Challenge of Change: The Wizdom of Oz

Author

PREFACE

MANY OF THOSE who assisted me in writing this book will remain nameless and were numerous. They were my teachers across the years. My personal intentions and inexperience as an author dictates that. There are several unwritten chapters that I would like to have shared in substance but must save for a later time.

Those who provided consistent and important assistance to me include:

Dr. Annette Graves, who spent long hours working with me on the manuscript. She often knew what I was going to dictate before I did;

My wife, Jean Mutz, who edited and re-edited the manuscript;

Martha Linder, who provided unique, experienced editing skills to us;

Linda Karnes, our long-time associate who kept the whole process glued together;

Chuck Colson, my dear friend and Christian mentor, who gave me the courage to start this book, and the stamina to finish it. If he were still with us, I could not thank him adequately.

PROLOGUE

ITHINK MY MOTHER was as stunned as I. Usually the first to respond in an emergency, she seemed to have momentarily forgotten the eight-year-old boy at her side. By the time she had recollected me and done an about-face, marching me firmly and purposefully in the opposite direction, it was too late. My eyes had seen too much. The picture in my mind is as fresh today as it was seventy-eight years ago.

My father commuted to Indianapolis from the little Indiana town of Edinburgh. Sometimes he would take my mother, my sister, and me with him, dropping us off under the clock of L. S. Ayres department store at the corner of Meridian and Washington. While we might browse the luxuries of Ayres’s upper stories, any purchases Mother made came from the store’s bargain basement. We would lunch in the bargain cafeteria as well, and then wait for Dad to pick us up once he had finished work.

Shopping was never something I looked forward to, but no one, not even an unwilling recruit like me, could resist the aura L. S. Ayres created in the 1930s at the heart of downtown Indianapolis. Their ten thousand-pound bronze clock had just been hung at the corner of Washington and Meridian, overlooking the Crossroads of America like a watchman on the city walls. The clock’s four enormous faces, each one eight feet in diameter and illuminated from within, maintained their steadfast lookout. They saw what was coming, even if those of us on the ground did not.

Mother and I were on the east side of Meridian Street. Traffic was lazy, and the city was rather quiet for the middle of the morning. I had anticipated more hustle and bustle from downtown Indianapolis on a shopping day, although for me, at eight, any foray into the world outside Edinburgh was an adventure.

A man on a motorcycle had just turned north onto Meridian from East Pearl Street. He was in our line of vision because we had stopped in front of the clock at L. S. Ayres to survey the State Soldiers and Sailors Monument and the Circle Tower. The midmorning light dancing on the tower in Monument Circle is worth a pause on even the busiest day. The motorcyclist must have turned too short coming off of the alley. His front tire hit some loose gravel and slid out from beneath him, spraying fine pebbles and dust at the bystanders on the walk.

Perhaps the impact had rendered him unconscious. He made no movement nor uttered any sound to suggest he was trying to either help himself or secure help from someone else. His body spun with the motorcycle on top of him, which ricocheted from side to side as it ground his flesh into the pavement.

I stood riveted to the sidewalk. I could not pull my eyes from the picture of the man beneath his spinning motorcycle.

It seemed a long time before anyone tried to help him. My mother and the security guard from the front entrance to Ayres sprang into action at the same time. My mother spun me around to face the clock over the crossroads and propelled me back toward the department store, being careful to block my view as I twisted my head around my shoulder, trying to see what would happen next. The morning’s quiet had fled. I don’t remember the motor of the cycle ever being silenced; I only knew that women were screaming and men were shouting and my mother seemed determined to put as much distance as possible between her son and the corner of Washington and Meridian.

I was left looking at the clock over my shoulder.

In a figurative sense, I am still looking at that clock, and it still sits at a crossroads.

That crossroads is the intersection of generations. What lives and what dies rests in the hands of the generation that is coming, not with the generations of the past. Such decisions need to be informed, intentional, and purposeful. In the story that follows, I have endeavored to communicate my negotiation of that generational crossroads from one Mutz generation to another. I pray that it will directly benefit those coming after me: that it will inform their decisions, strengthen their noblest intentions, and inspire purpose.

