Oral History Program Robert Wolthuis & Lynnette Hancock Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney 6 November 2014 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Robert Wolthuis & Lynnette Hancock Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney 6 November 2014 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Immigrants at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories, photographs and artifacts related to the immigrant populations that helped shape the cultural and economic climate of Ogden. This project will expand the contributions made by Ogden’s immigrant populations: the Dutch, Italian and Greek immigrants who came to work on the railroad and the Japanese who arrived after World War II from the West Coast and from internment camps. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Wolthuis, Robert and Hancock, Lynnette, an oral history by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney, 6 November 2014, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Frank & Leyonna Wolthuis Wolthuis Family 1928 - 2008 Lynnette Hancock & Robert Wolthuis 6 November 2014 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Robert Wolthuis and Lynnette Hancock, conducted by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney on November 6, 2014. Robert Wolthuis and Lynnette Hancock are of Dutch descent on both sides of their family. They talk about the Wolthuis side of the family, how their grandfather immigrated to America with his family, and how their father eventually started a successful dairy farm in Ogden. Robert’s wife Carolyn is also present during the interview. BW: Today is the 6th of November 2014. We are in the home of Robert Wolthuis in Pleasant View, Utah. We are interviewing Robert Wolthuis and Lynnette Hancock about their Dutch heritage. In particular, today, the Wolthuis family history. Interviewing is Brian Whitney and Lorrie Rands. Thanks for letting us back in your home. We’ll start off with some basic background questions and get further into the story from there. When were both of you born? RW: I was born 7 August, 1935, in Ogden, Utah at the Dee Hospital. LH: I was born the 12th of July, 1941, at the Dee Hospital in Ogden. BW: And what about your parents? When and where were they born? RW: Our father was born in Veendam in the province of Groningen in the Netherlands on the 24th of July, 1905. LH: Our mother was born the 24th of January, 1901, here in Ogden, but of Dutch parents. Her name was Leyonna Van Kampen Wolthuis. BW: When did your parents arrive in Utah? 2 RW: My parents married here in Utah. My father came with his family as immigrants in 1928, and they arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey on the 24th of October, 1928. He was one of nine children who came with his parents, Hindrik and Hillechiena Wolthuis. LH: And our father was the oldest of the family. He really had the option of staying in Holland or coming with his family, but made that decision to come with his family. He had served in the Dutch military prior to coming to the United States. LR: Did he ever say why he chose to come and not stay? LH: Family’s good. It was a fairly close-knit family and I think he wanted to be with them. RW: We need to remember that the Wolthuis family lived on a boat; and the family area in that boat, which you can see in the painting, was not as big as this room. So, nine children and two parents had a very close relationship both physically, socially, and spiritually. LH: Many of the children, though, as they reached a certain age were boarded out to grandparents or relatives. The girls, as they got old enough, went and got jobs. I don’t know if there was ever a point when the whole family lived on the boat at one time. But, if you can imagine—it was about 18x18 feet—having a family of nine children and the parents living in that area. Our father told an interesting story. He said that the far end of the boat was kind of like a little cabin, or little storage shed, and that was where he would sleep at night. He said that he had to go up along the side of the boat. When he got up there, he would hit on the metal railing to let his parents know that he had 3 arrived there safely at the other end. He had no heat; he had a mattress with seaweed, and he said that it always had little bugs. But that was where he would sleep because there just wasn’t room in the cabin itself for him. He also stayed on the boat. He did not go out to work for anybody else. If you’re a skipper of a boat… RW: He did go out to school. He stayed with Grandma Wolthuis and went to school. None of the children, in the years they lived on the boat, actually went to a steady school. Once in a while, they would come into a town such as Rotterdam or Amsterdam, Harlem, or Enkhuizen, or some town where the Dutch government maintained skipper schools. And the children of a skipper could go in there and attend classes for as long as the boat was in the harbor. When it was time to move on with the cargo, the kids came out of school, so a lot of their schooling was done by their parents. LH: Our father was generous in his praise of his dad. His dad taught them a lot. BW: So they weren’t stationary? Was this due to the line of work he was in? RW: Well, the boat was a freight boat. He could haul almost any type of cargo except liquid cargo, so he hauled a lot of things like coal, carrots, potatoes, peat—which was a form of vegetative fuel in the Netherlands—zinc, and sugar. He would go to the beurs, which was the place where shipper and producer met, and he would bid on cargo. Say he went to the beurs in Harlingen, obtained a cargo for Rotterdam, he picks it up and that was their modus operandi in picking up cargo. The hauling of cargo was their livelihood; it drove their life onboard the boat. 4 LH: Our father was given the job of cleaning the hull after each shipment. So they may take a load of manure type stuff out to the tulip fields, then he’d have to clean it and the next load may be a load of flower. So, that was our father’s responsibility. A lot of the boats had what they called the skipper, which was Grandpa, and then they had the “main man,” and Grandpa hired a man to work with him for a while, but then our father became the “main man,” and worked right beside his father. Another interesting thing is that baths were taken in a rowboat that was pulled behind the boat. If you look at the painting, you can see it. They would get out in the rowboat and scrub up, and that was how they took some of the family baths. RW: Most of them were saltwater baths. LH: Wouldn’t feel too good. Another interesting thing is that our grandfather did not swim. So, if a child went overboard, which I think happened every so often, they would throw the round inner-tube type thing to them. Being raised on a boat, you’d think he’d be an excellent swimmer, but he wasn’t. They went to lots of different ports. Grandpa was licensed to go down the Rhine River, all through Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. I don’t think he was licensed to go up into the Scandinavian countries. RW: He was not allowed to get into the open sea. His boat was not big enough, so he could sail on the North Sea coast, but he couldn’t venture out or, say, go to England. But he was licensed to operate in Germany and all three Benelux countries and France. 