MU| F e a t u r e s
H
e lives now in an upstairs
room of a lovingly preserved
historic home in downtown
Dayton, Ohio, surrounded by
artwork and a “Labyrinth of
Love” quilt and a “Peace Heroes” quilt that
features Gandhi and Ma rtin Luther King and
Bishop Desmond Tutu and Mother Teresa,
and also Jimmy Carter.
Ted Studebaker, a 1967 Manchester
graduate who not only talked but
lived non-violence, died violently in
a violent place in the wee hours of
April 26, 1971. But he lives.
something different about him, an empathy for
others that set him apart. the bedroom, and, after a brief interrogation,
shot him. He was 25 years old.
“He had a serious bent about helping people,”
Cornell says. “He knew he didn’t want to go to
war. That was obvious. But he knew he wanted
to participate in some way.” To this day, no one knows for sure why he was
killed. Fluent in both Vietnamese and Koho,
the Montagnard dialect, he was known, and
apparently well liked, by everyone in the area –
including U.S. military personnel. In any case,
his death became a national story; on
May 4, 1971, ABC-TV aired a piece on
Studebaker during the evening news.
It was an impulse cultivated by his involvement
as a youth in the local Church of the Brethren,
“Of course it was a shock,” Cornell
recalls of her brother’s death. “He
communicated with tapes, and
you could hear the mortars in the
background. So you knew it was
dangerous where he was.
He lives in the aforementioned
International Peace Museum in
Dayton, where his guitar and a vase
crafted from a 40-millimeter artillery
shell and photos of him in Vietnam
are displayed in the Peace Heroes
Room of the historic Isaac Pollack
House, which dates to 1867 and has
been home to the Peace Museum
since 2004.
He lives, Ted Studebaker does,
in tape recordings he made while
working as a conscientious objector
with the Vietnam Christian Service
in the village of Di Linh, where for two years
he taught farming techniques to the reclusive
Montagnard sect. And he lives in a neat, quiet
living room in Greenville, Ohio, where his
sister, Mary Ann Studebaker ’52 Cornell,
opens a scrapbook and holds up a photo of
a young man wearing black horn-rimmed
glasses and an engaging smile.
“This is our favorite picture of Ted,” she
says.
The eighth of nine children, Ted grew up
on a dairy farm south of West Milton, Ohio,
a “regular kid,” according to Cornell, who
played the guitar, swam in the pond out
back in the summers and skated on it in the
winters. Yet from an early age, there was
“And yet he didn’t worry about that.
He had just re-upped for another year,
because he didn’t feel his work was
finished and he wanted to stay.”
That commitment – to principle, to
the work, to the people with whom
he’d grown close – was why the family
let the ABC cameras in after initially
rebuffing them.
and nourished later on at Manchester, where
Ted played football and graduated in three
years. A graduate degree in social work from
Florida State came next; he had a grant waiting
on him from the state of Alabama when he
came home from Vietnam.
He never did.
A week after Ted married Ven Pak Lee, a fellow
volunteer from Hong Kong, the Viet Cong,
who had largely left Di Linh alone, inexplicably
began to shell the village shortly after midnight.
Everyone took cover in a nearby bunker; Ted,
for reasons that have never been clear, then
went back to the living quarters.
“At first my dad said no, they’ve got
no business coming and interfering with our
family,” Cornell recalls. “And then afterwards
he … (decided) it would be OK because Ted
would have wanted his story to be told. Not
necessarily for his sake, but for the sake of
what he was doing.”
And what he was doing – the example of it,
and the Manchester values it embodies – still
lives.
In the photo above, Ted Studebaker ’67 is
pictured with co-workers ’Lai and K’Krah in
Di Linh, Vietnam, where for two years he
taught farming techniques. Ted grew up on
a dairy farm near West Milton, Ohio.
The Viet Cong threw a satchel charge against
the building. Then they entered, found Ted in
Manchester | 25