Everybody Has a Story

EVERYBODY HAS A STORY

Introduction

It has long been my desire to be a writer, but wanting and being are two things that are as far apart as the East is from the West. As a child I was always writing stories and imagining the books I would publish, and to that end my well meaning mother insisted that I take a journalism class when I entered the tenth grade at South High School in Denver, Colorado. I took the class and had a couple of articles printed in the class newspaper which we called the Confetti. It was kind of a minor league version of the school newspaper, The Confederate. (We were the South High Rebels.)

With an A in Journalism, the following year I applied to be a reporter on The Confederate, but my tenure was short lived, lasting only one semester, because my real interest was not interviewing people and writing about current events. For one thing, I was too shy. I didn’t like talking to strangers. I wanted to write stories, particularly western stories. I also loved researching and writing about history. So, in my senior year of high school and again in my last year of college I took creative writing classes to try and hone my skills. In the latter class I turned in a paper on the Webster – Hayne debate of 1832 entitled, The Battle of the Giants. My teacher thought it good enough to submit for publication which I did to American History Illustrated. They bought the story and published it in the February 1982 edition. By then, however, I was a United States Marine Officer training to be a fighter pilot and my yearning to be a writer was put on the shelf.

The journalism class and the newspaper experience did not all go to waste. I learned the funnel method of writing and the need for a catchy opening line to grab the reader’s attention. And there was one other thing that the teacher, Carl Johnston, said, that has stuck with me all these years. “Everybody has a story,” he said. “You just have to ask the right questions.”

Mr. Johnston went on to tell how a couple of years before he had sent the entire Confederate staff down to the front entry hall of the school and told them to grab students coming in the door and ask them questions until they get a story. They finally found a student who was building a dune buggy in his spare time and did a feature story on him.

Two years later in my senior year I was building a dune buggy of my own. My dad talked me into using most of the money I’d saved for college (a decision that, although I loved that dune buggy, I later regretted ever having done) to buy the kit. Dad bought an old VW bug and some big, fat, off road style tires and we set about building a car. It was November in Colorado and cold, so much to my mother’s consternation, our one car garage became the work shop. We unbolted and disconnected everything, hooked up a hoist to the rafters and with the help of my brothers lifted the body off the frame. Then we towed the frame down to the dune buggy sales garage, where they shortened the frame by fifteen inches and attached a body style called the “Bandit.” We then towed the car back home and assembled all of the accessories until it was finished.

One thing that didn’t come with the “package” was a roll bar, but we decided for safety sake to go ahead and install one. That decision probably saved my life and three others about a year and a half later.

I was home from my first year at college when our church youth group decided to have a picnic and go tubing on the South Platte River near Deckers, about thirty miles southwest of Denver. A camp stove, hotdogs and condiments, and inner tubes were packed along with a horde of excited, screaming teens onto the church bus for the ride, but I wanted to drive my buggy up there in the mountains. My thirteen year old brother, Randall, my best friend, Ole Konnerup, and a mutual friend he had invited along, Brenda, hopped into the buggy and away we went intent on beating everyone to the river.

Our trip went out old highway 85 to a little wayside junction called Johnson’s Corner at the town of Sedalia, and then followed a narrow two lane road up over the first range of foot hills. At the top of the mountain the pavement ended and the last ten miles down to the river was a graded, gravel road. I was putting the car through its paces, sliding around curves, kicking up dirt, and blanketing all of us in dust. Then we came to a steep incline and started down. At that point we were only going about thirty five miles per hour and although I lifted off the gas pedal, we still accelerated a little going down hill. Not exceptionally fast on a long straight stretch, but perhaps a little careless on loose gravel. Off to the left was a ravine that dropped about forty feet immediately off the side of the road.

In those days seat belts had not yet been mandated in cars, and we had none. Ole was standing in the back holding onto the roll bar and we were shouting and laughing, having a good time, when the road began to veer slightly to the left. As I tried to steer into the curve I suddenly realized I no longer had control of the buggy. It wouldn’t turn. I took my foot off the gas, but only slightly applied the brake, knowing that on that gravel if I had stepped hard on it we would only slide. Then the front end, as if it were an airfoil, began to rise. Ole, sensing a problem, sat down. I just looked in horror at a boulder looming in front of us as we sailed over the ditch on the right, helpless to do anything.

The right front axle took the brunt of the impact, a loud bang that sounded to me like an explosion. We hit hard enough to bend the axle. The buggy came to an immediate halt, the rear end swung out to the left, and the car rolled over on its left side. As it rolled I went head first over the driver’s side, hit the top of my head on the gravel, did a somersault under the car as it rolled over me, and wound up on my feet with my right hand on the smashed window frame, and my left on the roll bar. The buggy had rolled three quarters over, and was lying on its right side in the middle of the road. Randall was at my feet screaming, his head wedged between the side of the car and the ground. Fortunately the design of the car was such that the wheel fenders stuck out wider than the sides where the driver and front passenger sat. There was just enough room for Randall’s head to fit, although it was tight enough that he was stuck and in pain.

Ole was on the ground to my left. Brenda was half sitting, half standing in the rear seat. When the buggy started to roll Ole did everything he could to keep Brenda in the car so she wouldn’t get hurt, and he was successful. I looked down, saw Randall, and shoved the car on over back onto its wheels.

Randall had cuts and bruises all over his head, but fortunately Brenda was a nursing student, and she took him over to the side of the road, sat beside him, put her arms around him and comforted him while he cried. I had a bump on my noggin, Ole’s arms were scraped pretty bad, and Brenda, well, she didn’t have a scratch. Ole and I looked over into that ravine and thanked the good Lord that we hadn’t rolled on over that side.

Was I going too fast? Maybe, but it couldn’t have been too much because even with that sudden deceleration nobody was thrown from the car, and it only made three-quarters of one roll. We all, except for Brenda, kind of fell out as it rolled over. The front end of that buggy was so light that people would pick it up by the bumper just to do it. With two people sitting in the back seat, which was over the rear wheels and going down that hill it didn’t take much to make the front end squirrelly and uncontrollable. We also found later that the bearings in the front left wheel were crushed. Was that a result of the impact, or could they have been going bad and suddenly locked up becoming a contributing factor to the accident?

The same day my other brother, Steve, was taking glider flying lessons. As he and his instructor were taking off, the cable from the tow plane snapped. They weren't high enough to catch an updraft and they made a crash landing at the edge of the airport. A wing of the glider was damaged, but the two pilots were uninjured. Imagine the thoughts my mother must have pondered as she tried to sleep that night. She could have lost her three sons in one day.

During my senior year in high school, a friend of mine, Dean Mosier, whom I had known since the first or second grade, went racing down a side street one night on a motorcycle, ran a stop sign, broadsided a car, flew a hundred feet through the air, and died instantly upon hitting the ground. I’ve often wondered, Why him? Dean was one of the most likeable kids around. He was friendly, outgoing, always had a cheery disposition, and everyone was his friend. He was never in any kind of trouble. Why him, and what kind of stories could he be telling his grandchildren thirty-five years later if he had survived? At my twenty-fifth high school reunion we were asked to write down a special memory of our high school days for an album that would be printed as a remembrance. I wrote down, “The funeral of Dean Mosier. I hope he is not forgotten.”

History is the record of thousands of individuals who have influenced people and events around them, and had their stories written down for future generations to read and learn about the past, and to apply principles to the present that will affect the future. But written history only skims the surface of all the stories that could be, and need to be, told. There are millions, indeed billions, of stories that have been lost and forgotten over the millennia. There are billions more today that will be lost and forgotten, because too often we just look at the surface, rather than the heart of the individual. We judge by appearance that this one or that isn’t important enough to have anything to say, and as such we judge badly. Every life has value, and if we but learn to ask the right questions we will find that everybody has a story.

Chapter One

A Legal Immigrant Comes to America

On July 12, 1920, my grandfather, Hendrik Boonstra, disembarked from the Rotterdam at Ellis Island, New York and began a new life in the new world. He traveled to Ringsted, Iowa and worked a farm with a Dutch family named Vanderby. Four years later he returned to Holland and brought his future bride, Rinske, his brother, Gerritt, and another man named John Planting back to the States with him. They sailed on an English ship which took them up the St. Lawrence River to Detroit, where they caught a train west and finally arrived back in Iowa.

