Oral History Program Ralph Vander Heide Interviewed by Brian Whitney 16 March 2015 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Ralph Vander Heide Interviewed by Brian Whitney 16 March 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: Vander Heide, Ralph, an oral history by Brian Whitney, 16 March 2015, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Ralph Vander Heide, taken 2016 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Ralph Vander Heide. It was conducted on March 16, 2015 by Brian Whitney. Ralph’s grandparents were both from the Netherlands, and immigrated to Ogden in the early 1900s. He discusses the Dutch community in Ogden, and the experiences of both his grandparents and parents. Kylee Handy, the video technician, is also present during this interview. BW: Today is March 16th, the time is about 1 p.m. We are at the home of Ralph Vander Heide in Ogden, South Ogden, and we’ll be speaking about Ralph’s grandparents and parents and his life here in Ogden. I’m joined with Kylee Handy who will be operating the camera and this is Brian Whitney. Good to see you again Ralph, appreciate it. RV: Indeed, it’s nice to see you two. BW: I appreciate the preparation you’ve put into today. So as you saw, and what I emailed you, I kind of want to start out with your grandparents and just work chronologically forward from there. So a simple way to start, can you just tell me your grandparents names and when they were born? RV: Yes, their names were Ralph Vander Heide, but his name in Dutch is Rapke and at Ellis Island, I guess that’s the famous way they did it. His name became Rapke, I mean became Ralph, but his name was Rapke. The story is that he would give my mother ten dollars if she named me Ralph, he didn’t try for Rapke. He was born in 1861 and he was a tough, old bird. 5’6 or so and he died in December of 1943. At that time I was about six. My grandmother was from 2 another part of the Netherlands, Johanna Hendricks, she died in 1940 and she was about three years younger than my grandfather. BW: She was born in 1858, oh sorry 1864. RV: I believe that’s right. I don’t have her actual date there, but I know she was 3 years younger. BW: When did she pass away? RV: In February of 1940. BW: Tell me where they lived. RV: They lived in West Ogden. BW: No I mean… RV: It’s a little bit of a long story because they stopped in Chicago for two years to have enough money to come on. The story is that grandfather took off and was going to grab a ship in Rotterdam that was going to make its last sailing, that’s how poor he was. The family always told me it was so, but who knows? He went back to get the rest of the family. He started out with leaving two behind, is what I heard. He went back to get them and they all went. One was a babe in arms. So there were five children and grandpa and grandma, oma and opa in Dutch. They had two more when they came here when they got to Ogden. They stopped two years in Chicago. That was 1904, 1902 and they came here in 1904. My father came along in 1906 and one other. BW: So your father was born in Ogden? RV: Yep, but they all spoke Dutch. He spoke also Frisian, they all spoke two languages. The Frisian is as different from English as Dutch is, but Frisian is 3 closer to English than Dutch is. So he seemed to learn the language easily. You know it’s not like today where you have all the modern classes. He was forty, what was he? Do the math, forty two, forty four, I always confuse myself, but I thought it was a great achievement linguistically since I’m a language teacher. He read the papers and he always was struggling. He’d say something and it was true if it was in the paper. So he translated the Dutch literally, “That stood in the paper.” Or he’d say in Dutch, “Het stond in de krant.” We all got a kick out of that. They would drop a lot of Dutch in and so some of those mates wanted to learn Dutch or a little bit. My mother, for instance, picked up a few words and they appreciated that. That’s probably why she was offered the ten bucks, but it seems important somehow that you at least appreciate the culture of whomever you’re marrying. BW: So let’s go back to your grandfather in Holland before coming to the United States. It was your grandfather that came over here right? RV: Right. BW: So let’s go back to your grandfather in the Netherlands. What was his life like back home? RV: Well it was very bad. But now, let’s see, it is a yuppy community, Dutch Yups I call them. People have second houses there and stuff. It’s an amazing change over the years. It was so poor and just nothing to eat they tell you and that sort of thing, just really bad poverty. So coming to the United States was most attractive. He’d been in the Army and that helped. In 1880 he got drafted so you can do the math pretty quickly, he was really young. He met grandma there because she 4 was a domestic in one of the rich patrician houses. She told us the lady of the house would take a white glove and go across things she dusted and she was rewarded accordingly. So it was a good time to get out. BW: So it sounds like they were from two kinds of distinct social classes as well? RV: She was from the province Gelderland, which is a little further east because there are no large distances in the Netherlands, but it means another dialect. So she had to learn Frisian, West Frisian. BW: So grandfather spoke Frisian? RV: Yes. BW: And she spoke? RV: Gelders, the dialect of Glederland. BW: Gelders. RV: They both spoke Dutch, High Dutch. Today there are 350,000 speakers of Frisian and they fight to keep it going in books and so on, which is one of the languages that came from so called Indo-European. You know, that means Yiddish and Scandinavian tongues and German, Danish, etc. BW: So they met while he was serving in the Dutch military? RV: That’s right. BW: She was working as a house… RV: Yes they tell me they met out at Scheveningen, which has been a resort community for years. The very word was used to test Germans because Germans always say shave. So it’s a known fact in Holland, that’s a spy test. If one can’t pronounce it, bam you got yourself a German. 