Today I bring you the amazing story of Leon Hostetler’s educational journey that took him from his Amish childhood to becoming postdoctoral fellow in the Physics Department at Indiana University. This story will be published in three parts.

Ever since I left the Amish more than forty years ago, I’ve always wondered if anyone could become a physicist if limited to an eighth-grade education, as nearly all Amish children are. That answer has been answered in the most delightful way. I hope you enjoy reading Leon’s story as much as I do.

Early Life

By Leon Hostetler

As a young boy, I was fascinated with technology. This was ironic. I was Old-Order Amish. Modern technologies such as cars, computers, radios, televisions, and cell phones were forbidden. That didn’t always stop me. The no-radio rule was pretty easy to get around. After all, radios are small and portable—easily smuggled—and they pull the forbidden songs out of thin air. I found worldly music, with its accompaniment of string and percussion instruments, thrilling in a way the slow hymns of Amish church were not. Once when Dad found and confiscated my latest radio, I stopped him before he destroyed it and asked if I could take it apart myself. I wanted to see how it works.

Home was in the northwestern corner of Montana, about a mile from the Canadian border. There were two million acres of national forest to our south and west to explore. When not getting into trouble, my buddies and I would often be out exploring. Through it all, I recorded lots of notes and diagrams. I was a bit strange that way. I would draw maps of the old logging roads, record animal tracks, note hiking tips, and jot down observations on life.

Photo by Leon Hostetler

My family tells me that when we first moved to Montana, I would follow our landlord around all day on the twenty-or-so acre property and quiz him on what he was doing and why. I would record his answers in my notepad. I don’t remember that, specifically, but I do remember as a kid filling notebook after notebook with everything from perpetual motion machine designs to youthful notions on the meaning of life. Taking notes was how I made sense of the world.

From fall to spring, there was school. During the winter, when it was too slippery to bike, my younger sister and I would walk a mile along a narrow gravel road that wound through the forest and deposited us at the one-room log schoolhouse. We carried our lunchboxes and a big can of bear spray for protection against mountain lions whose fresh tracks we would sometimes see on our way. I hated school. Our Amish teacher was the no-nonsense type. One smirk in the wrong direction and you got punished. My grades were good, but I chafed under the arbitrary rules and got into trouble a lot. On the good days, I would complete my classwork as quickly as possible so I could spend the rest of the school day reading.

Photo by Leon Hostetler

Reading was my escape and inspiration. I was lucky to be born into a family of readers and to have parents who encouraged it…though I did get punished once for reading under the covers with a flashlight while pretending to be asleep. Every time we went to town I’d beg Dad to stop at the library for me, and I would always come out with a huge stack of books. At home we only had a small library but with books ranging from Louis L’Amour novels to an Albert Einstein biography. After I’d read them all, I had no choice but to start on the encyclopedia set. We had an older World Book encyclopedia set. This was a 20+ volume set that filled an entire shelf of our bookcase. At the end of each entry, there was a list of related entries. So of course to fully understand any topic, I would have to read all of the related entries—each of which had their own related entries. And so I would end up with almost the entire encyclopedia set opened and spread around me on the floor, with pencil and notebook in my lap.

My brain was good at coming up with questions and bad at finding the answers. To understand something was to feel relief. But the Amish worldview could not provide this relief. My questions were brushed aside, or swept under a catch-all rug called “faith,” which I was suggested to get more of. When I read Einstein’s biography—probably at 14 or 15 years old—it suddenly clicked for me. Physicists were the ones figuring out how it all works and where it all came from. I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. As an Amish teenager, the life that was set out for me was to be a good Amish boy—to join the church at age 16, marry an Amish girl at 18 to 20, work at the family business, have lots of children, and maybe become preacher one day. But I dreamed of being a physicist like Einstein…of figuring out the big questions.

To be continued…

Photo by Leon Hostetler

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