Indeed, we look forward to the challenge of change that follows.

TAKE AWAYS

What lives and what dies rests in the hands of the generation that is coming, not with the generations of the past.

Operate from the basis of informed decisions, strong and noble intentions, and inspired purposes.

Good work ethics create the basis for success.

SALVATION FOR ZION

Look to Abraham your father, and to Sarah who gave birth to you in pain. When I called him, he was only one; I blessed him and made him many. For the LORD will comfort Zion; He will comfort all her waste places, and He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the LORD. Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and melodious song.

—ISAIAH 51:2–3

PART ONE:

EDINBURGH

Chapter 1

LOOK TO THE ROCK FROM WHICH YOU WERE CUT

ON JULY 4, 1876, a brief historical sketch of Shelby County, Indiana, was deposited with the county clerk to celebrate the great Centennial of American Liberty. The document’s authors pondered the accomplishments of the fifty-four short years since the county’s formal settlement in 1822.

Where now we may see broad fields and wide pastures of open woodland, they wrote, then stood the great oak, the poplar, the beech, the maple, the walnut, and the ash . . . so dense that they shut out the sun from May to October. The underbrush, they noted, often presented an impenetrable barrier to the horseman, and the level lands stood in water for more than half the year.¹

Making this part of Indiana suitable for agriculture was a Herculean task. Without money, and without the assistance which money brings, wrote an eyewitness, these men had come here to make war upon nature in her most forbidding forms . . . But they went to work with a dauntless and unconquerable energy, buoyed by the hope of leaving their children a good inheritance.² Within fifty years, one generation, men who had possessed little or nothing of the world’s goods owned taxable property amounting to fifteen million dollars. Out of the soil recovered from marshland and almost impregnable forest, the settlers of Indiana had made a very large and substantial prosperity.³

Among the names of men notable for their contributions to this growth, the authors of Shelby County’s first history cite Jacob Mutz, Representative in Indiana Legislature, 1861–1865.⁴

Barnabas C. Hobbs, appointed Earlham College’s first president in 1867 and the Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of Indiana in 1868, characterizes this first generation of Hoosiers:

High toned and patriotic, [with a] great regard for law and order. It was not safe for any man to swear profanely when in the presence of any authority that could impose a fine. Men had to obey for wrath if not for conscience. There was a strong repugnance to immorality generally . . . They were intensely but sincerely sectarian in their religious view [and] though religious they were men of honor, and ever held themselves in readiness to vindicate their honor by hard knocks when they thought it necessary.⁵

Described elsewhere as social and industrious, the people who developed the agricultural resources of Indiana’s wealth possessed a strong work ethic coupled with a high regard for moral behavior. They realized the American Dream within one lifetime, but never at the expense of the American character.

In every sense a faithful representation of the people who elected him, Jacob Mutz consequently functioned as a citizen legislator during his tenure in the Indiana government and never as a career politician.

In fact, in his Biographical Sketches of the Members of the Forty-first General Assembly of the State of Indiana, James Sutherland describes the freshman representative from Shelby County as exercising a degree of industry not practiced by many farmers in Indiana.⁶ Sutherland expands further:

He is not of that class who never have time to do anything except sit on pine boxes in front of stores in the county seats, plying their jaws on tobacco and their jack knives on the boxes to which they are anchored. Neither does he belong to that class that always get done planting corn, harvesting, or any other piece of work, precisely at noon on Friday. There are thousands of them in Indiana; and nothing short of an interposition of Providence could induce them to perform any labor from that time until Monday morning. No, Jacob Mutz is not of this order of agriculturalists; but a thrifty, judicious cultivator of the Western staples.⁷

Sutherland goes on to commend Mutz for his first term in the Indiana Legislature:

[He] has so performed the duties committed to his care as to receive the approbation of his constituents, and the confidence and respect of all the members of the House. He has filled several township offices in a manner that redounded to the interests of the township, and secured him much popularity among his neighbors.⁸

Such was the rock from which the Mutz family is hewn.

