Alfred L. Shoemaker, J. William Frey, and Don Yoder

In 2018 I was honored to be appointed to a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) Named Professorship. The terms of the award permit recipients to select the name(s) for the professorship, and I elected to name mine for Alfred L. Shoemaker, J. William Frey, and Don Yoder, who founded the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center (PDFC) at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1949.

The PDFC was at that time a unique institution at American colleges and universities. Devoted in equal measure to rigorous scholarship and public outreach, Drs. Shoemaker, Frey, and Yoder set out to document and interpret the history, language, and culture of the Pennsylvania Dutch and to disseminate the fruits of their research among both scholarly and general audiences. The interests of the three collaborators complemented one another well, coming as they did from different departments at F&M, Folklore, German, and Religion.

Immediately after founding the PDFC in 1949, Drs. Shoemaker, Frey, and Yoder brought out a bilingual weekly newspaper, The Pennsylvania Dutchman, which was named for an earlier publication edited by Edward H. Rauch in 1873. In 1952 it became a magazine that appeared twice a month, eventually shortening its title to The Dutchman. Six years later, in 1958, the magazine became the quarterly Pennsylvania Folklife, which was published until 1997.

The Pennsylvania Dutchman was devoted to all major aspects of Pennsylvania Dutch life, with each editor bringing his particular areas of expertise to the publication. Dr. Shoemaker wrote on folklore and material culture (“arts and crafts”); Dr. Frey covered language, literature, and music; and Dr. Yoder was responsible for articles on history, religion, and genealogy.

Alfred L. Shoemaker was born in 1913 into a Pennsylvania Dutch–speaking family in the unincorporated community of Saegersville, Heidelberg Township, Lehigh County, PA. A gifted student, he graduated from Slatington High School in 1930 and attended Muhlenberg College in Allentown, receiving his A.B. in 1934 with a major in German. Among his professors at Muhlenberg were two important figures in the nascent field of Pennsylvania Dutch studies, Harry Hess Reichard (1878–1956) and Preston A. Barba (1883–1971), both of whom were also native speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch.

During his undergraduate program, Dr. Shoemaker spent a year of study at the University of Munich, where he met Prof. Camillo von Klenze (1865–1943), a prominent American Germanist who was an honorary professor of American studies there. Dr. Shoemaker’s acquaintance with Klenze marked a turning point in his career, as he recalled a few years later.

“One afternoon Professor von Klenze invited me to tea. The professor, knowing that I was a Pennsylvania German, started to inquire about my ancestors. I knew absolutely nothing then except that they came to America mainly to escape religious persecution—and that turned out to be all wrong. Embarrassed, I determined then and there that it was someone’s duty to bring this information from under the dusty tomes of a few—only a few scattered libraries.” (The [Allentown] Morning Call, June 16, 1936, p. 21)

After a year of theological study in Pennsylvania, Dr. Shoemaker returned to Germany, to Heidelberg for a year, followed by another year at Cornell, before he enrolled as a graduate student in German and History at the University of Illinois. His doctoral thesis, which he completed in 1940, “Studies on the Pennsylvania German Dialect of the Amish Community at Arthur, Illinois,” was a groundbreaking study of the Pennsylvania Dutch spoken by Midwestern Amish. One important aspect of Dr. Shoemaker’s dissertation was his comparison of the Dutch spoken by the Arthur Amish with his own Lehigh County variety.

Dr. Shoemaker taught at Lafayette College until 1944, when he enlisted in the US Army and was sent to Europe. His experience there had a profound impact on him.

“It was an evening during the war. My Counter Intelligence Corps team—three lawyers, a fellow college professor and myself—were stationed in Hayingen [Hayange], a small industrial town in Lorraine. A mile or two away, across on the other side of the Moselle, the Germans lay entrenched. It was the long lull—those weary months of waiting—before the final offensive that carried our troops across the Rhine and brought an end to hostilities in Europe.

“From Hayingen, where we lay, and from the country 30 or 50 miles to the east, there had come, over 200 years before, the forebears of the Pennsylvania Dutch. They had left, weary of war and strife, to find peace and happiness in Penn’s woods.

