Oral History Program Joe Langeveld & Ria Neville Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney 23 February 2015 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Joe Langeveld & Ria Neville Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney 23 February 2015 Copyright © 2015 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: Langeveld, Joe and Neville, Ria, an oral history by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney, 23 February 2015, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Joe Langeveld in his home, 2016 Joe Langeveld & Ria Neville 23 February 2015 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Ria Neville and Joe Langeveld, conducted at the home of Joe Langeveld on February 23, 2015 by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney. Ria and Joe, siblings, discuss their Dutch heritage and immigration to Ogden, Utah. LR: It’s Monday February 23, 2015. We are in the home of Joe Langeveld talking with Joe and his sister Ria about their Dutch heritage and coming here into Ogden. I’m Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney is here helping. Now that we have that done, let’s start with really the basics. I would like to know when both of you were born and where. So you decide who goes first. JL: You go ahead and go first Ria. RN: I was born in Amsterdam in 1939. I can’t remember the name of the hospital JL: The Wilhelmina. RN: I don’t know Joe, it was the Wilhelmina. Anyway, I lived in Amsterdam until I was nine years old and then we immigrated in 1948 to Roy, Utah. JL: My name is Joe Langeveld. I go by the name Joe because it used to be, when I first came here, my parents could not speak English and it was always for generations that they had the father’s grandfather’s names. So I was given my grandfather’s name, Johannes, but for older people they used the name Jo. As a child they would call me Hanne, they used the name Hann. When we moved to Ogden a neighbor lady told my parents that Hanne did not sound appropriate, so they decided on Joe. I was born in Amsterdam in 1945 during the Hunger Winter. It was the last few months of Nazi occupation in the spring of 1945, and that was 2 a historical year for the Dutch, and they call that the Hunger Winter. During this terrible cold winter many people died of hunger, many were taken to concentration camps. You would see many dead people on the street due to weakness, cold and hunger. I was born on March 20th, 1945. LR: Now, I know you were just tiny but do you remember anything of that time period of World War II? Do you have any memories? RN: Oh, absolutely! Everything was fine in 1939 but when the Nazis came in it got worse and the thing that I really remember was that the Germans came marching in to Amsterdam. I remember as a little girl, watching them come in and I just felt like I wanted to fight them. I remember a lot of things. I remember my mother trying to hide my dad because they were trying to pick up people, young people off the streets and go into people’s homes and take these people to Germany to work in you might say in the factories to make war material. Most of these places were kind of underneath the mountains. They had dug them out so that nobody could find them. Mother tried to hide Dad kind of behind a buffet that we had and we saw that that wasn’t going to work. I also remember Dad, when Joe was in the hospital, I was staying with his family, his brother. I remember the Dutch homes, in the places where we lived, had small entrances as you come in you would push a button. The person in the apartment would answer, then you would visit that person. Dad had wanted to come and see me and see how I was doing. He met my uncle Fritz and his wife and family on the stairs and Dad said, “They’re taking people, they’re picking us up off the street. I want to hide my bike,” because bikes were stolen, you didn’t 3 leave them out. But the bike didn’t fit in the small entry way! I could feel his nervousness, and I can still sense this anxiety. Dad said, “Oh, never mind, I’m going, I’ll just go a different route.” My cousin Martin told me something really interesting, he said the thing that really saved my dad was, if there were crowds gathering, he would always go a different way, and that helped him. I admire my father and how brave he was. He worked for his dad, and his dad had a business where they made kitchen items out of metal. In those days they didn’t have plastics. Small items and large items were made for people’s homes. They also made the big milk cans. My father being a friendly and a very personable person would go out to the farmers in the villages around Amsterdam. He was the salesman for the business. He developed a very personable relationship with the farmers. This relationship helped him get food during the Hunger Winter of 1944 and 1945. All of Amsterdam was under curfew. Dad would go after curfew on a bike without tires to farmer’s homes and ask for food. JL: My father collected milk while he was at the homes of the farmers. His father’s business made him a tin vest that fit the contour of his chest. RN: I remember him fastening that vest with a kind of belt or ropes that tied behind his back. He would put on a sweater or wool vest and then a jacket over that. He would go to the farmers and they filled it with milk. My mother, bless her heart, she would add water to it, and then share the milk and food items with the different family members. 4 I can remember the anxiety that Mother felt as my father would leave us to look for food. I developed a very close relationship with my parents. This relationship I still have today even though they’re gone. I just have a very close feeling towards them. I saw how caring they were. I remember being invited to a birthday party and I didn’t have a present to give. We were at this little birthday party, this was during the war in 1944-45. One little person brought an egg. It was a hardboiled egg and I thought, “Oh! Those people must really be rich!” because they have an egg. I was thinking to this day, I don’t like to throw eggs away. I mean eggs to me are very, very important. My mother told me this often. The war ended in May 1945, but she said, “If it had gone for two more months we would’ve died,” because food was becoming more scarce. This is another interesting story too, and I love this story. There are a lot of stories. But I remember they left me alone because Mother had to go to the hospital to give birth to my brother. And there was no phone and Dad had to take her while I was sleeping. JL: At night. RN: At night on a bike without tires. Can you imagine being pregnant and being on a bike without tires? JL: On cobblestones. BW: That would’ve put you into labor. RN: Yes, it would. All of a sudden a German soldier stopped them, and said, “Halt!” Germans, I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with them, but they are very abrupt and I’d noticed that when I was back there in June of 2000. 