5 LR: Did your grandfather own a home or property of any kind? RW: No. The boat was it. LH: And it was sold just prior to coming to the United States. BW: Did it help finance their trip to the United States? RW: Yes. He had a man who loaned him the money to build the boat, and when they left Groningen in 1928, September, they arranged with the new buyer to use the boat one more time. They took a load of something down to Rotterdam and when they loaded onto the Volendam they turned the boat over to the new buyer and paid off their debt. LH: It was interesting why they chose to come. There were a multitude of reasons. I think Grandpa thought politically—they had been through World War I—and they knew there was something better. It had been almost twenty years since they had first met the Mormon missionaries before they made the decision to come to America. [To Robert] Can you think of any other reasons they chose to come? RW: Well, it was the [LDS] Church, mostly. They’d all joined the Church in 1923, and those old enough were baptized in Groningen and, they believed in eternal families, and there was no temple in Europe. So, they came primarily for two reasons: one was the Church and the other was economic opportunity. They had the unique experience of landing in the United States and getting into Utah one year before the 1929 Stock Market crash. It was a tough decision to leave the boat and sell it, and that lifestyle—Grandpa loved it, Grandma tolerated it. Our father was old enough that he could have stayed there and done a similar business. Carolyn makes a good point: the Hillechiena Harmina. 6 LH: Which was the name of the boat. RW: Was one of the last sailboats, freight boats, in the Netherlands. LR: Could you repeat the name of that? RW: We’ll spell it out for you. Grandma’s name was Hillechiena, so he named it after his wife. But they were then in a transition period of going to diesel engines, and the guy who bought the boat took it into a yard, cut it in half, extended it by about thirty feet and installed a diesel engine. Grandpa would have faced that requirement had he stayed there. LH: And Grandpa tells the story, as you go down the canals, this boat was dependent entirely upon wind. He said sometimes when there was no wind, you were what was called “dead in the water,” and he was literally dead in the water. They were not moving. And he said a boat came by… and correct me, Bob, was it a brother… RW: Let me get this part straight for you. It was, as they were coming in the Zuiderzee up near Lemmer, and they were dead in the water in the sea, not in the canal. There was a tradition in the Netherlands for a motorized boat to give a sailboat a tow, and this guy came by and it turned out to be his brother. He asked for a tow and his brother told him no, he wasn’t going to tow a Mormon boat-owner. That was very difficult for my grandfather. But, if you turn to your left, there’s a little statue there, and when they were dead in the water in canals there was a small industry of boat-pullers. These guys usually had one horse, and they could pull the sail boat along the canal fairly easy. 7 BW: You mentioned that there was a clash between the brothers over religion. What was the family’s religious background before conversion to Mormonism? LH: Dutch Reformed. It was interesting when they boarded the SS Volendam to come to America that members of the Dutch branch came to see them off, and Grandpa’s brother and some of his children showed up in Rotterdam. RW: One of Grandpa’s sisters rode the bike from her home in Slochteren near Groningen, when they took their farewells. LH: It’s interesting. In 1956, when my parents and I took our grandparents back to Holland. It was Sunday morning and we’d gone to the branch in Utrecht. We walked in, and there were two of Grandpa’s brothers. It had been twenty-eight years since they’d seen the family. They said, “We knew it was Sunday morning, and we knew if we came to the Mormon Church we’d find you.” It was quite a reunion. I spent quite a number of weeks with my parents taking my grandparents back around. All the relatives just greeted them with open arms, so things had softened over the twenty-eight years. It was really touching to see them reunited, because the grandparents were in their late seventies when we took them back. To see that reunion was a very priceless thing to me. To see our grandparents reunited with sisters and brothers, it was really neat. Over the years, we have kept in touch with several of the family members. BW: I’d like to go back to World War I. You said that it was your father or your grandfather that was in the Dutch military. RW: Our father, Frank. 8 BW: Did he serve during World War I? RW: No. He was not old enough. He had to serve for a brief time in basic training and then he had a six-month active duty stint, and then he became what the Dutch called somebody who could be called up in time of warfare. Had they been there in 1939 or ’40, he would have been subject, although he would have been 35 years old, would have been subject to being called up. In fact, when the war broke out in the United States, the Dutch government sent him a notice to report for duty, which he ignored. BW: When the war broke out in the United States—you’re talking about Pearl Harbor attacks? RW: No, I’m talking about the German attack on Poland in September of ’39, and then the attacks on Belgium. The Germans did go into Holland in May of 1940. LH: My dad told some really neat stories about this time period and World War I. He said that they really never suffered from food shortages because the boat was always going to the canals and hauling stuff. His dad, Hindrik, would say to our dad, or one of the kids, “Here, take this bucket and go down to that farm down there and see if you can get something.” And they did a lot of trading. So Dad said that they never really went hungry as many of the other people did. A really fun and interesting story is that there were some commodities you just certainly couldn’t get, so Grandma would peel potatoes and cut them up and put them in a pan of cold water. If you remember, the starch goes to the bottom if they sit there long enough. She would always save that starch to thicken a little milk to make a pudding. He said that they were very creative. 9 At one point, they’d gone over to Germany with a load, and Grandpa had bought a new washing machine and they had put it on the deck of the boat. The Germans were stopping and confiscating a lot of things. He had a cover over it, and my dad was so mad, he said, “If those Germans take that…”, but they didn’t keep it. There was always the chance you would be stopped and anything you were carrying, confiscated. RW: Just one story from when the war began. He was in Germany and he raced like the dickens to get back over the border into the Netherlands. LR: Was that in World War I? RW: Yes. I think it would be probably 1918, maybe even earlier than that, but in that time frame. BW: Were they fairly prosperous out there or is it economically always a struggle for them? LH: Are you asking in Holland before they came? RW: I think you could say they were lower middle class. They had enough clothing, they had enough food. Grandpa did not pay off the boat until 1928 when he left, so he did not have enough income to pay off that loan to T. G. J. Wortelboer who loaned it to him. So, I think you can say they had sufficient, but they were not overly well-off. LH: They were very humble. It’s interesting; I talked with two of my aunts to the original family. One is going on 93 next month and the other is about 87, and I spoke with them last night for quite a while. The younger one said she doesn’t remember a lot about coming to America. And you, yourself, think back to when 10 you were 4 or 5 years old and there’s not a lot of memories there. The one, Aunt Jean, who’s going to be 93, said she remembers. I asked her what she remembered most about coming to America, [it] was having to start school. She said, “I was bullied and picked on just horribly, I came home one day after I’d had about all I could take, and told my mother, ‘I’m never speaking a word of Dutch again.’” She said that she worked really hard, and in about six months she was fluent in English. Of course, being younger, I guess it came easier to her. I recall back when I was in junior high and there were still immigrant families coming, and I remember several of the kids, especially one girl that was Dutch, that was really picked on and bullied. They’d shove her in the locker. Just horrible things. I tried to befriend her because she was a Dutch girl. I thought of my own family. It took a while before some of these