Alumni Profiles
Kenneth Crose remembers when
By Cara Miler
Editor’s Note: Kenneth Crose passed away May 5, 2007. We at Signatures feel honored that he took the time to speak with us before he became ill.
At 91, Kenneth Crose BTh ’37, BTh ’38 is among the few who can recall when Anderson University was just a budding Bible college with less than 300 students. That was back when Old Main was the only building on campus, serving as a combination dormitory/cafeteria/classroom.
Considering the college’s humble beginnings and Crose’s distant location in Lebanon during much of his childhood and teenage years, it might seem unlikely that he’d already heard of Anderson College before he entered high school. But his parents, who were Church of God missionaries, had a history with the Anderson community. In fact, his mother had worked for the Gospel Trumpet for a short time before marrying Crose’s father, and they continued to receive the newspaper throughout their missionary travels.
“I just grew up knowing that as soon as I graduated from high school that Anderson College was the place to go,” Crose says.
He spent his first three years on the Anderson campus living in Old Main’s attic, in a room that overlooked the rock garden. He took on different jobs to pay for his tuition, first as a campus maintenance man, then as a lifeguard at the YMCA. Because the winter of 1936 was especially cold and because Crose had a long walk to and from the YMCA every day, he was allowed a special privilege over his classmates.
“Finally, the dean allowed me to buy a car to get to work and back,” he recalls. “I bought my first car for $25.”
Eventually, he took a job with a Chevrolet motor company downtown, where he worked from 4 p.m. to midnight seven days a week while also taking 15 credit hours. On top of that, he served as class president, president of the Student Volunteers (a missionary interest group), and he was the photographer for Echoes yearbook.
In his little spare time, Crose liked to overhaul cars, fixing them up and selling them for a profit. “I finally ended up with a real nice Model A Ford with a rumble seat in it,” he says. The car was an asset when the Roosevelt recession hit. The money he made from selling it was enough to feed him and his roommate throughout the remainder of the year.
Despite these difficulties, Crose graduated from Anderson College in 1938, unaware of the many challenges he had yet to face in finding a stable job and making it through the war. He tried a number of different occupations, including ministry, teaching, airport management, training for an oil company, and accounting. He traveled to places like Minnesota; Washington, D.C.; Lebanon; India; Nigeria; Cairo; Palestine; and Tehran.
Ultimately his work with the Red Cross brought him to Mabel Fedor BA ’42, who he’d met during his years at Anderson College through her older brother, and who decided it was her patriotic duty to help keep his spirits up during the war.
“We corresponded for a year or more,” Crose says. “When I got back to the states, I went to her home in Youngstown, Ohio, and she was waiting for me at the station to take me home. We got married the next year, 1945.”
After many more educational pursuits, occupations, and travels, the couple and their five children eventually returned to Anderson where Crose accepted a teaching position in the AU history department. He retired in 1982 and now lives a few blocks from campus. His wife, Mabel, died Feb. 24, 2007, at the age of 88.
Due to an advancing case of muscular dystrophy, Crose is confined to a wheelchair most of the time, but his mind is extremely sharp. With college pictures and Echoes yearbooks on hand, he recalls in clear detail the joys and challenges he faced during his years at Anderson College.
Crose has seen more than 70 years of Anderson University history and transformation, but what makes him even more unique is the joy he gets from sharing those memories and his desire to pass history on to others.
A life redeemed
By Randy Dillinger
During his student years at Anderson University, Greg Denniston had a clear plan for his life. A philosophy and religion major, he studied under AU professors Willard Reed and Fred Burnett and planned to pursue a seminary degree after graduation in 1984.
Everything seemed to be going according to plan. He was accepted at Iliff School of Theology in Denver and completed one year of study there. But shortly before the start of his second year at Iliff, Denniston’s world suddenly shattered.
“I had a psychotic episode,” he explains, “and I became depressed, anxious, and suicidal.”
Denniston was initially diagnosed with atypical psychosis. (Several years later, the diagnosis was changed to schizoaffective disorder.)
Iliff staff encouraged Denniston to stay in Denver and seek treatment, but he felt he needed to return home. So in 1985, he moved back to Anderson. He went through a period of denial, something he says is common for people when they first experience symptoms of mental illness.
“Reconciling the fact that you’ve got a disorder that’s life-threatening and life-disrupting of a magnitude of severe mental illness is really hard to accept,” he explains. “We take for granted how well we function until it’s gone. A person never grows up thinking, ‘I’m gonna become schizoaffective when I’m 22.’ That’s just not a dream that we aspire toward. But it does happen.”
Denniston began, in his words, “limping through life,” going from failure to failure. “I tried law school and flunked out,” he recalls. “I couldn’t manage a job. Things kept deteriorating. And by 1991, I was pretty much homeless, living out of my car, and in between staying with my parents.”
At that time, Denniston made the decision to undergo a 90-day hospitalization treatment. It was a terrifying time for him, marked by suicidal thoughts and delusions of being inhabited by an alien queen. He would hear noises on the floor above him and thought they were aliens seeking a way into his room.
“It took a couple of months of aggressive medication and therapy before I started to feel like I didn’t have the alien in me,” he says.
Through intensive treatment, Denniston improved so dramatically that by the end of his hospitalization, the doctors thought he was cured. He was taken off all his medications and had returned to Denver, where he had been accepted into an MBA program. But less than two months after going off his medications, Denniston relapsed into psychosis and depression.