Grandpa, although serious with old world values about strict discipline, loved to joke around and enjoyed a good laugh. He was born on April 29, 1894 in Wouterswoude, Friesland, in the Netherlands. He went to school only until the sixth grade and then had to go to work in his father’s potato fields. He found a job in Germany at one time, but when he was old enough he joined the Dutch army. Later he got a job working for a dairy farmer named Kooistra, who eventually had thirteen kids. The second oldest was a daughter named Rinske.

Gramps liked to say, “Yah, I worked for dat ol’ skin flint for several years and he never paid me da proper waches [wages]. But I got even with him,” he’d say with a sneaky grin and wink his eye, “I took his daughter!”

“Ah, Hank!” Grandma would say. Grandma was very staid and proper. She wasn’t one for jokes. She was more concerned with everyday living. She was the best cook this side of the Atlantic Ocean. She could even make boiled potatoes and red cabbage, one of her favorite meals, taste divine, but her piece-de-resistance was her blueberry pie. Nobody ever made a pie as good as Grandma’s blueberry pie. She was a simple woman, with only an elementary education, but she listened, and she learned. Prior to leaving for the United States, she had never been more than thirty miles from home, but she had a practical wisdom about life. She could quote many passages from the Bible, and she was very astutely up to date on all the latest news, not local gossip, but newsworthy events world wide. She could carry on an intellectual conversation on a wide variety of subjects. She and Gramps loved to talk about the “old country.”

The borders of Europe have changed a thousand times in the last thousand years; Holland and Belgium were at one time one nation. They were a puppet state of Spain in the 1500s, but Holland broke away with a victory over Spanish troops at Leyden in 1588, which prevented the Spanish invasion of England at the same moment the great Spanish Armada was being blown to pieces by a storm in the English Channel.

Friesland is the northernmost province of the Netherlands and includes several islands in the North Sea. Frieslanders were at one time independent, but were later integrated into the “lowlands.” As with many ethnic communities around the world, they maintained their own language and traditions while at the same time learning the national language of their country. Grandma used to laugh and tell about how they would speak Fries at home, while they were walking to school, and while they were kicking off their klompen (wooden shoes), but the moment they entered the school house they switched to the national Dutch language. They read, wrote and studied in the national language, and Grandma never did learn to read or write Frisian.

My mother speaks Fries and she often conversed in it with my grandparents. When my brothers and I were young, they would switch to Fries if they were talking about something they didn’t want us to hear. One of the great regrets of my life is that I never learned it myself. Mom taught my brothers and me some words, but that’s all the farther it ever went. When I was studying German in college, I discovered that there were some similarities between German and Fries. In fact, Frisian is a root language of both German and English.

One day Gramps showed me a book written in Fries and asked me if I could read it. I opened it up and the first paragraph just jumped out at me. “There is an old Frisian story,” it began. I translated as I read. Gramps’ eyes just about popped out. “How did you know that?” he asked. The similarities in the languages were close enough that the first sentence was just very clear to me. After that I couldn’t make much of it out, but I sure got a laugh out of the look on his face when I read that first line.

In our neighborhood in Denver there lived many Dutch families. One day my mother was talking to Grandma on the phone. This was in the days when there were party lines and sometimes old biddies with nothing better to do would pick up the phone to see if any conversations were going on that they could listen in on. Mom and Grandma both heard the phone click as someone on the party line lifted up the receiver, so they switched to speaking in Fries. “Ich kann also Fries gesprechen,” (I can also speak Fries) a voice came over the line. They decided to hang up and talk later.

Gramps had joined the Dutch army in 1914 and had a drill sergeant that was quite abusive and had earned the disdain of all the troops, but he seemed to have taken a particular dislike to my grandpa and made his life as miserable as he possibly could. Gramps took it all in stride until one day when they were given physical exams. The physician discovered that Gramps had a heart murmur and discharged him from the service on the spot. The doctor told him he wouldn’t live passed thirty.

Seeing an opportunity to get back at the drill sergeant, Gramps returned to the barracks and started packing his things. When the drill sergeant came in he ordered Gramps to put his bag away and report outside for duty. Gramps turned to face him and said, “No! I’m not going to do that.”

The sergeant was livid. He started screaming and swearing at Gramps and threatened to throw him in the brig. Gramps was still belligerent, yelled back at the sergeant, and strung him along until the sergeant called for military police to arrest him. Only then did he pull out his discharge papers and show the sergeant, and while the sergeant’s jaw dropped open in unbelief, Gramps picked up his bag and walked out.

Nobody knows how Gramps convinced Grandma, a single woman of only 22 years, to go with him to America without marrying her first. Equally puzzling is how she had the nerve to even make such a trip. The only time she’d ever been away from home in her life was a few months when she had worked as a housekeeper for a deaf uncle named Minne, who lived not far down the road from her own home. The biggest question, however, is how her strict and domineering father allowed her to go in the first place. It must have been true love.

When they arrived in Ringsted, Grandma stayed with the Vanderbys, whom they had known previously in Wouterswoude, while Gramps moved to another farm. Then on September 25, 1924, they tied the knot in a little wooden church building. Years later Grandma’s only comment on the wedding was, “The church was made all of wood.” In Holland all the churches were made of bricks.

Hank and Rose, as they came to be known in the States, farmed all the way through the depression years, moving from Ringsted, Iowa, where my mother and her older brother, Carl, were born, to North Dakota and back, finally settling in Rock Rapids, Iowa in 1935. Gramps spoke with a thick, Dutch accent all of his life, but he blamed it on the Danes. “Those crazy Danes,” he said. “We lived in a Danish community and they’re the ones who taught me English. That’s why I have this accent!”

Grandpa was not a big man, only about five foot nine inches, but he was strong as an ox. He plowed his fields with a four horse team until one of the horses, an old nag named “Maud,” laid down sick in the barn and then died. Gramps set about right then digging a hole in which to bury the horse. When it was wide enough and deep enough, he tied a rope around the dead animal and using another horse, drug it out to the hole and dropped it in. My mother, about four years old at the time, stood at the edge of the hole with my grandmother and looked in. When Gramps saw them he said to my mother, “Shall I throw Ma in too?” Mom screamed, “No!” grabbed Grandma’s skirt and cried.

My mother was named Jeltja, after Grandma’s mother, but in English they called her Jeanette. Jeltja was a strikingly beautiful woman who bore thirteen children including three sets of twins to Sape Kooistra. Frieslanders went by their first names only until Napoleon conquered Europe. Then he forced them to take last names. Kooistra was the name Grandma’s ancestors took. The word kooistra means “duck keeper.” The family tradition was to name every first born son after the grandfather. Sape’s father’s name was Simon. His grandfather was Sape, his great grandfather was Simon. That pattern had not changed since at least the mid 1700’s. My grandmother was the second oldest child in her family, and as her older sister was given responsibilities around the farm, Grandma was given the responsibility of looking after the younger kids. My mother asked her one time why, after having come from such a large family, she only had two kids. Grandma replied, “I’ve been raising kids all my life. I decided two of my own would be enough.” Mom’s middle name is Johanna, after Grandpa’s oldest sister, who married a Dutch soldier named Tiesma and died of a fever in Curacao in 1931, the same year my mother was born.

Besides a bad heart, Gramps had asthma and the heavy air of Iowa began to affect him painfully. At night he couldn’t breathe lying down, and often had to spend the night sitting in a chair. Sometimes my mother would go sit in his lap and spend the night with her head against his chest, listening to him wheeze until she dropped off to sleep.

On the Rock Rapids farm they had ten cows, some pigs, horses and chickens. They milked the cows, separated the cream, and on Saturdays they would go into town to sell eggs, milk and cream. But Grandpa’s health was declining and when he was unable to work the farm anymore it soon failed.

He was advised to go out west to Colorado or California. They had no map and were told they would have to cross the mountains, so they sold most of their possessions, and put what little was remaining in a small trailer. They arranged with a mortuary company to move the family in a hearse, so with his family sitting in the seat and Grandpa lying on a cot (which was very nearly his death bed) where the casket would ordinarily have rested, they made their way to Denver, Colorado. Grandpa’s brother-in-law, John Folkens, and a friend, Charley Smidstra, followed with the car towing the trailer, and helped them settle into a cabin camp on South Santa Fe Drive near Evans. Denver became the fork in the road, and there they decided they would stay. It was March, and the year was 1938.