families truly integrated into life in Ogden. RW: Jean’s Dutch name was Klazina. She picked up the nickname of “Cluck” among her schoolmates. That was part of her decision. LH: Another funny one: I talked to them about our uncle Bart Wolthuis, who was Mayor of Ogden. As a young boy he was taught some not-so-nice words by some of the kids while he was trying to learn English. RW: By some of the De Vries boys. LH: Yes, De Vries boys. And they used it on the bishop? RW: Yes. LH: Only once. Never again. When they first came from Holland, there was several things that was required. You had to have a sponsor. And the responsibilities of that sponsor was to say that you would have a job when you got here, and that 11 you have housing for the family. So, their very first house was a little, two bedroom, maybe it had three rooms, and my aunt Jean said it was horrible, “There were three of us sleeping in a bed; and sometimes two beds to one of those bedrooms. We were just literally crammed in there,” but of course they were used to living in close quarters. But on the boat, there were compartments; here they were just kind of together. She said that was really hard. Then they moved over to another house on 33rd. RW: That first house was on 35th street, just above Wall. It no longer exists. Then they moved to 33rd. LH: And we do have pictures of all of these houses. RW: Then they moved over to Steven’s Avenue, which I indicated earlier was Dutch Town. Then they lived on 30th Street. Then they bought their home on Patterson Avenue: 177 Patterson. And then in the space of ten years, during the Depression, they paid off their mortgage. LH: In fact, I have some of their mortgage payment papers I’ve kept. It was interesting, in talking to the aunts last night. I said, “Wasn’t Patterson really a Dutch Street,” and they said, “Oh, no. It was Italians.” And they rattled off Italian names. So I was kind of misled, I though Patterson was a lot of Dutch ones, but it was up there on Stevens and 33rd where all the Dutch people were with regard to the Wolthuis family. But she said it was a wonderful street to live on. She said the Italians and the Dutch got along very well. She laughed, she said, “We were always sharing food or cooking,” and she said that, “It always smelled like ketchup on Patterson.” 12 When they finally got to Patterson, Grandpa had a little chicken coop in the back and raised chickens. As grandchildren, we were not allowed to go run around in the backyard because we would frustrate the chickens. Another thing Grandma used to make was headcheese—if you know what headcheese is made from. BW: Can you explain it? LH: It’s made from a lot of the glands in the neck. Aunt Jean said she would put in the tongue, cook it all together, chop it up, and pack it in some kind of casing. That was headcheese. She said, “I just hated it when mom would make headcheese,” because it would smell so bad. LH: Another thing that was common—and I’m kind of bouncing around, so bring us back to where we need to be—it’s a Dutch custom, if someone comes, to offer them a drink, usually lemonade and cookies. That was just a custom, and I remember Grandma often having cookies there for us. The best thing she made was olie bollen. BW: Can you explain olie bollen? LH: Olie bollen are wonderful! It’s much like donut dough, but then you just drop small spoonfuls into the hot grease. They cooked up, then you dipped them into powdered sugar or granulated sugar. A lot of Dutch people would put cut-up apples in them or raisins. Our particular family hated raisins, so Grandma would always make us a separate batch. But Christmas Day evening, you always ended up at Grandma’s to have olie bollen, and we’ve kept that tradition going. 13 Bob and Carolyn sponsored a great big family reunion that we had down at the train station. How many did we have? RW: 412. LH: 412. Big banquet tables, it was a meal. And a cousin and I were in the kitchen cooking olie bollen as fast as we could, because every one of the grandkids just remembered olie bollen; it just brought back such happy memories. And we have the recipe for you. BW: I’ve eaten it. It’s so good. LH: They’re so good. It’s kind of like a little scone in a ball. RW: Also one of my grandma’s treats was Droste chocolate. It’s a Dutch product and this is a genuine Droste cocoa can and she made that to go with the food of the day, and sometimes with the olie bollen. LH: Another thing I remember about my grandparents when they settled at the house on Patterson is that Grandpa would get up early morning and listen to the national news. That radio was on the minute the news came on in the morning. I think having lived through World War I and then the invasion of Germany, that that was really near and dear to him. I didn’t particularly like it, but boy, Grandpa would just sit there with his little plastic radio about this big on the AM station, and just inhaled the news that came for the day. BW: I want to go back to the immigration into the United States. You mentioned that, due to their religious conversion, part of the reason was to come over here and be with the Latter-day Saints, to have a temple. Was there also a sense, because 14 of the escalating wars in Europe, was there a sense that it was a time to get out of there for safety reasons or anything like that? RW: They applied for their visas in 1924. They had to wait four years before they could come to the United States unlike issues today in the United States. So World War I was behind them. Hitler had not arrived on the national scene. He was involved in Nazi party politics in Germany, but I think it may have been a small factor, but it was not the large factor. The decision to come to the United States was religious and for economic opportunities. BW: And then they walked right into the Great Depression. RW: Correct. LH: There’s a paragraph here that said almost concurrent with baptism was Hindrik’s application to the American Consul in Rotterdam. Edwarde Dowe, for the necessary documents and approval to enter the United States as permanent residence. Mr. Dowe was most cooperative—the legal waiting period imposed by the U.S. Government at the time Grandpa applied was four years. At the end of this waiting period, Mr. Dowe issued the necessary visas for all family members. Hindrik and Hillechiena and six younger children were given numbers 640-647, the three elder were given the next numbers. The four-year wait gave them time to prepare and save. It also allowed the extended family more time to conclude that Hindrik and Hillechiena were really making some serious mistakes. They were persecuted a little. Again, I’m going to reiterate what it meant for me to see my grandparents reunited with their siblings. My grandmother had an aunt, Jantina, who was in her 15 90s. To see them embrace and know that over all those twenty-eight years that they’d been here, that relationship had improved and they were able to be there. RW: Jantina had to be a sister, not an aunt. LH: Oh! It was an aunt. LH: Our aunt. Grandma’s sister. It was just wonderful. Now I’ll share just one other really fun story. When we went back, my father of course was 19 when he left, so he knew Holland. One day, we were stopped for a drawbridge over a canal and my dad jumped out of the car and went running along the canal hollering at the guy on the boat. He came back and said, “Oh that was so-and-so, one of my friends. He told me that the boat was over at the sugar factory.” So we jumped in the car and went straight over to the sugar factory. The boat had not been in Holland for probably three or four years. It had been up in the Scandinavian countries. They had come in just a day or two sooner to get this load of sugar and they were leaving the next day. So, I was the first grandchild to actually go on the boat. BW: How old were you? LH: I had just finished ninth grade; I was 14. It was just an incredible experience. This was Grandpa’s boat! Tell them where it is now… RW: Well, we looked for the darn thing for a