He returned to Anderson and was hospitalized a second time. Denniston credits three of his classmates from Anderson University as instrumental in his treatment and recovery during this time. They were Barb (Morse) Scott BA ’84, Kevin Anderson BA ’79, and Melanie (Lain) Musser BA ’86.
“They were my therapists,” he says. “That really helped soften the blow.”
Denniston remembers a conversation he had with Barb one morning during his second hospitalization.
“I’d been there two or three weeks,” he recalls, “and she said, ‘Greg, We’re really glad how well you’re doing. It looks like the medication’s working and your prognosis is better. Maybe in a year or so you can go back to school.’ And just that little bit of hope that I could return to functioning in some ways that were meaningful to me really encouraged me.”
And that hope proved its worth as Denniston returned to school in 1992 to pursue an M.Div. at Anderson University School of Theology.
“My goal was to become a chaplain,” he says. “I wanted to connect to people in ways that were meaningful and enriching in ways that my friends had more or less ministered to me, by showing concern, respect, compassion, and dignity. Those were values I wanted to emulate once I started recovering.”
Denniston received his M.Div. from the School of Theology in 1996 and went on to serve in a mental health chaplaincy at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington, D.C.
“That’s where the thunder really started to roll,” he says. “That’s where I really started feeling like I had something to contribute as a person with mental illness, because I understood what was going on with my hospitalized clients.”
In spring 1999, Denniston returned to Indiana to become executive director of a consumer advocacy group for people with mental illness. Less than a year later, he became the program coordinator for the Indiana chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), an organization whose mission is to eradicate mental illness and improve the quality of life of those who are affected by mental illness.
In his role with NAMI, Denniston participated in panel discussions and presentations and made a number of connections with people in the mental health community in Indiana. From those connections came the opportunity to work with Adult & Child, an organization that provides services based on an assertive community treatment (ACT) team model. He currently serves as the team leader of the organization. With five or six case managers on staff, the team shares the burden of providing tangible care for their clients — care that includes medication management, therapy, support for employment and entitlements, and other services.
Denniston’s experience as both a provider and a consumer of mental health services has given him a unique perspective on mental health care. Through the encouragement of his parents, Robert Denniston BA ’58 and Dorothy (Speagle) Denniston BA ’58, his wife Cindy, and AU professor Willard Reed, he decided to commit his thoughts to writing. And in 2006, he published a book, The Meaning of Faith and Mental Illness. In the book, Denniston tells the story of his experience with mental illness, as well as offering a theology of mental illness.
The publication of the book marks another step on his journey of recovery — a journey that began 15 years ago with the compassionate support of his college friends.
“I never would have dreamed, when Barb told me in 1992, ‘Greg, you’ve got a chance to recover,’ that I’d end up ordained,” he recalls. “I never would have dreamed that I would write a book or end up being a mental health professional. … I think a big part of me stays in this position because I want to give back and make life as palatable for other people as my friends — Barb, Melanie, and Kevin — did for me. They treated me with courtesy, respect, and dignity, instead of with contempt or malice. I was treated as a person worthy of their compassion.”
Long-distance collaboration launches novel career
By Holly Miller
A distance of more than 2,000 miles was no obstacle when Christy Scannell BA ’89, based in San Diego, and Ginger Kolbaba BA ’90, a Chicago resident, decided to collaborate on a series of Christian novels. Bouncing ideas back and forth via e-mail, the duo produced an outline and three sample chapters that quickly caught the attention of Howard Books, a division of publishing giant Simon & Schuster. The first book, with its tongue-in-cheek title Desperate Pastors’ Wives, hits the bookstores this month; two sequels are in the pipeline.
Unlike some literary partners who write alternating chapters, Scannell and Kolbaba follow a less-predictable system. They work from a synopsis, and “we each write chunks and send them to the other for editing,” explains Scannell. “If we disagree on something, we discuss it on the phone and come to a decision.” The week before the first book was due at the publishing house, “I flew to Chicago so we could finesse the final version.”
Their ability to give and take criticism has been a key to their success. “Christy doesn’t have to worry about hurting my feelings,” says Kolbaba. “We’re used to the process, so we don’t take it personally.” They credit their years as nonfiction writers and editors with preparing them for the collaboration. Scannell was editorial director at Rainbow Publishers/Legacy Press for 10 years and oversaw the acquisition and publication of more than 100 Christian nonfiction books for children and teachers. She currently is an editor with a monthly business magazine. Kolbaba is editor of Marriage Partnership magazine, has been a colum-nist for Let’s Worship, and has written award-winning nonfiction books.
These separate careers as editors initially brought them together in 1999 when both served on the faculty of a writers conference in Florida. They made the AU connection, swapped news about mutual friends, and “realized we had tons in common,” says Scannell. The idea for the three-book series slowly took shape because they recognized a growing market for inspirational novels and thought a joint project would be fun.
“The challenge is to avoid a lot of pat answers and platitudes,” says Kolbaba about the state of Christian fiction. The “desperate wives” in their books are 35 to 40 years old, live in a small Ohio town, and are married to pastors. The issues that these characters confront are realistic, universal, and don’t lend themselves to easy answers.
“The book tackles serious topics,” says Scannell. “It has light moments and isn’t particularly heavy reading” but characters don’t “suddenly come up with a grand solution to every problem.” She believes that Christian fiction is maturing because of readers’ demands and expectations. “Fiction is getting a push from Generation X,” she says. “Young readers are saying, ‘Wait a minute, we want something a little deeper, a little edgier, a little more ragged around the edges.’”