5 JL: They mean it. RN: So he said “Halt,” and my dad said, in German or Dutch, “Ziekenhuis.” Then he showed that Mother was pregnant and he said, “Go, go ahead.” But he could have shot them, because it was after 8 p.m. curfew. JL: Yes, he violated orders and because he violated orders I’m here today. LR: There’s that other story. JL: I told them about the metal water bottle. RN: Oh, okay. I love that story because to me it’s a very religious story. LR: It’s a beautiful story. You need to repeat it. RN: I’d love to do that, and I’ve got it written down in my journal because it’s a story of how God watches over you and realizes your needs, no matter what religion you are He’s there to help you. It’s interesting, Mother would bring Joe in his little crib into the kitchen and it was a very small kitchen. Mother used a round metal water bottle. The bottle would fit perfectly in a man’s sock. The bottle was made in my grandfather’s business, and things like that were popular, and this was made out of brass or some other type of metal. JL: Copper or something. I don’t know. RN: Mother would fill this with hot water, this was perfect to warm a small bed. She would bring the little bassinet into the kitchen and the kitchen was cold. We had no heat in the other rooms. Mother heated the kitchen with a small kerosene heater. JL: No heat. 6 RN: As she put this in his little crib she said to me, “Oh Ria, darn it, the little cap leaks.” The gasket was too old in the little cap to prevent water from leaking out. JL: Here is the water bottle. RN: There’s a gasket in there now. JL: Yes. That’s the gasket. RN: She said, “I don’t know what to do because it keeps leaking, there’s nothing in stores, and you can’t buy anything like that. I wish I could find a small gasket.” I went downstairs, outside to play and we had large sidewalks in front of our apartment. It was a wonderful wide area for children to run, jump rope, and play tag. I was just kind of looking down and skipping, then all of a sudden I saw a little black gasket right in front of my foot. I picked it up and as I did so I thought, “This is for my mother.” This experience has given me a testimony that God is always near to you. JL: Mother had been praying. She had a dilemma and she asked the Lord, “Now you’ve given me this child but now you need to help me because I need to find a way so I can keep this child warm and keep him alive,” so she had been praying. When Ria brought that little gasket to me she said, “That is the answer to my prayer.” Mother saw that the rubber gasket fit perfectly in the cap. This is what kept me alive during the first few months of the war. RN: Also Aunt To’s breast milk. JL: Yes, because my mother did not have enough breast milk. My aunt To told me that she went into a bakery and she saw a woman that had had a child. The woman said, “Yes, I’ve lost mine because I could not produce any milk so my 7 baby starved to death.” My aunt thought of my mother. She was producing enough milk that my father was able to go and get the milk. She had my cousin in January, and I was born in March, so he was able to get breast milk from my aunt to keep me alive. So it was the breast milk that he was able to get from my aunt and this little hot water bottle that was placed in the sock that was put into the crib that kept me alive. RN: It’s a beautiful story and it’s interesting too. Mother had female problems after she had me and I guess she had kind of a difficulty having me. I was supposed to be an only child. She was having some problems, so she went to the doctor and he said, “I just can’t help you. I don’t have any medicines, there’s nothing I can do because there is nothing available. The only thing that would help you is to have a child,” so that’s why my brother was born at a very inopportune time. LR: Not the best timing. JL: No, not the best timing. You know, first the German violated an order so I’m here already, next there’s no heat at all in Amsterdam. People were tearing down the insides of their doors, everything to keep some heat and it was one of the worst winters that they had ever experienced. RN: It was. It was a horrible winter. JL: So it was a terrible cold winter and then my mother who was a very religious woman would pray to the Lord and ask, “You’ve given me this child but now you need to help me to keep him alive,” and so with my sister finding this item she said, “This is a sign that God answers prayers because that gasket came from nowhere.” Why would a little child go outside and find a gasket? 8 RN: Right in front of my foot. JL: Right in the front door and then— RN: I was skipping, concentrating on my skipping as kids do. JL: It fits there perfectly in the hot water bottle. So there was something we had to recognize. There is a higher power that has an influence on our lives that we many times aren’t always fully aware of, but we do get to see it every so often at work, and this was one of those times. BW: I have a few questions just to clarify before we move on to anything else. There’s just the two siblings then, correct? RN: Yes, my brother, and my other brother, who was born in 1946. JL: My brother. BW: Could you spell Aunt To’s name for me? RN: Her name was Antonia. She was named after her dad, Grandpa. They called her Antonia; instead of calling her Tony they called her To for short. JL: They do that in the Netherlands and a lot of European countries. RN: I don’t know where they get the shorting of names. Joe’s name is really interesting too, because his name was Johannes. What they would do with small children, they would call them Hanne or Hann. So he was going by Hanne and if they would grow up they would say Hann but they also called him Jo. Then there was a lady, Mrs. Curdo, she said, “Oh you should not call him Hanne or Hann.” Mother said, “Well his name is Jo or Jo (Yo),” because in the Dutch language they don’t say Joe, it’s just like Spanish, it’s a soft “J.” She said, “Just call him Joe.” But actually if Mother had realized it, his name should have been John. 9 JL: Well that’s why I named my son, my first son, I gave him the name John Marten after my dad which has been a tradition for generations in my family. RN: Then with my uncle Fritz, his name was Frederick and then they would shorten it to Fritz. BW: Going back to your mother, a devout religious woman. What was your religious background? JL: Dutch Reformed. RN: I don’t think they ever really took her to church. My grandma, her mother, was kind of a sickly person. She had Mother and then about seven years later my aunt Tony or To was born, and about a year and a half later my aunt Jo was born. So Mother had the responsibility of taking care of these two. When they were five or seven it was Mother’s job to take them to parks, etc. They always went to the Salvation Army on Saturdays. They did a lot of singing and had religious teachings. I think this is where Mother got her ideas on religion and my aunt To agreed. Mother and my aunt still remember some of the songs they sang and music that was played. BW: And your father? JL: He was non-religious. RN: Father was not religious. His real dad died when he was a year old and his mother remarried. I don’t think he had a close relationship with his stepdad. He went on his own when he was fourteen. Actually the first job that he had was getting metal scrapings from barges that were brought in on the canals in Amsterdam. The scrapings were from businesses. 