Never put off what you might later regret
Two guys from Davis County made an unlikely connection we all can learn from
I have been kicking myself since being reminded that procrastination comes with a price.
This lesson arrived the week before Christmas when I spotted a small obituary in the Bloomfield Democrat. Seven succinct paragraphs informed readers of the death of Titus Wagler, 66, a longtime Davis County business owner.
In 1997, Wagler and relatives began Midwest Truss Co., a small manufacturing operation whose employees produce wooden trusses for builders in southern Iowa and northern Missouri.
For several years, I had been promising myself, and Titus, that I would drop by “soon” for coffee and conversation. Unfortunately, “soon” kept getting delayed — because of work, because of the weather, because of other distractions … because … because … because.
Titus could not easily come to see me. It was not easy to orchestrate a coffee klatch in Des Moines for two unlikely acquaintances. Titus spent 42 of his 66 years in a wheelchair, and there are no drivers in his closest circle of friends.
Titus was a member of the Old Order Amish Church, a religious denomination known for its members’ distinctive style of dress, with wide-brimmed hats and bonnets, for their use of horse-drawn transportation, and for shunning conveniences many people would not want to live without today — cars and trucks, electricity, television, computers, the internet. And most telephones.
I say “most,” because I came to know Titus during extended phone conversations that grew out of his reading my columns in the Bloomfield Democrat for the past 10 years. I could not dial him up, dash off an email or send him a text message. But there is a telephone at Midwest Truss, and Titus would call me when time allowed.
Education came from our telephone connection
Our conversations typically were about subjects I wrote on, some book or article he read, or some trend he observed in American society that concerned him. Titus was an avid reader. He often would politely but firmly point out flaws he saw in some of my columns’ logic.
Other times we might talk about some aspect of the Amish way of life that struck a chord with me — such as the inspiring compassion and forgiveness shown by Amish families in the Nickel Mines village of Pennsylvania toward the family of an “English” man who massacred six Amish girls there in their one-room school.
Such conversations only whetted our desire for more time to talk, especially face to face. He promised his wife Ruth would have a fresh pot of coffee waiting if I stopped by their home west of Bloomfield.
I sometimes wondered whether Titus was drawn to our conversations by his innate curiosity or by his extended family’s ties to writing and the news. I never broached the subject and figured that was best left for in-person discussion.
Titus Wagler’s father, David Wagler, was among the earliest Amish to arrive in Davis County, in the 1970s. He already was a prolific writer with a wide following among the Amish across the United States and Canada because of the books he wrote, the magazines his published, and the written materials his Pathway publishing company produced for “the plain people,” as Amish and some Mennonite audiences are known within.
(An interesting tidbit: Fittingly, when David Wagler died in December 2018 at age 97, he was buried with a pen in his hand.)
My conversations with Titus never got around to one of his father’s books, “Through Deep Waters,” which deals with the swimming accident in 1982 in Davis County in which Titus was paralyzed when he broke his neck diving with buddies into a farm pond.
Regrettably, my conversations with Titus never got around to talking about the devotion of Ruth Yutzy, his girlfriend at the time of the accident and for the past 40 years, his dear wife and the mother of their two sons.
We talked only briefly about Titus’ brother, Ira, whose memoir, “Growing Up Amish,” tells of Ira’s decision to leave home, and the Old Order Amish culture, as a young man.
There never seemed to be time in our phone calls to delve much into the connections between Titus’ extended family and perhaps the most famous photograph ever made by a Des Moines Register photographer, the 1965 image of Amish boys and girls running into a cornfield near Hazleton to get away from sheriff’s deputies. The officers were there to round up the children and take them to a public school.
The scurrying children included some grandchildren of Gideon Yutzy, a patriarch of Davis County’s Amish settlement and the grandfather of Titus’ wife.
Seven years after the Iowa cornfield confrontation, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the landmark Amish schools case, Wisconsin v. Yoder. The court held that the right of Amish parents to freely exercise their religion by educating their children in their own schools outweighs the state’s interest in requiring all children to be educated in state-approved schools. One of Gideon’s sons, Adin, was among the three fathers who were the respondents in the history-making case.
All of this may help you understand why a journalist was interested in Titus’ views and experiences — as a business owner, as someone whose life was forever changed by a diving accident in a farm pond near Bloomfield, and as a person whose religious faith guided him through life’s ups and downs.
That was why I was drawn to Titus Wagler, one of my readers. I never asked why he gravitated to our telephone time together.
Whatever the reasons, there are a couple of things everyone can take from those connections Titus and I shared: We all can learn from those who may be different from us. And as important, never put off what you someday might regret.
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Maybe Titus would appreciate that I’m walking to the Ames library today to pick up my copy of Ira’s books—walking not driving:).
Lovely piece, Randy. I am sure that Titus would appreciate your column. We can never alter temporal changes to our own trajectories. So frequently we forget that we are biological organisms. We can easily break, become incapacitated, and subsequently we need to reinvent ourselves. Your column demonstrates how Titus had a fulfilling life, despite his personal life altering accident. His interactions with you reminds us to maintain friendships with people who are different from ourselves. Titus’s life reflects that of a noble man who was an inquisitive thinker because he was an active reader and questioner. And I think we can all heed that message as we gird ourselves for a very non conventional new administration that shows a pronounced paucity for scientific inquiry, research and rigor. May we continue to think like Titus and keep asking skeptical questions from our elected representatives.