Oral History Program Robert Wolthuis and Lynnette Hancock Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney 4 December 2014 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Robert Wolthuis and Lynnette Hancock Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney 4 December 2014 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Immigrants at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories, photographs and artifacts related to the immigrant populations that helped shape the cultural and economic climate of Ogden. This project will expand the contributions made by Ogden’s immigrant populations: the Dutch, Italian and Greek immigrants who came to work on the railroad and the Japanese who arrived after World War II from the West Coast and from internment camps. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Wolthuis, Robert and Hancock, Lynnette, an oral history by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney, 4 December 2014, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Lynnette Hancock & Robert Wolthuis 6 November 2014 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Robert Wolthuis and Lynnette Hancock, conducted by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney on December 4, 2014. Robert Wolthuis and Lynnette Hancock are of Dutch descent on both sides of their family. They discuss the Van Kampen side of the family. Also present is Carol Wolthuis. BW: We are at the home of Lynnette Hancock with Lynnette and her brother, Robert Wolthuis; today we’ll be discussing the Van Kampen family as part two of our interview with them. We are in North Ogden, today is the 4th of December 2014 and the time is around 10 a.m. Thanks for having us back. LH: Our pleasure. BW: So we’ll start this off with a simple question. Tell us the story of the Van Kampens, start at the beginning. LH: We have to state first of all that we never knew our Van Kampen grandparents. They passed away before we were born, but they’ve left a wonderful legacy in their children and grandchildren. That’s what we’re anxious to share. RW: Well it goes back to the LDS church in the Netherlands. It seems that Healena Jansen embraced the gospel and did it almost immediately and sometime in the time frame she was baptized by two American missionaries and was accompanied by a young elder from Delft named Van Kampen, who had also joined the church there. About ninety percent certain that he attended her baptism and he stayed in that mission assignment for only a few months and then he had to be released. 2 BW: What years are we talking about? LH: 1890. RW: Why don’t you take this, she’ll put a finger on it. He had to be released to go back to Rotterdam because he came from a family that was really quite poor. CW: 1891. RW: Her baptism was 1891 and they couldn’t care for themselves, so Krijn—who had been trained as an upholsterer—had to go home and take care of his parents. His father had some kind of a disease that made it very difficult for work and he later wandered out of his house up into the rolling hills in the middle of winter. He passed away in that environment. So after they joined the church they wanted to come to Ogden. They had several missionary acquaintances from the Ogden area. One was Elder Barton and it was their goal to come here and be married in the temple and their decision was not to marry in the Netherlands civilly. They came here, she came here first and worked for a year and lived with a former mission president whose name was? LH: Volker. RW: John Volker, he had a huge home on 27th street. He came a year later and then six months after or so, after they arrived, they were married in the Logan Temple. BW: What’d she do for work? RW: She was a domestic for the most part. LR: So just so I understand this correctly. She’s baptized by a gentleman, or he didn’t baptize her but he taught her. He goes home in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam… RW: To Rotterdam. 3 LR: Rotterdam thank you, to take care of his father but eventually they end up getting married? LH: After they had both come to the United States. RW: Well at some point he decides that he’s going to move up into that vicinity. So the Van Kampen family, his parents and himself and several siblings, move to a small village. We’re pretty sure that he went there to be a gardener of sorts, the father, and that was about an hour’s train ride from where she lived at the time, but romance was carried on. CW: Tell them what Krijn’s occupation was. RW: Krijn was an upholsterer. LH: He’d gone to school in Rotterdam for training. CW: But he worked at a paper. LH: Yeah in Holland. LR: So what was his full name and what was her full name? RW: His full name was Krijn Van Kampen. LH: K-R-I-J-N. Later in the United States they went K-R-Y-N. RW: I-J and Y make the same sound. Her full name was Healena. LH: It’s Helen with an A, lena. Maria. LR: And her last name? LH: Jansen. LR: Okay now we have a better idea… LH: Of who we’re talking about. Yes, just get them straight. LR: Thank you. 4 RW: Okay this is the Jansen family. They took that picture before they immigrated to the United States. Father was a banker and a big, Dutch family. LH: That’s why Topper Bakery in Ogden was our favorite place for a