“And I, two centuries later, realized for the first time how strong must have been their longing to leave those parts for a better world, one free of hatred and slaughter. And it was then, that moment, that I came, quite by chance, upon a 38-page booklet, ’77 Nursery Rhymes for Our Little Ones.’ It was in German, of course. I turned the pages nervously. There were the identical rhymes I had learned as a child from my own Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother. …” (Alfred L. Shoemaker, Traditional Rhymes and Jingles of the Pennsylvania Dutch, Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center, 1951, p. 3)

Dr. Shoemaker returned from Germany a committed pacifist and even more passionate about his heritage language and culture. In 1948, he accepted a professorship in American folklore at Franklin & Marshall, becoming a colleague of a former fellow graduate student at Illinois, J. William Frey.

Like Dr. Shoemaker, John William (Bill) Frey was a native speaker of Pennsylvania Dutch, though his variety was that of York County, which differed from Dr. Shoemaker’s Lehigh County Dutch. Dr. Frey was born in 1916 and grew up in Harrisburg, where his father, Howard, was a high school teacher. Most weekends and holidays the Frey family spent in East Prospect, in eastern York County, where Howard had grown up and Freys had lived for generations. During the 1920s and 1930s there were still many fluent Pennsylvania Dutch speakers in East Prospect and young Bill became immersed in the folk culture, using the language actively with relatives and friends and also learning many traditional folk songs that years later he would perform.

Already as a child, Dr. Frey was passionate about languages, including Pennsylvania Dutch. He graduated from John Harris High School in Harrisburg in 1933 and was admitted to Dickinson College, in Carlisle, PA, where he graduated in 1937 with honors in German and was certified to teach Latin, Spanish, and mathematics. That next fall, Dr. Frey received a fellowship to study for a year at the University of Giessen, where he attended lectures by two eminent philologists, Alfred Götze and Helmut Arntz. While in Giessen, Dr. Frey shared his knowledge of the Pennsylvania Dutch language and folk songs. Prof. Götze encouraged him to focus on Pennsylvania Dutch in his further education, which he did.

On his return to the US in 1938, Dr. Frey entered the graduate program in German at the University of Illinois, where Dr. Shoemaker was in the second year of his course of study. In just one year, Dr. Frey completed a master’s degree, writing a thesis titled “A Morphological and Syntactical Study of the Pennsylvania-German Dialect of Pumpernickel Bill.” William S. “Pumpernickel Bill” Troxell (1893–1957) was the most prolific writer of Pennsylvania Dutch “dialect columns” and a major figure in promoting the language in the first half of the twentieth century, especially through the Grundsow Lodge movement, of which he was a founder.

Dr. Frey’s 478-page doctoral thesis,”The German Dialect of Eastern York County, Pennsylvania,” which he completed in 1941 at the age of 25, focused on his native variety of Pennsylvania Dutch. Of special importance in his dissertation was his extensive treatment of the syntax of the language.

In the fall of 1941, Dr. Frey accepted an appointment as a lecturer of German and French at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. During his time at Presbyterian he wrote A Simple Grammar of Pennsylvania Dutch (1942), the first modern grammar-textbook of the language.

Dr. Frey longed to return to Pennsylvania, so in 1943, after two years at Presbyterian College, he accepted an offer to teach German in the Army Specialized Training Program at Lehigh University in Bethlehem. Right away he began editing a publication that was a forerunner of the PDFC’s Pennsylvania Dutchman six years later. Der Pennsylvaanisch Deitsch Eileschpiggel (The Pennsylvania Dutch Eulenspiegel) was described as En Zeiding, Schwetzbrief un Blauderschtick far die Deitsche (A newspaper, newsletter, and chat-sheet for the Pennsylvania Dutch). Aimed at both “scholars and laymen,” the Eileschpiggel included prose and poetry in Pennsylvania Dutch, readers’ letters about the language and culture, book reviews, and discussions of scholarly publications about Pennsylvania Dutch.

In 1944 Dr. Frey joined the faculty of Franklin & Marshall College as the chair of the German department there, where he was to remain for the rest of his academic career. Even before the fall 1944 term began, Dr. Frey offered a summer course on the Pennsylvania Dutch language that was one of the first, if not the first, at an American college or university. He also was active in speaking engagements at public venues, his signature presentation being “The Amazing Pennsylvania Dutch Language.” This talk was published with a slightly amended title in 1951 by the PDFC. The first paragraph shows how Dr. Frey aimed to deliver scholarly substance in an engaging way.