Ethical, pragmatic, industrious, just—these are our family core values, our family characteristics. The good inheritance Jacob Mutz entrusted into his children’s care encompassed more than the prosperous Indiana farmland carved out of swamp and wood; it was more than his neighbors’ approbation or the recognition of the quality of his public service as a legislator, member of the Indiana Board of Agriculture, or trustee of Purdue University.

His legacy to us is the lifestyle of the good steward who multiplies the talents his Master has given him intentionally and faithfully and avoids—as the framers of the Shelby County centennial history would phrase it—the temptations of those pleasures too dearly purchased.

A FAMILY INHERITANCE

Born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1825, Jacob Mutz was raised in Montgomery County, Ohio, and settled in Edinburgh, Indiana, with his new wife, Anna Maria Snepp, in 1847. Oscar Ulysses Mutz was the youngest of Jacob and Maria’s ten children. His oldest brother, Charles, became a doctor, and two of his four sisters (Catherine and Emma) married doctors. Oscar and his wife, Emma, owned and operated the O. U. Mutz Hardware Store in Edinburgh.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Edinburgh was a small but prosperous town with a population hovering around 2,200. Franklin and Columbus were the nearest population centers of any consequence, and Franklin lay a little under eleven miles to the north, Columbus a little over eleven miles to the south.

In the thirty years between 1900 and 1930, Indianapolis, twenty-two miles north of Franklin, doubled in size to over 350,000 residents and became firmly entrenched as one of the country’s major manufacturing centers. While the first generation of its settlers were considered industrious but unenterprising, content with small gains and pleasures not too dearly purchased, nor shared in with an eye to business by the writers of the Shelby County centennial history, their children and grandchildren had shifted the scale and scope of local ambitions.

This change is reflected in the Shelby County document itself. The authors—reflecting the vision of a rising generation—conclude their description of the area’s development by lamenting the fact that, though ornamented with crowded, thrifty streets and graceful . . . frame houses that loom up in every direction and indicate the comfortable circumstances and taste of their owners, . . . now, as in the past, [the county’s] mercantile interests largely outweigh its manufactures.

More pointedly, the writers state:

However much this fact is to be deplored, it is nevertheless true. It is not because there are not manufacturing facilities. Upon every land are large forests of timber satisfactory for manufacturing purposes. Already we have furniture, carriage and wagon shops, but not upon the scale that should exist. Abundance of walnut and ash for all grades of furniture can easily be obtained and manufactured here; and with Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Chicago as distributing points, will command a ready market throughout the West. The same holds true in regard to other branches. Competition in railway freights secures cheap transportation, and wood and water are in abundance. Even the facilities of a HYDRAULIC are within our reach. At a point six miles above town a canal can be built at a moderate cost . . . sufficient for immense manufacturing purposes.⁹

These sons and daughters of those first settlers who cleared the forests and drained the swamps and founded towns based on a thriving agriculture were not content to live off their parents’ inheritance. They sought, instead, new opportunities to expand and multiply that inheritance, confident they would pass on a better world to those who came after them.

As part of this bridge generation, Oscar Mutz had translated his portion of the agriculturally based wealth of his father, Jacob, into a prosperous hardware enterprise in downtown Edinburgh. He had married the daughter of the local baker, a wealthy citizen whose family name—Winterberg—was attached to many of the small business concerns dotting the municipality at that time, among them, a grocery, millinery, and shoe store, as well as the original bakery.

Emma Sanders Winterberg was something of a musician. Her father had acquired a Steinway grand piano custom-built at the governor of Indiana’s specifications for his nine-year-old daughter. This magnificent instrument graced the Winterberg home. Its frame was of rich, inlaid woods, and the piano bench legs were shod in crystal. The piano’s large, rectangular shape would have dominated any but the most generously sized rooms.

On such the wife of Oscar Mutz practiced her art.

Since the task of domesticating the Indiana wilderness was completed by the previous generation, parents turned their attention to the more pleasant challenges of educating and preparing children for higher positions in life. Emma had been educated at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music in 1885, and, in due course, enrolled her daughter Evelyn there.