What fears must have harbored in Grandma’s heart as they made that trip. Her English was still broken, her husband was nearly bedridden, she had two children to raise and she was leaving the only thing she knew in a country that was not yet her own. Things would get worse.

They found a room to rent on the west end of Denver from a Dutch family that owned a very large house, but the room was infested with bed bugs. Grandma was constantly cleaning, trying to get rid of the pests. When Gramps finally had enough strength to drag himself out of bed, weak, wheezing and struggling to breathe, he made two wooden signs and painted on them, “Fishing 10 cents.” A few blocks from the house passed Wadsworth Blvd, were two little lakes. Gramps posted a sign by each lake and then sat in a chair between them. Men wanting to fish automatically assumed he had bought the land and without question paid him so they could cast their lines. Gramps didn’t get wealthy off the venture, but he made a little bit of money, and in desperate times like those every little bit helped.

In the fall my mother started riding a bus to Bear Creek School. One day she came home to find Grandpa in bed and a doctor who had just finished examining him. Gramps had suffered a heart attack. The doctor announced there was nothing he could do, and Gramps might die. Mom sat at the foot of the bed crying until Gramps told her not to cry, it was going to be okay.

The doctor suggested that the elevation of Colorado might have been the cause of the heart attack. Gramps thought Canada might be a better place, so in the autumn of 1938 they packed the car and drove to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Gerrit, who, by that time, went by George, had decided on Canada and immigrated there instead of the US. Forty years later he would have the largest dairy farm in Manitoba. George married a woman named Pearl. Their first son, Carl, also married a Pearl. (Grandpa’s sister, Alice Folkens, also had a son named Carl, who also married a Pearl.) They tried to get my uncle and my mother into school with their cousins, but there wasn’t room in the little school house so they had to wait at home. They stayed about six weeks until winter came, but the low elevation of Manitoba was no help for Grandpa and they started back to Denver.

On the way they stopped at a cabin camp along the highway. The cabin they stayed in was not insulated and the joints in the wall boards were not sealed. There was a pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room and Grandma was up periodically in the night stoking the fire, but it was very cold. When they woke up in the morning there was frost between the cracks in the wall boards. Grandpa needed medicine so Mom went with Grandma toward town to find a store. It was a bright shiny day, and as they trudged through the deep snow a man in a pickup truck offered them a ride. Mom was scared of this stranger, but he took them to town, waited for them to do their shopping, and then drove them back to the cabin. They stayed for several days and when Gramps was feeling well enough to drive, they started for the States. It was early in the morning when they pulled out, the car had no heater, and they were nearly frozen. Along the road they stopped at a little gas station but the owner, who lived above the garage, hadn’t opened up yet. Gramps pulled up to the pump and they waited until the man finally saw them and came down to give them some gas. Leaving the station they somehow got turned around on the road and after a good while Gramps said, “I think we’re going back the way we came.” Sure enough, they were, so he turned around and finally they were on their way home.

Grandma and Grandpa were extremely frugal people. They never wasted money on anything. One Christmas when my uncle gave Mom a set of pop beads that could be made into necklaces and bracelets, Grandpa made him take it back. They had already given Mom a necklace and she didn’t need another one. They didn’t own a television until I was about twelve years old, and then they bought the cheapest black and white they could find. You always knew what you were getting at Christmas and birthdays; socks or shirts, practical things, not play things.

Maybe that’s how they were able, after Gramps recovered, to buy a store at Hart’s Corner at Morrison Road and Sheridan Blvd. They rented the building which had a small apartment in the back where they could live. Gramps ran the meat market while Grandma tended the store. He had a large butcher block behind the meat counter and would be up early each morning cutting the meat. Grandma took care of ordering the groceries and produce, stocking the shelves and handling the cash register.

Neither one of them had any experience in running a store and their English was still not that good. Gramps had learned somewhere along the line in Holland how to cut meat, but in Europe they cut it differently than in the States. On his own he learned how it was done here and together, by sheer will power, they made it work. Gramps would be in the store early each morning getting things ready and when customers came in he would knock on the wall and Grandma would come into the store.

They were there for about two years and the store was quite successful, but in 1941 when the owner of the building decided to raise the rent Gramps refuse to pay, sold the business and moved his family about a mile west and started over. Before they could make a real go of this store, however, Gramps came down with a serious case of rheumatism. He was in such pain that he couldn’t stand the sheets on his feet while lying in bed. He was so bad that John and Alice Folkens drove out from Iowa to see him, and took him immediately to Colorado General Hospital. He was there for several days but when the family came to see him my mother had to stay in a waiting room because children under twelve weren’t allowed into patient’s rooms.

Gramps got so mad that they wouldn’t let his little girl in to see him that he refused to stay another day longer and told the hospital to check him out. The administrator told him that if he signed himself out he would never go back there again. Gramps boldly declared, “You are right. I will never come back here again.”

Gramps was almost more dead than alive when they took him home and when John and Alice left a day or two later they thought they would never see him again. They underestimated his will to live and care for his family, and Grandma’s ability to nurse him back to health. How they were able to survive for a year until he recovered is a miracle in itself, but when Gramps got well, he bought another store in Mountaire near Sheridan and Colfax. He also bought a one bedroom house with a basement and an outhouse for $1000. My mother slept in the basement until they were able to add a bedroom and bath onto the back of the house. Finally they were able to settle into a place and stay. My mother entered the sixth grade that year and was able to continue with her classmates until she graduated from Mountaire High School. In the thin Colorado air Grandpa’s health began to stabilize and the struggle for survival, for his very existence, seemed to be at an end.

In spite of his heart, asthma and rheumatism problems, he was still as strong as an ox. On one occasion as a young boy my mother took Steve and me to the store. Gramps took us into the freezer to show us all the meat hanging on the hooks. Then he put his arms around a beef quarter, hoisted it off the hook, and carried it out to a prep table where he proceeded to cut it up. At that time he was already sixty-five years old!

One day Randall and I had gone over to Grandpa’s house to mow his lawn. When we arrived he was in the kitchen soaking his swollen left hand under the faucet. “What happened?” we asked. “Oh, I swatted a wasp off the tomato plant with my hat and he fell on my hand. Like a dummy I stood there and watched him while he got up, turned around, and stung me. Yah, dummy.”

We went into the living room and then we noticed a lump on the left side of Grandpa’s right hand middle finger, just below the knuckle. “What’s that?” I asked. “Shhh!” he said, and looked toward the kitchen where Grandma was. He didn’t want her to know the story that he then related to us. One time, when he was working as a butcher for his friend George, a Hispanic man came into the store and demanded money from the cash register. George, who was working at the register told him no. The man insisted and grabbed George by the shoulders and started to shake him. Gramps came out from the back and said to the man, “You heard him. He said, ‘No.’ Get out of here.”

The man then turned and came at Gramps. Grandpa described the man with his fists in the air going up and down. “So what happened?” I asked.

“I hit him,” he said matter-of-factly, as if I should have known.

“And then what happened?” I said impatiently breaking into laughter.

“Well, he fell to the floor and just lay there for awhile. We thought he was dead, he laid there for so long. When he came to he crawled out the door and we never saw him again.”

“Did you call the police?” I asked.

“No. We just left him laying there until he woke up.”

“Didn’t it bother the customers?”

“Oh, no. They just stepped over him and did their business.”

“And you never told Grandma?”

“No. She’d worry too much.”

“And how did you get that lump on your finger?”

“Well, after I hit the man, it swelled up like that and never went away.”

Gramps was over sixty years old when he kayoed that thief with one punch!

Gramps loved to joke around, but he was serious about eating. When you sat down to the table he expected the kids to behave themselves. My cousins Sharon, Carla, and John and my brother Steve all remember times when Gramps thumped them on the head with his butter knife when they got a little unruly or talked too much. “Be quite!” he barked (meaning quiet). I don’t remember ever getting thumped myself! Maybe I was too busy eating.

Carla’s two girls, Nicole and Shelly, were Grandpa’s first great grandchildren. He acted like the sun rose and set on those girls. He would lay them on a pillow and walk the floor singing, “Draga, draga, draga.” He did the same with his grandchildren, but while he thumped them on the head at the dinner table, he gave Nikki and Shelly a spoon and showed them how to ding on their glasses.