10 JL: They made cookware out of it. RN: They would use these scrapings to make all matter of household items. That is where Grandpa got the idea of starting his own business. He told my mother, “I don’t really believe in Jesus Christ. I think he’s a very good teacher.” He was not a religious person, but he was very honest. He had extremely high values. He told Dad, “If you give somebody your word you have to keep it.” This was my dad’s rule too. My grandpa was well liked and this is why his business was very successful. Customers are first, do things for your customer and give them a little bit extra; that was Grandpa’s motto. When I worked at Penney’s candy counter, older people would ask for ten cents worth, I would give them twelve or fifteen cents worth. JL: They always loved coming, you always had all these old men coming to the counter to get some candy. RN: I know, these little old men. I felt sorry for them, they would come and ask for their little bag of candy. LR: That’s so cute. RN: I’ve always remembered that they were on 25th Street where the buses would come, but they sat on all the benches and munched on their candy. JL: But can I mention a couple of things that need to be mentioned? I got a chance to go back as a missionary for the LDS church at age nineteen and I got to meet a lot of my dad’s family. I had never met them before and they said, “You know he had a very honorable position in our family.” I said “What do you mean?” They said, “He saved a lot of us during the war.” They said, “Your mother and dad 11 were very good.” In fact I met one of the ladies in Markem who ended up talking about Dad. She said she always called him “lanke,” which means tall in Dutch, because she said he would come and he had such a good sense of humor. She said, “I just laughed and laughed when he came.” My dad learned that when he was young. Grandpa thought he was a little bit shy when he was a young man. My grandfather said, “I’ve got to teach this boy not to be so shy. What I’ve got to do is, he’s got to learn how to deal with the public and I know exactly what I’m going to do. I know a cigar place in the red light district of Amsterdam. This man owns a cigar store so I’m going to ask my friend if my son could work in there because he will learn how to deal with the public.” Well believe me it worked; he learned. But it taught him a lot about being a wonderful salesman, and he made all these various friends of people that he got to know. Then what happened was, like my sister said, he had a lot of connections that he was able to get food and food items that he snuck out, but if he had been caught sneaking food at night, he would never have come back home. The biggest fear that my mother had, and I think it’s a fear that she lived with, was he would leave but would he ever return? So you lived with that fear all the time. His older brother named one of his sons Marten after my dad because he said he was such a wonderful person and so my dad always had many friends with being a wonderful salesman. RN: Another story, since you were talking about Dad being a good salesman, I remember and I am thinking about a little room, it brings back a memory of a small town called Monneke Dam. He had met some very wonderful, wonderful 12 friends and the man’s name was Lauwtje DeWolf. He was a butcher by trade. So what they did was they could not butcher a cow, they were not allowed to do that. They were really watched. So in his little living room the windows were all covered with dark drapes so that you couldn’t see light. He would butcher a cow, and I was just looking at Linda’s room and I thought—because they were small homes—but can you imagine butchering a cow? JL: In your living room? RN: In the living room and then Dad would bring home meat, and the meat they brought home sometimes was horse meat. Horse meat is very good, especially steaks. JL: I got to meet the man when my wife and I went there because my cousin who knew him, who had lived there, took us over there. He said, “I want you to meet the DeWolf family,” so we went over there and he still had the shop there, and I got to meet his son. He said, “Oh, I remember your dad very well. I want to do something for you. In honor of what we gave your dad during the war, I’m going to give you some free meat.” So he did, so many years later. He said, “He was so special to us. We loved him. It was a hard time for your mother. She really suffered, your mother did, during the war.” He said it was very difficult. My mother could hardly talk about it because they used to stack the bodies. The problem was it was so cold they couldn’t bury the bodies, so they just wrapped the bodies and stacked them on the streets against the buildings during the winter. They lost 20,000 people that year during the winter and it was so hard for my mother. She 13 just couldn’t talk about it and I would ask her to tell a little bit and she said, “Every time I do, I just break down and cry, so I just can’t do it.” LR: I want to move into immigration. BW: So how much longer did they stay in Holland after the war? JL: Tell what happened with Uncle Charles coming. RN: Oh! Then Mother’s brother came in 1946, well the war ended in 1945 so he came I think in 1946 and the end of 1947. I remember he would stand in front of the window. BW: The window of your house? RN: Yes. He was staying with us at our little apartment, and I went back to that little apartment when we went back. I thought, “This is small.” As a child you think everything looks bigger. He would wear these dark kind of maroon silk type pajamas and he would stand in front of the window and my friends would say, “Is that een Americaan?” They wanted to see this Americaan. They were kind of fascinated with him. JL: His long socks that came clear up to his knees. RN: Yes and he was a very nice, charming person. BW: Was he an American? JL: No. RN: He had come over in the 1930s and married a Dutch Mormon girl. LR: So he went back in 1947? RN: Yes, and I’m sorry I should have mentioned that. No, he immigrated in the 1930s, and he immigrated to Roy, Utah. 14 JL: He’s the oldest, he was my mother’s oldest brother. LR: So he basically sponsored your parents then. JL: Yes. RN: He was worried about his family and concerned, and that’s why he came back. Then he came back a second time in 1948. He wanted us to immigrate to America. He sponsored us, and my dad was supposed to go into business with him because he had a painting business, painting homes. JL: Wallpapering. RN: But it just didn’t work out, my