Music was a nonnegotiable in the equipping of a new generation for the task of extending the family’s fortunes. Oscar and Emma’s youngest son, Harold Winterberg Mutz—my father—played flute and piccolo in the symphony orchestras of both nearby Franklin and Columbus and in the local Edinburgh band. While studying at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Harold managed to combine business with pleasure in his own typically eclectic fashion by assuming the management of Coe’s Girls’ Glee Club. His business acumen as well as his aesthetic appreciations were exercised in booking the Glee Club programs; arranging travel, lodging, and board; and chaperoning the Club on tour throughout Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana every spring.

The party started when your dad arrived, my maternal aunt Marguerite confided to me later, and it didn’t start until then.

The Mutz family’s commitment to education did not begin or end with just immediate family concerns. O. U. and Emma Mutz not only reared four children of their own—Marie, Evelyn, Frank, and Harold—but continued the care and education of an orphaned child, J. Richard Francis, assuming the responsibilities of provision and oversight from Oscar’s father, Jacob.

Francis was sent to Purdue University where he studied pharmacy in Purdue’s School of Pharmacy and dabbled in engineering. With the rapid advance of the new automotive industry, his pharmaceutical concern in downtown Indianapolis—Hooks Francis Pharmacy—became the site of intense research on carburetors. In 1908 Francis funded the initial manufacture of a carburetor, invented by Indianapolis fiddle maker and woodworker Burt Pierce at Hooks Drug Company.

So began the Marvel Carburetor Company. By 1912 the company had relocated to Flint, Michigan, where it serviced its largest client, a new automobile manufacturer by the name of General Motors.

Francis maintained his home in Indianapolis after the move to Flint, but the investment made him wealthy beyond local imaginations. He purchased a tract of land in Dade County, Florida. After Francis’s death, his widow continued to visit the Mutzes in Edinburgh once a year. As the chauffeur maneuvered her car into our street, it seemed to us children to be half a block long. The tan-colored car inevitably sported a soft top and side mount tires and spares. Francis’s wife would arrive in a new one every time she visited.

The vision of those who wrote the county’s centennial history in 1876 was coming to pass: mercantile interests were giving way to manufactures, and the Mutz family was perfectly poised to take advantage of this shift.

AN ERA OF OPPORTUNITY

The success of Cousin Dick was not immediately mirrored in the fortunes of the Mutz family itself. O. U. Mutz was a gentle man with a keen appreciation for the joys of domestic life and the pleasures, as well as duties, of civic living. At the turn of the twentieth century, Edinburgh was thriving, his hardware establishment was thriving, and his family was thriving. He was a man at peace with his neighbors and himself, a quality of character that must at least partly explain the singular closeness and lack of conflict in the relationship between his two sons.

Frank Mutz, the elder of O. U. Mutz’s two boys and the third of his four children, was born in 1896. His younger brother, Harold Winterberg Mutz, was born October 4, 1902. Although different in temperament—or more likely because of this difference—the two brothers would forge life together, partnering on every level to secure the success of each other’s families, finances, and futures. Except for Harold’s college years in Iowa, Frank and Harold never lived more than a few minutes’ drive from each other. Their sons would be born in the same house. They would take turns managing their father’s hardware business. They would build successful careers with the same company during the leanest years of the Great Depression. They would retire together to neighboring farms.

This degree of family harmony is not just the product of random chance. O. U. Mutz sowed good seed into his sons’ lives. Although I was not quite five years old when my grandfather died in 1932, his memory is vivid. I was frequently parked at my grandparents’ house and just as frequently parked on his shoulders. I can’t begin to tell how far I rode on those shoulders.

And when he was gone, I carried his name into the future.

My grandfather Mutz was a marvelous man. He did honor to his middle name, Ulysses, a name undoubtedly reflecting the singular challenges his father had faced as state senator during the Civil War. When my mother was carrying me in her pregnancy, he dogged her footsteps, asking her to name her child after him. I liked your grandfather so much, my mother later explained (or apologized?) to me, in a moment of weakness I said yes, and then prayed for a girl!

In my four short years with him, Oscar Mutz taught me two lessons I remember well: how to shine my shoes and how to wash and stay clean—lessons small boys do not always appreciate but that come in handy later!