long time. LH: For a lot of years. RW: And we finally had an archivist—and I have a lot of respect for you people—and those kind of people who took the time and the interest in identifying where it was, because all boats in the Netherlands are registered, and he found it. He told 16 us that it was in Amsterdam. And we found it there; it had been modified into a hotel. It hadn’t been out of the port for years and years, but it’s still sitting there and we have some pictures here that shows that unique bow of the boat. So, Carolyn and I wrote this book on the grandparents in 1996. I think that was the year. And we visited all kinds of archives in city and provincial government offices. And we had to go to Amsterdam to get the birth certificate of one of the children who had died. We were six hundred yards from the Hillchiena Harmina and never knew it. It was several years later that we finally found it. LH: A lot of the grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren have now visited it. So, a little piece of history lives on. RW: It’s a sacred… LH: And in almost all of our children’s and grandchildren’s homes, a picture of the boat hangs there for what it means to all of us. LR: I can tell how much it means. It holds a very special place. That’s great. LH: We count our blessings and we think of how lucky we are, living where we are, and it is because of those grandparents that made that sacrifice. I remember the story of one of the little daughters stepped on a needle on the boat before they got into Hoboken, and Grandpa was upset because if you were ill or anything, you didn’t come into the United States, or they held you. RW: You were quarantined. LH: He told her in no uncertain terms that she couldn’t limp, and that they were going to be okay. We do have a picture of the family when they came. BW: They came to Hoboken rather than New York? 17 LH: Why was it not Ellis Island, Bob? Do you remember? RW: Ellis Island had been shut for that at that time. BW: Any other stories from their crossing or getting to Utah after their arrival at Hoboken? LH: They rode the train from Hoboken to here. The story they talked about: Mr. Weston, who was the sponsor—Joseph Weston—came with his little car…do you remember what it was? I want to say a Model T, but it was newer than that. He picked up the grandparents, but the kids all had to walk. So, they leave the Ogden Station and they’d then give them directions: “You go just right up Wall and past Shupe Williams Candy Company,” and find their own way. So they were on foot from the day they landed in Ogden. RW: Well, let me embellish that. You know this as well as I do that you have different versions of different stories, and the thing you want to try and do is get to the truth and who knows if there are two stories about it: one was that they walked and they finally got to the Weston home; another one was that they only walked one block and sat down in front of Shupe Williams Candy Company and waited for Weston to come back and find them. Mormon missionaries had kind of led the family to believe that they would be on the train with Pullman accommodations, and there were no Pullman accommodations from New York to Chicago to Omaha, Cheyenne, and Ogden. They sat up for the whole four days on the trip. LH: And with a family of nine…and the littlest one was a little toddler. 18 BW: So you mentioned the Mormon missionaries—there were travel arrangements made through the missionaries, then? RW: No. The missionaries had worked with them on a sponsor; the travel relations were made mostly by themselves with the Holland American Line and the SS Volendam was a Holland America boat. As a byproduct, Carolyn and I took a cruise in Alaska two years ago on a newer version of the SS Volendam. But all of the travel arrangements were made with the railroad company and the line. This picture is the family on the foredeck of the Volendam. LH: We might note that Grandpa Hindrik had been to America a couple of times. As a young man, he had been onboard—can’t remember the ship; it’s in the book— and been to America a couple of times with the ship he was working for until he became his own owner. Our father spoke fairly good English, he said. To this day I maintain he always prayed in Dutch, but he said it was English. Having traveled so much with Grandpa and the boat, and then being in the military, I don’t think learning English was ever a problem for our dad. RW: Well, it wasn’t for Dad and it wasn’t for most of the girls, but it was for the grandparents. They never really learned good English. They could confer with some people in basic dialogue, but the language in the home was Dutch. It was Dutch to the children and all of the children retained pretty good knowledge and speaking ability of the Dutch language. LH: I know when I visited with Jantina, or Klazina, last night she said that she felt her dad never got English down pat. She said Mom did a little better. And I got thinking about it through the night last night, and I thought, I don’t really 19 remember having a conversation with my grandpa. You did [to Bob], because you went to Holland on your mission. RW: Another thing that bears on family history and research, that if any of your students up there read this or see it, my grandfather wanted in the worst way to share his life with us. They had a couch, and he would often sit me down on the couch and he’d try to talk to me about his past and his life in the Netherlands as a skipper, and I did my darndest to get off that couch because I couldn’t understand him. I went to the Netherlands as a missionary; I started looking in the family histories, and I could kick myself for never ever sitting down with him and saying, “Grandpa, tell me your story.” I could have done that after I came back from the Netherlands. A lot of historians and a lot of family history writers don’t take advantage of the moment to get the knowledge in the history from those who lived it. I made that mistake. LH: I made a mistake [with] the next generation, because I became very interested in our family history, but by then our father had had a stroke and so I would spend many, many, half-hour segments with him trying to get information from him. And he would sometimes call me when I’d leave a session and gone home and say, “Don’t close the book yet.” Of course, in his slurred speech, but, “Don’t close the book yet, I’ve got another story to tell you.” Carolyn, do you have Dad’s book? So, I started this whole episode trying to gather information from my father who had had a stroke, and I’m right there with Bob: don’t wait. Don’t wait. I’ve always told my children that, “Nobody’s going to write my life history; I’m going to write my own.” This is the one I did on our father, not quite as documented as 20 Bob’s, but it kind of got us going on these histories, and we’ve done them on all of our grandparents now. But nobody can tell you, nobody can say, “This is what he meant. This is what he thought.” No. You don’t know what he thought; you don’t know what he meant. So, first of all write your own history, and second of all get it from the person. LR: We understand that. BW: Let’s talk about the early integration into Utah. LR: Let me ask this question: was Joseph Weston a relation? RW: No. Joseph Weston was a former missionary in the Netherlands. And there was also the DeVries family—Bouwe DeVreis, who had come to America through his family—was also back in the Netherlands as a missionary, and he was very close to our grandparents. So, a lot of these sponsors for Dutch immigrants in that time frame were former missionaries or Dutch families in the United States. BW: Actually, I need to back up a second before we get into immigration. Did they purchase a home out here prior to…you had to have a home to get through… RW: No. As soon as they landed, the whole family was farmed out for a few days or months, and then they bought this little single-family house on 35th Street. It wasn’t until about, I’ll have to get the date, probably 