dad being an independent person, did not like working with his hands. Sales was his expertise. We stayed with them for about six months. BW: In Utah? JL: In Roy, Utah, I remember. RN: Yes, in Roy, and I started school there at Roy Elementary, the old Roy Elementary on 5600 South. JL: Ria couldn’t speak a word of English. RN: I could not speak a word of English, I was in the fourth grade and everybody looked at me. I thought, “I’m on another planet.” I felt very uncomfortable. JL: Coming from Amsterdam to Ogden, my mother was so homesick it was terrible. BW: Do you remember the crossing at all? Crossing the Atlantic on a steamship? JL: Yes. LR: I know you have a good story. JL: I have pictures of that. 15 RN: The Noordam, and we were all there. BW: Did you land in New Jersey or New York? RN: New York. BW: At Ellis Island? RN: They didn’t have Ellis Island anymore. We came in 1948 and I don’t know if they closed in 1945, but they closed sometime before, so we never went through and this is really a good picture of us. JL: I’ve got a bunch of pictures of the boat and everything else. LR: So do you remember? I know Joe’s earliest memory is being on the ship. RN: Yes, I remember being very, very seasick. JL: So were my mother and dad. LR: You were basically on your own. JL: Yes because my mother was terribly seasick and so was my dad, so a lot of times I was on my own. There was a little railing with an opening, and one day I decided to crawl through the opening. I remember looking through the opening. I thought, “Oh, that water looks so beautiful, I think I’ll just jump in,” but then the last minute I had the feeling that I shouldn’t go in there and so I decided not to. I’ll show you the picture. Actually, see how available that was for someone to jump into the ocean, but oh it looked so beautiful and I thought, “Boy do I want to jump in,” and then all of a sudden I thought, “I better not.” RN: And then we had another experience. JL: The sick sailor. 16 RN: It was really interesting as I saw this. There was a Greek ship, and they had a sailor on that ship who needed a doctor, and of course our ship had a doctor. At the time there were no helicopters, so they took a little lifeboat from our ship. The weather was really stormy, and that little lifeboat went out to the Greek ship with about three or four seaman on the little lifeboat. JL: I have a picture of that. RN: The waves were so high you couldn’t see the small lifeboat and then you would see it come up on the crest of the waves. They were able to get the Greek sailor and bring him to our ship. This was on the Holland-America line. The Holland-America line was known for good food and that’s when we would sit down and eat. I thought, “What kind of water is this?” It was ice water with ice cubes in it. I thought this was so interesting because in Europe they don’t do that. I remember the food being very good and I met some very nice people. There was a lady I met from Florida, and she was a Dutch lady, younger than Mother, and she was going back to Florida. She just loved my two little brothers Joe and Charlie, and she would kneel down and talk to them. She really enjoyed them and thought they were darling. I asked her, “Is it nice living in Florida?” I’ve always remembered she said, “Oh no it’s very hot, sticky hot.” That was interesting, I thought, “How can weather be sticky?” To learn the culture is hard for people when they come to a different country. I don’t know if you saw that film that they made, The Hundred-Foot Journey. It’s really good, it’s about a family, an Indian family that moves to France, and what I noticed in that picture, I saw that with our family. If you are an 17 immigrant and you want your family to succeed, you work together and that’s what Mom and Dad did. They really worked together. Friday night Dad worked at Utah Power, which was the Utah Power on 23rd Street. They had a great big hall on the second floor where they had large meetings and held dances. There was a wooden floor, and what Joe, Charlie, and I would do was run with the chairs, and then we would jump on the seat with our knees and we would just roll along that floor. It was great fun. JL: They were our toys. RN: I still think about the chairs that rolled and laugh. We also helped Mom and Dad too. JL: My dad worked two jobs. He would start work at 7 in the morning, then he would work for Ogden City Schools; he worked at Ogden High. I’ll show you the picture of him, here he is, one of the custodians. He worked his eight hours there, then at 4:30 he would go to the Utah Power Light and work there as a custodian till 11 p.m. in the evening. RN: I marvel at my mother, and I think about how hard she worked. She started cleaning homes for other people. She would get up at 6, and Dad would get up about that time too. She would prepare breakfast and get herself ready. He would take her to the place where she worked, because they just had the one car. Every day she had a different house that she cleaned. Dad would pick her up between 2:30 and 4. People going home at 4:30-5:00 would lock the building. Usually at the Utah Power, they would have meetings or club meetings, so he was kind of in charge of watching over them while also cleaning the building. 18 Mother would fix his dinner as soon as she came home. She would have a little bowl that she would put the hot food in, then she would wrap it with newspaper. Microwaves had not been invented yet. She wrapped the bowl with newspaper and tied a strong string around it. She would walk from 36th Street all the way to 23rd. She would help Dad, she usually cleaned the bathrooms. Sometimes the boss, Mr. Underwood, would come to do some work. Mother was not supposed to help Dad, so she went upstairs and cleaned the bathrooms, then Dad would say, “Luke is in the office so you’ve got to be quiet.” She left, walking for home, about 8:30-9:00. We were taking care of my grandfather who was in his late seventies. My aunt To would take him for six months in the winter, and Mother would take him for six months during the summer. We lived right there on Riverdale and Grant where they now have Macey’s. We were lucky we had sidewalks in our street so Grandfather was able to walk. JL: Where the flagpole is now is where our house was. RN: They have Kentucky Fried Chicken where our house stood. Grandfather was legally blind, and using the sidewalk for exercise was important to him. RN: Grandfather, being blind, right at 9:30 he was waiting for Mother to read scriptures to him, and she always did. Then she would do the wash downstairs in the basement. We had the old wringer washing machine and the two tubs. One for bleach and one for Mrs. Stewart’s bluing rinse. Sometimes I would go downstairs and would say, “Mother,” I was worried that she was going to die. “You’ve got to come to bed.” She was up again at 6 o’clock. I really marvel at her; 19 I could not do what she did. I love her very much, she means a lot to me. She would walk home from