As a youngster, Robert Kreider lived in Bluffton from 1926 to 1935 when his father pastored First Mennonite Church. After moving away, he returned Bluffton as a professor, academic dean and later Bluffton College president. In the 1970s he moved to Kansas. Click here for his obituary.
In an opening 1968 school year convocation, Bluffton College President Robert Kreider compared the height of the campus water tower to the timeline of earth’s history.
A one-inch block on the tower top represented the era of living things on the earth. Everything below the block represented earth-time before life existed. And it was a long way down. A sheet of paper on the block’s top represented humankind’s time on earth. Or, so he said.
An object lesson still remembered, Kreider turned the complicated into simple language for this then-college freshman.
While many of his pupils remember Kreider for his never-ending curiosity for knowledge – be it religion, history, politics, literature, science – it was his stories of growing up in Bluffton that resonated here.
Stories like:
• A Bluffton College student from Cuba who proudly presented Dean Byers with a box of expensive cigars – much to the non-smoking Dean’s embarrassment.
• Older friend Dana Whitmer edging himself all the way around the Victorian elementary school building on a six-inch ledge five feet above the playground.
• Clayton Bixel gliding down the icy winter streets of Bluffton in his propeller-pushed sled.
• Jumping off the high tower of the Buckeye for the first time, with Charlie Schumacher having the courage to do it first.
• Describing a caravan of gypsies descending on Main Street.
• Experiencing the misfortune of being at Boy Scout Camp the day John Dillinger robbed Bluffton’s bank.
Kreider’s Bluffton stories placed us in the action’s center, witnessing the drama with the storyteller. We immediately chilled, striking the Buckeye’s cold waters after leaping off the quarry tower.
A collector of Bluffton footnotes, observations of town characters, he never forgot the common events of a small Midwestern village in the midst of the Great Depression.
He turned those Bluffton memories into life lessons for all of us.
