Fast, Menno (1916-2008)

Mennonite Weekly Review obituary: 2008 Apr 21 p. 9

Birth date: 1916 Apr 16

text of obituary:

MENNO FAST

Menno Fast, 91, of Hesston, Kan., died March 23, 2008. He was born April 16, 1916, to Isaac and Aganetha Unruh Fast on the Unruh homestead east of Goessel.

He joined Goessel Mennonite Church. He attended Bethel College in North Newton for two years, which qualified him to teach all eight grades at Emmenthal School for three years. He then returned to Bethel and graduated in 1942. In fall 1942, he began graduate school at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where he earned a master’s degree in physics education. Then for one year he taught high school physics in Chicago.

In World War II he entered Civilian Public Service as a conscientious objector. He served in Three Rivers, Calif., where he met Naomi Brubaker, his future wife, then in Livermore, Calif., and finally in Akron, Pa. In June 1946, he left for Poland as assistant director of the tractor unit, a joint project of United Nations Recovery and Rehabilitation Act and Mennonite Central Committee. This six-month project to rebuild agricultural technical ability destroyed by the war put him in contact with local farmers and authorities, and he discovered many refugees who had lost their families. So MCC asked him to continue in Poland to work with the refugee relocation effort. He concluded this work in the summer of 1949.

He married Naomi Ebersole Brubaker on Aug. 20, 1949, in Lancaster, Pa., after which they settled on the Fast family farm east of Goessel.

He taught physics at Bethel College and farmed with his father. In 1954 he joined the physics department at the University of Kentucky. In 1968 they moved to Lincoln, Neb., where he worked in the physics department at the University of Nebraska until his retirement in 1981. In 1987, he and Naomi moved to the family farm near Goessel. In 2001 they relocated to Schowalter Villa in Hesston.

Survivors include his wife, Naomi; three children, Catherine and Douglas Everingham of Wichita, Elisabeth and Theodoor Beels of Grand Rapids, Mich., and John and Jenny Fast of Goessel; a sister, Martha Waltner; seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

He was preceded in death by an infant son, Robert Lowell; and a sister, Selma Schmidt.