Minersville case made legal history

Editor's Note: At our invitation, our longtime special correspondent Ione Geier chose eight of her favorites stories for republication from a quarter-century of writing for this newspaper. This, the first, was originally published Sept. 22, 1988.

In 1935, when William Gobitas and his sister, Lillian, were schoolchildren in Minersville, their refusal to salute the flag was the first act in a legal drama that has become the subject of heated debate in this year's (1988) presidential campaign.

The flag pledge became a campaign issue when Vice President George Bush, the Republican candidate, criticized Democrat Michael Dukakis for the Massachusetts governor's veto of a 1977 bill and then -- when his action was overridden by a state Legislature his own party controlled -- refusing to enforce the new law requiring teachers to lead public school students in reciting the pledge.

Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for the election now less than two months away, claimed his actions were based on legal precedents. Republicans countered by saying teachers leading students in voluntary pledges is different from mandatory flag salutes, which are forbidden by the Supreme Court partly because of lawsuits brought on behalf of Gobitas and his sister, now Lillian Klose, when they were children.

Gobitas, now 63 and living in Belgium, Wis., and Klose, now 65 and in Riverdale, Ga., are not interested in the pledge as a campaign issue. Their religion, Jehovah's Witnesses, prohibits political activity of any kind, including voting. For brother and sister, the current flag controversy is a painful reminder of a time when they were berated and even physically attacked for their refusal to pledge.

Mrs. Klose was Lillian Gobitas and 12 years old in 1935 when she and her brother, then 10, refused to say the oath on the grounds that their religion forbade them from paying homage to the flag or any other ``graven image.'' When the children persisted in their refusal, they were expelled by Minersville schools superintendent, Charles E. Roudabush.

The resolution permitting expulsion was adopted by unanimous vote of the Minersville school board: David I. Jones, president; Dr. A. E. Valibus, vice president; Thomas B. Evans, secretary; William E. Zapf, treasurer, and George Beatty, Claude L. Price and Dr. Thomas J. McGurl. In Minersville then, school superintendents were members of the school board but did not vote.

In spite of the community disapproval and difficulty in finding legal representation, the children's father, Walter Gobitas, decided to sue on their behalf. After more than a year of being turned down by one attorney after another, he finally found help in the Jehovah's Witnesses legal department.

The Witnesses' attorneys brought suit in the federal courts on the basis that the flag pledge was a constitutional concern. On June 18, 1938, the federal district court in Philadelphia granted the Gobitases an injunction that was upheld Nov. 10, 1939, by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, also in Philadelphia.

The Gobitas victory was shortlived. The Minersville school board, with financial help from the now-defunct Association of Patriotic Societies of Schuylkill County and other like-minded organizations, appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

In a decision handed down June 3, 1940, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 against the children. Religious scruples, the court's large majority opinion said, did not constitute sufficient reason for schoolchildren to refuse to made the pledge.

The decision, still known mistakenly as the ``Gobitis Ruling'' because of the perpetuation of a federal district court's spelling error, aroused violent reactions nationwide.

Defiance, violence mount

In Sanford, Maine, two Jehovah's Witnesses who refused a mob's order to salute the flag had their office wrecked and were beaten. In Litchfield, Ill., 60 Witnesses were set upon by angry townspeople who burned their cards and printed material.

In Elsinore, Calif., 30 Jehovah's Witnesses were forced to leave town after irate citizens protested their presence. And all across the county, flag-carrying roughnecks broke into Witnesses' homes to try to force them to salute the flag.

In Minersville, the Gobitases were told a mob was planning to vandalize their self-service food market, the Minersville Economy Store at 15 Sunbury St., their apartment above it. The Minersville police sent a patrolman to protect the family and their property, but the mob never materialized.

``The call came in the middle of the night telling us our place would be torn apart if Billy -- which is what we called my brother then -- and I didn't publicly recant,'' Mrs. Klose said in a telephone interview from her Georgia home.

``People didn't seem to understand,'' she continued, ``that Billy and I weren't being disrespectful when we refused to salute the flag. We were just trying to follow our religious convictions.''

Supreme Court reverses

In 1943, three years after ruling against the Gobitases, the Supreme court reversed itself. In a landmark decision -- West Virginia State Board of Education vs. Barnette -- it held, by a 5-4 vote, that regulations requiring a student to give the oath of allegiance violated the Constitution's guarantee of free speech and worship. The ruling, ironically enough, was handed down on June 14, Flag Day.