helping Dad at Utah Power. One time she had a man that followed her. She told Dad about it and he said, “Well, you’re not going to do that anymore, I’ll just take off, drive you home, and then come back.” He was concerned. My job, when Mother would leave at 4:30, was to make sure that my brothers would eat, then I had to get them ready for bed. I was kind of their second mother, I truly tried to do my best. LR: Can we back up just for a minute and talk about coming into New York and then coming into Utah, do you remember that? JL: Oh yes, let me tell you a little bit about that. We came and landed in New York and my parents could not speak a word of English. They had no way of knowing how to get to the train because they had to get to a train depot. My dad told me that there was a fellow who looked like a Dutch minister, an old man, and he said, “He looked at me and he was a man I could trust.” My dad said he looked so trustworthy that the man pointed to him and said, “I will take you where you need to go,” so he took us, the whole family, to the train depot. My parents said they don’t know where the man came from, who he was or whatever. Dad said it was wonderful because here they were in New York not knowing a word of English, they were not members of the LDS faith, so they were totally on their own. My dad gets off the ship, has no idea or my mother, where to go in a city without knowing any of the language, then having a man there who said, “I will take you where you need to go.” So he took our whole family to the train depot. 20 RN: It’s interesting that my dad did use an English dictionary and he found words in there and I can honestly remember he would open that dictionary and look for a word. The thing that I remember was going through the Holland Tunnel and I thought, “Oh that’s interesting,” it was a big tunnel and I thought, “Why would they call it the Holland Tunnel?” The first thing that I noticed as a child, the ship had good food and nicely set tables, but on the train I saw a black lady, kind of heavy, and she had her lunch on her lap and she was peeling a hardboiled egg. I thought, “Well that’s strange.” Our next stop was in Chicago. We had been on the train and we did not realize that the train station was in the bad area of Chicago. We got off the train and Dad said, “Let’s just kind of walk around Chicago.” The thing that my dad saw right away were hoodlums standing against the buildings. I can remember how they were standing; they were standing with one leg against the wall and kind of just looking at us. Then I noticed curtains in the windows of apartments. These curtains weren’t white; they were gray and dirty. Dad quickly said, “Oh, I think we’re in the wrong neighborhood, let’s hurry and go in the train station.” BW: What were your train accommodations? Sleepers, did you sit the whole time? RN: I can’t remember. We landed in Ogden at the train station. JL: Where the museum is in the Union Station. RN: I remember coming and seeing my aunt, my uncle, my cousins Elaine, Deloris, Bruce and Brent. BW: Did you have a place to live when you got here? 21 RN: We stayed with my uncle. We stayed downstairs, and later my grandparents came over, my mother’s parents. JL: Our grandparents, being old, had some health issues. RN: Grandma had cancer and they lived there for a while. Then her cancer got worse. We had moved to Grant Avenue and Grandma came to live with us. Mother would say, “3606 Grant Avenue,” when people asked where we lived. JL: The situation that happened is, my uncle is a wonderful man, and he sponsored us, but the marriage he had with his wife was not a good marriage. He was quite abusive and my parents did not want to be around that and that’s why they separated themselves. The problem was that he was upset because we were leaving. He would not take my mother to Grant Avenue in Ogden, so my mother decided to walk from Roy, with me, my brother, and Ria too, all the way from Roy to Grant Avenue in Ogden. LR: While carrying your stuff? RN: Some things, yes, and I know exactly where we got picked up. Mother said, “Ria, let’s hitchhike.” Mother was an interesting woman; she would take the bull by the horns. BW: She was very pragmatic. RN: As we started to hitchhike, a gentleman, I still remember what he looked like, he was wearing a hat, a suit and was very nicely dressed. He said, “Do you need a ride?” We said, “We do,” and it was in the area of where Harmon’s is now. We had walked all of 1900 West until the gentleman took us to Grant Avenue. He 22 said, “Where do you need to go?” and Mother would say, “3606 Grant Avenue.” That’s all she knew how to say and so that’s where we ended up. JL: It was a run-down house but my parents didn’t have any money at all. We weren’t sponsored by any church or anything like that. So my dad had to get a job at the Ben Lomond hotel as a dishwasher, that’s what he did and later, a year later, he ended up getting a job with Ogden City Schools. My mother was extremely homesick, she said, “Ik ben alleen,” which is homesick, and “I miss my people, I miss my culture.” My mother loved Amsterdam, she did not want to be away from Amsterdam but she had her sisters who had come here and their families. She and my dad also wanted to be here. I remember they only had, for example here again an egg, my mother had one egg and she cut it. What was it, two eggs or one egg? RN: Two. JL: Yes two eggs, and she gave one to my dad and then the other egg she cut into three pieces one for me, my brother and one for Ria. RN: Eggs play a very important part of this story don’t they? JL: Yes. BW: You’ve mentioned your brother a couple of times. How much younger was he? JL: He was two when he came here. RN: Yes, and he was a little accident. He turned out to be a big accident; we tease him about it. JL: Yes we tease him about it all the time. 23 LR: Let me ask you this, and I don’t mean to cut you off, but I’m curious and I kind of want to go this route for a moment. When you were in school and learning how to speak the language that couldn’t have been easy. Did you have any friends or did you feel like you were struggling with the people or the other kids? RN: You know I’ll tell you the teacher that I had at Roy Elementary did not help me at all. I could not speak a word of English and she’d put me kind of in the back of the room with some books and then I’d pick up a book, the first English book, and I thought, “Oh, a book about Abraham. Well that’s interesting, but this doesn’t look like the Abraham from the bible.” It was a book about Abraham Lincoln and that’s when I learned about Abraham Lincoln. I was so thirsty that first day, and did not know how to express this. I still remember some of the students because I went to Weber High School with some of them, and then Weber College. I still remember Mary Lou Lindquist who was in my class in the fourth grade. At recess the girls pretended that I was a baby, and they were the parents. I was the baby because I could not talk. I said, “Water, water,” because I was very thirsty. They said, “You want water?” They showed me the fountain and so that was the first word that I learned, water! You look at your life and then when I moved here from San Jose, I moved back because of Mom being in a care center. I thought she kind of needed my help and I did some subbing for Roy, I mean for Weber County School District, I was asked to sub. JL: At Roy Elementary? RN: At Roy Elementary, I told the secretary, “You would laugh, I came as a person in the fourth grade not speaking a word of English.” 