I remember only one spanking from my grandfather. My Mutz grandparents lived only two blocks from us. While playing ball with some neighbors, I swung the bat through the window of the house behind and immediately sought shelter with my grandparents. When Grandpa Mutz heard about the broken window, he asked me if I had done it, and I fibbed. I said, No. He believed me until the neighbor man came and blew my cover.

Grandpa didn’t say anything. He pulled me over his knee, and I knew I was in for it. Then he reached up and took the felt hat from his head (Oscar Mutz had a thin spot up there he liked to keep warm) and spanked me with it. It’s the only spanking I can remember from him. Now, he admonished me when he had my full and undivided attention with the spanking, always tell the truth right away! The lesson was memorable.

The first corpse I ever saw was that of my grandfather in his casket. He died in 1932. By that time, the Great Depression had hit. He had sold his hardware store shortly after the crash in 1929, and my father had begun commuting to Indianapolis to work, having secured a sales position with the Peerless Foundry, Inc., where his brother Frank had recently been promoted into management.

For many, the onset of the Great Depression was the end of an era of opportunity, an era that had realized the American Dream in the histories of many families like the Winterbergs (my grandmother Emma’s family) and the Sawins (my mother’s family). Dick Francis, an orphan who rode to wealth in a GM car, was raised by Jacob Mutz and educated by his son Oscar. He epitomized the thousands of real-life counterparts to the heroes peopling Horatio Alger novels.

But that party had come to a crashing end.

For the two Mutz brothers—Harold and Frank—opportunity had, however, just knocked.

TAKE AWAYS

Work with dauntless and unconquerable energy with the hope of leaving a good inheritance.

Develop a strong work ethic coupled with a high regard for moral behavior. The American Dream can be realized in one’s lifetime but never at the expense of the American character.

Core values such as ethical, pragmatic, industrious, just make a strong foundation for a good inheritance.

The good steward whose lifestyle multiplies the talents his Master has given him intentionally and faithfully and avoids the temptations of pleasures too dearly purchased is a good legacy.

Seek new opportunities to expand and multiply the inheritance, confident of leaving a better world to those who follow.

Seek peace with yourself and those around you and minimize conflict in relationships. Harmony is not the product of random chance.

Tell the truth—right away!

Chapter 2

TO EVERYTHING ITS SEASON

LAND WAS WEALTH for the first generations of Indiana settlers. Financial solvency from the acquisition and sound management of their land gave parents the resources to expand the next generation’s opportunities through higher education. But it was the ability to acquire—and keep—land that made this possible. If a family could not make their land pay, they lost the benefits of owning it and often forfeited the land itself.

My mother’s family history, stretching all the way back to Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony, followed the fortunes of those members who could keep their land and make it pay. My mother herself suffered personal injury to her educational opportunities when her father could no longer reap a profit from his land. One can only speculate how those changes in fortune might have affected her life’s story in other ways.

I can’t remember a time when Mother wasn’t sick. She had missed a year of high school battling rheumatic fever and really never recovered from it. She always had some kind of illness. I was only thirty-two when she died at the age of fifty-eight, the still-young mother of two young adult children.

But to think of Laura Sawin as sickly or weak or wanting in any way is never to know her or understand the power of her influence and example in others’ lives. My mother’s example has guided my response to living with Parkinson’s disease, a pacemaker, one lung, a replaced hip, and five levels of reconstruction in the back. I can still hear her saying, You can do things with handicaps if the handicaps don’t rule you.

So I have a broken leg, she would shrug, What’s wrong with that?

Her father, Asa Sawin, had known personal tragedy in his own life. He had two siblings: twins, a sister and a brother. The brother, Lon Sawin, an alcoholic, took his own life. Lon’s son, my mother’s first cousin Brent, also committed suicide. At the time of my mother’s birth, my grandfather and grandmother lived in Hope, Indiana, about fifteen miles from Edinburgh. Grandpa owned a hardware store on the town square. He had either inherited the store or been given it by his father. In either event, he eventually traded it and a substantial part of the family farm for a watermelon farm near Rensselaer, Indiana. Watermelon was promoted then as the panacea for faltering Indiana farmers. It was going to take them all to heaven, economically.