5 BW: That’s a wonderful story. So then when did they decide to come to the U.S.? How quickly after their meeting and marriage? RV: Well you have to do the math there. 18, he was born in 1881, 1861? Drafted in 1888, he was in the Army then. He was a little older than I thought wasn’t he, twenty seven? Is that the math on that? Then they went back to Surhuisterveen to exist I guess, the whole family helping Opa. The word was he didn’t walk that well until he was quite old, they talk about his brothers carrying him to school. My aunt, the oldest of the family talked about not having transportation to school. Which might be obvious but it’s not that obvious because some people had horses. She said then they could ride the horse to school. I don’t know about caring for the horses, so don’t let me go there. BW: They had to carry him you say? RV: Yes, they probably had to help him do things and just carry him around. We had a lot of family gatherings, and you asked me the last time how well they fit in and how well did they stay together or did they split up. Well, they stayed together. They went to each other’s houses for dinners and my oldest uncle, the second oldest of the family, was sort of in charge. He didn’t marry until he was forty eight. BW: So it sounds like they stayed back in the old world for quite a while after his service in the military? RV: Yes. BW: A good twenty years at least. RV: Yes. BW: Then they came over here. What was their decision for coming over here? 6 RV: Well the Mormon Church, but they were converts. They weren’t too greatly helped, they had to stop in Chicago for two years. BW: So did they have a sponsor? RV: Apparently the sponsor wasn’t very strong. They were promised stuff that they didn’t get and they were always kind of bitter about that. Nobody liked to stay in Chicago for two years at that time. At least they didn’t, maybe somebody did. Certainly Chicago was founded and grew. BW: This is during the stockyards time. RV: Yes. BW: Upton Sinclair time. RV: Yes that’s what we were talking about last time. I often think of Opa. I didn’t know enough, he was dead before I knew enough to ask about that stuff and other family members… BW: Do you know what he did for work in Chicago for those two years? RV: Well I, no see I can’t seem to, that seems obvious to me, but many, many have passed away. There are three cousins younger than I, but that’s one little fact we don’t get, but probably in a slaughterhouse. Probably in the stockyards because there was always work in the stockyards. So I hear. BW: So they finally made it over to Utah after eeking out some sort of existence. RV: That’s about it yes. BW: Got here you say it was about 1906? RV: Four. BW: 1904. 7 RV: So I think it was real nice to be here. I mean it’s not quite the beauty of Northern Holland and the meadows and the nice fog, the pretty fog and the water, but it was a tough time. It’s as cold as can be up there. This is dry and whatever we have here, but I think they were glad to be here poor as they were. People did help them with housing. The church had to help them. What else do you do? BW: Now at the time they arrived here. Remind me, how many children did they already have? RV: They brought five with them. BW: Any of those from Chicago, born in Chicago or were they all… RV: Interesting, no. No my youngest aunt was a babe in arms and in fact I think I had it written down here when she was born. No she’s not the youngest, but next to youngest. So she came as a babe in arms with them and then one other daughter was born here and dad, my dad, whose name was Peter. So they didn’t change that. He was born here so anyway it wouldn’t have been changed. What I mean is he got his name. He’s got the right name the first time around if you will. BW: How did Ralph and what… RV: Johanna. BW: Johanna thank you, how did they survive when they first got out here to Utah? What did they do? RV: Well they went right to work, the whole family. Everybody told me this consistently through all my years too. The old man would always scream, “Werken.” Work was the objective because work meant money and you shared it with the family too by the way. You had to get out and get married before you got 8 away from the old man’s outreach, but we understand why that was necessary. His oldest son, Samuel, really took over the family and ran it. That was the European way back then and you still see it. BW: Did he have a trade, Ralph? RV: They told me he was a weaver. He did learn that, but he never practiced it. So here he was a farmer, such as it was, they lived out there where the grain towers are now. Farmer’s Grain we used to call it in West Ogden. Then my Uncle Sam bought that property out there at the industrial park. He had a big piece. He sold it too soon because a few years ago the industrial park came, but