long time because it was by a Dutch family. You could go get the—and this is just a side note—the father used to make special Dutch treats with almond paste in them that were just wonderful, just wonderful. BW: Volker was the name of the stake president? RW: Mission president in the Netherlands. BW: In the Netherlands. LR: Oh wow that’s a beautiful home. LH: Yes that was here in Ogden. The area where a lot of the Dutch people lived besides out on the southwest part of Ogden was called Volker Avenue. I guess because Volker had helped so many of the early Saints come to Ogden and lived in that area. BW: Did she need to be sponsored to come over here? RW: We have no evidence at that time if there was a legal requirement for it, but I think there was a practical one, that they gave these newcomers from the Netherlands a place to live and find employment because that’s exactly what she did was come over and work as a domestic in his house. BW: It was in whose house? RW: John Volker’s. BW: Okay so he had a house here in Ogden? RW: Picture in the book. 5 LR: Right that’s the house. RW: It was a huge frame house. He was a lumber dealer. LR: So what year did she come? CW: 1897. BW: So about six years after her baptism. LR: Then he followed six months after that. RW: No he came a year after. LR: A year after? So he came in 1898. RW: 1898 and then they were married six months after he got here. LR: Okay so would that be 1899 or was that still 1898 that they were married? LH: Well there’s the marriage certificate, but I can’t read it without my glasses. Page 166 Carolyn. CW: ‘98. LR: Okay thank you. CW: 31st day of August. LH: They said they went to Logan by buggy ride. They left early in the morning, rode all day and stopped a certain point to find hotel quarters that night as they had not yet reached Logan. They laughed many times when they rehearsed this story. Here they went over narrow roads and finally got out on the wrong road and landed close to the lake. So you can imagine, and anyway they finally made it. BW: Is this Bear Lake that they’re talking about? LH: I would suspect it would be out by Corinne, or out that way. 6 RW: They obviously didn’t go over Sardine Pass. LH: Probably had to go up through Collinston and that way. LR: So where did they settle? Once they were married where did they actually reside? RW: They resided in Ogden. They had two or three homes. Why don’t you just list them? LH: Well they lived on 859 20th, they lived on 2032 Gramercy, which was formerly known as Ballantyne Avenue; they lived on 2078 Monroe, and then their home when they passed away was up on Volker Avenue which is now called Liberty. RW: Yes this is the home that they built on Volker and they had some assistance in building it from Volker. LR: Is that still standing? RW: That is still standing although a couple years ago there was a fire in it. So the back part of the house was burned quite badly and is now sheltered, sealed up, but it still exists. There’s another home across the street that Krijn’s sister lived in. CW: With his mother. LH: There were several family members that eventually came on both sides. RW: Eventually Healena converted to the LDS faith, all of her family members. Krijn had some success with a few of his family members, but they were opposed to her joining the church originally. She persisted and when they all came over here they were all members of the church. 7 LH: They all are buried in the Ogden City Cemetery. Some of those little headstones that are leaning this way are out of red sandstone or something, but that’s where they’re all buried. BW: Now they came here right about the same time that Utah achieved statehood. RW: About three or four years later. 1896 was statehood. LH: Krijn, being a talented upholsterer, went to work immediately for Boyle’s. It was a furniture store, upholstery, a number of things in Ogden. There is a still a Boyle’s on 36th street that is being run by the descendants of the original Boyle’s. The IRS has taken over one of the big buildings, the warehouses. Is that right Bob? RW: I don’t remember. LH: If you drive down there, in fact I tried to take a picture the other day for you, but couldn’t see it. It still has Boyle’s written on the side of the building there above Wall, between Wall and Lincoln. LR: Didn’t they have a store on Washington Boulevard? RW: Their first store on Washington Boulevard was on the east side of the street between 24th and 25th. LR: Okay that’s what I thought. RW: Then they opened the big store between 23rd and 24th on the west side which I think was next to C.C. Anderson or Sear’s, in that vicinity. One of the responsibilities that Krijn had with Boyle’s was to take the westbound train, probably the Southern Pacific passenger train, and he would work on upholstering and repairing seats in the train as it traveled over the lake and out to Nevada. He would overnight out there and then he’d come back and do the same 8 thing. He was a pretty gifted upholsterer and not too many years did he decide, “I need to get out on my own.” So he got out on his own as an upholsterer and as a carpet cleaner. He opened his first little shop in back of the home on Volker Avenue. The family stories go that after a little while he built a little