It didn’t.

Asa lost his farm at Rensselaer. He and Anna moved back to what remained of the original Sawin farm three-and-a-half miles east of Edinburgh with three sons and four daughters. My grandfather owned twenty-one head of dairy cattle, milking fourteen regularly and keeping seven dry and calving. He also raised hogs and grew enough grain and hay to feed all his livestock. His wife, my grandmother Anna, had been more accustomed to affluence. Her brother had inherited the Riggs family’s home, a graceful, imposing residence near Nineveh, Indiana—the typical abode of a successful farmer. I remember well going there for family picnics. Strategically located next to a spring that flowed twenty-four hours a day, it was the perfect location for outdoor feasts in those days, conveniently providing land, shelter, and fresh water on one site!

Anna’s sister, too, had married into a family who knew how to succeed at farming.

Not that the Sawins had lacked agricultural savvy in the past. Grandma Great Caroline Harvey Sawin, Asa Sawin’s grandmother, was born on September 13, 1808, in Tompkins County, New York. In 1818 her parents pushed westward, first to Sharon, Ohio, and from there by wagon to the relatively unsettled county of Shelby, Indiana, arriving April 1, 1821, according to an article published in the Indianapolis News, April 25, 1902. Caroline Harvey, the writer continues, was united in marriage to James H. Sawin, February 23, 1826. Her husband was born in New York, April 29, 1802. His father was of English parentage and his mother of French ancestry. James H. Sawin, previous to his marriage, had entered land at the government office at Brookville, State of Indiana, settling in German township, Bartholomew County in 1824, and had made such improvements as were common in those days in the wilderness—a round log house with puncheon floor and stick chimney.¹ His deed carried the signature of President Andrew Jackson.

The story describes the challenges our family overcame when first settling Indiana:

The writer well remembers the cabin, where all the family but two were born. They experienced all the hardships incident to the life of the settlers in that early day. For several years an annual trip was made to Madison, about sixty miles distant, with a two-wheeled cart, loaded with wheat selling then at fifty cents a bushel, [and] returning with the annual supply of coffee, salt, etc.

Thirteen children resulted from the union, ten reaching manhood and womanhood. Six are still living, three of whom are ordained ministers of the primitive Baptist church. Caroline Harvey Sawin is now in her ninety-third year, and though quite bent with the weight of years, she retains well her mental faculties. She is small of stature, weighing but seventy-three pounds. At no time did her weight exceed ninety pounds. She is the oldest pioneer settler living on the same land where she and her husband first went to housekeeping. It is probably the only farm in the county that has never been transferred from the original government deed and purchase.

Her husband cut wood at twenty cents a cord where Washington Street now runs through the heart of the city of Indianapolis. He died in the seventies. Since then, Mrs. Sawin has superintended her own affairs. The only remaining daughter, with her husband, live at the old homestead, tenderly caring for the aged woman. Five generations now represent the line of descent.²

Kate Milner Rabb, the well-known columnist for the Indianapolis Star and respected Hoosier historian, reported on a letter by J. G. Sawin, one of Caroline Harvey Sawin’s sons, in Hoosier Listening Post:

About 1823 my father, James Sawin, entered a quarter of timber land east of Edinburgh.

A young man of limited means, James Sawin learned the Bates House wanted substantial cords of wood cut, and walked thirty miles to Indianapolis. He and Colonel Bates looked at timber together.

My father proposed fifty cords of wood at 35 cents per cord. Bates was willing to pay only thirty cents. That’s my price—not one cent less. Realizing James was serious, Bates said, If you’ll cord the wood so close I cannot throw my hat through the open spaces, I’ll pay your price. Father closed the deal and completed the job. Bates inspected the work, periodically flinging his slouch hat. It would not go through the spaces. Satisfied, Bates told Sawin he’d earned his money.

Years after the Sawin cabin had given way to a substantial frame house, my parents went to Indianapolis to purchase shrubbery and trees, staying at Little’s Hotel. After their return home, my father mentioned the proximity to the spot where he cut the cord wood for Colonel Bates.

The frame house was built in the forties by contractor Sanford Rominger of Hope. All finishing lumber