he was long passed away and what not. BW: Now did Ralph purchase land out there or did he rent a farm do you know? RV: I guess with Samuel’s help they owned that house out there, but they had to contribute—that’s the story. BW: Do you know what they did, what they farmed, what they raised? RV: Well I’m thinking of Mr. Stratford and some of the guys out there whom I knew. BW: Vegetable? Dairy? RV: Well that’s whatever they raise around here. I’m just not sure. Mr. Stratford and grandfather must have done the same thing though. What did we have in Utah then? We had sugar beets, they must have had some beets. My uncles up north did from my mother’s side of the family. BW: That was the predominant production. RV: There were canning factories all over, they were all over back then. Del Monte was the big one out there in West Ogden, but we also had private ones. The 9 Jones family had one, Nobles, I think their name was Nobles had one. North Ogden Canning as I recall the exact name. I think that’s it, but others. BW: As far as you’re aware did your father or any of the siblings end up working in the canneries? RV: Yes, I think they all did at some point, but dad certainly did. BW: Any memories that your father told you? RV: Yes well he was out of school at grade eight. So he worked at the Globe Mills for twelve years which is right in West Ogden in the middle of West Ogden sort of. It’s a killer job because you breathe that dust and it’s like weightlifting. You have heavy days and light days I guess, but lifting those heavy sacks of grain is truly work. Looks like you’re heading to what the family did now right? BW: Yes. RV: They weren’t Phi Beta Cappa at any of the universities because that’s not what you did. You went to work, work, work. There was Scowcrofts in town, made overalls among other things. Their building is still in Ogden, you know where that is? BW: No I don’t. RV: 24th street down there by the viaduct. There was something called Quinn’s, a place where ladies were hired to sew and make things, clothing I guess. So Scowcroft’s, Quinn’s, some of the immigrants who were smarter, cleverer perhaps than my people, they got to run the businesses. I sometimes say, “My family worked for their families’ right?” They have now become prominent names around town. 10 BW: Any examples? RV: Well I don’t want to say anybody’s name. BW: It’s part of our history. RV: You know the prominent, the Eccles, Scowcroft and these people needed employees. So I guess its fine to say their names they did a great job. They did fine work. BW: Yes, but so it sounds to me like if we’re going to get a picture of Ogden at this time most of the immigrants that were here were only working class. RV: Absolutely. Well when you go into the Bertha Eccles Art Center you read the plaque on the wall. I think he was fifteen years when he came here and had the foresight to know what he was doing or the right friends or whatever and those people all worked together on these projects. They saw trees in the mountains so they cut the lumber and established their companies and so on. Then you branch out and pretty soon you own a bank and you’re on your way. Whereas some of my people put their money in the banks but the depression came and they lost the money which they didn’t have to begin with. BW: Now that’s exactly where I wanted to go next, depression. RV: Yes well it hit them hard. My dad did everything. He used to talk about it a lot. He cleaned what do you call those, sewers? Not sewers, but septic tanks goodness! BW: Wow. RV: I’m losing my historical sense. He cleaned septic tanks. You know the pipeline that goes over the Ogden Canyon, the necklace they call it? He worked on that. He told me he worked there about two days. He was too scared. Whether or not I 11 had food as a baby by god he wasn’t going to work on that pipeline anymore. So my mother comes into this at that time because she was a teacher so she had a job. She was making more than anybody in the family. BW: What was she teaching? RV: She was teaching elementary school up north, Box Elder County, and that family is Danish so that’s another story. BW: What language did your father speak predominantly? RV: Well when he went home they switched right to Dutch, but English. It used to embarrass him actually when his father came down the street and he’d be with two or three of his buddies and one guy was named Jacobson, a Norwegian and they were good friends. My dad would say, “Oh god there’s the old man.” You know, “Hoe gaat het.” Dad said it just embarrassed the bajeezus out of him, but he’d answer him. Today I observe Mexican kids, I watch them in the stores. It’s very similar except there’s a lot more of them. BW: So if their parents are speaking Spanish… RV: I watch in ShopKo and Wal-Mart. The kids go back and forth in English, Spanish, just smooth as can be. In fact the other day we were walking through Wal-Mart and my wife said something, “I’m going this way I’ll meet you in plumeria.” I said, “What?” I don’t think the Dutch took over that much, but nowadays it’s the same idea. They’re wise enough to put everything in two languages for these folks. BW: Why do you think it embarrassed your father? RV: Well he wanted to be a real American and I’ve noticed some ethnic groups are like that more than others. They don’t want the language and other ethnic groups 12 want to hang on to it. The Italians in New York, we lived there twenty two years and it seems to me they really hold on to it. BW: So it seems like there’s a difference between groups that really assimilate into it and groups that really kind of keep to themselves. I know there used to be in Ogden, there used to be a kind of the “Dutch town” area of Ogden, mostly, but other than that it seems like the Dutch were living more diffused. RV: Yes we had the Dutch who spoke Dutch in the Dutch Hollow area. BW: Dutch Hollow? Tell me more about that. RV: It was over there on, now I got to think exactly where that is. 30th street there yes, maybe 36th street just past there and it’s called Dutch Hollow and a lot of Dutch lived there. All the names were here, Timmerman and VanFliet and Van de Graaf. There’s a big fellow about my age, Van de Graaf, who was a friend and they’d get together all the time with his parents. In those days (I always say) my dad knew all the Dutch men and if he didn’t my grandpa did. Obviously they had something ethnically similar. They spoke the same language and tales of the old days and all of that. BW: Did they have any sort of formal organization? RV: Well they did, they had Dutch Days at Lagoon. They had Dutch orchestras, they had singing groups and some of those combined with or joined the Salt Lake groups. I’ve heard some statistics, but there was a big growth there for a while. I think it was in the Depression in the early years and then it slacked off. To my knowledge there are places that are Dutch in Salt Lake, for instance, but it’s not pushed like it was. 13 BW: It seems like we’ve diffused more. RV: You know you had more German in Salt Lake, I mean German places to eat and the whole thing, German bakeries. Obviously you might say they’re more of them but you have to look at the reasons for coming here and so on too. We didn’t have many Italians come here for example. BW: Do you mean specifically Ogden? RV: Yes or anywhere in Utah. Many, we said the other day came for the mines, now that’s a different story too. BW: Well and then we also had the POW camps. RV: Yes but they don’t count because they went back home. Some of them came back. BW: Some of them stayed for family reasons. RV: Yes everybody knew what was his name? Rigo, had a restaurant so there’s one. BW: Yes, one, and no you’re right you find a much larger Dutch population out here. I think the Dutch were attracted to this area. What was the attraction of this area to the Dutch? Do you know? RV: Well sometimes the choice was just where your sponsor brought you, it was that simple. I remember the Gieben family somebody sponsored them and they helped others come over, they helped Burt Havas whose family was in a concentration camp. So yes Havas were helped by the Giebens. BW: So it wasn’t because of the geography of Ogden per say? RV: Well it probably was for some. It certainly wasn’t for a lot of people in my family and some of the people I’m thinking of in West Ogden. I think they just wanted a 14 place where they could get a job, and another place they worked for was the railroad. In that day, if you worked in the shops or in fact if you had any job at the railroad it was a good job. The conductor was a fantastic job and still is today. There were all those railroad based jobs like the freight house where my dad ended up. There’s a funny language thing. In Dutch, people eten (the verb, to eat), but animals freten, and this indicates how much Dutch was spoken to me. My dad went to work at the freight house and after about three days I said, “Daddy what do you do? You just eat all day there?” So that became one of my cutesy sayings as a boy. Another thing they did with me (because I was around, grandpa took care of me). I knew more Dutch than the other grandkids because of that. I lost my thought for a second, let’s see where were we? Freten and eten. BW: And then you had another cute story. RV: Oh yes and the other cute story, this is a good one. The barber shop, Clyde Buehler’s Barber Shop on 25th street just down from Washington by what was then the Broom Hotel, and replaced by that tall green building, but I can’t remember the name. Anyway it’s there, go see. So I would be taken to the barber shop and then I had to sing a Dutch song or give him a couple of sayings and my grandma just spoke in sayings. She said, “Doing that comes to a bad end,” whatever. She just spoke in proverbs, sometimes practically. So you could learn those even though you didn’t know exactly what they meant always. Then I could get a quarter out of that or maybe even fifty cents if enough guys threw in. So that was a good way to spend a Saturday morning or you’d get to do it twice. I 15 think I stood right up and did it and that was your time of bonding with your father. There was the guy with the hat store, he blocked hats and cleaned them that day. There were bars up and down the street and pawn shops, and a little tamer than it is now. Or do I mean not as tame as it is now. BW: When were you born? RV: I was born in 1937. So that was right smack in the depression. I’d ask my dad I said, “Why didn’t you buy some of this land out here?” He said, “Oh I didn’t have any money.” I said, “Hell, it was only a dollar an acre.” He said, “Didn’t have a dollar. Didn’t have a dollar for an acre.” BW: How many siblings do you have? RV: I’m it and that’s a depression issue too. In fact my mother had friends who said, “Why do they have so many kids today? Then, we knew what to do.” BW: So what are your memories growing up in this period? RV: What I remember now, I didn’t really realize I was an