War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. SEEKING IMPROVEMENTS Though it never attained the infamy of Pennsylvania’s Byberry, Virginia’s Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia, less than 30 miles south of EMU, had similarly disturbing conditions. It was one of the first institutions staffed by COs. Charged with assisting 2,000 patients, the first 19 men sent by MCC worked an average of 76 hours per week for their first year in this hospital, receiving an allowance of $2.50 per month. One CO did not have a single free day in seven months of work. Eventually a total of 110 COs worked in this institution between 1942 and 1946. Among the EMU alumni in the CPS unit at Western State Hospital was Clarence Kreider ’40, who kept a journal detailing the inadequate meals served to hard-laboring staffers (e.g. on January 3, 1943, beans and prunes for lunch, and red meat and sour pears for dinner; the next day, potatoes and apples for lunch, and meat and more apples for dinner). When a Staunton Episcopal priest, W. Carroll Brooke, learned about the
Paul T. Gue ngerich bega n four years of CP S service tw o months after his mar riage to Mar jorie Yoder on May 24, 1942 (above ).
appalling conditions for both patients and employees at Western State, he gathered testimony from the COs in Civilian Public Service (CPS). Together they urged officials at the state level to replace the hospital’s superintendent and increase funding for mental hospitals. Trained cooks were among the improvements to emerge from the efforts of Brooke and the leaders of CO units in other Virginia hospitals.6 In 1945 Harry L. Kraus Sr. asked to be assigned as a CO to Western State, in part to be closer to his future wife, Mildred Brunk, living in Harrisonburg. Caring for the patients at Western motivated Kraus to overcome great odds to become a physician after the war. He and Mildred raised chickens to pay the fees for his undergraduate studies (he started at EMC but finished at Bridgewater in 1951, for reasons of class scheduling).7 Across the nation, the COs found that mental hospital conditions “were deplor6 Mary Emma Showalter ’37 Eby, who later wrote the popular The Mennonite Community Cookbook, was the dietitian at a CPS camp in Grottoes, Virginia, from 1942 to 1943. She then traveled the country for six months, training cooks at other MCC camps. After the war, she started a home economics program at EMU and was the first woman on faculty to hold a doctoral degree. 7 Harry Kraus earned his MD at the Medical College of Virginia in 1955. The Krauses had two elementary school-aged sons who drowned while on an outing with a neighbor soon after Harry set up his medical practice. The Krauses set up an endowed scholarship at EMU in memory of these sons, Joseph and Milton.
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Dietitian Mary Emma Showalter ’37 Eby (center) guides conscientious objectors at the CPS camp in Grottoes, Virginia, in preparing the camp meal.
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able. . . . They [non-CO staffers] treated patients like animals,” said retired EMU administrator Paul T. Guengerich, who served in the CPS from July 21, 1942 to March 9, 1946. In a 2006 interview with EMU undergraduates, Guengerich said that patients “were abused, and our COs that worked in hospitals did all they could to bring some change to that. They felt that these patients deserved being treated like human beings.”8 With as many as 300 patients for each attendant, however, there were times that the COs felt uncontrollably frustrated, showing “fits of temper” and employing “unnecessarily rough language and rough handling of patients,” admitted Linscheid. Yet the patients and their families expressed gratitude to the CPS-assigned workers, telling the COs they were doing a much better job than previous staffers. Referring to the Hudson River Hospital, Willard Linscheid said in the short term: Our efforts were concentrated on giving better and kinder treatment to the patients and to keep the ward as clean as possible under the circumstances…. We all chafed 8 Paul Guengerich was interviewed by EMU students Monica Stouffer, Loriane Bundu, and Megan Good on Feb. 16, 2006 for Martha Eads' College Writing class. The recording and transcript are in EMU’s historical library. None of the four locations where Guengerich served as a CO was a mental health facility; his knowledge of them came from other COs.
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