building in the back, but he would bring the carpets in and he would throw them over a wire and he would beat them with the carpet beater before he cleaned them up with soap and water. LH: Interestingly, one of my husband’s uncles said when he was a young boy that he worked for Krijn Van Kampen beating rugs at the back of the house. He said, “I used to go there and just beat for all your worth.” A lot of these rugs were from the upscale homes on the east part of Harrison and that general area. RW: The Beckers, the Wattis, the Scowcrofts, the Eccles. LH: He would go and pick up the rugs and bring them. I assume most of those homes had hardwood floors with carpet similar to what we do. So then he would clean them. LR: So Krijn ended up working for himself? RW: He established his own business, Krijn Van Kampen. LH: Was it on 23rd? RW: We have conflicting, multiple stories that he opened a shop on 22nd street and she manned that and then some of the other family said he had a shop on Washington Boulevard between 22nd and 23rd. LR: About what time frame do you think? 9 CW: We looked up in the Polk Directory to find the address, 2227 Washington and that was in 1914. LR: It’d be interesting to see if we have a photograph of that, 1914. CW: The advertisements, it’s in the book. It’s 1914. RW: One of the things he did was he bought a carpet cleaning machine. Carolyn you got… CW: Yes that’s it. RW: I think there’s a better picture later, more pages. LH: What page are you on Carolyn? RW: He claims it was the only one in the west, and after he operated there in that house and in the facility on Volker Avenue he decided it was time to build a bigger shop. So he, through a brother-in-law, bought a fairly sized piece of land at 37th and Riverdale Road. There they built both the home and a shop. BW: This was about the same time period, oh, 1914-ish? LH: No it was 1920. RW: The ‘20s and the family got very involved in their own food preservation. They had a cow, they had fruit trees and a garden. They stored and preserved a lot of their produce. Also in the book is a picture of the shop which burned down with a spectacular fire in the late 1920s. LR: Then did he immediately rebuild on that same spot, the store as we knew it? CW: Well it burned down when Dale had it. RW: No it burned down when Krijn had it. One of the things about the family that we found interesting is early on they decided they would spend part of their summers 10 in Ogden Canyon. So they would take a big tent and set it up not too far from the old Hermitage building up there and they would spend a couple months in the hot part of the summer. Up there they would play in the river… LH: Wasn’t there a trolley or something went up? RW: Yes there was a trolley from Ogden to the Hermitage and they did that for several years. LH: The original vacation cabin. BW: I don’t know if you have any research about their response or reaction to some of the larger social events that they lived through. For example, they were here shortly after Utah gained statehood, but then the LDS church was on a national trial in 1900-1904 with the Reed Smoot hearings. Then ten years after that we enter into WWI. Do you have anything from your research that indicates family involvement or feelings or anything of some of the events that were happening on the outside of Utah? RW: I don’t. LH: I don’t either. I think they were a pretty close knit group. Again as we talk about all these things, the Dutch people did enjoy being together. Yes the little silver teapot up there was Grandma Van Kampen’s and she and the ladies up on Volker Avenue would get together and have tea sometimes in the afternoon. This kind of always bothered me, I thought, “Grandma’s drinking tea and Grandpa’s on the high council at the Weber Stake.” I don’t know what kind of tea they were drinking, but it wasn’t until 1934, when the Word of Wisdom really took effect. So that’s her little teapot from her gatherings with the other ladies. We don’t have as 11 many mementos from the family; I think because they were gone so long before us. Genealogy was really important and family history to Grandpa. I have several books that he had hired somebody in Holland to research their family history line and it’s all handwritten, they’re wonderful books to research the Van Kampen and the Jansen line. RW: That’s all found in the green book, that’s genealogy. Yes we have to assume that they noted those events in their home and their family. We have no record of their involvement in the war effort so they were probably a pretty inward looking family. LH: Grandpa must have mastered English enough to serve on the high council. I don’t know if he knew English before he came or if he learned it. Grandma struggled to learn English. She never became a citizen, did she? I think Grandpa did, a naturalized citizen. RW: He was naturalized, certificates in the book. CW: She was the president of the relief society board which is the same as being the stake relief society president. LH: So she must have mastered English. I just often think of them coming and we’ve shared stories from the other side of the family, what it meant to learn English and that. Interesting thing my mom told us is that as the girls all got older and worked