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Today Marlin and Laurie continue from the last episode in this second part of the story of the founding of Veritas Press. Learn how they went from using their garage as the Veritas warehouse and their home as the customer service center to now having a successful accredited online school that reaches families worldwide!
Episode Transcription
Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.
Marlin Detweiler:
Hi, you've joined us again for Veritas Vox. This is the second episode about the origination of Veritas and we left off last time with the first summer related to our first catalog. The year was 1998. We were living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
We put together a catalog and that was a lot of work. And confirming prices and identifying products and that sort of thing. It was good work, but it was a lot different than today because the Internet was not as developed and there were a lot of things that we had to get by telephone.
But there is a whole lot more to the story. I'll let Laurie jump in here with what that summer was like.
Laurie Detweiler:
Well, we had four small boys at the time and they were busy and we had not lived in Lancaster that long, maybe three years at that point. And so we were still getting settled. And Veritas Academy had started. And so we were involved there and working on the following school year.
But that summer we sent those catalogs out and we had no idea what was coming. We decided we would do this from our home. We didn't want to spend the money on any rental space, and it was just the two of us at that point. So what difference did it make if we were doing it at home? That was way back before COVID and work from home. So that was kind of an odd thing. And we had pulled our cars out of our garage and set up a tiny little warehouse and a two-car garage. And then the catalogs hit and, oh my goodness, we had no idea what was coming.
Marlin Detweiler:
We obviously hit a nerve in the marketplace. We set out 32,000 catalogs to lists that we were able to acquire that were really people who were going to be very inclined to classical Christian education. And we thought we were going to handle the business of Veritas with one phone line that had call waiting. And that's how we started. And it was in very real terms, an unmitigated disaster. I would get up and I forget what our hours were. They were short, I think maybe 12 to 5.
Laurie Detweiler:
Right.
Marlin Detweiler:
But at 12:00, the phone would ring. I'd answer it and then it would ring again on call waiting, and I'd clear one call, the second call to get back to the first. And it was not uncommon for me to handle 12 phone calls while on one call. What else do you remember? I know what I remember.
Laurie Detweiler:
The second we would wake up – we didn't sleep very much. We'd go out and the little boys too were helping and packing boxes, and we wouldn't even get out of our pajamas. It wasn’t long before we ended up having to hire some people to come in and had more phone lines. So literally, we had people in our dining room, our living room, our bedrooms, answering phone calls.
Marlin Detweiler:
We had six phones being manned in our office in our house. And that was before wifi. We had to have a hardwired Internet installed. And if I remember correctly, I was in my study. We had some in the dining room kitchen basement, which was a finished basement. There was a good work area there, an upstairs bedroom, and I believe family room. There were six locations and the one in the kitchen led to the garage/“warehouse”. And so they were back and forth constantly.
Laurie Detweiler:
And it was on one of the phones that you can take the receiver off, you know, the speaker for like a speaker phone thing. And I could only get so far from the house and the kids would be in the backyard.
Marlin Detweiler:
Oh, you mean a wireless cordless phone?
Laurie Detweiler:
A cordless phone. And so I would be standing on the back porch or put it on mute so I could yell at my kids to not kill themselves, jump off the swing set or whatever, and then get back on the phone with the person. And fortunately, most of it was homeschooling moms. So I would finally just start laughing and say, “I'm really sorry, but I have a kid on top of a swing set and I've got to get them before they break a bone. Hold on a minute.”
And then I run to the warehouse/our garage and I can remember you being on the call with the customer and the UPS truck would back in and our neighbors were starting to get irritated. So Marlin hired their daughter to work for us.
Marlin Detweiler:
So that was a little bit of a political move. She was good, but it worked out really well after that.
Laurie Detweiler:
The UPS truck would come 2 to 3 times a day because we couldn't get semis in where we were. Obviously, it was a neighborhood, so they'd send a little truck. And honestly, that summer, I don't think I remember what we ate, what we did. We didn't do anything except ship boxes and answer phones and then looking forward going, “We've got to get an office location. Like this is not going to work.”
