Category Archives: Stories-Quaker

Sample A Quaker Mystery: “Murder Among Friends”

Valley State College is just north of Winchester, about half a mile west of Interstate 81. The campus is compact and cozy, with nondescript red brick buildings ranged around a lush green oval lined with tall old oaks and maples.

“Welcome All‑Friends Conference,” read the hand‑painted sign at the north entrance, with a black arrow pointing toward Mott Hall for Registration.

“It was started by Quakers from Opequon Creek Meeting, in 1867,” I was telling Eddie as we turned in. “To train young women who were going South to teach former slaves. Lots of them went. After Reconstruction the meeting turned it into a normal school, for schoolteachers. It closed in the Depression, then the state picked it up.”

I pointed across the oval, toward a tree‑covered rise. “The Meetinghouse is over there, behind the trees. It goes back to before the American Revolution. Here’s Mott Hall.”

“That’s Lucretia Mott, I hope?” Eddie asked.

“Yep. This may be one of the few public buildings in the valley not named after a treasonous defender of chattel slavery or a segregationist governor. Not that I’m prejudiced about the Old Dominion. I’ll open the trunk.”

With the obligatory nametags soon pinned on our shirts, we were quickly assigned to a room on the dormitory’s third floor, and lugged our bags up the stairs.

From the doorway the room looked like an optical illusion, with two of everything: desks, beds, dressers and closets, arranged in sequence and exactly opposite each other.

I dropped my suitcase, flopped down on one of the beds and scanned the conference schedule, printed on a pink sheet in small type, while Eddie unpacked his bag. “There’s a steering committee meeting going on now, in the auditorium,” I noted. “I should get down to it, since I’m technically a member. You could come, too; it’s an open session. Hey, what’s that?”

I had glanced up and seen Eddie pulling out what looked like a sawed‑off baseball bat from his bag. He grinned and tossed it at me.

“It’s an authentic family heirloom and homophobia deflector,” he said. “Got it at a yard sale outside Pittsburgh, cost me a buck. Look on the other side.”

A Quaker Christmas Story: Candles In The Window

Christmas Eve, so called by the world’s people, was always a frantically busy time at the Woodhouse bakery. While the Woodhouse family, being Quakers, did not observe Christmas as a special day, almost all their customers did. That meant orders for dozens more pies than usual, plus hundreds of tarts and ginger cakes, and scores of extra loaves of their rich, thick bread.
So all the week before, the whole Woodhouse family were in the shop almost round the clock, mixing dough, sprinkling sugar and cinnamon, spooning out the cherry preserves, and tending the fire under the big brick ovens.
Abram did all of this, and more: he was often sent out with a basket full of pies or tarts for delivery to the better customers: beef and mincemeat pies to old Tilbury at the Golden Lion Pub beyond the square; or down the cobbles of South Street, through the narrow passage of the Ginnett and past the sturdy old Meetinghouse, with scones for the Blackburns and buns for the widow Kilburn. Sometimes he crossed the river Ribble to Giggleswick, where the vicar doted on Mother’s ginger cakes.
This evening he had been sent to the pub, where Tilbury wanted three more pies for his last round of customers, and it was from there that he had turned to climb the hill Castleberg.
Abram wouldn’t have thought of climbing Castleberg, especially in the cold, except for the candles–two in a window in every house and shop.
“What are they for, this time?” he had asked Father that morning.
“It’s a double illumination,” Father said, “for victories past and victories prayed for. George Cockburn’s troops burning Washington, DC is the victory past, and Wellington beating Napoleon before the end of 1815 is what they’re praying for.”
“That’s a fine thing to pray for, in what’s supposed to be a Christian country” his grandmother had snorted. Laying down her rolling pin, Gran had wiped sweat from her brow. “All it means is more dead soldiers, penniless widows and hungry orphans, from Paris to New York. Love thine enemies, indeed. A terrible, sinful waste.”
She sighed and picked up her rolling pin. With swift, expert strokes she flattened a thick lump of dough into delicate pie crusts. . . .

A Continuing Quaker Thumbprint on Japanese (& World) History

She had done teaching and library work when, in 1946, she was selected to be an American tutor to crown prince Akihito of the Japanese imperial family; one of the stated requirements for the position was that the tutor be “a Christian, but not a fanatic.” When Vining quotes this description later, one can see the sly grin; she spent nearly four years in this assignment. . . . Why her? A scholar says: “the religious denomination of the new tutor was, in fact, one of the major factors that led to the imperial household’s decision to hire Vining. According to Maeda Yōichi, son of Maeda Tamon and the crown prince’s French tutor, a Quaker woman was considered most ideal because Quakers are pacifistic but not self-righteous or preachy.” (Well, maybe not ALL of them.)

For Friendly Summer Reading: Two New Books

So you know I’ve been interested in Quakers and Quakerism for decades.
I began exploring this interest by writing stories about Friends in 1977.
Beginning in 1989, I was asked to read my Quaker and other stories to campers and adults at Friends Music Camp, at the Olney Friends School in Ohio, where Peg Champney was the founding Director. I’ve been invited back to read more of these stories every summer since.
Now I’ve collected nineteen of these stories in a new book, “Posies for Peg.”
And: My granddaughter came to me awhile back, to say that some schoolmates had been asking her about what Quakers believe, and how our beliefs differ from other Christian churches — but she didn’t know how to answer them.
Her uncertainty was no surprise: even though she grew up among Quakers, she hadn’t been taught about Quakerism. And I couldn’t find any compact, accessible guide to the topics that kept coming up for her.
So I set out to produce one.
I wanted to offer concise answers to some of these typical questions. So far I’ve gathered almost fifty such FAQs.
These make up a new book — really an over-sized pamphlet– called, Some Quaker FAQs. I think of it as the beginning of an “un-systematic theology” for Friends.

A Haunting Quaker Story about U.S. Concentration Camps for Japanese Americans in World War Two

“You been hitch-hiking all the way?”

“Oh no,” he said. “Only here and there. Out to the camp in Manzanar, where there wasn’t any bus or taxi. And a stretch in Mississippi, after we got bumped from a train by some war shipments or other.

He shook his head. “Same thing happened in Cleveland. The army wants a train, they get it. Then you either wait for the next train, or find some other way. I couldn’t wait anymore, so here I am. That happened to you? Getting bumped from a train, I mean.”

“Um,” I stumbled, “not recently.” I was sure now that I was carrying some kind of mental case. Probably harmless, but not operating in the same dimension.

A blast of static from the radio caught his attention. “That a ball game?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. Pirates and the Cubs.”

“Is that so?” He seemed puzzled. “They in spring training?”

“No,” I began, but then stopped. I had a feeling it wouldn’t do any good to explain that the season was half over. His time sense was clearly out of whack. “Cubs are ahead,” I said lamely.

“Don’t have a radio in my truck,” he said. “Too bad. It’d be good to listen to on some of my runs to the camps.” He rubbed his hands together. “I’d a driven it out here if I could, but o’ course, you can’t get gas, what with the rationing and all.”

While I was trying to remember when there had been gas rationing, he looked around the interior of my Toyota. “Real nice car you got here, friend. You maybe working in the war effort?”

The question caught me off guard. “I-I guess you could say that,” I answered. After all, I thought, what else is designing parts for missiles?

My hesitation seemed to embarrass him. “Gosh, Mr. Nelson, I don’t mean to be asking sensitive questions,” he said hurriedly. “I’m not digging for military secrets or anything. It’s just hard to get away from the war, you know?”

missile-launch
A home run?
“Yeah,” I said, “I know.”