24 JL: Now I’m teaching an ESL class. RN: I had to sub the ESL class and I thought this is so funny, I’m teaching English as a secondary language. I thought it was really funny how life comes around in circles. LR: Comes full circle. JL: Well my mother had not put me in kindergarten at all and she decided to take my brother and me, and at that time we did not know where the boundaries were. We lived on 36th and it should have been Weber County School District, but instead my dad enrolled me at Washington Elementary school, so we had to walk there to school. I remember the first day I walked there, my mother put me in the first grade. I had never been in any kind of a classroom so I thought I was being abandoned by my mother so I just broke down and cried. My brother was put in kindergarten and I had to sit in a desk and the whole thing all day, and I could not take that emotionally. I just cried, so they took my sister out of—what grade were you in? RN: Seventh grade, I still remember. JL: Seventh grade and she had to sit with me. RN: In the first grade. JL: We spoke mostly Dutch at home, so I had learned some English, but later on I ended up blending both languages together, but that was my experience in school. Ria said, “Why do I have to sit with my little brother?” RN: Then to make things worse, the seventh grade kids that I knew, that were in my homeroom, I guess they walked past us in the first grade and they pointed and 25 said, “Ha ha ha, Ria has gone back to first grade.” I felt bad, you do go through very hard times. BW: That’s where I’d kind of like to go next, you have an interesting story in that you didn’t come over as an LDS family. JL: Yes, we’ll explain how we got involved with the LDS church. BW: Most of the Dutch immigrants that we’ve spoken with converted in Holland and then it would be an LDS sponsor that would end up kind of helping them settle here. Here we have a different story your uncle. JL: He was LDS, yes. BW: So here you’re surrounded by LDS. JL: I want to say also my uncle was a wonderful person but he had a habit, he liked to party quite a bit. As an LDS missionary this was not an acceptable trait. Ria can explain a little bit of how this came about, how she met a person by the name of Linda Russel. She’ll go over exactly how this all happened. RN: Yes, Linda Russell lived up the street from me, on Grant Avenue. That’s all disappeared with the stores and everything that they have now. She lived about three or four houses up the street and I met her and we became good friends. I went to church with her, but Mother wanted me to go to the Presbyterian Church. JL: It was like the Dutch Reformed, it was Christian Reformed. RN: It was on 26th Street and so we went there for the first Sunday and I told Mother, “I don’t like it. I really don’t like it,” because we had to go with the bus, I just kind of liked walking to church with Linda. JL: With her friend. 26 RN: We really became very good friends and I think it was because of Linda introducing us to the church. JL: She took you to primary. RN: Yes primary, and we met some very nice people there. BW: Was she a grown up or a child? RN: She was my age. She was six months older but she was in the grade ahead of me. JL: She took her to primary and— RN: Then to mutual; I liked the people, I thought the people were very friendly. I had a wonderful primary teacher by the name of Mrs. Fowers. Do you remember the Fowers? She had a breakfast one Saturday morning for her Seagull girls. We were called the Seagulls, Bluebirds and then Seagulls, and she had breakfast and fixed pancakes. She said, “It’s really important for us to make Ria feel like an American.” I came over in the fourth grade so this was about a year and a half after. So we joined the church and also Mom and Dad met some really nice people, Henry Hansen and Brother Koldewyn. Henry Hansen was a returned missionary with a strong testimony, and Brother Koldewyn, who knew the Dutch language, were our missionary visiting teachers. They taught Mom and Dad the gospel and then we were baptized. In 1951 my parents went through the temple, the Salt Lake Temple, and we were sealed to them as a family. I remember the thing that I just loved was once a month we went to a Dutch church meeting. It was right on 32nd; the building is still there. 27 RN: It’s where we would go, and we would hear a talk and then we would sing and the spirit that came out of these Dutch converts lifted the roof top. JL: Boy they sang with full gusto. RN: Oh did they sing, and the one that I loved was “The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning.” I just loved that and we’d sing it in the Dutch language. JL: The roof would come off the building. RN: I thought, “We need some Dutch people to bring that enthusiasm in our singing in Sacrament Meeting.” JL: They’d sing it in Dutch. RN: Oh yes they’d sing it in Dutch, it was once a month on Sunday afternoon. JL: But it’s interesting, and I was just mentioning when Ria had gone to the Presbyterian Church, my mother wanted her to have a religious education. She thought that a Protestant church would be the best for all of us. Anyway she went there, but then Ria came back and said, “Mom why do I have to go clear into Ogden when this church is only a block from our house? That’s where my friends go. I want to go with my friends.” So she went there and then what happened is if you have a Dutch person who seems foreign you can imagine what happens in the LDS church. Within a few days you have missionaries knocking on your door and that’s exactly what happened. These two men, Brother Hansen and Brother Koldewyn, spoke fluent Dutch and my mother and dad loved them. I remember one fellow, who my dad met, had a large belly and my dad said he always told the guy, “Do you know why your stomach is so large?” The guy said, “Why?” My dad said, “Because you eat so much spinach.” He called him the spinaase buik, 28 which is spinach belly. My dad would joke with most people he met all the time. The one thing that got my dad around life all the time is, he always had a wonderful sense of humor. No matter where my dad went he made friends and even at his funeral we were surprised that so many people that came loved my dad, because of his wonderful sense of humor. That’s what got him through the war. He was able to make connections, in fact, the one thing that I was close to is we got to watch the Jewish