1931-32, that they bought a house on Patterson Street—177 Patterson. LH: Backing up to…back to our headcheese. One of our cousins said that Grandma and Grandpa cooked a pig’s head, pulled the meat off and added spices; they used it as a sandwich spread. I found a tooth in the spread one time. 21 BW: So now we’re in Ogden. We’re on Patterson Street. They finally have a home. It’s predominantly an Italian neighborhood. LH: Well, there were Italians who lived on Patterson from Wall up to Grant. RW: Lincoln. I would say it was more of a mixed neighborhood: Italian families, American families, and the Wolthuis family. LH: We’ll talk about some Dutch treats when we get to the other side of the family. BW: You mentioned that there was also a little bit of a culture conflict at some point. LH: Well, it was mainly when the kids started to go to school. The youngest daughters were the most affected because they were into elementary school. Aunt Jean said she was really bullied. She said it was horrible. Before we got to the point where we are today about bullying, it was real, it happened, and you just didn’t get away from it if you were different or handicapped or whatever. I just can think back—I went to Burch Creek Elementary and South Junior High—and I can remember some real nasty bullying. RW: The integration of the family, I think, was a mixed bag. Grandpa and Grandma never, as we alluded to, learned good English, but all the children did at one level or another. They all went to work. A couple of the girls went to work for American Linen and Dad went to work at Southern Pacific Railroad. Bart and Gerrit went to school and they were outgoing guys, and Bart and Gerrit both went to Weber College, and Bart was freshman class president. LH: And he was king of the Snowball Dance. RW: Yeah. And as the girls married, two of them married Dutchmen. Jane married Balster Post and Annie married Cornelius Visser. Everybody else married an 22 American with no Dutch connections. One of the things that the grandparents did in their social life was they belonged to a Dutch dinner club. Once a month, they would go to each member’s house for a dinner. Grandpa and Grandma often had the family down to their home, and it was a big affair; we all tried to make that. One time at about the 75th birthday, we had a gathering up at Patterson Avenue and all of these kids and grandkids running around, and Grandpa turned to his son Gerrit, and he said, “Gerrit, without me none of this would have happened.” Neither one of them ever learned to drive a car. At the time in Ogden they had to shop by bicycle or somebody had to pick them up in a car to go to Coops or down to the American grocery store on Washington Boulevard, or somewhere else. They maintained for all intents and purposes a Dutch menu. They ate a lot of Dutch dishes and Dutch gravy, which they call sju, and red cabbage. Their breakfast was sometimes toast or something with some chocolate sprinkles on it. LH: Or boiled eggs. RW: But they integrated within the Dutch community and then, as is always the case, with American immigrants. The kids went out on their own and they became Americans. I think I told you this: when Grandpa and Grandma and my parents came back from the Netherlands, they landed in New York. Grandma got down on the runway and kissed the concrete. LH: She was so glad to be back in America. RW: So glad to be back in America. So they became Americans, but they never really gave up their Dutch heritage. If you drove down Patterson Avenue in the ‘40s or the ‘50s in the late afternoon, you would see Grandpa and Grandma sitting on 23 their porch in two red chairs. That was their entertainment for the evening. I had a lady come to me one time, and I don’t remember if it was when I was speaking in a church or I was campaigning in the ’72 political Congressional race I was in, and she said, “I just want to tell you how much I loved your grandpa, because I used to go buy eggs from him and he would always give me brown eggs, and once in a while he would give me thirteen,” a baker’s dozen. LH: I loved to go to Grandma’s house because we would play kick the can. There was an alley behind there…never a fear, we just thoroughly loved being there and playing there. Not many of the grandchildren got to stay with Grandpa and Grandma for any time. I one time got to stay there and they had a wood-burning stove in the kitchen, and Grandma warmed the brick, and I went into one of the two bedrooms that were ice cold and I had the warm brick in there. The only heat they had was in the living room; was a big oil-burning—it was wood-burning to start with… RW: Wood-burning to start with. LH: Then oil. The kitchen had its wood-burning stove and the other, the bedrooms, were just ice cold. RW: They had the boys sleep out on the back porch—screen porch. LH: Summer and winter. RW: Summer and winter. So those guys knew what it meant to cover up. Another thing that was a big event in their life was when they got natural gas. Grandma was so appreciative of having the whole house heated. 24 LH: Maybe we ought to share a little bit about Grandpa working at the Municipal Building. LR: Please do. LH: I have an article that the newspaper did showing him riding his bike. He would ride it there and work nights, I think, quite a bit at the Municipal Building. One time I went to visit. I don’t remember if Mom was with me or Dad, but he took us up to the top where they kept prisoners. I don’t know if you knew, that used to be the jail up at the top of the Municipal Building. Oh, I was terrified as a child, but Grandpa did all of the custodial work there. I’d often think: you’d go from owning your own boat and traveling the waterways of Europe, and then you come to riding a bike and doing janitorial work, but he did a good job and he did it for a lot of years. Another job they had, they cleaned the old 19th Ward LDS church house just below Wall Avenue. Their job was to clean the building and, at that time, they had glass sacrament cups. I remember one time going down there with my grandpa and grandma, and Grandma would wash and just shine every one of those glass sacrament cups, so it was ready for the next Sunday. They did that quite a few years, too. BW: I’m getting the sense: they’d come here to America for opportunity—economic opportunity—religious belief, they are part of the dominant religion, but there’s still this sense of separateness it sounds like. RW: Culturally, I think you’re correct. They saw themselves as Americans. They integrated as best they could. But their close friends were Dutch. Their communication in the home was Dutch. I think it would be safe to say that their 25 memories were of the Netherlands, the freight boat, and they had a lot of family over there and, especially during the war, they were very concerned about them. So the parents were mixed in their integration; the children, over a period of years, became pretty thoroughly integrated into American and Ogden society. The two girls that married Dutchmen retained a language environment, unlike the ones who married Americans, which didn’t. So, Annie and Jane had married Dutchmen. I can remember one time when they wanted to go to Rock Springs and visit their daughter; their son Gerrit rented a car. He drove them up there and drove them back. So, I think your question is—quite thorough for the children, mixed for the parents. LH: Well, and the younger ones, it was a whole different thing. Aunt Jean, who’s the 93 year old, married a military man and her husband retired as a brigadier general, and so they had traveled the world. The very youngest child, Dena, married Orla Charles Shurtluff, a very successful businessman in the area. To them, there was no hint of Dutch in their speaking or anything. Culturally, both of the aunts, when I talked to them last night, said, “Oh, I remember Dutch Day at Lagoon.” I’ve never heard of that one, but she said that was something they so looked forward to, was that all the Dutch people would gather at Lagoon. They also