Although he was strict with his grandchildren at the table, Gramps always had a tender side with children. Every Sunday he loaded his pockets with Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum and after church he’d say to the kids, “Little ‘stickya’ gum?” He’d break the sticks in half and give a piece to every kid that came up and asked. Countless children went home happy every week because of his simple kindness.

The last house Grandpa and Grandma lived in was an old place on South Cherokee in Denver. It literally had central heating, an old furnace in the basement directly under the middle of the living and dining rooms. It had a circular funnel, about two and a half feet in diameter with a square grate over it in the floor. It was the only vent in the house. In the summer time they put a rug over it, but left it uncovered in the winter. When my brother, Steve, was four years old he remembers getting a little yellow barrel full of red monkeys for a birthday present. The little monkeys had hooked arms so the whole bunch could hang in a chain. While Steve was playing by the furnace one of his monkeys fell through the grating and he began to cry. If the monkey had fallen into the middle down the funnel it would be burned up and lost, but if it fell through at the corners, it would be on the floor around that furnace. The furnace room was a little closet that was barely larger than the grate, but Gramps would reach back in their around the sides with his arms or a broom if he needed it and he rescued a number of small toys and marbles over the years. When he brought up the little red monkey Steve was convinced that Gramps was a hero. He had saved his monkey.

My mother started working when my youngest brother, Randall, was only two years old. There were no day care centers in those days so Grandpa and Grandma became his regular baby sitters until he was old enough to go to school. Gramps usually went for a walk around the neighborhood and Randall became his partner on those daily constitutionals and developed an endearing relationship with him that he would one day write about in a song.

Sometime in the mid 1960’s Gramps had another heart attack. We were at their house for a Sunday dinner when he suddenly had a severe pain in his chest and had to lay down. He wasn’t rushed to the hospital and I didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation, but he was sick. After dinner Steve, our cousin, John, and I just went outside to play, but the seriousness of Grandpa’s condition hadn’t escaped Randall. That night as we prayed before bedtime, Steve and I simply said, “Help Grandpa to get well.” When it came Randall’s turn he broke into tears and prayed, “Please don’t let Grandpa die.”

Grandpa and Grandma were notorious coffee drinkers. Every morning at 10 o’clock they had their coffee break. They drank it with milk and sugar, and had Dutch windmill shaped cookies and buttered bread with Gouda or Edam cheese. Their coffee break became a weekly gathering place for a number of their Dutch friends, one of whom was a big, square shouldered man with a butch haircut named Bert Middle. Bert lived somewhere in north Denver. He didn’t drive, but he had a tricycle with 28 inch wheels and a large basket on the back that he would ride all the way across town to come to coffee.

Around 1971 Gramps had become very ill again. I had my driver’s license by then and sometimes I’d take Grandma to get his medicine. I was at their house one day when Bert came by to see Gramps. For some reason he had taken the bus that day and when he was ready to leave Grandma asked me if I could drop him off somewhere around a shopping mall called Cinderella City. I said sure. When Bert got into the car he had tears in his eyes. “Your Grandpa is the finest man I know,” he said.

Bert was a couple of years older than Gramps but he was the picture of perfect health. When he was 80 years old he married a woman about 50 years younger than he and they moved to California. We never heard from him again.

Steve and I would occasionally ride our bikes over to Grandpa and Grandma’s house in the summers for coffee. When Randall was old enough he joined us. We would sit out on the front porch in lawn chairs with TV trays and Grandma would serve the refreshments. Gramps was a great whittler, and he had a pocket knife that he always kept sharp and liked to show it off to us. He would open up the blade and cut the hairs on his arm to show us how sharp it was. Grandma would fuss at him to “put that away” in front of the boys. Gramps would immediately comply, but when Grandma went in to get more coffee, he’d pull the knife out and let us handle it, all the while watching through the door for Grandma. As soon as she would come out of the kitchen he’d ask for it back quickly.

He was skilled at carving whistles out of the thin twigs of a lilac bush that was in the back yard by the garden. He would cut off a section, taper one end down to a mouth piece, cut a slot in the top, then score the bark all around and deftly slide it apart slightly. The whistles worked every time and we’d go around the yard blowing one note tunes to our hearts’ content. While he was whittling our whistles, he’d be singing, Jimmy Crack Corn and I Don’t Care, and another tune I’ve never heard anywhere else, It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More.

When my dad divorced my mother, Gramps stepped in as best he could and was somewhat of a surrogate father to me and my brothers. He bought me my first bicycle. Being an old farmer he loved to go down to the stock yards in Denver and just walk around and look at all the livestock. Sometimes he’d take me along. We’d make our way into a large multi-floored covered corral where the sheep and hogs were kept. When we’d find a sheep pen, Gramps would open the gate and tell me, “Go in and catch one.” I was about five or six years old and the sheep weren’t too cooperative. Whenever I got close they’d all run and huddle in another corner. I gave it my best chasing them around the pen, but I never caught one.

One day we stopped at a pen and I climbed up on the gate and looked in. “Can I go in and catch one?” I asked. He shook his head no. “Why not?” I wanted to know. He turned his head slightly and nodded toward two cowboys sitting on a bench about three pens away. For the first time it dawned on me. I wasn’t supposed to be in the pen playing with the sheep. Gramps was sneaking me in when nobody was looking!

Another time on our way home from the yards we were heading west on I-70 when he missed our turn south to I-25. I said, “Gramps, you missed the turn.” As soon as we crossed the bridge and there was no traffic going east, he drove down into the grassy median, turned the car around and came back up on the other side. “You can’t do that, Gramps,” I said. “I can’t?” he replied. “I just did.”

On a Sunday after church, when my cousin, John, and I were about fourteen, we were standing at the exit to the parking lot just as Grandpa and Grandma were driving out. We waved good-bye and John said, “Hey, Gramps, peal out.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It means go real fast,” John replied.

So, Grandpa stepped on the gas of his ’64 Rambler American, and ran it up to about 20mph in first gear as he raced out of the parking lot and around the corner. Grandma was always a nervous rider anyway and she’d sit with the index finger of her right hand hooked into the latch of the little triangular wind visor that cars used to have on the front windows. She turned pale going around the corner that day, probably thinking for sure it was all over.

The next week we caught Grandpa and Grandma again on their way out. “Peal out,” we said. “No,” Gramps said, “I can’t.” “Why not?” we wanted to know. “Grandma will get mad at me,” he said. Grandpa’s days as a hot-rodder were over.

During my senior year in high school I bought a class ring with a beautiful faceted purple amethyst stone. When Gramps saw it, he went into his bedroom and brought out an old ring and said, “Try it on.” It was gold plated with a design on the sides, but had a black, plastic filler where the stone should have been. “I was wearing that ring when the ship docked in New York in 1920,” he said. “I was standing at the railing when all of a sudden the stone popped out and fell into the harbor. It was a purple stone,” he said, “just like yours.” The ring fit my finger perfectly so he gave it to me.

Grandpa couldn’t sing a lick, but in church you could always hear him singing loud. He loved old hymns more than anything else, his favorite being, Shall We Gather at the River. Sometime after they arrived in the States, Grandma bought him a push button accordion which Gramps proceeded to learn to play by ear, and became very good at it. It was quite an accomplishment since the buttons played a different note depending on whether the bellows were going out or in. Gramps knew every note, and when to push the air exhaust button to pull the bellows out or in quickly if the next note required the bellows to go in the same direction. When I was young and we’d have family gatherings, he would bring the accordion along and play old Dutch tunes, and Grandma would sit nearby and sing. One of their favorites was, I Hear in the Air ’Neath the Canopy Blue.

In 1974, Grandpa’s brother, George, his sister, Alice, and two other sisters, Boukje and Folkje, who still lived in Holland, came to Denver for a family reunion. It was the first time in fifty years the five siblings had all been together at the same time. They were at our house one evening when the Denver Post sent over a photographer and a reporter to do a story for its Features section.

As usual with grandparents, Grandpa and Grandma were extremely proud of their grandchildren, but when Grandpa’s first great-grandson was born he was bursting at the seams. Zac Smith was born two months prematurely to my cousin Sharon and her husband Jim. He was in a neo-natal unit at the hospital with IV’s stuck in his veins. Sharon held him up at the viewing window and Gramps was beaming.