that they would bring their paycheck home, their pay envelope, and put it on the table. They had to contribute to the financial part of the family. Our mother 12 worked at Wright’s Store down in Ogden and she would walk from 37th to what? 23rd and Washington, 24th. Anyway, that’s how she got to work, hoofed it. LR: That’s a nice, long walk. LH: She was a fast walker. Oh I tell you, our mother served a mission in the eastern states mission and I met one of her companions. She was a little, short lady and she said, “It was so hard with your mother as a companion because she could walk so fast.” This short lady just couldn’t keep up. That was Ina, “I just couldn’t keep up with her.” The other interesting—just a little side note—but my mother just wanted so bad to hear from her parents and of course mail took a long time to get there. Our mother often expressed in her missionary journals she was so disappointed that she didn’t get a letter from her parents and it’d been like twenty-five days and finally the mail came through. The encouragement and love that she felt from her father and the parents, her mom, very good. One time they sent her some fried chicken through the mail so by the time it got there it was all green. So the thought there was what counted. Another thing they bought, I can’t remember what it’s called. Mom was on her mission but they bought an old Bush and Gerts upright piano. It was in the home and one of the daughters decided she was going to shine it up and she cleaned it with something that ate the whole finish off the piano. They had it refinished and it’s in my basement right now. It was the old player piano, you’d pump the feet. We had dozens and dozens of rolls that you’d put in and have the good music. Mother always spoke of her parents being very kind. I do look 13 forward someday to meeting Grandpa and Grandma. She said he was just a gentle, good man through and through. I think that certainly radiated in the family. BW: Let’s talk about going through the Great Depression with the family. What can you tell me about how it impacted the family? CW: Parents had died by then. LH: Yes, the parents had died. RW: ‘27. LR: So Krijn and Healena died before 1927? RW: She went to the hospital for gall bladder operation and one of the fascinating aspects of family research is to take the family stories to measure that against the facts. She passed away and Rudy the youngest son was a good friend of Gilbert Moesinger and another doctor. What was it, Rich? LH: It was Rich Senior, Dr. Rich Senior. RW: Both reported to Rudy that she was overdosed with the anesthesia and she died during the surgery. That was a family myth and it was wrong. We went back on the birth certificate... CW: Death. RW: Death certificate and she died four days after the surgery. My mother and another sister believed that she probably died of a blood clot and there were conversations between Healena in the hospital and another daughter. She made a comment to somebody, “Please make sure that Dan fills his mission to the Netherlands.” LH: That was one of her sons. 14 RW: That was her oldest son, and so she lived for four days after the surgery and the cause of death is listed as something other than anesthesia. He died about a year and a half, two years later, also in his mid-fifties. He stepped on apparently a nail in his shop and another family story says he just had a crack in his toe. The nail is probably the correct interpretation, but he got blood poisoning and he died within a few weeks. So the business was then taken over by Dan and Rudy, the two boys. They built it into a really fairly good-sized thriving furniture, carpet business. LH: Rudy was working out across the lake, and I can’t remember exactly where, but our mother was determined that Rudy was going to get a college education. They had him come home. Somebody took a message out to him and said, “Your sister wants you home and you’re going to go to Utah State.” So he attended up there and he was an assistant football coach to Romney, the football coach up there. So he did make it. BW: Can we list all the children they had? LH: Yes. BW: If we have the years… LH: It’s all in the book. RW: We have birthdates, all of them. We’ll just point them out to you. In the backrow on the left is Mary and next to her is Rianna and they were twin sisters. LH: Yep they were twins. 15 RW: They were born a few minutes before midnight. Rianna was born a few minutes after midnight, but they listed both of them as having been born on the 24th of January 1901. Next to her in the middle is the oldest child, Cora. LH: Cornelia Francisca. RW: She was a pretty good singer. Next to her is Ang. LH: Anglena. CW: So these four girls were three years apart. They were dear friends, all of them. LH: In fact I’ll show you a picture of all of them before you leave. RW: The next on the right is Krijn and he passed away on Volker Avenue from probably rheumatic fever, but he had a weak heart and passed away about eleven years ago. LH: He was called, “K.” His name was Krijn, but he was referred to as “K.” RW: The bottom left is a daughter named Katherine. She was a Child, married into the Child family. LH: In Clinton. CW: These two girls married brothers. RW: The middle is Rudy, the