The court's reversal, Mrs. Klose said, came too late for her and her brother. ``By that time, I was 20 and Bill was 18 and both of us were working in the family store. We'd never gotten high school diplomas because financial considerations forced us to drop out of school.''

Her brother, speaking by telephone from his Wisconsin home, added another dimension to his sister's description of one of the most painful periods of their lives.

After being expelled, Gobitas said, he was beaten by classmates and thrown into a gutter. Jeers greeted him when he walked through the town.

``Then there was the boycott of our grocery store, one of the three large establishments of its kind in Minersville,'' he said. ``Most of the customers came back when they realized they were paying more at other stores, but the boycott still took its toll financially.''

Gobitas still has a copy of the letter he sent to the Minersville school board explaining why he could not recite the flag pledge.

Billy makes case

In the letter, addressed to ``Our School Directors,'' and dated Nov. 5, 1935, he said, in part, ``I do not salute the flag because I have promised to do the will of God. That means I must not worship anything out of harmony with God's law. In the twentieth chapter of Exodus, it is stated `Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images nor bow down to them nor serve them.' I do not salute the flag not because I do not love my country ... I love my country ... I love God more and I must obey his commandments.'' The letter is signed, ``Your pupil, Billy Gobitas.''

Gobitas and his sister were present when lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union argued their case before the Supreme Court April 25, 1940.

``The justices asked that we be pointed out to them,'' Gobitas recalled. ``The occasion remains one of the indelible memories of my childhood.

``After the Supreme Court's 1943 decision declaring the compulsory salutes unconstitutional, the Minersville school board wrote and asked us back. Their invitation came in time to benefit our younger brother and sisters, but too late for Lillian and me. There was no apology in the board's letter for the hardships our family had undergone.''

By then, the school board's composition had changed. Only four of the 1935 membership remained: McGurl, Valilbus, Evans and Jones. The new members were Elvin W. Keith, T.C. Condron, Herman Schenck and Superintendent Edward A. Brady.

Roudabush, the superintendent who had expelled the Gobitas children, died in 1941. All the other school board members from 1935 and 1943 are dead, too.

Discipline above all

There are no members left from the 1935 board to present their side in the Gobitas case; no one to defend their action.

But clues that help tell the tale of the board's position can be found in letters and memos stored in an out-of-the-way corner at Minersville Area High School.

Most of the correspondence was written by Roudabush, who was eulogized in the 1942 Minersville High yearbook as ``one who loved truth and duty; a man who had strength of purpose and granite integrity.''

His correspondence reflects those qualities. It also shows a man who believed student disobedience undermined the educational process, a man whose patriotism made him fear the results for his school and country if schoolchildren failed to honor the flag, their nation's ``most sacred emblem.''

It seems safe to say that other members of the Minersville school board shared his sentiments -- at least in part -- since they carried the Gobitas case to the Supreme Court.

M. Joseph Brady, superintendent of what is now the Minersville Area School District and son of Edward A. Brady, the superintendent when the Gobitas ruling was reversed by the Supreme Court, said his father never discussed the case with him.

``The board members of that era were products of their time. It was an authoritarian system then. And they considered refusals to pledge an affront to patriotism,'' he said.

Disrespect ruled out

Brady explained the school district's current pledging policy ``as enunciated by the Supreme Court, students do not have to salute the flag if it violates their religious principles. But they cannot remain seated or show disrespect during the flag pledge.

``The way it is handled now is to excuse the child from the classroom while the pledge is being made. But the child must have a certificate from his parents saying the decisions not to salute is based on religious or moral principles. In the last 10 or 12 years, we've had only one or two children who chose not to salute.''

In the interview with Mrs. Klose, she said that for several weeks before being expelled, she and Billy pretended to pledge -- moving their lips and stretching their arms toward the flag when they saw their teachers glancing at them. ``We were afraid of being different from the other children,'' she explained.

``But when Billy and I heard about Jehovah's Witnesses in Massachusetts refusing to pledge, we decided to make our own stand,'' she said. ``Our parents were the ones who had taught us that saluting the flag was against our religion, but the decision to stop pledging was strictly our own.''

After being expelled, Mrs. Klose recalled, some of her classmates threw gravel at her. Others taunted her by shouting. ``Worse things happened when I went with other Jehovah's Witnesses to make house-to-house calls, which is how we spread the word about our religion.''

Animosity everywhere

In New Philadelphia, she said, the police rounded them up and kept them all day in a firehouse that also served as a jail. In another section of Schuylkill County -- she couldn't remember whether it was Branchdale or Heckscherville -- tin cans were thrown at them and one fiery homeowner threatened to throw them off his porch unless they recited the flag pledge.