When she came out a few minutes later she began to cry and Gramps said, “Let’s take a walk.” As they strolled through the corridors of the hospital he told her about the army surgeon who had said he wouldn’t live passed thirty. “That was fifty years ago,” he said. (Actually it had already been over sixty.) He had seen his children grown, his grandchildren grown, and now he had seen his three great grandchildren and his first great grandson. “Don’t you worry, Honeybunch,” he said. “God has plans for that little boy. He’s going to be just fine.” There was a passionate side to Gramps that wasn’t always apparent. He seemed to be shy about it, and clumsy in expressing it, but he very deeply loved his family.

He especially loved Grandma, even though at times he was hard on her. When she didn’t understand something Grandma had a way of saying, “Well, I don’t know about that,” which revealed her skepticism. That was her response when I told them I was dropping out of college one year to play winter ball in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida at the Philadelphia Phillies Baseball School. “Of course you don’t know about that,” Gramps snapped at her. “What do you know about baseball?” (Gramps didn’t know anything about baseball either.) A lot of women would have been offended. I was taken aback a little myself by his sudden outburst. But Grandma just took it in stride. After dinner that evening Gramps put on an apron and stood by the sink helping her with the dishes, just like he’d been doing after every meal for years and years.

Grandma and Grandpa were not openly affectionate. They never held hands or hugged when anyone was around. I only saw them kiss one time. Gramps was sick again and in bed, and I was about to take Grandma to the pharmacy to get some medicine. Gramps was going to be by himself for a few minutes and Grandma went in to tell him good-bye. I was standing in the living room looking through the bedroom door when Grandma bent over and kissed him on the lips, then patted his hand and giggled a nervous, shy little laugh that was typical of her. They were totally devoted to each other for, counting the years they were separated in the early twenties, over 63 years.

Grandpa and Grandma were old world conservative in their ways and had no time or patience for the hippie culture, flower children, long hair and short skirts, drugs or rock music of the sixties and seventies. They looked with disdain at love-ins, peace marches, draft dodgers and campus riots, and they often came across as not only old fashioned, but cold and uncaring. But the reality of it was they saw a generation of young people without conviction, standards, or ambition, looking for handouts rather than opportunities to work. They saw in it the absence of patriotism and the seeds of the destruction of our whole culture and the country they had adopted. They were often critical of such people, and yet, they were not without compassion.

In our church youth group was a teenager named Matt. Matt’s parents were divorced and he lived with his father, but his father was often away on business trips and Matt was left to fend for himself. He had long red, wavy hair, and was a wild, somewhat unruly boy, who only came to church to see his friends. He didn’t seem much interested in the spiritual part. Gramps often wondered why he even came to church. One Sunday morning Matt’s dad was gone and he had forgotten his house key. When he got home he was locked out. So he broke a window to get in but in the process cut his hand deeply and lost a lot of blood. He wrapped a towel around the wound to try and stop the bleeding and then finally got a bandage on it. It was a make-shift job and not very tidy. He came back to church for the evening service anyway, but he was pale, and as he walked through the doors to the rear foyer he collapsed. Fortunately some of the teens were there and caught him as he fell. Grandpa and Grandma saw it and were worried. Later they asked me what happened and when I told them a look of horror came on both their faces and they exclaimed loudly, “No!” “That poor boy, is someone helping him?” Grandma asked. Matt got some stitches and needed to lie down for a couple days and he was okay, but Gramps and Grandma kept asking me about him for some time to come. While they wouldn’t stand for the shenanigans of the hippie culture, they still genuinely cared for people, hippie or not.

They were not openly religious in their younger years. They seldom attended church, but that was mostly because they worked long, hard hours six days a week, and with Grandpa’s health so bad, Sunday literally became a day of complete rest for them. They were, however, privately very devout. No one was allowed to leave the table after supper until they had read the Bible and prayed. And whether they were in church or not, they never worked on Sunday, not on the farm or at the store, because it was the Lord’s Day. Church attendance became more regular in their later years and over one twenty year period, Gramps only missed a Sunday worship service twice due to illness.

Whenever I’d be leaving to go back to college or off to the Marine Corps, my last stop would be by Grandma and Grandpa’s house to say good-bye. Grandpa was old and getting tired, and for several years whenever I’d leave, he’d just sit in his big cushy arm chair, I’d shake his hand, and he’d wave as I went out the door. After Christmas in 1982, as I started to leave, I had shaken his hand and told him I loved him, and then he started to get up.

“Don’t bother, Gramps,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“No,” he said, “I better get up this time.”

He came over to me, put his arms around me and gave me a very tight, lingering hug. Then, not wanting me to see his face, he turned quickly away. I couldn’t help but notice, however, the large tears streaming down his cheeks and falling to the floor. It was a special moment for me, and I thought it rather strange because he normally wasn’t that emotional, but I think he knew it was going to be the last time.

Gramps had several heart attacks over the years, each one progressively getting worse. Then on Saturday, March 19, 1983, his heart stopped beating for the last time. I was at NAS Whiting Field in Milton, Florida, getting ready to go into Pensacola for a date. Gramps was in the hospital and I wanted to call him before I left. I had no phone in my quarters, and the phone in the lobby was being used, so I drove on into town and stopped at a pay phone on the way. When I tried to deposit a quarter it wouldn’t go in and after several tries I noticed that the slot seemed to have been blocked. There were no other phones around, so I decided I’d just try to call later. As it turned out, Grandpa’s heart monitor was already flat lining by the time I was trying to call him. When I returned to my room that evening I had a note on my door telling me to call home. Instinctively I knew what it was. I cried the whole night, I loved him that much.

Mom, Grandma, and my brother, Randall, had gone to the hospital to see Gramps that afternoon, but they arrived just moments after the emergency technicians had rushed into his room. A nurse prevented them from entering, while they put a shot of adrenalin directly into Grandpa’s heart. It was to no avail. Grandma nervously asked Mom what was happening. With tears welling in her eyes Mom replied, “I think he’s gone.”

Grandma, trying to keep a stiff upper lip even as her heart was breaking, replied, “Well, what do you expect? We’re old.”

I wore my Marine Dress Blues for the funeral. Steve, Randall and I sang I Hear in the Air, and later I sang The Last Mile of the Way. The message was preached from Proverbs 22:1: "A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favor rather than silver and gold." There could not have been, I think, a more appropriate passage.

Gramps had always kept a garden in their backyard, even in his last years when he could hardly do any work. After he died Grandma continued to plant the garden every year. It had become a part of her life, but it was lonely without Grandpa. “It’s not as fun anymore,” she told me once.

Slowly, as her right eye went blind and her left eye dim, she became more and more nervous. One day the hose to her washing machine broke and flooded her basement. My wife, Leah, and I and Steve were at Mom’s house when we got a frantic call from Grandma. We raced over as fast as we could and found her at the top of the stairs crying, waving her hands frantically trying to point downstairs, and hyperventilating. I took her into her living room, sat her down, and told her to calm down, we would fix it. Leah and Mom stayed with her while Steve and I waded into the basement. The floor was concrete and cold and she had a long throw rug across the floor that covered a drain in the middle of the room. We shut off the water tap and moved the rug and the water started to drain. A few minutes later while we were hauling furniture out into the air to dry Mom’s husband, Al, showed up and fixed the hose.

My biggest worry when I saw Grandma was that she was going to have a heart attack. A few months later she did. Mom took her to the hospital, but she had never been admitted before and refused to stay. Anybody else would have been in intensive care, but she went home and recovered in her own strength.

After Grandpa’s funeral Grandma gave me his watch, and I wore it for eleven years until she passed away. On Sunday, July 3, 1994, Grandma came with us to a special patriotic service at our church in which I was again wearing my Marine Blues. After the service Leah and I had our picture taken with Grandma. It was the last picture ever taken of her. Four days later Grandma was pulling weeds in her garden when her hip broke and she fell to the ground. No one was around, but even at 92, she was strong enough to crawl to the back door of her house, up four steps into her kitchen, and then into the dining room where the phone sat on a small table. She couldn’t reach the phone and worried that if she pulled the table over it might land on her head. Just then my mother walked in and found her.

The next day she had hip replacement surgery and the day after when we visited her she was so proud that she was already able to lift her leg. Then on the third morning she suddenly declined and by the end of the day she was gone. Her last words were spoken in her native Fries. “I must leave,” she said. The day she died the watch she had given me stopped working. I still have the watch and the ring.