youngest of the children and the bottom right is Dan. LR: Which one was your mother? LH: That was our mother. She said that people would take a visit and they’d say, “Oh you have twins.” You hear these two sisters going at this every once in a while years ago and my mother would say, “Mary was the cute one so they’d bring Mary out first and say oh she’s so cute. Then they’d bring me out and they’d say oh.” That wasn’t true, but they loved to kid each other about that. Mary was left 16 handed, she taught my mother how to crotchet. They faced each other, my mother was right handed and they did a very good job. LR: Wow that’s unusual. LH: The story of Rudy is fun and I went up and interviewed him and I’ve got quite a bit of his story there, but he and a Barker here from North Ogden were the originators of the Little Brown Jug. They were students at Weber High and they were going to go up to Ogden to challenge for the football game and they figured they needed a trophy of some sort so Barker said, “Well, let’s go see what’s in our cellar.” Uncle Rudy just kind of laughed, he said, “We found the little brown jug and finished off what was in it.” They took it up to Ogden High and said, “This is the trophy for the little brown jug game.” That’s how the famous Little Brown Jug game started. If you’re from around here it was pretty intense, for a lot of years. Rudy went on to be a bishop and stake president out in South Ogden for what, twenty years? RW: Yes. LH: Long time, his wife is still alive. She’s 102 and I almost debated about bringing her here today, but she’s the only living left and very alert, very bright. BW: So Rudy and Dan took over the family business after Krijn passed away? So they were… CW: Yeah Rudy was only 14. BW: Okay that’s what I was wondering. So they were teenagers at the time? CW: Well he was, Dan was on a mission in the Netherlands. 17 RW: So when he came home he took over the business and he ran it on his own until Rudy stepped in. LR: So these teenage boys managed to keep a business going through the Depression? LH: It would’ve been through the Depression. LR: Well their parents died in the late ‘20s, 1927 and 1929, so they managed to keep this business. That’s pretty incredible—that is really not just incredible, that’s remarkable that these two teenage boys kept the family business going. RW: Well Dan ran the business and Rudy came into it, not in his teenage years, but his early twenties. Then they had a benefactor in Dan’s family. CW: Rudy had an aunt. RW: Rudy had an aunt that loaned them some money, but there are a couple things about Rudy that are interesting. He was the bishop of the 22nd ward, it’s that old cement building on 27th and Grant. It’s still there, it’s owned by somebody else now. He set up a little canning factory in back of the church and for several years members of that ward and stake canned their own produce. LH: That was one of my favorite things. RW: Preceded the big canning projects that the church had. LH: To my mother down there, the cannery there and we’d take bushels of tomatoes, oh it was fun. BW: I think a lot of larger canneries started in the mid-thirties, didn’t they? RW: Yes he was a very young bishop. He was exempted from the war because he was a bishop. Then he became… 18 BW: When we say the war we’re talking about WWII? RW: WWII. He became very involved in the livestock industry. They had a, they bought a ranch up in Driggs, Idaho. He and Ang’s child Austin operated it and they got into the purebred Hereford business. They raised Hereford bulls for sale. Then he became a significant player in the Golden Spike Livestock Show with Rulon Peterson. The Peterson brothers operated a ranch out in Roy and one in Nevada. It was, I think, still operating in that capacity when the main livestock building burned. The year that happened, I don’t recall, but that ended the Golden Spike Livestock Show. LH: That was a big event. I mean people came from all over for the livestock show. The best homemade pie was in the little café right across from the livestock building. So they ran it, a little old place with homemade pies. It was wonderful. BW: So that’s Rudy. What kinds of stories do we have about Dan? LH: He bought a new car every year. CW: He was a bishop, he was a hard-nosed business man in the furniture business. BW: So he stayed in the furniture business? CW: Yes. LH: If you went to the furniture store and if you got Rudy to help you, you got a little bit better deal than if Dan helped you. So you’d always look for Rudy or if he wasn’t there then you’d come back. CW: One of the things that Krijn did also in addition to cleaning rugs and upholstery was he actually made mattresses. Yeah that was one of the things they did. LR: So when Dan retired, then what happened to the business? 