“It has been no less than a hundred times that I have been asked by curious friends, especially ‘outlanders,’ what kind of a tongue Pennsylvania Dutch is; it has been no less than several hundred times that I have been quizzed by numerous skeptical individuals, including surprisingly enough a goodly number of fellow-Dutchmen, as to whether Pennsylvania Dutch actually has a grammar, a syntax and an indigenous vocabulary of its own; and it has been no less than a thousand times that those same ridiculing inquirers—plus many more honest-to-goodness objectively inquisitive persons—have put the question pointblank: is Pennsylvania Dutch a language at all? The most interesting statement one could make at this point is what the natives themselves say: DES DEITSCH ISS KEN SHPROACH—’S HUT KEN GREMMER! ‘this Dutch ain’t no language—it ain’t got no grammar!’ Surely, what could be more humble and modest, more deserving of deference—winning our awe and admiration for these interesting people—than for a folk to say of its own rich, cultured and grammatically-governed speech: DES DEITSCH ISS KEN SHPROACH—’S HUT KEN GREMMER!” (J. William Frey, That Amazing Pennsylvania Dutch Language!, Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center, 1951, p. 3)

As the author of the first Pennsylvania Dutch textbook, no one was better able than Dr. Frey to convince skeptics that his native tongue did indeed have a grammar and was a legitimate language.

Two years after Dr. Frey came to F&M, in 1946, an eminent geologist from Myerstown, in Lebanon County, Dr. Harvey Bassler, donated to the college’s Fackenthal Library a massive trove of rare Pennsylvania Dutch materials that he had purchased from a collector named Claude W. Unger. The Unger-Bassler collection offered endless possibilities for research, which was supported by F&M’s president, Theodore A. Distler, who in 1948 hired Dr. Shoemaker to work with Dr. Frey on the collection. Dr. Shoemaker was appointed a professor of American Folklore. The following year, Don Yoder joined the F&M faculty as an instructor in the Religion department, and the three colleagues founded the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center, which was physically located in the Fackenthal Library, where the Unger-Bassler collection was housed.

The third member of the Pennsylvania Dutch triumvirate at F&M, Don Yoder, was born in 1921 in Altoona, PA, where his father, Jacob H., was a mechanical engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Jacob Yoder was a native speaker of Pennsylvania Dutch with deep roots in the Dutch Country of southeastern Pennsylvania. Don’s mother, Ora (Cronister) Yoder, was of Quaker and Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, though not a speaker of the language. As a boy, Dr. Yoder became steeped in Pennsylvania Dutch language and culture through frequent visits to relatives on his father’s side of the family, which left a lasting impression on him and shaped the trajectory of his professional career.

“[W]hat made my boyhood visits to grandmother’s farm decisive for me was the fact that my father’s family was Pennsylvania Dutch or Pennsylvania German (the terms are interchangeable) and all of their everyday culture was a living complex of ideas, framed in the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect but completely American in its ramifications. To this day I can call up a Dutch expression or proverb from the rich store imparted to me while growing up by my father and his brothers and sisters, who spoke Pennsylvania Dutch all their lives and whose memories were stocked with all the traditional lore of special days in the calendar, proverbial sayings and bywords, folk tales and legends, and above all, songs.

“… Of all the American regional and ethnic cultures … the Pennsylvania Dutch world with its living, vibrant culture came to be my principal research focus. In collecting folksongs and folktales in those early years, I first became fascinated with the linguistic element of my own culture. The Pennsylvania Dutch dialect—Deitsch, as it was called—was there to learn, and I learned to use it, along with standard German, as a research tool, although I must admit my spoken ‘Deutsch’ is often flavored with telltale elements of ‘Deitsch.’ ” (Don Yoder, Discovering American Folklife, 2001, Stackpole Books, pp. 2–3)

After graduating from Altoona High School in 1939, Dr. Yoder enrolled in F&M, earning his bachelor’s degree there in 1942 with a major in American history. He then entered the doctoral program in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1947 with a dissertation on the topic, “Church Union Efforts of the Reformed Church in the United States to 1934.” After brief teaching appointments at the Union Theological Seminary in New York and at Muhlenberg College, Dr. Yoder joined the religion faculty at F&M in 1949 where he remained until 1956, when he accepted an assistant professorship in religious thought at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1951 Dr. Yoder was ordained a minister in the Reformed Church.

A few months before Dr. Yoder officially joined the F&M faculty, Drs. Shoemaker, Frey, and Yoder founded the PDFC and began publishing The Pennsylvania Dutchman. The colleagues modeled their center on similar institutes for folk cultural research in Europe, in particular the Schweizerisches Institut für Volkskunde in Basel, Switzerland, and the Irish Folklore Commission in Dublin, both of which Dr. Shoemaker had personally visited. In 1950, the three colleagues started the Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival at Kutztown, located in the heart of the traditionally “Dutchiest” county in Pennsylvania, Berks. Today, the Kutztown Folk Festival, as it is known, is America’s oldest continuous celebration of regional culture.