Chapter Two

The Son of an Honest Man

Gramps kept a picture of his parents, Klaas and Geeske, on the dresser in his bedroom. They were seated at a table, both wearing either black or very dark clothing. Geeske wore a Dutch style bonnet. It was white and lacy, round and conforming to her head at the top, with a skirt that extended out from shoulder to shoulder around the back of her neck. It’s hard to tell how tall Klaas may have been, but he looked to be a big man with large hands and a solid jaw. Neither one of them was smiling. Klaas had a rather stern look on his face, but Geeske had a very bitter looking scowl.

Apparently she’d had two children before marrying Klaas. There is some question as to whether she was widowed or whether they were both illegitimate. Her marriage to Klaas seems to have been one of convenience and there doesn’t appear to have been a whole lot of love lost between the parents and the children. There was never any laughter in the home.

Gramps had to quit school after the sixth grade and work in the potato fields. He never talked about his childhood, but the discipline was so strict and the home so cold that he looked for the earliest opportunity to leave. One thing he did learn from his childhood was the value of hard work. All of this may also explain the kind of man and father he would become.

My grandfather was a man of character. His word was his bond. He was never known to have cheated or deceived anyone in business or in private matters. He knew what it meant to work. He loved the land, loved to put his fingers in the soil, plant the seed, and watch the crops grow.

When he came to America, he became an American. He worked for his living, never took handouts, and after nine years of honest toil, he became a citizen of the United States in 1929. Grandma kept a picture of him the day he swore allegiance and became an American citizen. She was so proud of him. In time she also became a U.S. citizen. Both of them were legal!

They learned to speak English, but Grandpa always prayed in his native Frisian tongue. When I was about five years old, my brother, Steve, and I, spent the night at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. At the dinner table Gramps prayed and finished by saying, “Ah-men.” We were used to pronouncing the word with a long “a,” so I said, “You didn’t say, ‘a-men.’” He said that he had, but I insisted. So, he bowed his head and pronounced, “a-men,” with a long “a.” I don’t remember ever hearing him say “ah-men” again. Sometime when I was around ten or twelve years old he stopped praying in Fries altogether.

Grandpa was an impeccably honest man. Even in the depression years when money was scarce he would accept no excuse for dishonesty. Once a week the family would hop into the old Ford and drive to town for supplies and groceries, and to sell their milk and produce. On one occasion, my mother’s older brother, my Uncle Carl, was given five cents to spend in the store. He bought some candy and other things, but when no one was looking he pocketed a pack of gum.

The next day at home he was chewing a stick of that gum when Grandma asked him where he had gotten it. “I bought it at the store,” he told her, but Grandma wasn’t buying that. She knew exactly what he had bought the day before and gum wasn’t one of the items. Carl and Grandpa had a face-to-face meeting at which a switch also attended. The next weekend Carl had to pay for the pack of gum and apologize to the store owner.

On another occasion Carl was riding one of the horses bareback when my mother wanted to ride. He put her up on the horse and led it down to the road by the reins. They walked for awhile and when they came back and turned down the lane to the farm, the horse bolted and headed for the barn. It took Carl by surprise and the reins slipped out of his hand before he could grab them tight. My mother bounced off the back of the horse and fell to the ground. She was more scared than anything, and only slightly bruised, but Grandpa was incensed that his son could have been so careless, and they had another meeting with the switch.

In 1933, at age eight, Carl came down with inflammatory rheumatism. His skin was so sensitive, and it was so painful, that he couldn’t even stand to be touched. As a result he missed a lot of school that year. The depression hit Iowa as well as the rest of the country and Grandpa struggled to keep the farm going, but by 1934 he moved his family to Christine, a small community twenty miles south of Fargo, North Dakota. When Carl started school he was behind his other classmates. He never did learn his fractions, and to make matters worse, being the new kid on the block, he didn’t have many friends. For him it was a miserable nine months and he was never so happy to have moved on.

In 1935 they moved back to Rock Rapids, Iowa where Gramps continued to try and make a go of a farm, but he often complained that he had the worst farm in Lyon County. And his health was deteriorating. More and more Carl had to help and often he’d be gathering eggs or picking corn for John Folkens and missing more school. By 1937, at age twelve, Carl had to drop out of school to help Grandma run the farm. It was a cold winter with a lot of snow and when Carl shoveled a path from the house to the barn the banks were higher than my six year old mother was tall. Carl and Grandma would be up early every morning to milk the cows while my mom and Grandpa would be inside washing the dishes. Gramps finally became so ill he that he couldn’t do any work at all and they moved off the farm into John and Alice Folkens’ home before leaving for Colorado.

Once they had settled into the cabin camp on Santa Fe Drive in Denver, Carl was enrolled at Grant Junior High School where a thousand seventh, eighth and ninth graders met in a three story building. It was a huge adjustment for a boy who a year earlier had been the only seventh grader in a one room school house. After several months at the cabin camp Gramps was able to rent a room in a large farmhouse from another Dutch family that lived on the far west end of the city on Jewel Avenue in what is now Lakewood. The bed in their room was full of bed bugs and they all got bit. Grandma had to clean and clean those mattresses to get rid of the bugs.

Grandpa was still recuperating, and Carl was given a job working for yet another Dutchman nearly a mile away near Morrison Road. He had to be up at five o’clock every morning to milk the cows, and then had to irrigate the farmer’s fields. The ditches were blocked only by mud and as the water came down the main channel, Carl had to block it off with mud to divert the water into an irrigation ditch. When it was full he had to remove the mud from the main channel and block off the side ditch, then go on to the next ditch and do it again. At the end of the day he had to milk the cows again. For thirteen hours a day he milked cows and shoveled mud, and because the job was too far from home to walk back and forth every morning and evening, he wound up boarding at his employer’s house. He was thirteen years old.

About once a week Grandma would prepare a little package of food and walk to the house to visit Carl. Then she cried all the way home, knowing that he wasn’t being treated well and probably at the edge of despair considering the desperate condition they were in. Carl was in the field one day when someone came running out to him telling him he had to go home. His father was sick. When he got home he found his father had had a heart attack.

At the end of the summer Carl went home but the Dutchman didn’t pay him anything. He apparently figured that room and board was enough. Gramps finally talked him into giving some amount of money, about $25, but then he kept it for the family’s needs. Carl never got anything for all his labor.

He started back to school and rode a bus everyday with his sister to Bear Creek School, but once again his schooling suffered because as soon as Gramps was feeling up to it, he took the family to Canada where they stayed for six weeks with Grandpa’s brother before finally heading back to Denver.

Carl only went to school through the tenth grade, and he didn’t finish that. He lacked in many areas, such as math and other basic instructions. It may explain his unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Today he reads books like there was no tomorrow. His motto is, “Learn to read, read to learn.” Wherever he goes you will find him with a book. He has thousands of them in his personal library.

It may seem like my uncle was always getting a raw deal. The discipline was stern, maybe even excessive. His education was lacking. Living for a summer with strangers was lonely and did little for his self-esteem, and he would do it again when he was a little older, albeit with friends that time. Dr. Spock certainly wouldn’t have approved. He wouldn’t have understood either, but the lessons weren’t lost on Carl. He grew up to be a man just like his father. Honesty, integrity, and hard work were the foundations of his character. When he preached Grandpa’s funeral forty-five years later, he honored his father as few men have ever been honored.

When he turned eighteen Carl was called into military service and sent to Camp Carson, near Colorado Springs, Colorado. He was assigned to a new unit that was standing up, the 109th Evacuation Hospital. The 109th landed at Utah Beach three weeks after the D-Day invasion and followed General Patton’s Third Army all the way to Germany and the end of the war.

After World War II Carl returned to Denver and to the First Baptist Church of Englewood. There one Sunday a red-haired girl caught his eye and he asked someone to introduce her to him. Her name was Elsie Herzog.

Elsie was born in Greeley County, Kansas in 1926, but when she was three years old the family moved to Englewood, Colorado. Kansas had become as much of a dust bowl as Oklahoma and her father, also named Henry, said he was tired of having his crops blown away. Her mother, Adeline, said she was tired of sweeping with a shovel. In Englewood they raised chickens and rabbits which often times became their Sunday dinner.