movie, Schindler’s List, where they saved so many people. I saw the film, and my dad had quick humor that helped them to survive. Let me give you one example of his quick humor. He was at Grandpa’s business, the tin factory, up on the second floor they had tons of tin cans. The Dutch underground had asked them to store matches. Someone told the Germans that Grandpa’s business was storing matches in the tin cans in their warehouse. All of a sudden two large trucks of German paratroopers come driving up to the warehouse. My grandfather’s eyes were about this big to see all these German soldiers and they said in German, “We hear that you are storing matches here.” “What, we’re storing matches? Where did you get that information?” That’s what my dad said, so they went upstairs and he showed them all the boxes full of tin cans. He started kicking the boxes and he started joking and laughing because he had such a sense of humor about this. That’s what my cousin told me when I went back to Holland. The Germans were laughing with him and they went downstairs and said, “Well there must have been a misunderstanding because there’s nothing but tin cans in there.” What they did not know was that behind the tin 29 cans were all the matches where they were stored. My grandfather became so nervous about this, my uncle told me that for several weeks he couldn’t get his breath back. He was so upset about it that he was walking the streets of Amsterdam trying to get his breath back because it bothered him so much, what had happened. Grandpa knew if they had been caught lying, they all would have been lined up and shot. BW: The conversion, did you feel like at that point you were integrated into American society? RN: Well I think I wanted to be part of American society. I did not like to be different. BW: Did you feel discriminated against? RN I felt kind of discriminated against, I felt like we were different, and I don’t really like that I wanted to be part of the group and I still feel that way about being part of the group. JL: Let me explain also, and I think one of the things we found out is that being immigrants, there were people who were jealous that we were hard working people. They could see that we were beginning to be successful and they saw that we obtained and were getting more than what they had. It’s kind of like the old crab theory where you’re trying to pull people back, and so we had some people who were quite jealous about that, because my dad and parents were very hard working. RN: We worked together like the film, The Hundred-Foot Journey; you should see it, that’s a wonderful film. In fact, Steven Spielberg was the producer. You worked together as a family, that’s what you know, you stick together and it makes you 30 successful. The thing that I had, and I remember with Mother, and this is kind of a religious story too. We didn’t have a lot of money, Dad got twenty-seven dollars a week working as a dishwasher at Ben Lomond Hotel. My aunt Cora, Mother’s oldest sister, was there in the kitchen and Mother had said to her, “It’s so hard, I’m trying to make dimes into quarters,” to make ends meet. I guess Dad got paid at the end of each week, plus our house cost four thousand dollars, which at that time four thousand was a lot of money. It was kind of a run-down home. The apartment next door had a dog and it was a very cute dog, everybody liked him. My aunt Cora saw him coming into the yard and it was early evening. She said, “Marie, the dog from your next door neighbor has brought a package in the yard. Let’s go out and look at it.” I went with them and it was a package wrapped in butcher paper. We picked it up and took it home and the paper had not been broken apart by the dog’s teeth; it was like a big chuck roast. JL: Could I mention a couple of things there too? You asked was it hard to adjust? We became good friends with a boy by the name of Harold and he was an only child. We would go over there all the time and at first I could not say the name Harold, so we just called him Boy. My parents asked, “Where are you going?” “Oh we’re going to see Boy.” Harold had a neighbor and she did not like us, so she would always end up giving candy to him but she would never give anything to my brother and me. That was what we had, there were people that were prejudiced about us being immigrants, and she was very prejudiced about it. She would not hide it at all, and it really hurt our feelings. She would call Harold to 31 come over, “I want to give you some candy. No, these two boys are not allowed to have any of it.” RN: This is interesting because I don’t know what her problem was, they were good people. They were what you would call farm people. I don’t think she understood foreigners really. She had a beautiful flower garden on the side of her house. I had a friend that lived in the apartment. Her mother was crippled and she had a hip problem, but she could walk. She said to my friend, and I was standing right by her, “Would you like some beautiful flowers for your mother?” The neighbor picked a whole bouquet of flowers for my friend. I thought, “What about me, my mother loved flowers.” I’ve always remembered that. Her son and I were good friends, and we enjoyed playing Stage Coach on an old shed in their backyard. JL: My dad did get a letter from his dad. The letter stated he wanted him to come back to Amsterdam because he said, “I never raised a son to clean toilets. I will pay for everything for you to come back.” He wanted our whole family to come back because he knew he would never see my dad again. My uncle said, “You don’t know how hard it was for Grandpa, he walked for several weeks weeping,” because he saw us for the last time. I have a picture of him saying goodbye to us, which was very difficult for him. Then my grandma had died earlier during the war because they didn’t have any medicine for her. That was hard also, it was just a difficult time. Another thing that was special to me is, I remember when I was baptized in 1953, my parents did not know very much English. So my baptism, the whole service, my dad did it in the Dutch language. All my friends who spoke English 32 had it all done in English, and mine was all done in Dutch. I remember my dad doing that, so that was special that he did. I will say one thing that I loved about my dad, if he gave his word he kept it, that was always something you could depend on. RN: That was taught by my grandfather, if you give your word you have to keep it. My parents were very supportive of us. In high school Dad always came to every conference. One time my report card, it had a D on it or a C. It was not a good grade. He says, “Well Ria, are you happy with that grade?” I said, “No.” He said, “Well I’ll tell you, if you’re happy with it, I’m happy with it. If you want to do better you can do better.” He left that decision up to me. I’ve always applied that with my son that they have that freedom to choose and I also tell my son, David, “Use that