19 LH: His son… RW: His son Danny took it over. LH: Then they also had a store in Idaho Falls. RW: Idaho Falls, next to the stockyards. CW: And another son still runs it, it’s still there. RW: That son is Dale and they had a third son who was a piano player. A pretty outstanding piano player, he taught piano. CW: He also ran a boat store. RW: Used to sell boats. LH: Dan fully supported his son that played the piano but he said, “I couldn’t take the practicing at 4:30 in the morning.” So he would lock the piano until he was up and then he’d let the son practice. RW: Let me just give you a little rundown of where the family went. Mary married a guy named Harvey Butler and they met because Harvey was the milkman for the Van Kampen family. They had a farm out on 12th street where Business Depot Ogden mentioned it was established, and the federal government took all of the farms in that area and they took the Butler Farm. BW: Was that during the Depression era? RW: No that was the buildup for the war, World War. He had another farm that he bought also to 1900 West on the viaduct. He farmed there for a few years and then he packed up with his family and they went to Idaho. Our mother married Frank Wolthuis and Frank got into the dairy business as we talked about a month 20 ago. They ran the City View Dairy until the late ‘50s, early ‘60s when he sold it out to his brother. Cora married a guy named Stevens. LH: Frank Stevens. RW: Frank Stevens, he was an owner of property that they sold to the Van Kampens for the house and the business on 37th and Riverdale Road. They eventually moved to California. Angelie was married to Austin, they farmed out in Clinton for a while and then became partners of sorts with the Van Kampen ranch in Driggs, Idaho and he ran the operation. Katherine married a Child, John T., who was Austin’s brother. They farmed in Clinton for a while and then he went to work for Hill Field. I don’t know if it’s worth the time and the effort to tell the story, but the Child boys were really practical jokers. They were sitting in church in the Clinton Ward and Johnny had fallen asleep and Austin punched him. He says, “They just called you to go say the closing prayer.” That was shortly after the service began so the story is that Johnny went up there and gave the closing prayer quite a bit ahead of schedule. LH: Probably a favorite among the congregation. RW: Rudy, you’ve heard some of the things about him and his coaching role up at Utah State. He could’ve probably stayed in that profession had he not gotten in the business. He married Afton… LH: Rigby. RW: Rigby from Cache Valley, the town of Newton. She is still alive waiting to celebrate her 103rd or 104th birthday. Dan married also an Afton and we 21 elaborated quite a deal about him and then the one son Krijn passed away when he was 11 or 12 years old. CW: Afton, Rudy’s wife is still living. The governor always has this big dinner for everyone over 100 years old. So her daughter took her to the dinner and during the dinner she turns to her daughter and she says, “I absolutely do not want to be here next year.” She’s a character. BW: It was that bad, huh? CW: No, she doesn’t want to live that long. LH: She’s through. BW: You had something you wanted to say? LH: No that’s fine, it slipped my mind. RW: I’m sure the camera won’t pick this up, but this is the glass case of Krijn’s father Daniel. LH: The one that froze. RW: The one that froze to death in the rolling hills outside of Arden. This is a Dutch Bible, this goes back to my father. It was given to him by Joseph Weston who was a missionary in the Netherlands and he was the official sponsor of the Wolthuis family. LH: He also helped with the Van Kampen family prior to that. I still have my mother’s missionary scriptures, they’re divided into columns and all the numbers are roman numerals and that. BW: Wow, very interesting. So let’s talk a little bit about how they maintained their heritage. 22 LR: Especially after their parents died. LH: My mother took kind of control. She was the oldest of the, well and her twin, but her twin was already married. So Mom kind of came home and she said it was interesting when they decided to break up the home because now both parents were gone. They gathered together and she said, “Each starting with the oldest to youngest got to choose an item out of the home.” My mother chose the piano, but because it was a more costly item she said that she paid into the family fund for the piano but she said there was never a disagreement or anything in just settling the things out of the home. The home eventually was torn down and the Van Kampen store was expanded. RW: Okay the home was not torn down. CW: The second home was. LH: Oh the second one. RW: 37th. CW: Rudy’s home was torn down. RW: Rudy’s home and Dan’s home were torn down, but the Van Kampen house that was right on the corner of 37th and Riverdale was moved about twenty-five years ago up to Perry. We will tell you that story before, it’s kind of interesting. I’ve always said that God is kind to fools and humanitarians and Mormons trying to write family histories. We had some indication that the home was not torn down that it had been moved and that somebody told us we think it went up to Perry. So my wife and I, when we were writing the green book, went up to Perry. We stopped at one of the fruit businesses and said, “Where can we find the oldest 23 resident of Perry?” These two young honeys said, “We don’t know anybody that old. Why don’t you go down to city hall?” So the Perry City Hall is west of the highway and we told the lady what we were looking for. We said, “We’re trying to find a house that was moved into Perry about twenty, twenty-five