immigrant. You see a movie about immigrant experience in Brooklyn or the so called slum districts in New York, but we had some of that too. It took me years to figure that out. BW: Tell me more. RV: Well I wasn’t like some of these, some of the other kids here because you had this other side. You knew a few words of a foreign language, maybe you ate a little bit differently although Dutch food that’s about the same thing, it’s not like exotic spaghetti or something it’s aar dappels as we say. Potatoes and beans and eggs and pea soup, but there are also some vile things like buttermilk soup 16 which is kind of a milky soup they eat. I don’t think my grandmother fixed much of that. She was blind. We are past that story in our interview. BW: Well let’s go back to that. RV: So we’ll go back to it for a minute. BW: Yes let’s go back to it. RV: By the flu the so called… BW: By the Spanish Flu? RV: Spanish Flu or the influenza epidemic or pandemic maybe. BW: Time period wise that was, when did that hit? When did the Spanish Flu hit? RV: Well 1917, 1918 and it taught my dad a lot because he did a lot of work for grandmother. His sisters always comment on how nice he was because the older ones were gone already and he did a lot of cooking and that sort of thing for the family. BW: Was your dad the youngest? RV: No his sister, one younger sister, so they kind of hung out together. They were a twosome sort of and as the older family married off, that was something too, you got out of there. The kids got out and I think the immigrants do that all the time, but there’s just too many mouths around the table and my one aunt was married, three times, otherwise they were pretty well steady, if that’s considered unsteady, I’ve been married a couple of times too. She got out and wanted to see more of the great world and others were happy to stay here being good Mormons in Zion and some were in between. BW: Did the second generation marry Dutch or did they… 17 RV: That’s the other interesting one. Some did, my oldest aunt did. She married John Roghaar who did very well. He had grocery stores in Idaho and got into real estate. He was a good provider as the Jewish people say. The son, Samuel, didn’t marry until quite late, 48 I think he was. The youngest sister married a Dutchman named Kapp, (we have different families of Kap or Kapp here in Ogden) and they had two children. One is my cousin Gary Kapp, he’s my age, and he just had a birthday a couple days ago. He was an outstanding athlete among other things, a realtor and worked at Hill Field many years, did a lot. All American football player so it’s interesting to watch what happens in the second and third generations. BW: Did you find that those who married, that married within the Dutch heritage have retained more of their connection to their background? RV: No I don’t think so. BW: Tell me a little bit about it. RV: I don’t know it’s kind of a strange thing to explain, but I just always had that feeling you tried hard to be a real American and if you were going to associate with the higher types in Salt Lake City then I don’t know if that’s even so. BW: That’s okay this is your experience. RV: But it’s my story and how I feel. BW: So they wanted to present themselves as strictly… RV: Real Americans, yes. BW: Patriotism, how was, how did… 18 RV: Patriotism, I think they were loyal, quite loyalists to the United States who gave them bread and butter. I think they were very appreciative. BW: Your family was here during WWI and… RV: Yes Dutchmen weren’t considered—German’s took a lot of flak, but you know German being my major and having written a book on it, it’s of interest to me. The Dutch, I can’t think of any unless they were mistaken for a little while, although a lot of Dutchmen were sympathizers in WWII, far, far too many. It’s quite shameful in one way and another way it’s survival in Europe. There were probably sympathizers here too but I certainly wasn’t aware of any. My aunt had her stars in the window for her three sons who were in the service. BW: That would’ve been WWII then? RV: Yes in WWII, but that’s the tail, it takes that generation far to move on. In my generation, I am one of the youngest. Let’s see there’s one my age and one younger. So the rest of them are gone. One was a Battalion Chief at the fire department, with the police department and sheriff’s department. Another was a school superintendent in a couple places, a couple were school teachers. BW: These are your cousins? RV: Yes so it’s that generation that finally loses or greatly diminishes the immigrant background I think. BW: Now most of your, as you said most of your cousins were older than you. RV: Right. BW: Some of them old enough to serve in the European Theatre… RV: Yes they did, like I said my aunt had her stars in the window for her three sons. 19 BW: Was there a sense at home, during German occupation in Holland, was there a… RV: Well yes we sent the care packages and the whole bit. BW: What organization did you send them through? RV: Red Cross, and I was once told by my cousin that she didn’t need them, but they were on the farm. I think in other places they did sorely need them. There was much worry about that and my one cousin over there, was he a cousin? Yes, he was shot through the head. His platoon, as I understand it, was captured and they were marched off to the side of the road and told they would go to a prisoner of war camp and they shot them all through the head. It’s called The Battle of