Marlin Detweiler:
But we were in the middle of the summer, which is very much our busy season so we couldn't move. So it had to wait until the fall. And that's what we did.
Laurie Detweiler:
And at that point our neighbors were quite grateful as well. When we started, Marlin still had not given up our real estate investment company and we kind of realized God and called us here. He wanted us to be doing this and there wasn't going to be time. So then he started transitioning really to where this was going to be full-time work for both of us and has been now for a lot of years.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, nearly 30 years. So we really, really, you know, ordering fulfilling orders. All of those things were just a huge challenge. And I don't know that many of you listening were around for us back then almost 30 years ago. But as it happens to have been your parents or even grandparents, please thank them for their patience in the process, because it really was an enormous challenge of blessing beyond our imagination.
Laurie Detweiler:
I remember hauling, going to Home Depot and getting folding tables so we could put them down our driveway so we could get more people. Fortunately, you know, it wasn't raining, but we could get more people to pack boxes because we just couldn't get enough done. And our little boys pack more boxes than I want to even think about.
Marlin Detweiler:
So that was the first summer for Veritas with the first catalog, it was 1998 for the 1999 school year.
Laurie Detweiler:
And I should say that real quickly, Ned Bustard, whom many of you have seen his name, he's authored and worked on a lot of our curriculum. He and his wife – Leslie passed away in this past year from cancer very early this year. You know, she's home with the Lord, but that's been hard for everybody, particularly for Ned. But they were so involved in putting the catalog together.
And then just as we built, there would be so many nights I can remember over at Ned and Leslie's where our kids would sleep on their floor. They didn't I mean, their children were little, little at that point, and they might have only had one.
Marlin Detweiler:
And as were old enough, that didn't remain the case. But we would get close to the catalog deadline. We were working on a deadline for delivery so that it gets mailed timely. And of course, any time that kind of thing happens, the last few days end up being really crunch time. And there were nights where we would literally sleep in Ned's office and he would wake us up when we needed to look at something to approve it, to move on. And he would work through the night to meet the deadline.
Laurie Detweiler:
And Leslie was just a saint, which everybody knew her to be. But when I really look back on those first years and those first catalogs that we did because it's very time consuming, she put up with so much to have all my little boys there.
Marlin Detweiler:
So we've always done one catalog a year. It gets mailed around Mother's Day, which is the second Sunday in May, and that's been a pattern that we've had now since the first catalog. Of course, the mailing list has grown from 32,000 to be into six figures, and it's a very different world. We have a whole lot more help now.
And so it's a very different set of circumstances. So that moved along the history and Bible cards, tapes, and teachers' manuals were created. But before we moved to Pennsylvania, we had the history, the music for the history cards done. Tell us a little bit about that.
Laurie Detweiler:
When we were transitioning between Orlando and Pennsylvania, we were homeschooling, we were going back and forth and a dear friend, Michelle – I told many people this: If you want to homeschool, find a best friend and then homeschool with them. And I was the creative. She was the math person. So we divided and conquered. And so I taught history, literature, Bible, and English grammar, and she taught math and Latin. Actually, we split grammar, but she taught all the math and all the Latin. And so we would trade boys. So she had two boys. And so Monday she got all the boys, Tuesday I got all the boys. And it was really great for a couple reasons. One, it gave each of us two days off.
Marlin Detweiler:
So you didn't really trade that way. As I remember, they were all in our house. So all six and Michelle in the house. We had a room set up. Anyway not going to argue it. We can do that another time.
Laurie Detweiler:
But it was a great way to do it. But she when we started doing this and we, you know, everybody believes that kids learn best when they have music to memorize and to help memorize with. And so she had a music background and she wrote the music for all of the history.
Marlin Detweiler:
She wrote it, produced it, and sang it. It was hilarious because her husband, when he found out how much she was going to pay out of her own pocket to do that out of their pocket said, “Well, that money is gone.” And what is absolutely hilarious is what happened. Why don't you relate?
Laurie Detweiler:
She was paid royalties. And over the years she did quite well from them. And so he was very happy at one point in their marriage when she had done really well with them.
Marlin Detweiler:
When her royalties were about 100 times what she had paid to produce it. And what she finally said was, “I just can't take any more.” It was pretty funny.