years ago from Ogden.” She said, “Well I don’t know.” At that moment a guy walks out who was an employee of the city and he said, “I bought that house. I moved it to Perry and it’s right up there.” CW: Took us to it. RW: Took us to it. We went up and took several pictures. Then about a week or two later we took Afton, who’s still alive up there and she verified that it was the house. We’ve got a picture of both, the original house and the way the house was modified. Eventually the furniture stores, the furniture buildings were sold. They had an original, right on the corner next to the house, and then they added a big cinder block addition. They were sold and had a big warehouse in the back, and all of those items were knocked down. If you’ve driven by there recently the whole vacant lot is empty. LH: Just sitting there. RW: The Van Kampens very seldom had family reunions like the Wolthuises. I think it was a case where the Dutch heritage didn’t last like the Wolthuis heritage because everybody except our mother married Americans and they went their own way, the Childs, the Butters or the Butlers and the Stevens. The only Dutch element or heritage that was left was Leona Van Kampen Wolthuis and our 24 father. Dan had gone to the Netherlands on a mission, one of Andrew’s sons went to the Netherlands on a mission, John K. LH: And you. RW: Dale Van Kampen… CW: Dan’s son. RW: Don’s son went to the Netherlands on a mission and he’s the one that picked up the event. The story in the Dutch mission publication called The Star. In Dutch it was De Stare that Krijn had written about the death of his father and it was published in that magazine and I went to the Netherlands on a mission—there were four of us. Dale, John D., Kent and me, four of the grandsons went on missions to the Netherlands. BW: Do you feel like for the four of the grandchildren that helped them reconnect to the Dutch heritage? RW: Yes I do. I think anytime you get back to the nation of your roots it helps. LH: You know Bob said that we didn’t have family reunions, per se, but one of my happiest memories at Christmas time was after you got up and opened your gifts, you would start going to all these places. I remember we’d go out to Clinton, then we’d go out to Wilson Lane area. That was how you spent a lot of Christmas Day, was going, and you’d call and you’d say, “Are you going to be home? We’re coming right now.” It was really a special time to me. CW: When we got engaged and we came back at Christmas time after we lived in Virginia for two years, the first thing we did was we went to see Aunt Katherine and her family. That’s what they did and I remember doing that. 25 LH: The sisters were really close and if you excuse me a moment, you can keep him talking, I’m going to show you a picture of these sisters. BW: I know a lot of Dutch families that celebrate Cinter Klaus Day. Did the Van Kampens celebrate Cinter Klaus Day? RW: We have no record of that happening in the Van Kampen family. It was done in the Wolthuis family by my sister and her family which is a pretty good sized family out in Uintah. She just found a Cinter Klaus wherever she could and when I’m with my Uncle Garrett who did that fairly routine… LH: Those are those four older sisters and they just were very, very close. BW: They’re beautiful too. RW: Well that’s very kind of you. They were not raving beauties. Ang might have been quite nice-looking. LH: Our mother, she got hit in the mouth with a baseball bat while a young girl and she was always very concerned about how she looked. LR: Interesting, I know where this is in Salt Lake. LH: Really? What is it? LR: 1306 _____ Street. I grew up not three blocks away. LH: Oh my gosh. RW: In Salt Lake? LR: Yes, sorry, it’s just, oh my gosh, I know this street. LH: 37th and Adamson. 26 BW: So we talked a little bit last time we met about how your mother and father met, but just so we have it on this side of the story. Can we talk about the connection there with the Wolthuis and Van Kampen family? RW: Well we’re pretty sure they met in the 2nd ward which is on 33rd and Grant. It was a Dutch connection of some consequence. I don’t know if my dad was looking for a Dutch wife or if my mother was looking for a Dutch husband. Before Mother went on her mission she had almost been engaged to a guy named Baker from down in Utah County. That marriage didn’t occur because when Mother was ready to go on her mission, the family planned a big party. She was, I think, down in Baker’s home and so they would’ve had to leave fairly soon and she said, “Now I need to go home.” He said, “I’m not going to take you home.” So she took her ring and gave it back to him and he threw it in the stove. They retrieved it and she said, “Okay I’ll wear it but if you find somebody while I’m gone on my mission you go ahead and get married.” BW: How romantic. RW: We have not avoided the Mormon connection in this narrative either for either family so I think it would be interesting to just make a few comments about Mother’s mission. LH: Yeah that’s just what I was going to say. RW: She served in the eastern states. Her mission president was… LH: B. H. Roberts. BW: No kidding? LR: Oh isn’t that interesting. 