Aside from producing The Pennsylvania Dutchman and the festival in Kutztown, which was highly successful, Drs. Shoemaker, Frey, and Yoder published several scholarly books through the PDFC as well as pamphlets geared toward the general public that were grounded in solid scholarship.

The 1950s marked a period of growth and change for Drs. Shoemaker, Frey, and Yoder and the PDFC. After 1953, Dr. Shoemaker retired from teaching in order to devote himself exclusively to the work of the Center, especially the summer festival. Dr. Frey, for his part, came to focus more on his duties as a professor of German and also Russian at F&M and on his family, which included three children. His wife, Jean (Kratz) Frey, contracted polio in 1954, became paralyzed, and was confined to an iron lung. For years thereafter both Bill and Jean were active in public campaigns to eradicate the disease. Dr. Yoder continued working closely with Dr. Shoemaker even after his departure for Penn in 1956. In 1958, the PDFC was renamed the Pennsylvania Folklife Society and their journal became Pennsylvania Folklife, a reflection of Dr. Shoemaker’s and Dr. Yoder’s interest in expanding the impact of their work beyond Pennsylvania Dutch.

Dr. Shoemaker, the leading figure in the Pennsylvania Folklife Society, although successful in many areas of the society’s public programming, struggled with financing his various endeavors, especially a Dutch Harvest Frolic that was held in Lancaster County in August 1961 and incurred a substantial debt. The Frolic took place a second and final time in August 1962, but the society went into bankruptcy, and the organization, along with its journal and the oversight of the festival in Kutztown, which continued, was relocated to Ursinus College. In late 1963, Dr. Shoemaker suffered a nervous breakdown, eventually moved to New York City, and is presumed to have died there some time in or after 1967.

Dr. Frey remained on the F&M faculty until his retirement in 1980. The following year, his classic grammar was republished, and it has since appeared in two more editions. Dr. Frey passed away in Lancaster in 1989; his wife Jean preceded him in death in 1967. Among Dr. Frey’s many students was a fellow Dutchman, C. Richard Beam (F&M ’49), who went on to do graduate work at Penn State and enjoyed a successful career as a German professor at Millersville University. In 1986, Prof. Beam founded the Center for Pennsylvania German Studies at Millersville, which was in many ways a successor to the PDFC. Prof. Beam’s monumental contribution to Pennsylvania Dutch studies was his twelve-volume Comprehensive Pennsylvania German Dictionary, which was completed in 2011. On January 26, 2018, Prof. C. Richard Beam passed away, just weeks shy of his 93rd birthday.

Dr. Yoder’s career at the University of Pennsylvania was a long and distinguished one. He played a leading role in the creation of the Department of Folklore and Folklife there, and in his forty years on the faculty supervised fifty-three doctoral dissertations. Dr. Yoder built an international reputation in the field of folklore and folklife studies and was instrumental in the establishment of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. He was the recipient of the American Folklore Society’s Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award in 2006, and in 2011 Kutztown University bestowed on him an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. Over seven decades, Dr. Yoder produced hundreds of publications, many of them on Pennsylvania Dutch. He did not slow down after his retirement from Penn in 1996, working on various projects until literally his final days. Don Yoder passed away on August 11, 2015, at the age of 93. [Click here for a video of a public conversation with Dr. Yoder at the American Folklore Society annual meeting in 2013.]

Sources:

1950 Oriflamme (Franklin & Marshall College Yearbook), accessible here online

Beam, C. Richard. 1985. Preface to A Simple Grammar of Pennsylvania Dutch by J. William Frey. Brookshire Printing, Inc.

Bronner, Simon J. 1998. Following Tradition. University Press of Colorado, Utah State University Press. (Chapter 6, Alfred Shoemaker and the Discovery of American Folklife, pp. 266–312.)

Bronner, Simon J. 2016. Don Yoder (1921–2015). Folklore 127: 103–106.

Yoder, Don, 1990. Introduction to Discovering American Folklife: Essays on Folk Culture & the Pennsylvania Dutch. Stackpole Books.

Yoder, Don. 1999. Foreword to Christmas in Pennsylvania by Alfred L. Shoemaker. Stackpole Books.