``There was also a lot of economic hardship for us because of the flag controversy,'' Mrs. Klose recalled. ``One of the churches in Minersville declared a boycott on our parents' grocery store. Business fell off quite a bit for several weeks and some of the customers never did come back. There were times when my father had to borrow money for the mortgage from his sister.''

Mrs. Klose said the flag dispute upset relatives who did not share their religious convictions. But she added that ``all of them remained close and loving even though we embarrassed them almost to death.''

The problem of education the Gobitas children and several students expelled from other school districts was solved somewhat in December 1935 when Jehovah's Witnesses started a school in a farmhouse near Andreas. By the end of the first year, attendance had increased to 40.

``Most of us lived too far away to commute so we stayed on two farms owned by Witnesses,'' Mrs. Klose recalled. ``We were all jumbled together, upstairs, downstairs, everywhere. The families we stayed with were so kind to us, but it must have been a terrible strain on them.''

Minersville forgets

Tuition costs strained the family budget, from which school taxes still had to be paid even though the Gobitas children were not allowed to attend classes.

Today (in 1988), Minersville residents show little interest in the Gobitases and their impact on constitutional history. Perhaps one reason for their disinterest is that the family is long gone.

William Gobitas left in 1944 to do missionary work with Jehovah's's Witnesses. In 1955, he went to work for the Maryland Casualty Co., Milwaukee, retiring as personnel manager in 1976. He is now a piano tuner.

After leaving Minersville in 1945, his sister spent seven years at the World Headquarters of Jehovah's Witnesses in Brooklyn. She met her husband, Erwin Klose, in 1952 while attending a religious conference in Germany.

During her telephone interview, Mrs. Klose said, ``Erwin, who is 10 years older than I am and also a Jehovah's Witness, refused to serve in the German army because of religious beliefs. It's always been interesting to me that at the same time I was being expelled for refusing to salute the flag, he was in a concentration camp for refusing to `Heil Hitler.' ''

The younger Gobitas children also left Schuylkill County, Paul lives in Miami, Fla.; Joy Yubeta, Sylmar, Calif.; Jeanne Fry, St. Petersburg, Fla., and Grace Reinisch, Riverdale, Ga.

Mrs. Klose said her parents sold their store in 1946 and moved to Pottsville, where they devoted themselves to Jehovah's Witnesses work. Her mother died in 1962. Her father, now 87 and remarried, lives in Gaston, S.C.

Peaking anonymously

One of the few Minersville residents interested in discussing the Gobitases is a clubwoman prominent in senior citizen activities. She said, ``I bought at their grocery store and they were a very nice family. I know there was some kind of controversy about them, but I don't remember exactly what it was. Just don't use my name if you print this.''

Three retired Minersville teachers also requested anonymity when asked about the Gobitas case. ``It was no big thing,'' one insisted. ``It was all a long time ago and practically everybody involved is dead,'' the second said. The third recalled, ``I taught Lillian and William and they were very nice children, very bright and well-behaved.''

At the Sundowner Pancake House and Restaurant, where the Gobitas' grocery was once located (now an apartment house), the owner said she had only moved to Minersville three years ago and didn't know much of anything about the Gobitases. She said she preferred not to have her name used in a news article about them if it had anything to do with the flag pledge.

The same stipulation was made by her afternoon coffee customers, three men and three women, all of whom exhibited only minimal recognition of the Gobitas name. But they had strong views favoring mandatory flag salutes. And when one woman said, ``There should be prayer in public school, too,'' the others were quick to agree with her.

Jehovah's Witnesses still distribute their religious literature in Minersville. ``But I never heard of anyone harming them,'' one of the restaurant customers said.

The harm done to the Gobitases by their expulsion stays with them.

William Gobitas cannot understand why there is no mention of his father, Walter, in ``Minersville Bicentennial 1976,'' a compilation of local history published for the nation's bicentennial celebration.

``The book refers to the flag salute case, but there's not one word about my father being one of Minersville's prominent merchants and leading citizens.''

Faith in future

He said he was sad but not bitter that he and his sister were denied an education in the public school system. But he lamented, nevertheless.

Mrs. Klose said the harm done to her by her expulsion has been alleviated by the rewarding life she has had and her faith that one day ``the whole earth will be one with no dissention and no divisiveness.''

Her brother shares her faith in the future. But for him, ``There is still the trauma and the lost educational opportunities,'' he said.

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