same philosophy that Grandpa had with your children.” JL: I could say one quick thing too that was hard. When I was dating my wife— because kids would always make fun of my parents, they’d say, “Oh they speak funny, why do your parents speak so funny?” So I was always hesitant about wanting to take people over to my house. So when I dated my wife, at one time I didn’t want to tell her that I was Dutch because I was afraid if I brought her over that she would think that we were strange. But what happened was, I brought my wife over to my parents’ home and the nice thing about that is my wife loved it because her grandparents were from Sweden and spoke with an accent so it didn’t bother her one iota. RN: Well and I want to say this too, that I did not want people to know that I was from a different country. I really perfected my English and lots of people say, “Oh you 33 speak perfect English,” unless you hear me have a little accent, then your ears are really good. Anyway, nobody knew that I was from a different country. I started at the Utah State University, living at the dorms. My parents called, and the girls that I roomed with were sitting in the kitchen. As I started talking Dutch through the phone they thought, “What has happened to Ria?” They looked shocked because I was talking Dutch. JL: I had to do a report at school that was hard, because they said, “Oh we have a little Dutch boy and he can teach us everything about Holland. Now is it true that they wear wooden shoes, do all the people wear wooden shoes?” They would ask questions like that. So what happened is I had to give a report. I went home and got an encyclopedia and read all that I could so that I could talk to the class. They were thinking I would be an expert about the Netherlands. It’s interesting because we didn’t have much money, we were very poor. I remember when my mother started me at Washington Elementary she would take the canned milk which was cheaper and put it in a thermos bottle and then mix it with some water. Well what happened was I brought my lunch, my little lunch box to Washington Elementary, and one of the kids said, “Can I drink your milk?” I said, “No you’re not going to have a drink of it,” because I knew the minute he did that he would just balk. One of the first things that I really loved as a little boy was when we first started buying regular milk, that we were able to drink that because we drank canned milk for some time. Then the thing was, the Dutch did not understand some American foods. They had never seen cereals 34 like you see in the grocery store. I always wanted to get cereals but my mother never really wanted to buy any of the cereals, so we ate oatmeal. BW: We’re going to wrap up now. RN: Talking about milk, and I’ll make it real short. In the war, I was in first grade in Holland and the children had not had any milk during the war. I remember distinctly right after the war the schools supplied milk to the children. I remember my mother had given me a little tin cup that we have from home. I remember the time very distinctly. Eleven o’clock, milk time, and they would put milk in these little cups, regular milk not canned milk. Oh it tasted so good, and I made it last. BW: Did you have something else to add? JL: We had a wonderful neighbor lady by the name of Mrs. Curdo. She was not a member of the church, she had a daughter by the name of Colleen. They owned a large apartment. She saw how hard we had it when we first came over, so she brought all of her daughter’s clothes over, and also some other clothing. She also brought her daughter’s socks over. The last thing I wanted to do was to wear her daughter’s socks but my mother and dad had no money for socks, so I had to put those socks on. RN: And they were probably pink! JL: Yes. BW: So, a question that I would like to ask as a final question, and I’m going to word it a little bit differently than I normally do: what can we learn from your family’s experience? What would you say the legacy is of your family’s experience? 35 RN: I think as I said before, working together as a family and not being afraid to work. I love America and my parents did too. If you want to achieve something you have to work hard. Today that theory is being lost. JL: I think also my parents stressed education; it was very important for us all to get an education because they saw that if we got an education that we would have a bright future. They pushed that along, all three of us are college graduates. I remember the first time my sister went up to Weber State University, how happy my parents felt to have someone go to college. They said, “Make sure you develop yourselves,” and I think that’s one of the things that was pushed. The thing is, my mother and dad worked so hard to allow that to happen. Another thing is I had terrible buck teeth, they had no money to have my buck teeth fixed. Mother said, “I will do whatever it takes so that his teeth will be straight.” When I was younger, kids would give me a nickname, “Bucky Beaver.” They would make fun of me because of the terrible buck teeth I had. At that time my mother took on extra work in a job, just so that my teeth would be straight. I’m so grateful for that. I’m grateful also for the dance lessons she was able to get for my sister. She used to tap dance on the kitchen floor, and Mother would say, “Please do not tap dance on the kitchen floor.” Mother told me and Ria, “We didn’t have much during the war, but I want to give you some things I did not have.” She would work extra hard just to buy a dress for Ria. Even though it was very difficult for her to afford it. It was the sacrifices that they made to help us, to make us successful. Piano lessons for all three of us. In fact it was my mother’s wish that someday we would have a great pianist in the family. They were able to 36 buy a piano, because Dad had done some jobs for a gentleman who sold pianos. He was able to buy it at a cheaper price. We all took piano lessons, but piano was not for me, and I finally talked her into getting to play a trombone. Mom thought music lessons were important for your education. RN: Mother was not educated; she went to school until the seventh grade, and then they would go to an apprenticeship. She learned how to be a hat maker. She was taught how to make beautiful stitches that I noticed when she hand sewed. She also made some beautiful hats. To her, education was so important. She says, “Ria, I want you to become a teacher.” “But Mother, I think I would like to become a nurse.” She said, “No, become a teacher.” That’s all women could do: teaching, nursing, secretary, beautician, that was it for women in the sixties or late fifties. JL: Well, my brother was a teacher, an educator in high school. RN: You were too. JL: Yes, I was a school psychologist, and I’ll tell you what my parents encouraged us was to get an education. They also encouraged us to marry people who had developed themselves. LR: Thank you for talking with us today.