27 RW: Had a pretty close relationship with him. She kept a very extensive diary and women missionaries in that era were not unknown to have gone to movies with elders, they went swimming frequently… LH: At Coney Island wasn’t it? RW: At Coney Island and it was an eye opener for me to read those accounts—the things they did—because if I’d have done that in the Netherlands I would’ve been sent home. LH: We have her mission handbook, in the books I wrote on our mother’s life and the rules are so different now. It just says, “Be pleasant, be congenial with the people.” You know this type of thing, not that you’ll be in by 9:30, etcetera, etcetera. Mother always had just a warm spot in her heart for B. H. Roberts. BW: That’s wonderful. What years did she… LH: 19-- CW: ‘24. LH: 1914, no this is 1924 and ‘25 and she’s in this picture with B. H. Roberts. So it’s ‘24 and ‘25. CW: She was known as the mission scriptorium. LH: I probably in my life have never met anybody that knew the scriptures as our mother did. She developed systems for marking the scriptures and putting a thread to the next scripture and what not. She loved teaching, she taught a lot of the teenage groups and very frequently, one night a week, all the teenagers would come to our house and my mom would hold a class and they would mark their scriptures. In fact I have mine, she let me mark mine right along with her 28 group one time. Long before there was a topical guide or anything. She had that down pat. BW: So she went out as a missionary shortly after the rules changed that you had to be married as a woman in order to serve a mission. RW: Well yes, she must have gone before that, but there were a lot of women in the eastern states mission. They formed an organization called Estalama, for the eastern states lady missionaries. They met socially for several years in our lifetime. So that was still going in the ‘40s and early ‘50s. CW: When we got married we got a present from the Estalamas. LH: Did you? So that would’ve been in the ‘60s. RW: ‘59. She had an interesting mission, it would probably forerun or what the church is doing today. It was inter-related and inter-connected with members a whole lot more than my mission was. So I think she probably came back in ‘25, went to work for Wright Store and helped in the family business. My dad didn’t come to America until October of ‘28 so they probably met in ‘29 or ‘30 in what I think is the 2nd ward. LH: Our mother did speak. LR: Okay that’s just what I was going to ask you. LH: She spoke some Dutch yes, in her home. CW: Didn’t your dad, wasn’t one of his best friends Uncle Dan? LH: Well I know Uncle Dan drove them up to the temple to get married. They sat in the rumble seat of this little whatever year car it was, and drove up to Logan and 29 nobody went with them. Dan just drove them up in his little car, one of his mini cars. LR: So they drove up to Logan instead of down to Salt Lake? LH: Right, they drove to Logan. CW: Ogden was in the Logan Temple district. We were both married in the Logan Temple. LH: Yes, you didn’t go to Salt Lake. Now you can just go down the street to Ogden. Well we think we received a great heritage from the family. I think from their example, even though we didn’t know them I think it was handed down to the children and to the grandchildren. Grandpa Van Kampen is certainly one that I want to meet just as soon as possible. I just think of their dedication as Carolyn said. She was president of basically the stake relief society, Grandma was. Grandpa served on the high council of the Weber Stake and so… CW: She was a ward primary president. RW: That’s their wedding picture. LH: Isn’t it beautiful? LR: It’s beautiful. LH: He always had a moustache. RW: There’s the big picture there… BW: Sure looks a little like B. H. Roberts. CW: Those are the Johnson family. Everything else was the Wolthuis family. LH: So any other questions? LR: No I’m good. 30 LH: You’ve got Bob’s book. Mine is more specifically just on my mother and us as siblings and that, but anything. They’re absolutely amazing in their research and documentation. BW: I think you pretty well answered the questions. LR: Yes, unless you have anything else. BW: No I don’t actually. I think we have a really good history on that. RW: Okay let’s run through those. CW: Okay so this is the Wolthuis grandparents when they were married in 1904 in Holland. They also had their family picture taken before they immigrated. It seemed like the thing to do. Before you come to America you have your family picture taken. BW: These are some great pictures aren’t they? CW: This was taken on the ship on the way to America. LH: And the one daughter hurt her toe or stepped on something. Oh, on a needle. CW: We had the 80th family reunion I superimposed that picture at Union Station and then we did the reenactment. LR: Oh that’s cool. I like that. CW: This is the train they came on. I thought that was neat we could actually find the real train that they rode. This is in Weber Canyon. Then this is the family later after they were in America for a few years. BW: This is the Van Kampen… CW: This is the Wolthuis family. All of these last ones are Wolthuis, but we just thought since we had them we’d show them to you, thank you for this. 31 BW: Thank you for sharing this with us.