remembered the Dutch Day at Lorin Farr Park, and all of the Dutch people would come; they’d bring picnics, and I can just close my eyes and envision all those Dutch people sitting around—I mean they just had a wonderful time together. And the other I alluded to was a Dutch fireside. It was 26 on a Sunday night, and we’d go to the chapel that’s no longer there, but it was on Grant… RW: First Ward chapel was on Grant. LH: I remember I always took lots of stuff to do because I didn’t understand anything. They would have a speaker, they would sing lots of hymns in Dutch and stay after and have cookies and punch. But neither of my aunts remember a lot about it, and you don’t remember a lot about it, do you? RW: No. LH: So that’s my memory, going to that. I don’t remember it going on for years, but I remember that there were a number of occasions that I went with my parents. I’m the youngest in my family, so I think I experienced things with my parents that my siblings didn’t. They were enough older. But that was always a wonderful occasion for them, too. I feel like the Dutch people looked out for new immigrants that were coming. This is our funny story in our family: our mother had a beautiful oak table with the claws and a couple leaves that would go out, she had all the chairs for it, and she gave it to one of the Dutch immigrant families because they didn’t have a table, and she bought a new red Formica top table. I don’t think it even occurred to her. RW: One step forward, two steps back. LH: But that family needed those—the DeRykes, I think, was the family. I remember sharing some clothing with some of the immigrant children. I feel like they looked out for each other. 27 BW: Talk to us about Stevens Avenue. What are your memories of it? RW: Almost non-existent. I wish I could tell you more. But Stevens ran, I think, between 33rd and 32nd, and as you drove out to go to the landfill, which you probably don’t know was out by the river, Stevens was a half block below Wall Ave in Ogden and it was a lot of frame houses, and they were similar in design, and all I can tell you is that the Wolthuis family lived there for a short time and that Gerrit and Bart both mentioned to me that it was called Dutch Town. That’s about all I know. BW: Where there businesses? LH: I don’t think there were businesses there, but just housing. Both of my aunts alluded to Stevens Avenue last night, saying that’s where the Dutch congregated. Like I said, when we get to the other side of the family, we’ll find another part of Ogden that was very thickly populated by the Dutch. The family has done well. If you go through each child—maybe it was the next generation that arose above it—succeeded in education and missions. Bart was Mayor for three terms, four terms in Ogden. BW: And Bart is your… LH: Uncle. Our dad’s brother. Very outgoing. Very prominent dentist in the area. He had a son and a grandson now that are dentists in the same office building. Gerrit served in the military—was a pilot and then was in business with our dad. Like I said, if we go to the grandchildren of Hindrik and Hillechiena, you find an extremely successful family and one that has valued education. I think that was one thing that we all wanted because Grandpa and Grandma weren’t able to 28 have it, our own dad wasn’t able to finish school, so education has become a very energizing thing within our family. LR: Going back to your uncle Bart. Was there a lot of support when he ran for Mayor? Within his family? RW: His first appointment as Mayor was from the City Council. It was a Council appointment. I think he did run one term in the General Election. For reasons of uniqueness, I’m going to tell you another Bart story. He went to school and became a dentist and was assigned to the European command in Germany. As the war was winding down, he was able to get a vehicle and quite a bit of foodstuffs, and he took it back up to the family members in the Netherlands. One of Bart’s most unique stories was that they came into a German town which I cannot identity, and they found this barn. One of the Sergeants said to him, “You know, the dimensions of that barn do not quite mix.” And they began checking around, and they knocked down a few bricks, and they found a Mercedes Benz bricked up in this barn for the purpose of hiding it. They took it, Bart began to drive it as his personal car; he made the mistake of going to a meeting one time where George Patton was present, and Patton came in and said, “Who is driving that Mercedes?” And Bart said, “I am.” He says, “Not anymore,” and Patton took the car. LH: I have never heard that one. Bart has two sons in the area, plus a couple of daughters. But John Wolthuis is a neurologist in the area and Bart Jr. is a dentist. So, if you’d want to extend this, I did talk to John and said, “Do you want to be 29 part of this?” and he said, “No, you tell it.” But they probably have some wonderful memories, too. LR: My question was more did he have the support of the family? Were his parents excited that he had integrated himself; did they feel like they had succeeded? RW: I think we have to speculate on that question, but I’m going to say yes. I think they were very proud of him. I think they were very proud of Bart’s and Gerrit’s service in the military; they were both commissioned officers. Gerrit was a B-25 pilot, he had standing orders for the Japanese theater when the atomic bombs were dropped, so they were cancelled. But I think they were very proud, not just of those guys but of their whole family. They came to America for economic opportunity as well as church, and I think they saw that dream and that purpose was realized. LH: And it was a close-knit family. I loved Christmas because you’d spend Christmas Day going around to all the cousins, or all the aunts and uncles, and end up at Grandma’s for olie bollen. It was good. BW: [to Lorrie] Do you have any further questions before we talk about City View Dairy? LR: No, let’s talk about City View Dairy. BW: We’ll start at the beginning of City View Dairy; when it was founded and the story behind it. LH: And he [Bob] is the expert on that. RW: I don’t say this categorically, but I suspect it’s true that when Dad was kicked off the brand new Hillechiena Harmina, it broke his heart, because Grandpa had just 30 picked up the ship from the ship builder. He brought it to Veendam and he informed Frank, who at that time was 13 or 14, that he was going to have to abandon ship and live with his maternal grandmother so that he could go to school. His maternal grandmother, Geesjen Veldhuis, was a widow, and she made her living as a milk woman. She had a cart and two big milk cans, and she would go down to one of the dairy farmers on either the Oosterdiep or the Westerdiep and buy the equivalent of ten gallons of milk, then she would peddle it in the streets of Wildervank and Veendam, and he went with her periodically to do that. When Dad got to the United States, his first employment was with the Southern Pacific Railroad where he was an engine cleaner, and then he’d picked up a part-time job delivering milk for Belvedere Dairy, which was on Washington between 32nd and 33rd. Then he decided that he wanted to be a dairy owner himself. He bought a cow, a Jersey cow, and that was a serious mismatch. He did not initially know how to milk the cow but eventually learned. But if you know anything about cows, of all the milking breeds, Jerseys are the hottest tempered. So he finally sold the cow and he started buying some milk from Belvedere Dairy, and he bottled it in the little facility there on 3906 Ogden, and he had a canvas bag that my mother made for him. And I don’t know if he… I think his first milk deliveries were raw milk, and then he somehow came up with a little pasteurizer. And he did it all on a bicycle for the first several months. And after a point of some growth and his first customer was his mom and dad. LH: Go Mom and Dad. 31 RW: And another Dutch family. He decided to go all out and he converted the little