Grebbeberg. That’s a mountain in Holland, it’s eighty feet tall, but it’s beautiful, one of the most gorgeous places in Holland. It sits up on a hill in the town of Rhenen above the Rhine and it’s just a beautiful spot. I have family there, they own great chunks of it because they’ve been there for so long and we have visited them way back in the 1950’s, at the end of the 1950’s. I was a Mormon missionary and visited them and have been there a couple times since. They are very strict in their religion. Wow, my grandpa liked that too. He loved to argue the Bible, argue a passage of the Bible. BW: Now Dutch reform, is that what most of your… RV: Yes, as I said before I’d tell you the exact name, but it’s better to explain. It means to be outside of the bands. They’re so reformed that they’re reformed, reformed. They’re outside of the old reformed organization, outside of the bands, the restrictions the Verband. So they’re sort of removed, removed. 20 BW: Was that reformed more in a conservative sense or liberalized sense? RV: Conservative, boy as I say they’re always wearing black and those who belong, belong really strongly. They have the largest church building in the Netherlands. They only have three or so, including the largest one in Holland. They are fighting all the traditions of Catholicism and Lutheran and all those people, Calvin the whole bunch. BW: Then your grandfather comes along and converts to Mormonism and American religion. I imagine that must have caused some riffs. RV: Yes, yes, yes it was good for grandpa it was very argumentative. He had a good friend named DeVries who was a very successful farmer out west here about where the motels are now out on 20th street. He was just right down the party line and they always joked because his wife died. He got married to another woman, brought her over from the Netherlands, then he did it again. He and grandpa would go around and around. There’s a great story about just how much the immigrants change. The bishop caught Opa with a cigar hidden in his pocket that’s the basis of that story. BW: I think you told me a little bit more than that. Did it burn his pocket? RV: He burned his pocket. BW: He burned his pocket. Yes it was still lit. RV: I guess he got excited. I don’t know why because he had a white moustache and it was always stained because he chewed. That was kind of a lousy habit, I guess he picked up in the Army, but he didn’t want to get rid of it, let’s face it. I say he was small, he was 5’6 and feisty, feisty as can be. He’d say things like, “I 21 don’t give a shit for war.” That’s a direct translation of Dutch, “Ik geef geen schijt voor.” Maybe that’s strong for the cameras. BW: No it’s not. The only people who are ever going to see this is me. RV: Okay, okay. Well with the way I’m stumbling that’s probably good. BW: No worries, no worries. We’re getting good stories. RV: You can’t answer everything. I took a lot of kids to Europe and they’d ask me what something was and I’d say, “I’ve never been here.” So after about three or four times I just made something up. Pretty soon they’d catch on to what I was doing. I said, “I told you I’d never been there. Therefore, you get a made up version.” But I won’t do that for you. BW: So I want to get back to your experiences growing up. You realize at some point that you were from a different stock? RV: Yes and you’re different, same on my mother’s side. I figured out you’re different because you have these European traditions in you. Food, well a lot of it’s food. I remember how my grandfather met my mother’s mother, and they discovered that kool was the same word in both languages. “Cabbage,” and I imagine it’s the same in Swedish and Norwegian, same in German. So that’s the common word for cabbage, kool in much of Europe. There’s also other linguistic stories that are real funny. I’ve told you a couple, but my dad was once sent to Mister King who lived in West Ogden and later moved to California, he got really well to do, was a nice guy. Grandpa sent Dad over to get a knife to cut kool and Mister King told the story whenever he could. He said, “Boy how you going to cut coal with a knife?” So they had to go through that for a while and figure out and teach Mister 22 King what kool was. Those things happen all the time, they happen with the modern day Hispanics. I taught high school Spanish and college German. At Clearfield High that kind of thing happened every now and then with the Mexican kids. BW: At some point though rather than you feeling like you’re immigrant history was maybe a source of slight embarrassment (that you weren’t all American), at some point that switched. RV: Yes, I thought that was kind of neat, but I just noticed there’s a period probably when you’re right, when I didn’t know. I thought if you’re at the age where you’re dating you just wondered if that had any influence, but we were a mixed bunch. Some taller than others that’s for sure. BW: What do you mean by that? RV: Well at Ogden High School there were always certain people who were a little bit with their noses in the air right? BW: I see, I see. At some point you embraced this and decided… RV: Yes I thought it was a good thing. Well there’s the Turkish proverb that says, “Learn two languages and you have two souls.” You have a soul for each language you learn and there’s a lot to that. There’s a lot to that when you get into literature. You pick up a new soul without doubt. BW: Would you say that this contributed to your