When she started the first grade, the school she attended was overcrowded and by the end of the first semester she was told to either jump ahead to second grade or she would have to take the first grade over again. She jumped ahead. When she reached the seventh grade the same thing happened, so she wound up graduating from high school a year ahead of most of her original classmates in 1943. With a diploma she got a job at Meyer’s Drug Store as a “soda jerk” and became an expert at making fountain drinks, floats, malts, and banana splits.

She was a bit of a tom boy and liked to climb trees and shoot guns. One day her older brother, John, came in from target practicing with a rifle and a pistol, and Elsie wanted to play fast draw with him. They thought the guns were unloaded, and the rifle was, but when John pulled the trigger on the pistol it fired. The bullet hit Elsie in the shoulder, curved down and around and lodged a quarter inch from her heart. She grabbed her shoulder and walked all around the house saying, “I’m shot, I’m shot,” trying to imitate what she had seen in the movies. The doctors were unable to operate because the bullet was so close to the heart that they didn’t want to risk it. So to this day my rootin’ tootin’ aunt has a bullet lodged in her chest. It makes for some interesting conversations whenever she needs a chest x-ray.

After they were married, Carl took his new bride to seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas, and then worked for several years as an associate to the “Colorado Cyclone,” Rev. Harvey Springer, at the First Baptist Church of Englewood. Harvey Springer was a man after the mold of the “Texas Tornado,” J. Frank Norris, who had founded the World Baptist Fellowship in 1928. Neither of them ever backed down from a fight, and in the 1940’s Springer led a crusade against communism that even brought threats against his life.

That same spit and fire rubbed off on my uncle. Carl was never afraid to stand for truth and righteousness on any issue. Yet, he tempered his zeal with a tenderness and compassion that those other firebrands never had. In 1955, he founded the East Side Baptist Church in Denver. The church met in a small house and had 25 in attendance the first Sunday, about twelve of those being relatives. In sixteen years he built the work to an average attendance of nearly 600, and led the church through three building programs from a simple A-frame structure to a modern 555 seat auditorium. The members at East Side loved my uncle because he loved his members.

The church was located at the corner of Iowa and Cherry in East Denver. When the original A-frame was built, there wasn’t another building within six blocks of the property. The community grew and so did the church. After the final building project was completed, a parking lot was paved behind the building along Cherry Street. The parking lot was on a slight slope that went up from the street to the property line. Six foot high fences lined the border and houses were built on the other side. As the attendance grew two school buses were purchased to pick up children for Sunday school. The buses were parked at the far end of the lot near the street.

At that time a family that lived in the house behind the fence at the far end of the parking lot filed a complaint with the city trying to get the buses moved. They were blocking their view of the mountains from their dining room window, they claimed. A committee from the zoning commission went to the house and stood in the dining room to see for themselves. Because of the slope of the lot and the six foot fence the buses weren’t even visible from the dining room. They ruled in favor of the church.

But the family had an axe to grind with religion in general and filed suit against the church and the zoning commission. Not wanting to waste church money over frivolous issues, Carl declined to hire a lawyer and represented the church himself at the court hearing. He offered to park the buses at the other end of the lot near the church to remove them from the people’s view, but they weren’t satisfied. They wanted the buses removed. When it appeared that the judge was sympathetic to the plaintiffs and was about to schedule a jury trial, my uncle agreed to move the buses. Not only was he concerned about the waste of the church finances, but he also didn’t want to bring public attention to the case lest it be the catalyst for other disgruntled people to bring suits against other churches in the city.

Carl had a sense of the bigger picture. He saw that the work of churches in general was more important than the work of his one church in particular. He also saw that the use of the tithes and offerings of his own church members was better spent in the work of the Lord and winning lost souls than being thrown down the drains of some lawyer’s pockets and court fees. His humbleness, which was genuine, in acquiescing to the plaintiffs was no defeat. A family that lived near the church volunteered to park the buses on their property and the church work was not hindered by the decision. In fact, a year later the Sunday school had grown so large that for a Daily Vacation Bible School program during the summer, 15 buses were borrowed from other churches. For five days during the DVBS program those buses sat on the parking lot all day. No doubt it was the cause of some bitterness on that family’s part as they threw a bunch of firecrackers over the fence one morning to try and disrupt the general assembly in the parking lot at the beginning of the program. The attempt failed.

After sixteen years as a pastor Carl and Elsie left East Side and moved to Springfield, Missouri, where he became the Mission Director for the Baptist Bible Fellowship, Int., an association of over 3,500 Baptist churches at the time. He brought the same loving, pastoral care that he had for his church members to the mission office and for the next fourteen years fathered, encouraged, oversaw, and directed the work of over 500 missionaries world wide while administrating an annual budget that grew in the mid 1980’s to over ten million dollars.

Uncle Carl gave me my first job. When I was twelve years old he hired me on as a janitor for 75 cents an hour. Every Saturday morning from eight am until noon or one o’clock, my cousin, John, and I swept and dusted the floors and pews in the church. One Saturday I was cleaning the eight bathrooms in the building, and as John and I were trying to hurry and get done, I skipped a couple of them. When Carl asked me if I had done the job I lied and said, “Yes.” “Let me show you something,” he said, and led me to a bathroom where one of the toilets had not been flushed.

My heart was breaking as he asked me again, “Now, have you cleaned all the bathrooms?” I felt about as low as one could feel as I answered, “No.” Tears came to my eyes and all I could do was shrug my shoulders when he asked me why I had lied. He didn’t beat me, hit me, twist my arm, yell at me, call me names or ridicule me. He just wanted the truth. I knew right then that I never wanted to lie to him again, and as far as I can remember, I never have.



Chapter Three

Westward Ho!

My great, great, great grandfather on my father’s side was Aaron Patterson. He settled in Illinois in the 1830’s or 40’s, and sired a son named Joshua. Joshua rode in the 8th Illinois Volunteer Cavalry, Company C, during the Civil War and was wounded at the battle of Antietam. At the end of the war his unit was on board a river boat that capsized on the Illinois River on its way to Chicago to muster out the troops. There was great loss of life, but Joshua survived to live until 1897, when, after his teeth had fallen out and he was in great bodily pain, he finally succumbed to syphilis. He must have been what a later generation would call, a real “swinger” in his day.

Joshua had two sons, Grant and Sheridan, named after his heroes of the war. Sheridan was my great grandfather. He married Georgia Kassinger, whose parents had emigrated from Wiesbaden, Germany, and they traveled west to Colorado by covered wagon in the 1890’s, living for a time on a farm in Manasseh, and finally settling in Fort Collins.

Sheridan also had two sons, Bruce and Harold, who went by Hal. He died in 1935 of what was then an undiagnosed disease, but what my grandfather, Hal, later said may have been multiple sclerosis. Three of his four children, including my father, contracted the disease and the symptoms were similar to what Sheridan had gone through before he died.

My Aunt Marianne, the youngest of the four children, came down with MS when she was in her 20’s, and suffered with it until she was totally bedridden, unable to swallow, and barely able to speak. By then her speech was so slurred she could hardly be understood, and at the age of 62 she asked that the feeding tube be removed and she be allowed to die. Her sister, Carol, was stricken with MS in her 40’s, and my dad, Howard, came down with it at age 73. In that, our family has set some kind of medical history. When Marianne was diagnosed the doctors told my grandparents that multiple sclerosis never strikes the same family twice. It has now struck our family three times.

Hal was a character who also loved a good laugh. When he was a teenager he and some friends, out to pull some harmless practical jokes, would go down the road every New Year’s Eve to the house of an old widow and push her outhouse over. The next day a neighbor across the street would come over and set it up again. It became a routine until one year they pushed it over while the widow was inside. The door wound up on the bottom and she couldn’t get out. The boys didn’t hear her cries for help and she nearly froze to death before the neighbor found her in the morning. That ended the yearly routine.

Hal was an ornery, but likeable guy. When, however, he started dating Thircie Champlin, a girl who lived down the street, her mother objected. He was 26, she only 17.

The day before her 18th birthday, February 27, 1928, they decided to get married and ran away to elope. After an afternoon on the run, however, they determined that it might be better if she went back home until they could figure out a way to break the news. Bruce took care of that a few days later when early one morning he walked down the street and knocked on the Champlin door. Thircie answered with her mother standing right behind her. “Good morning, Mrs. Patterson,” Bruce said loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear. The new mother-in-law let out a scream and fainted dead away.