Laurie Detweiler:
Yeah, but anyway, and we've had a friendship for years. And anyway, we spent the year putting all the cards together. We were living in Lancaster and once again this was way back before the internet. Now if I want to access the library of Congress or any of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or most of the art museums, now all I have to do if I want an image, is just go online and I can get it. That was not the case. None of their stuff was digitized at that point online, and so you literally had to go in, you had to get checked out your credentials.
Marlin Detweiler:
At the Library of Congress.
Laurie Detweiler:
I would go in, put on the white gloves, put on the mask, not for COVID reasons, for getting things contaminated. And we would go in and spend hundreds of hours going through images, trying to find images, and then they would digitize them and we would purchase them. And so we spent a summer, we would trade.
I would take the kids and he would go look and then I would look and he would take the kids to do something. So we had a summer where our kids spent a lot of time in Washington, DC. Museums.
Marlin Detweiler:
It was only about a two-and-a-half-hour drive. And there's also a book bar. It's a bookstore, but it's called the Baldwins Book Bar. In about an hour from us in West Chester. And the owner of that was very good. He would literally let us set up in his shop with a scanner and have complete access to books that were public domain books for images and that sort of thing. It was quite, quite an ordeal. And the kids were with us every step of the way.
Laurie Detweiler:
People ask us, how did we have four sons that are – and this is kind of a side note, all very entrepreneurial. And they they always say, how do you do it? Entrepreneurship isn’t taught. I really believe it's caught.
And so our kids just grew up with this business growing and we pretty much included them in everything. And we always made sure they had fun. We always made sure, I mean, they got to see lots of different things in the world that they wouldn't have seen had we not had this business. I believe that along the way they just really learned how to build a business. And now they all started their own businesses.
Marlin Detweiler:
But probably notable following that there were a whole lot of other things that happened, but it was the great books curriculum that we call the Omnibus curriculum. We had a symposium in Lancaster where there were about 30 participants just talking about ideas. And out of that came an idea that became the Omnibus curriculum. And so Ty and Emily Fisher, Doug and Nancy Wilson, Laurie and I got together in Colonial Williamsburg, the best place that we knew to have a meeting like this and spent, I think, three, maybe four days discussing and designing what has become the Omnibus curriculum and we selected it at that get-together.
I think the books for Omnibus I, maybe one, two and three. I don't remember. And Ty Fisher agreed to function as the I don't know what his title is in the books off the top of my head, but he really became the general manager, the managing editor, and that was the birth of the Omnibus. And in that year that followed, then we did Omnibus one and the next year we did two, the next year we did three.
Then we took a year break and did four or five and six and one-year sequences. So we created the Omnibus books themselves over a seven-year time frame. What do you remember about that?
Laurie Detweiler:
It was just a lot of work and we read a lot of books. I read a lot of books that I had not either read in years or had never read, and I just remember thinking, I wish that that was the education that I'd had. As we were putting lessons together and talking about it, talking about what is it we wanted students to know.
Because after all, the entire point of you know, Veritas is we talk about changing yet one young heart and mind at the time for Christ. And so the whole point of reading this is not just to say you've read it or to say you've got a great education, but it's to help them better understand the world in which they live.
People say, “Why is it all Western civilization? But it's to help them understand the world in which they live through the lens of a Christian worldview and having students get to ask the tough questions while there are still people there to lead and nurture them. So teachers or parents or whoever that may be, but asking the tough questions that are going to come up in life and I hear more parents say, “I wish I could go through Omnibus”, which by the way, I ran into somebody this summer and she had purchased a Self-Paced course for herself to go through it, just because she said it's probably going to take me three years, Can I get an extension? I'm like, “Oh, sure, we'll figure it out”, because I was so impressed that she wanted to further her education.
Marlin Detweiler:
My role as the publisher was to be kind of the last point of editing. And while I haven't read all of the content of all of the books, just reading the introductory essays and then going through all of that, I literally have read, in fact, edited every page of every Omnibus textbook, all six of them. And it was really a remarkable time to do that.