desire to get into… RV: Yes, I was of an age where I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. Some kids don’t, some do, but I wasn’t committed to the law or medicine, history or something when I was sixteen, eighteen or even twenty. I went to Holland when I 23 was what? Twenty one I guess and developed there. That’s my latest book, I call it a Mormon Lad, which is the German term for The Novel of Development and in that genre a young man develops and goes through life and Goethe is famous for being one of the first to use that. Well he probably wasn’t because that’s kind of a common thing, but anyway I felt that I was formed to a great extent through the mission experience even though I gave up by the end, but it was still a wonderful experience. It was great, it was fantastic, to go to Europe, meet the people, learn about your own roots and who you are. It also made clear some things that you never would’ve understood just remaining here about yourself and what’s in you in your Dutch background. I think it’s really neat. BW: So this seems to me and I’ve spoken to several people now and it seems like this was the thing, if you grew up in a Dutch family and you speak a lick of Dutch you were often sent to Holland on your mission. RV: Yes. BW: I think you’re right that’s probably changed because of the way that they treat languages now in missions. RV: Yes I’d like to think I was responsible for some of that for sending them for some training, and I don’t know that I was at all. I’d like to think I was because it was so vital, it was so necessary. These kids came from wherever. I’d say sometimes I kindly name a spot that’s way out in the sticks in Southern Utah, but it’s true and that’s not fair to them. They chatter all the way through the airport on the way to their airplane I notice. They come from the training school in Provo and they really pump it in to them. I knew some of the professors back there. Wilkins and 24 some of them who started those programs. I guess Wilkins was the president, but they were behind it at least and the teachers were Hansen and some of these guys that I had known when I was teaching here. BW: What years did you go over to Holland? RV: I was 58-60. BW: So one of the things that I’ve been seeing as unique for Utah, because during that time period we’d send people back to where their family originated. It seems like there’s this opportunity for the third generation to become reconnected with their heritage. RV: I know some probably don’t want to do it that are uninterested. I watched that too. I watched it among my colleagues. My best friend in the mission his mother was Dutch and he was quite interested in all that. I think I went with him for the first time when he went to his mother’s house or the general area where she lived in Southern Netherlands. Often someone would say, “Let’s go over to my aunt’s house and get some lunch or something.” This happened too, those people took good care of you. I mentioned my oldest aunt marrying a Roghaar and some of that family went back. My uncle’s father and his sister wanted nothing to do with Salt Lake City and Mormonism after a while and they went back to Rotterdam where they established a very profitable business on a Rhine boat. They’re not tugs, they’re the transportation on the river, what do they call them? It wasn’t a tanker either, but it’s tanker-like and they carried goods up and down the Rhine. Those people put their bicycles on the boat, they have their wash hanging out and there they go as far up as Switzerland. 25 BW: What a life huh? You came back here knowing that you were going to do something with language? RV: Yes I did. BW: So from there you studied at? RV: I majored in German, but I made too many assumptions. I really wasn’t ready for German at the U so I went back to Switzerland. I went to the University of Zurich where I was immerged in the language. No it was too tough. I just kind of took it too lightly. I mean I had been studying German and I knew it wouldn’t be real easy, but I thought it’d be easier than it was. BW: Yes, no it’s tough. RV: I wanted the whole cultural thing, the whole setting. BW: Did you always know you were going to come back to Utah after your education? You said you lived in New York for a long time. RV: 22 years, but that was after my second marriage and I wanted to teach. I wanted to get a doctorate and teach university. So Judy was divorced and I was divorced and we’ve been married 48 years or something. So it worked out very nicely. BW: You landed a teaching position out here in Utah? RV: Well, I taught at Clearfield High for seven years when I was first married. Then we went to New York and from 1970 on we were there having a good time in upstate New York in the cold winters and beautiful summers and the beautiful settings. It’s a nice place to live. I was at Skidmore College and that’s pretty well known, small. I went the year that they changed, it became co-ed. It was a girls school before, established by the Scribner family, so one learns a lot that way by 26 getting out from one’s home base and learning how the other half or twenty five percent live. So it’s a good thing to do and I wanted to come back here much more than my wife did, but she’s not from here. She liked this house, liked the surroundings and she’s got along quite well. BW: So we’ll wrap up with a few questions here. How important is it that people try to keep the connection to their cultural heritage? RV: I think