Champlin is a French name and somewhere back in the skeleton closet of the Champlin family is the story of one of my great grandfathers, who as a teenager in France, went with a friend and kidnapped a Jewish boy and took him out to their barn. They went to a stall, made the boy stand on a post, tied his hands behind his back and put a rope around his neck, and tossed the rope over a rafter. Then they told him to say the name, “Jesus Christ.” The Jewish boy refused. They began to mock and ridicule him, poking him with sticks and nearly causing him to lose his balance. Again and again they tried to make him say the Savior’s name, but being a devout Jew, he stubbornly refused. Finally, their patience at an end, and getting angry, the teenagers climbed up on the fence rail and were about to push the boy off, when Champlin’s father walked in the barn, rescued the Jewish boy, and saved the family from an everlasting shame.

My grandmother, and her brother, Don, grew up in an old slat board house on the wind swept plains of Wyoming. Her father, Gerald Champlin, was an alcoholic and a womanizer who often, after he was paid, went into town with the paycheck and spent it on his pleasure, while his wife and two children barely had enough to eat and nearly froze in that drafty old cabin in the winter. Finally, my great grandmother had enough and ran off with a traveling salesman, taking her children with her to Ft. Collins, Colorado, where she later met and married a man named Don Poor.

Don Poor loved baseball and had tried out professionally at one time. Baseball was also my favorite sport and occasionally he and I got to talk. When I played my first organized baseball in Old Timer’s I became a pitcher by default, because I threw the ball harder than anyone else. By the time I was fourteen I had learned to throw a pretty good curve. Don told me that if I ever wanted to make the “bigs” (major leagues), I’d have to learn to throw a screwball. He tried to explain to me from his chair how to twist your arm to throw it, but he was too old to show it to me, and although I tried, I never could throw a screwball. Maybe that’s why I never made it into professional baseball, which I did try with all my might to do!

Don and my grandpa must have gotten along well. Grandpa loved baseball. Back in the 1970’s when NBC had its hey day on Monday Night Baseball with Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek announcing, I used to call him afterward to discuss the games. Grandpa was a real fan and knew all the players from his youth. I would sit enthralled as he’d tell me about Christy Matthewson, Rube Waddell, and Home Run Baker.

In the early days of professional baseball many players would barnstorm around the country and get into pick up games with local teams after the regular major league season was over. Grandpa saw a game once that included Grover Cleveland Alexander, and a fireballer for the Dodgers, who had led the National League in strikeouts seven or eight years in a row in the 1920’s, called Dazzy Vance. They picked sides and a local kid was the catcher for Vance’s team. Dazzy took to the mound to start warming up for the game. The local kid crouched behind home plate with a glove that looked like it might have been older than he was. As The Dazzler sent his first pitch screaming toward the plate, the fearless catcher held his glove out to receive it. He caught the ball square in the pocket, but as the ball smacked the leather, the glove exploded. A hundred pieces of leather, string, and padding went flying in every direction, and the poor kid jumped up and down howling with a badly bruised hand.

Grandpa was a carpenter by trade. He built houses all over Colorado and at one time lived in Dillon while he worked on the construction crew that built the Dillon Dam. The house that he lived in then is today at the bottom of the reservoir. He also built the house he lived in for the last thirty years of his life. In 1948, at the age of 46, and without any formal training, he decided he would take up the art of painting. He was a natural talent. And he was a naturalist. Forget the abstract, modern art. He painted real life, especially western themes and the mountains and streams he loved to fish.

From memory, he painted The Old Homestead, the farm he lived on as a boy in Manasseh. Two antelope stood on a hill overlooking the farm house, a wooden frame building with a slanted roof and a plank porch. A fence enclosed the property with a gate at the front and a corral off to the side of the house. In the background the sun was just above setting over mountains that were barely visible in the distance. His paintings wound up in art shows and many of them sold, some for over a hundred dollars, not a small sum in the 1960’s. Among his works were the backgrounds for the two baptisteries at the East Side Baptist Church, the first in the original building, and the second in the last auditorium.

Grandpa also learned to play guitar without any lessons and became very good at it. Occasionally he and Grandpa Boonstra would play a duet in church. Gramps would play a melody on his accordion, and Grandpa would strum along on his guitar.

He died of congestive heart failure in January 1987. I had been in the Philippines for a year and a half and wasn’t around when he passed away, but I took leave and came home for the funeral. At the funeral I also saw for one of the last times my Dad’s oldest brother, Terry. Terry also had a natural artistic talent and focused his energy on sculpting. He opened a shop in Colorado Springs and his work has been sold world wide. He was once contracted to sculpt a pair of wings out of a ten ton block of granite for a fighter squadron in England. He also did a project for the president of Mexico.

He had sculpted a fighter pilot for the Air Force, and in 1983, a Navy admiral arranged for him to do one for the Navy. He came down to Beeville, Texas on a fact finding tour, and was taken aboard the USS Lexington to observe flight students doing carrier qualifications. I was a student pilot in Beeville when he and his wife, Betty, came through. Before going out to the carrier he had lunch with all the brass on the base, and although I was only a second lieutenant, I was invited to tag along and sit at the end of the table while he described to an admiral, several captains and several commanders and Marine majors how God had gifted him with a talent and how he felt it was his duty to use his talent to God’s glory.

My poor grandmother lived an awful hard life. She grew up in poverty on the plains, then her last child, Marianne, who was an accident, had polio in her left arm and then MS. Grandma blamed herself for all of her baby’s woes. When Marianne’s husband left her, Grandma determined she would take care of her and she and Grandpa moved her into a house close by their own. But as the years went by it became more than she could handle, and with bitter tears, Grandma finally agreed to put Marianne in a nursing home.

One day I dropped in on Grandma just after she had returned from visiting Marianne. Marianne was getting worse and Grandma was feeling bad for all the hardships she’d had to endure in her life and told her how sorry she was. Then Grandma sat there with a look of utter amazement on her face as she told me Marianne’s response. “Oh, I don’t think I’ve had such a bad life,” she said.

Marianne had indeed had a good life. In spite of polio, which made her left arm useless, she learned to play the organ. Her left hand was okay, she simply had to lift it with her right hand up to the key board, and then she had no problem. She was the organist in our church for several years when she was young. She had one son, Mike, whom she raised pretty well by herself after being divorced and in spite of her condition. And she had her father’s sense of humor. She could laugh at anything, even when it nearly choked her in her later years. She was Elvis Presley’s greatest fan, but her biggest concern while she lay helpless in her nursing home bed was that the bird feeder outside her window be filled so she could watch the little red finches. She enjoyed the simple things in life. Maybe that’s why she could say it hadn’t been so bad.

One of the sad ironies of Grandma’s life was that after being nearly deserted by her own father, he wound up living in a basement room of her house and my grandparents looked after him for several years until he died. Then, after Don Poor died, Grandma took her mother in and cared for her also. She lived to be 92. One by one Grandma watched as the health of her children deteriorated. First Marianne, then her oldest daughter, Carol, also came down with MS, and then on October 17, 1989, the night of the San Francisco earthquake, my dad had an aneurysm burst in his brain. Grandma just happened to be visiting Dad and his wife in Las Vegas, Nevada, and she made the 911 call. Dad’s survival was simply put, a miracle, the surgeon that worked on him said so himself. He lives on, but he was disabled for life and now he has MS as well.

Then suddenly, in 1992, at the age of 62, her oldest son, Terry, her only healthy child left, died of brain tumors. Terry loved to fish, particularly the Arkansas River. The Royal Gorge was his favorite place on earth. After his funeral, his body was cremated and the remains were poured out from a plane as it flew low over the gorge, which was his final wish. But for Grandma, it was a final blow. “I have no place to go to mourn him,” she said.

When I got out of the Navy Leah and I bought a house close to Grandma’s so we could help her out as much as possible. We dropped by often and in the winter I shoveled her walks. Four years later when we had decided to go to Kenya as missionaries, I went to tell her how sorry I was that we wouldn’t be around. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “You have to live your own life.”

Then as we sat on the couch and continued to talk she began to lament about the tragedies her family had gone through. She had felt the pain that only a mother can know, seeing her children suffer, and at the time outliving one. She would later outlive two of them. When she was old and should have been taken care of by her children, she was still taking care of them. She was tired and worn out. “Why has all this happened to my children?” she cried. I put my arms around her and held her close.