building behind the house into a little dairy plant. He dug a big deep well for water and began to equip it with a few machines—a pasteurizer, a bottle washer. On the second shelf down, up there are samples of soon to be dairy bottles. The two round quarts that have white in them. They were washed by hand. He had three tubs: one a soaker, one a washer, one a rinser. And he had a motorized brush and these bottles were put in the brush like this, and then rinsed, and then he filled them. LR: That is so cool. LH: And to have the bottles. RW: Then he started to, he decided he had to get away from the bicycle. He bought a used Chevrolet truck, and he bought a new Ford truck, and then he bought another Chevrolet truck, then a meat truck. Which had a little motor problem for a while. But he gradually built the business and my mother was working at Wright’s store, which was at one time next to Penney’s. And at a point in time he decided he needed to go bigger. He did have a truck and a delivery man. So he and mom bought the house on the street on 3905 Adams. And that was owned by Leonard Ross. And Ross had built a fairly good-sized shop. Dad modified the shop and turned it into a dairy. He put in a coal-fired boiler. He had a receiving room, and then he had a pasteurizing plant, the filler, and he built a nice box. He bought milk originally from a guy named Jim Combe. And if you know anything about 36th street, on the corner of 36th and Monroe is a market. It used to be George’s market. 32 LH: Yep. RW: A house or two up is a big red brick house. On the south side of the street, that was the Combe farm. And Dad bought milk from the Combe farm, which took in most of the area of Grandview Acres. LH: Grandview Acres, we’ve got movies of him plowing that area. RW: We also bought from producers in Roy—Garner and Hollie. And when the war ended. BW: World War II? RW: World War II. Garrett came back and Bart wanted him to go to Dental School. Dad offered him a partnership in the Dairy and he decided to be a milkman instead of a dentist. He probably made a mistake in that sense. They built the business rather successfully over the next fifteen to twenty years. And they branched out with a delivery system. They went on to square bottles, and they went to half-gallon bottles, and then they went to gallon bottles. Sitting over here, a gallon milk case from the City View Dairy, which I found down at the local… LH: Fruit…Sacco’s. RW: Sacco’s. My dad always wanted to expand the business. Garrett and my mother thought it was big enough. Made a good living for both families. They went through the evolution of pasteurized regular milk to homogenized milk. And new filling systems. Flash pasteurization versus a tank. Converted his boiler to gas. And then at one point he… well, he had a milk truck hauler that picked up his milk in Roy and hauled it in. It was a guy named Joe Todd—had a big Ford… bought in. They had this fan but it was not cooled. And Joe would come in, there 33 was a hole in the wall and run it on a roller. We would weigh it or produce this quantity. And washed the cans and send them back with Joe. Then at one time, Dad decided they had to modernize, and he bought a big cooling tank—a 500 galloon cooler. And by this time he bounced with farmers and two of his main producers were Wayment and Muirbrook out in West Warren. Muirbrook ran his own commercial retail outlet for a long time. And Dad bought a Dodge tank truck from Paramount Dairy. Paramount had used it to haul milk from his Holstein farm, which was right next to Lagoon, to the processing plant, on Washington Boulevard where the sign is, over the river. And so for several years they hauled this milk in bulk, no longer in cans, and processed it. One of the biggest things they did was go into gallons and they’d ask their brother-in-law to take an empty gallon, which he did, and he went around town up to Washington Terrace. They’d hand the women who’d answer the door. The man would say, “Would you tell me if this will fit in your refrigerator?” They did and it did. And so they expanded their business quite a bit with that project. Then they did some retailing on their own. They opened a little dairy store on 31st and Wall Avenue; it had been a drive in. They had another one on 42nd and Harrison which did not last long. They did one in Layton. LH: The one on Harrison… RW: And then they [had a] milking operation. They built a retail store in front of the milking operation, where people could come in and buy their milk in gallons or half-gallons and watch the cows be milked. At the same time, my brother and I were milking those cows. I did it for two years, he did it for four. 34 BW: Where was that one located? LH: 4811 Harrison Boulevard. RW: Down from the veterinary facility there. LH: There was a newspaper magazine, or story. There was a magazine for dairy equipment and they told all about it. And said it was the most modern milking operation in the mountain west. But… RW: But it had its limitations. We had to buy all of our feed, which was very… it made it very expensive. And my dad and the dates I cannot remember without reading this thing again. Finally sold the business to Garrett. Garrett ran it for ten years and then he sold it out to Cream of Weber. Cream of Weber was the giant in the business and they survived all of the little dairies. Sooner or later it went away. LH: Yep. RW: Made us a good living. It was a 4 a.m. start whether you were milking the cows or delivering the milk, or processing the milk. LH: They delivered three days a week to some customers. Three days a week to the others. RW: At one point, he started with probably six bottles in a canvas bag. To his mom and dad and one another. By the time he sold, they had six routes, they delivered Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday—on three of the routes. And Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on the other routes. So they didn’t make a Sunday delivery. LH: And in the book there’s a picture of all the trucks lined up, there’s four trucks here. 35 RW: Two Chevy and two Dodge. But pretty soon the home delivery gave way to the gallon jugs in the grocery stores. It was an evolution of marketing and efficiencies that the little guy couldn’t keep up with. LH: Couldn’t match. Nope. LR: So you mentioned Cream of Weber. When it first started, how much competition was there with the smaller dairies? RW: Well, Cream of Weber had a processing plant on Ogden Avenue between 25th and 26th on the west side of the street. They were a big co-op. And they had probably seventy-five, maybe sixty-five percent of the business. Meadow Gold and Garden Dairy was across from the tabernacle on 22nd Street. There was a Meadow Clover Dairy, but they did not do home delivery, they were basically cheese, and cottage cheese, ice cream. And then all of the little dairies: Ollie’s, Carmax, the two dairies… LH: Maple Leaf, Ekins— RW: He had a dairy out in Slaterville. LH: Maple Leaf—in South Ogden. Morgan— RW: South Ogden, Lone Pine—Lone Pine and Maple Leaf were started jointly up on Combe Road. They were brother-in-laws and then they split and Wes Poulson brought his dairy down to 41st and Adams. And John Combe took his dairy up to Morgan. That was the predecessor of Johnny’s Dairy. But the thing that finally killed our business was the federal milk market in order. And it was designed, I don’t mind saying so, to help the big producers. It was written by the big producers. And so a little business like my dad’s, suddenly had to start putting 36 $800 to $1,000 a month into the federal milk marketing order. And it just wasn’t feasible. BW: When was that? CW: 1960s. LH: It’s probably in that paper when it came out. Carolyn, if you’d… I just thought I’d give them each one, and then there’s a cap—I only brought one cap. But they could see. BW: Wow, that’s neat. LH: I smile as I look at that order; would I want a quart of cream? BW: Yeah, that’s really neat. LH: It’s a little interesting. BW: I’d love to get scans of these. LH: Well, you can have those. And I’ve got more bottle caps or whatever. BW: Going back to the very beginning, the Belvedere Dairy. Was that a Dutch family? RW: No, as far as I know, it was not. Dad had a good friend in Salt Lake named Pete Sparbone, who ran a dairy and had a big influence on my father. The Belvedere was… I can’t remember the guy’s name. In Paramount there. He was… LH: Squeaky Pete. RW: Squeaky Pete. LH: That’s all I can remember him by. My dad had always kidded that Pete had owned… was so tight. He got killed coming across Wyoming back into Ogden. He was driving late at night. Dad said, “Well if he’d spent some money and got a motel.” I just remember him. 37 RW: Glenn Garrett was the manager of the Weber Central Dairy Association—Cream of Weber. And as big as they were and they were the elephant in the room. Glenn Garrett was always very kind to my dad. Garrett, he sold him the products, sold him milk when they needed it. And so we owe Glenn Garrett a debt of gratitude in our family. LH: But all these little dairies… and Bob has bottles from most of all of them. There are quite a few of them. That’s our favorite thing to look for in antique stores. BW: Yeah. LH: We had never… we hadn’t found a round bottle. And I talked to a man one day and said, “Do you ever look for antiques?” I said, “Would you keep your eye open for a City View Dairy bottle?” He said, “Sure.” And he called me, he said he had been in up in Idaho and picked up one. He said, “Come on over.” And he just apologized and apologized—it was $16. And I thought, “That man had no idea that I’d give $116 for that bottle.” But that was our first one and then we have gradually got some others… the squirt-bottles that they went to. Anyway… CW: We found the other one. It came from Salt Lake and Bob had collected round bottles from Salt Lake. We had to trade five Salt Lake bottles to get the other one. LH: I saw one at the antique store this weekend that was from the town where Amy used to live. And I almost got it and thought, “Somebody in that town would love to have that bottle.” BW: What would you say is the legacy of the Wolthuis family here in Ogden? 38 RW: In the 2008 Wolthuis Family Reunion, we counted 789 descendants. That included those who married into the family of course. But I think the legacy would be families that have been successful—economically, professionally, quite a few doctors, Ph.D.’s, dentists, educators, and a family that has multiplied and replenished quite well. LH: Church wise— RW: Bishops, stake presidents… LH: Patriarchs. RW: Career people. We range from my stint in the White House down to Bart’s mayoral race. And we’re not all active in the Mormon Church but most are. Post Asphalt Company is a legacy of the Wolthuis family. CW: Learning Wrap-Ups… RW: Which my sister started. It’s a learning device company out in Layton—which operates world-wide. Several lawyers… So I think that the move was a good one— to come to the United States. I’m grateful that they did. I think economic opportunities in the Netherlands were limited. And they escaped World War II. LR: Lynnette, What about you? LH: I agree with Bob, I think the standard for education—it seems like I don’t remember grandparents telling us, but we knew that they had sacrificed so that we could come and do something. And if you go family by family, I mean, all of my children are college graduates. All of Bob’s are college graduates. It’s just been imbedded in us that we take advantage of the opportunity of being in America. And then I agree with Bob also—church wise, we have some that are not active but in general 39 it’s an incredible group that have stayed close to the church and have been faithful in their responsibilities and accepted responsibilities. So, you know like Bob served in the White House—deputy assistant secretary of defense. Led the way for a lot of us, you know, to be a little more politically minded and evaluate. And I think the Wolthuis family in general looks to Bob as our political leader, you know? RW: We are all Republicans. LH: We are Republicans, and for a while we all drove shift cars. I don’t know somehow Ford snuck in there once in a while. This is a picture, which of course, you can’t see that. RW: Carolyn, why don’t you come over and explain how you did this? This is kind of unique and I don’t know if you can pick it up on your camera. RW: We had an 80th family reunion. It was in 2008, and one of the things that we did was reenact the arrival of the Wolthuis family at Union station. In October of 1928. LH: And almost 500 were in attendance. BW: Wow. RW: 412. CW: It was the 80th anniversary of the arrival of the Wolthuis family in America. LR: That’s wonderful. CW: And so we celebrated at Union Station and every family was represented and they did a count of how many descendants Hindrik and Hillechiena have. And there’s— when they added—these are the nine families of the children. And then they added it all up there were 789 descendants that came from that family. LH: And as Grandpa said it wouldn’t have happened. It’s all because of him. 40 LR: That’s true. BW: Amazing. LR: So you put this together, Carolyn? LH: Bob and Carolyn did it. CW: Yes. LH: It was wonderful. You know, I guess because our family name is so unique that we’re so quick to… if we find somebody with that name we’re related to them. Well, at least in this area. CW: This shows Jean and Dena and Bob. So when they did the reenactment we took the picture that they had taken on the boat. And then a descendant of each one of those played the part. For example, Feike, is our grandson, Frank. Okay? Anna is her granddaughter. This is Gerrit’s grandson. It goes all the way across. Jean didn’t have anyone to play, so Dena let her borrow hers. So there is one niece in there. Otherwise, they are all direct descendants of the person that they were portraying. And so… RW: Wait a minute, I want to make a comment here. Henry Post, the founder of the Post Asphalt Company—painting company, was run by his son. And Henry has died, but Henry played the part of Grandpa Veldhuis. He had a beard, he shaved it, off for us. He got the timely hat. And when Henry walked in there, the whole audience thought Grandpa had arrived. LH: And they didn’t say anything. I mean, they just walked out there and stood. CW: And stood. 41 LH: And it was just… overwhelming to realize the blessing that each family had from that event. LR: That is a unique thing. I think…it sounds like that’s something that your grandparents instilled within each one of their children—family is important, don’t forget it. LH: Yeah. RW: Yeah I agree. LH: It did. LR: And it’s perpetuated itself down through your own children. To be able to put something like that on CW: Right. LR: That is just amazing. CW: So besides the olie bollen, which was a family tradition, Grant Roylance wore your father-in-law’s conductor hat. And he announced that the train had arrived and that the Wolthuis family was here in America. And that’s when they came out. It was really impressive. LH: I have a spare copy of my book about my father if you want to put in your archives. LR: If you are willing to—If you are willing to grant that to us we are willing to take it. Let me get a little closer to that, Robert. What is that that you have in your hand? RW: I have three antiques that are fairly family heirlooms. I have a Texaco gas pump out in the garage that I can show it to you—these milk bottles. But this is the most prized, because it came off the Hillechiena Harmina. And Grandpa gave it to my father and he gave it to me. So this barometer, made in Germany, was purchased 42 sometime after 1913 when the Hillechiena Harmina was turned over to the skipper, Hindrik Veldhuis. It still works and it’s something that is very tangible. LR: It’s unique. RW: Indeed. BW: It’s a wonderful piece of material history. RW: It is. LH: I love artifacts. RW: And all of our copper ship lights, which have nothing to do with the Veldhuis family. BW: Thank you for sharing this with us today.