew of Dean Stoltzfus. By virtue of their frequent visits to South Side bars in Chicago they had perfected a pretty decent imitation of the Chicago blues sound popularized in those years by artists like Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf. Stevie played an impressive blues harmonica, or "harp", and did the vocals, while Mark played lead guitar. (Mark later wound up in New York as a studio musician whose claim to fame was that he once played in sessions with John Lennon.) They cut a single single record. The A side was "Evil" by Howling Wolf and the B side was "Corrina, Corrina" by Big Joe Turner (popularized by Bob Dylan). Stevie dedicated the band's rendition of the latter to a popular Goshen College cheerleader.

The more formal concerts by the Backdoormen were staged in Assembly Hall in the old Ad Building, and even the Dean was wont to attend his son's performances. The faculty and administration at the time were something of a family affair -- Dean Stoltzfus' brother Robert was the Business Administrator while his son, a Harvard grad, was Professor of History. His daughter was married to a Boston architect who subsequently got the contract to design the Umble Center. When the new President, J. Lawrence Burkholder, replaced Ho Chi Miniger in 1970, Dean Stoltzus had to resign as Dean, since the new President was his brother-in-law.

But the wildest performances were held in Spouter Inn, a venerable old dormitory across College Avenue. This venue was set up as a "coffee house", a performance space much in vogue in the late sixties. It was dark and smoky from the candles inserted in old wine bottles that decorated the tables. In 1969 it burned to the ground in a mysterious fire. Some said it was a case of arson by disgruntled Trustees who had gotten wind of the shameless contemporary musical performances staged there to corrupt the Youth.

Goshen College and the Amish Druids

Even Goshen College, a humble and diminutive Mennonite institution at the south end of Goshen, Indiana, felt the reverberations of the tumultous events of the spring of 1968. In the previous year four editors of an underground magazine irreverently titled "Mennopause" were expelled from the school after much angst and soul-searching on the part of the administration, primarily because the fanatical writers had dared to publish the word "Fuck", a word which was much in the zeitgeist but still highly offensive to the "constituency", primarily comprised of staid Mennonite farmers and burghers.

In March a group of wannabe merry pranksters rented a van and drove north to Racine, Wisconsin, where they canvassed for Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. Upon their return to Goshen, President Lyndon Johnson went on the TV (television was by then an accepted part of Mennonite, although not Amish, life) to declare he would not accept his party's nomination. Two days later he was badly beaten in the Wisconsin primary. Only two days after that, on April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated and the campus was deeply roiled. Students and faculty processed silently and prayerfully down to the town square and held a vigil, where the largely rednecked townspeople honked and hooted at them derisively.

Goshen at the time was a deeply schizophrenic town. One of the birthplaces of the Ku Klux Klan, the small city had not a single African-American resident, and Negroes passing through were advised to leave town by sunset. The high school principal was a fascist who expelled students for suspected Communist leanings. On the other hand, the Mennonite and Church of the Brethren population had leavened such institutions as the draft board to such an extent that obtaining conscientious objector status for nice Mennonite boys was almost de rigeur and routine. Even flaming radicals who burned their draft cards and American flags were treated almost politely by the board, being sent to Chicago to work in hospitals rather than to prison to be raped by the hardened mother-rapers and father-stabbers.

The campus itself was never roiled by the student demonstrations and building takeovers that troubled such secular institutions as Columbia University or the Sorbonne. In fact the closest approximation of such manifestations was a very odd evening which began when twelve hooded monks with flaming torches marched across campus singing a Gregorian chant which had been improvised by one of the future settlers on the Lower East Side (he became a church organist for the Episcopals and later died of AIDS). Understandably, a crowd of several hundred male students soon gathered, marched to the all-girl dormitory of Westlawn where the females were safely sequestered for the night, and began to chant the name of the college president (Paul Mininger) in a sort of lampoon of the big city hard-core protestors. The chant went "Ho Ho Ho Chi Mininger" and drew alarmed and puzzled faculty onlookers from their nearby suburban ranch houses. Finally the mob of male students did what came naturally and staged a panty raid in the basement of another nearby women's dormitory (Coffman Hall), and were finally dispersed by the campus cop (there was only one) who was rumored to carry a gun and went by the sobriquet of "Delmar Dumbfuck."

Amish Druid, West Philly, c. 2005

The Origin of the Amish Druids in the East Village

The Amish Druid Liberation Front arose out of a heretical Amish cult in the late 1960s centered around a young Amish powwow artist who left the faith to go and live on East 13th Street in New York City's East Village. At the time East 13th Street between Avenues A and B was the center of a burgeoning Mennonite colony founded by the "I-W Boys" who had come to the city to do their alternate service at local hospitals. Soon they were joined by other Mennonite farmboys -- gays, hippies and nogoodnik rebels -- who found the strictures of Mennonite life in rural Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana altogether too binding and suffocating for comfort.

The gays played the organ or sang in the choir at upscale uptown Episcopal churches. The rebels founded a bicycle repair shop named "Toga" on Avenue B. The hippies sat on the fire escapes grooving to the sound of the mammoth Con Ed plant on 14th St and wrote poetry long into the night. And they all replaced the sacrament of Holy Communion, generally observed twice yearly in the churches back home, with weekends of experimental drug use -- pot, hash, amphetamines, LSD, and cheap wine -- in the new holy land of Tompkins Square Park. Soon they were joined by some of the more free-spirited and adventurous Mennonite women, who chafed after their own fashion at life in the hinterlands.



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