it’s very important and to those who say you should discard it, my argument is keep both. I don’t see why you can’t. Again I go to school, every time I’m out there in town and in the Mexican community, because they’re bigger and bigger in Ogden, there are more and more of them, and it seems to be easier and easier for them to handle it. I mean Mexicans were much frowned upon when I was a kid and that’s so lousy, that’s so bad. I think that Dutchmen and other people can experience a little of that once too, for example, the Dutch is called “stiff heads” or “cheese head.” My family always seemed like they did a lot of fighting on the way from school. They’d walk from their home where farmer’s grain is, to the Wilson Lane school, that’s quite a hike. They’d beat each other over the head with their lunch buckets. I don’t know how they afforded lunch buckets so I don’t know how they came into the picture. One of those people out there later became the superintendent of schools here. T.O. Smith had a degree from Stanford, his one daughter was governor for a while here and my family would say things like, “Well T.O. went to school with us and he’s not so red hot. We’d bang him over 27 the head just like we did other kids.” So that was one of their outstanding graduates if you will. That’s how it was. Culturally it’s really very interesting. You don’t know the same nursery rhymes. For example, I was married to a German, and as a child she didn’t know American nursery rhymes. Now some of them you know because they’re all Grimm Brothers stuff but that’s a typical example. That’s why it’s so ludicrous in spy novels and the guy comes in, a Robert Ludlum character. They’re nice travel logs but he comes in, he speaks the native dialect on the mountain top in a remote village in Italy. Even if he did he wouldn’t know it well enough, but first of all he wouldn’t even know it. So if he’d learned Italian at all it would be probably in school with proper conjugations but not these Ludlum guys. They just go along and pick it up in a couple of days. BW: Last question and this is more of a broad just cultural question about the Dutch experience here in Utah. From your education and personal opinion what do you think the overall legacy is of the Dutch immigration experience in Utah? What can we learn? RV: Well maybe we can learn to be thrifty. The Dutch brought us that. We can learn to be energetic in what we do to accomplish things. They’re hard workers I think and the Dutch in general are probably more liberal, maybe not if they’re tightly wired in Mormons, maybe not. They’re tolerant, they have a whole history of tolerance that’s being shaken now by the Arab world, it really is. It’s different when you go there, you see whole streets where I used to live for example, in the eastern part of Amsterdam that are all Muslims. Only Dutch people were there 28 and now you don’t see virtually any. That’s right there in that district. Tolerance has been a Dutch heritage, people have fled to Holland historically. BW: The Jews fled there after Spain. RV: They hid Jews and some of them turned Jews in, but the tradition was, that was shameful. I think maybe also the Dutch can teach you that a brighter day comes because they’re certainly doing well now. They tell you they’re not, but they are. I was just there in September and when my cousin sold his company for twenty eight million Euros he’s doing well. He’s fifty four years old and one of the fifty up and coming, he is up and coming, but a young leading entrepreneur in Europe. BW: Do we still have a Dutch community in Ogden? RV: No I can’t got to a Dutch meeting anywhere. You could back then probably. The Dutch bingo, there’s another one. So you get them hit and miss here. We haven’t said anything about Lagoon. Well we said a little bit, but the Dutch Days at Lagoon, the orchestras, the other societies, bingo societies. BW: Dinners. RV: Yes dinners and just at each other’s homes. BW: That’s not happening as much? RV: No I don’t think so. I think it’s safe to say that, but I can’t speak for other families, but they’ve just become ban this and ban that. You see they’ve become assimilated, that’s how far it’s come or how far it’s dropped. I had something to kind of end up with. Let me do this, I got inspired. I said the Dutch are self-sufficient, they work very hard. This is kind of a wrap up here. They watch how the Americans did it and took sides with that. They did it their way. I mean 29 especially in achieving, if you want to achieve see how they do it. They learned to buy low and sell high and they learned to join them, don’t fight them, but don’t degrade yourself. Why would you? You’re as good as they are, you simply have less money, but one day you may have it. That’s another kind of cute thing. My aunt would say, “Oh that Mimi such and such she wormed herself in there and married a…” One of the Ogden names. “You should have done that Marie.” “Well Denzel’s okay for me. He’s a good old farmer,” or something, so at these family things they’d let all that out. I always tell my wife, “I was called big ears because I picked up on all that stuff.” Not in English they wouldn’t call me big ears. They’d call me something in Dutch or Frisian. Those were the days. BW: I really appreciate you have all this information, it really helps us to understand. RV: Oh it’s fun to do because it must be preserved so that generations understand it. The whole world’s taking these strange twists that I don’t understand.