This summer, I keep missing the most venerable member of the Plough team. Tony Potts was eighty-eight when he succumbed to leukemia on April 28, 2025. But “succumbed” is not a word anyone would associate with Tony. He was on the basketball court and in the soccer goal well into his eighties. A week before his death, he commissioned some grandsons to wrestle two electric scooters – his and his wife Jenny’s – into a pickup so they could traverse the Walkway over the Hudson one more time. Till his final days, he went out behind his house to revel in the early morning birdsong and the wind in the trees.

Tony joined the Plough staff around the same time I did, when the magazine relaunched in 2014 with offices at Fox Hill, a Bruderhof community in Walden, New York. For years thereafter, he replied to pretty much every reader who asked a question or simply left a web comment, whether positive or negative. He penned the kindest rejection letters to hundreds of aspiring writers whose articles or book proposals were not selected for publication. He handled rights and permissions for the many anthologies that anchor Plough’s book line: Watch for the Light, Bread and Wine, Called to Community, Following the Call, Poems to See By, and the Plough Spiritual Guides series. And he coached younger staff with his lifetime store of business acumen.

Why was an old man still working so hard? At the Bruderhof, everyone contributes as long as they are able, and the community in turn commits to providing each with meaningful work. This was at least Tony’s third career, and he loved it.

Tony Potts. Photographs courtesy of John Noltner, APeaceOfMyMind.org.

Memorably for the rest of us Plough staff, at his eightieth birthday party he recalled where he was at the turn of each decade of his life. Tony came from a Philadelphia Quaker family. As a teen, he joined his parents to visit the Bruderhof in Paraguay (the community had fled Europe during World War II but not yet established communities in the United States). Family discussions centered around the idea of joining this group dedicated to putting into practice Christ’s Sermon on the Mount by sharing all things in common.

In 1954, shortly after Tony’s parents, Tom and Florrie, made the decision to liquidate their shares in the family steel company and throw in their lot with the Paraguay Bruderhof, the first North American community began in Rifton, New York. Visions of communal living were percolating across the country, and Woodcrest was soon inundated with visitors.

Tom was asked to take the helm of Community Playthings, the Bruderhof’s (still young) company, manufacturing solid maple furniture and toys.

Tony didn’t join the Bruderhof when his parents did. Enrolling in Haverford College, he majored in mathematics. But on his breaks, as he shuttled back and forth between the campus and the community, his heart told him where he belonged, and it wasn’t at Haverford. He was twenty-one when he made his commitment to the Bruderhof, requesting baptism for the forgiveness of sins and as a declaration of faith in Jesus and faithfulness to his church.

After studying at a local college to become a teacher, Tony taught in Bruderhof schools for many years, leaving indelible impressions on a generation of students. One of them, David Johnson, remembers:

Tony gave us a wonderful lens through which to view and understand the world – the world of mathematics, of music, birds, and trees – hiking the Berkshire and Catskill mountains and swimming in their cold and rushing streams. Although he never spoke in religious terms, we knew he loved us and that he cared about justice, and we absorbed his unspoken faith in God and the vibrant life that flowed from it.

Students remember learning how to fix bikes and play soccer; sportsmanship was prized over championship. Others recall wild April Fool’s pranks ending in water fights, and quiet story hours out on a hillside overlooking the Catskill mountains, as Tony read aloud from Tolkien.

And they certainly remember his marriage to Jenny Bazeley, who had captured his heart from the moment she first waved and smiled at him. Actually, having just landed with a friend after a rather turbulent trip from England, Jenny was waving – with relief – to the small party that had come to pick them up. But Tony, one of the picker-uppers, saw that smile. “My heart flipped over a bit, and I thought, ‘Wow, that is an interesting girl.’”

On meeting Tony and Jenny, you might be excused for thinking him a quiet man. Jenny, in a wonderfully matched contrast, has always been the flamboyant one, with her boisterous laugh and enough energy and ideas to keep their eleven kids busy with hikes, cookouts, camp-outs, and community beautification projects.

Jenny and Tony Potts.

Last August, as they celebrated sixty years of marriage, they looked back on the arrival of their three boys and eight girls, and all the happy memories of a busy, lively household. Then they considered all the hard times: neither of them pulled any punches about the difficulties of a shared life, they just made it clear that love and faithfulness were stronger. Among their hardest tests was the long illness of their daughter Brenda, diagnosed with an aggressive cancer at age fifteen. She fought recurring brain tumors and chronic head pain her entire life, marrying, becoming a mother of four, and seeing her kids into adulthood. But the tumors kept coming back, eventually taking her life. There had been many other heartaches in six decades of marriage, yet here they were, giving thanks in everything.

