Note: Robert Kreider, former Bluffton College president, comments from time to time on  growing up in Bluffton.

Here's a recent Kreider comment: 

I'm beginning to read McCullough's "The Wright Brothers," and Lois and I preparing to celebrate our 70th anniversary.

I have been reflecting gratefully on a sense of place: Bluffton, a town embraced by two streams - the Big Riley Creek and the Little Riley. 

For me it is sacred space: surrounded by woodlands inviting boyhood exploration. . . . plotted along an old Indian trail. . . . a few miles from the great Lincoln Highway leading from Pennsylvania into the distant West. . . .

not far to the west the Miami-Erie Canal linking the Great Lakes with the Ohio-Mississippi rivers. . . . astride the Dixie Highway -stringing together towns of inventive and entrepeneurial masters - Wright Brothers and the origins of aviation,

National Cash Register and beginnings of a technological revolution, and to the north Henry Ford's Detroit. . . . the inventive genius that abounded in shops about town - meters, slaw cutters, fire-less cookers, gloves, hay rakes. . . . around the town the aroma from the earliest of the oil fields. . . .

a sawmill in town sawing timber from nearby virgin hardwood forests. . . . and the town where I delivered the Toledo Blade and knew almost every household along the route. . . . a town that gathered together with county folk to talk and shop on Saturday nights, hearing chatter in Swiss. . . .

the a town that held a a winter-mini-county-fair. . . . a town with eight church bells that rang on Sunday mornings. . . . a town with a college that opened windows to a wide, fascinating world.

Reflections on sacred space take flight as I approach a 70th anniversary and as I read Wendell Berry and Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It" and the passage in Genesis, "Take off your shoes, for the place where you are standing is holy ground."

Bob Kreider - [email protected]

Comment from Joanne Niswander:

Thank you, Bob, for your reflections on our favorite town.