It was a lot of work, but it was a labor of love and it really was a good thing. And I would really encourage any of you parents who are interested in getting the kind of education that you're giving your children now to do it. Pace yourself, but eat away at it a little bit at a time. And I think you'll find it a real blessing.
Laurie Detweiler:
And I think one of the things that the older Marlin and I get, the more I look back and so many curriculums change all the time. They do it for lots of reasons. Some people do it for bad reasons because they just want to change them to make money because then they don't come up with new stuff. They can't sell me books.
Others change because they think there's a better mousetrap. But the one thing I know is that scripture is really clear what we need to teach our kids. And I think starting with history and Bible and having children become so familiar with Scripture that it's just part of who they are. I am blown away by parents who say to me that their children are the only ones that, when they're in Sunday school or whatever, know the answers to stuff.
And they're just so much more familiar with scripture. We want our young children to know scripture inside and out, like we just want them familiar with the story. And then as they get into secondary, you probably know this, but Omnibus covers all the parts of the Bible. And so if you go through the whole thing and so we want our students to interact with that, but not just to interact with that, but we want them to interact with what else is going on in history.
Marlin Detweiler:
We could talk then about another major project after that was the Self-Paced courses, which is an interesting story. The fun thing about it was for the Omnibus courses for the film team and the talent, the teachers to literally go on-site to film various things that if you've seen a Self-Paced course, you know that if you haven't, you really want to take a look because filming about the Battle of Marathon from the site where it happened, or a French Benedictine monastery to discuss the role of Saint Benedict, I think one of the most fun things that I remember about that was that Jose Dixon, the teacher that arranged that monastery and taught there, was able to get a special dispensation for one of the residents to be able to be interviewed. And he had not literally spoken in ten years. So here's a guy being interviewed who has not used his voice to speak in 10 years. It was really cool. Another thing is World War II and the concentration camp. Talk about that.
Laurie Detweiler:
They were filming literally in a cell in a concentration camp, and everybody that was there talked about just how overwhelming that was. I mean, that was a fun moment for Marlin and I also because our third son, Travis and his wife, they didn't do the history, but they did the all the Bible and they did the Omnibus. And, you know, to see your son and his wife be the ones that are behind that, behind the Self-Paced, that's one of those moments that as a parent, you just go, Oh, this is exciting.
Marlin Detweiler:
And then roughly 18, 19 years ago, we started offering online classes. The first year we wanted to start very slowly and make sure that we didn't get caught by surprise, so only allowed 16 students in a class. We had two classes and one teacher and one course, Omnibus I Primary. We had our first end-of-year gathering following that. And of the 32 students, I think that 26 or 28 of them were there.
Laurie Detweiler:
It was pretty amazing.
Marlin Detweiler:
If we had 90% participation now… My goodness, I don’t know, tens of thousands of people show up in Lancaster, and that wouldn't be possible. But it's been a really, really fun run and we're not done yet. Excuse me. We have other projects we're working on and we have a great team to work with this school year, which is the 23-24 school year.
Marlin Detweiler:
We have 170 teachers all over the world, and I'm told we have students in 70 countries. We never saw it coming, did we?
Laurie Detweiler:
I know. It's amazing when you pick up the phone every once in a while, when we get really busy, Marlin and I will hop on phones.
Marlin Detweiler:
That's been a few years now.
Laurie Detweiler:
I've been on the phone in the summer.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, returning phone calls, but you're not handling the call center.
Laurie Detweiler:
But getting to talk to parents. And it's it's always you know, I had a woman that was literally in Africa and they're starting a classical school there and her kids are taking shape. They're starting grammar school. And so her older children are taking online classes with us, or it might be somebody in Pakistan. It's just amazing to see where things have gone and what God's doing and the way families really have connected with one another has been amazing.
Marlin Detweiler:
So we're glad that you have been a part of the Veritas family for whatever period of time you have been. We hope that you'll continue. It has really been a labor of love with lots of challenges and lots of bumps along the way. But what a blessing it has been. Thank you for listening to us and being a part of what we've had a chance to do.
You've been with us, of course, for Veritas Vox, thanks for joining us.