Because a living community is constantly growing and changing, it can take some creative juggling to make sure all the most urgent tasks are covered. At the Bruderhof, anyone may be called upon to learn a new job. And because we consider each other brothers and sisters, not competitors, our identities are not rooted in profession or status.

Eventually leaving his teaching career behind him, Tony joined the Community Playthings business, where his father passed on to him his experience, wisdom, and “humility file” (a folder of bright ideas that had fizzled spectacularly). Tony worked on the shop floor, then as shop foreman, as head of sales and marketing, and in regulatory affairs. He was often on the road to set up exhibits and demonstrate new products. John Menz, a younger colleague, remembers:

Tony told me that the business is simply a means for us to work together and represent the true value of work; it’s all about harmonious fellowship: “If you want world peace, it has to begin at home and in the workplace.” This was the baseline for our business.

One of Tom Potts’s maxims, inherited by his son, was that “the community should run the business, not the other way around.” With the ebb and flow of orders and a limited labor pool, it can be challenging to ensure that the pressure of order fulfillment doesn’t overpower the rhythm of daily life.

Jason and I first lived alongside Tony and Jenny during the early years of the Bellvale Bruderhof, and they both reminded us frequently that one of the ways to build community is through song. They have always been the king and queen of hootenannies, or jam sessions where we sing what Jenny calls “songs of the people.” Which people? Really any folk who struggle and survive, laugh, grieve, work, love, and sing about it. (I can’t think of a more accurate way to describe their own shared life.) If Jason or I didn’t instigate a hootenanny about once a month, Tony or Jenny would start dropping hints. We didn’t mind taking hints from them, and I am here to tell you that those hints have continued over the last twenty-two years.

There they always were, in the first row of the circle, holding hands and belting out every tune from the boisterous to the profound. In all those years, Tony rarely let an evening of song go by without suggesting Bill Staines’s “The Faith of Man”:

Now the farmer sees the fields around him ripen
And whispers something low beneath his breath,
Perhaps a little prayer to help the growing,
Perhaps a word of thanks for all the rest.

The fact that he couldn’t actually carry a tune bothered neither him nor anyone else. It sounded right somehow, like the drone of a bagpipe continuously underscoring its chanter.

The core of Tony’s Plough correspondence was prison ministry, donating books to inmates and chaplains across the country and following up with personalized suggestions for the next title to read. Over the years, he became something of a spiritual advisor to dozens of men behind bars, encouraging them in their faith and their search for forgiveness. This continued until the end of his life.

Soon after his final discharge from hospital he emailed his friend Jonathan Rivera:

Dear Jonathan, my beloved spiritual grandson,
I’m so glad that you are doing better and that the classes are earning you time off. I have been sick, myself; in fact, I was in the hospital just when you wrote. I was diagnosed with leukemia, and have chosen to come home from the hospital to have hospice care. I am eighty-eight years old, and I can hear God knocking on the door to tell me that he wants me. I want to be ready, and I’m so grateful for all that has been given to me in my life – my wife, my loving family, and the community that surrounds me with love. I embrace you with the arms of my heart. This may not be the final farewell, but I want you to know that I’m on my homeward journey.

Jonathan wrote back “with tears running down my cheeks, because you are family to me, and you have helped me grow closer to God.” He anticipated Tony’s reunion with his daughter Brenda in heaven, and continued,

I will pray with the brothers tonight to give your family strength and to give you comfort. Thank you so much for seeing God in me. Tell Grandma Jenny to be strong and that I send my love and prayers. I am not going to say goodbye because we will see each other in God’s kingdom. See you later down the line, Grandpa. I love you.

Grandma Jenny is strong; every day faced without your partner of six decades must take inordinate strength. I know she has re-read these and other letters in recent months, remembering all the ways Tony lifted others up, whether by an encouraging word, a heartfelt letter, or a dedicated prayer. She recalls that in these last years, he woke up early every day to read the Gospels and pray very specific prayers: he had a long list of initials on a sheet of paper, each representing someone he wanted to remember – from prisoners to friends suffering from sickness or carrying other heavy burdens. Only he and the Good Lord knew who they were.

There’s a storm-tossed ship tonight out on the water,
There’s a soul that sails alone out on the blue.
There’s a dreamer with his eyes upon the heavens,
They’re all looking for a way to make it through.

When Tony died, Jenny called together friends from many years and places to attend his wake at their house. But she had no intention of letting folks stand around the casket in somber silence. We were to assemble with songbooks and guitars, and raise voices one more time in honor of Tony’s life. There were far too many friends to fit inside the house, so, from an ever-expanding circle outside the open window, the chorus of his favorite song filled the evening:

You can trust the moon to move the mighty ocean,
You can trust the sun to shine upon the land.
You take the little that you know,
and you do the best you can,
And you see the rest with the quiet faith of man.