Oral History Program Don Koldewyn Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 17 February 2015 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Don Koldewyn Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 17 February 2015 Copyright © 2015 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Immigrants at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories, photographs and artifacts related to the immigrant populations that helped shape the cultural and economic climate of Ogden. This project will expand the contributions made by Ogden’s immigrant populations: the Dutch, Italian and Greek immigrants who came to work on the railroad and the Japanese who arrived after World War II from the West Coast and from internment camps. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Koldewyn, Don, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 17 February 2015, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Don Koldewyn February 17, 2015 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Don Koldewyn, conducted at his home in Ogden, Utah on February 17, 2015. Don discusses his memories of his family and the Dutch community, his genealogical research, and the family legacy of hard work. The interviewer is Lorrie Rands; Tanner Flinders is also present, as is Don’s wife, Becky Koldewyn. LR: It is February 17, 2015. We are in the home of Don Koldewyn in Ogden, Utah, around ten in the morning. We are here talking about the Dutch community, his family, and his memories of all of that. I am Lorrie Rands conducting the interview and Tanner Flinders is here on the camera. Again, thank you for your willingness; I am very appreciative of it. You have an interesting family in the sense that there were two families that came together. So I was hoping we could start with one and then move into the other. So let’s start with the Tingen side and talk about when your grandmother came and what brought them to Ogden. DK: The Tingens left the Netherlands on the 7th of June, 1898. After about a week or so on the ocean, they arrived in New York and from there came by rail to Ogden. They arrived in Ogden, lived for a period of time with my grandmother’s oldest sister. They lived on Pacific Avenue off of 33rd Street. My grandmother came with Roelfje (Rose), came with her widowed mother Aaltje, two older brothers, Jan (John) and Jans, and an older sister, Jantje (Jennie). As I said, they came by train, got off the train, and went by horse and wagon to 33rd and Pacific. As they were on their way there, one of them said, “Where’s the town?” The driver of the 2 wagon said, “We’ve passed through it.” I’m assuming they came to Union Station, so they went along Wall Avenue, which at the time was not the center part of the town. The thing to remember is that they had lived in Amsterdam four or five years previous to their coming, which is a big city. Her older brother Jans’ description of when they passed through New York said that they had terribly high buildings, so they were coming from a large city. Passing through Ogden on Wall Avenue was not a big city. LR: It was a bit of a culture shock. DK: I think it must have been. LR: What was your grandmother’s name? DK: My grandmother’s name in Dutch was Roelfje, which they anglicized to “Rose,” so Rose Tingen. Just know that is not a translation. Some of the names you can get a translation, but that is not a translation. Roelof in English would be “Ralph.” The je on the end is the feminization of the name. But how they got Rose I don’t know; I guess they just picked it out. LR: Do you know if they had a hard time— DK: Getting the money to come? LR: No, settling into the community. DK: Well, the only thing I know about that is that my grandmother and her sister Jantje (which they changed to “Jennie”), were domestic servants. So in that regard, I don’t know how much trouble that caused them. The two brothers were farmers, and of course they had no land. I think they just hired out for a while and then the older one, Jans, finally got some land down on Pacific Avenue. He had 3 acreage there and I understand that he used it to grow crops and peddled his vegetables throughout the city with a horse and wagon. So I don’t know what the difficulty was in adapting. I am almost certain that my grandmother never spoke very good English. I say that because she was a very quiet—I don’t want to say backward, but she was not assertive in the sense that she would put herself out in front of anybody. One sad thing about remembering all of this is that I wish I could recall if she had an accent when I was growing up. I have to believe that she did but I can’t remember. I think she had a little bit of trouble assimilating. The reason that I think she had some trouble with language is that her oldest son, my uncle Bill, when he went on an LDS mission to the Netherlands, when she wrote him—and I have all the letters that she wrote—they were all in Dutch. She didn’t write English as far as I know. LR: How old was she when she came? DK: You would ask me that. LR: A rough guess. DK: She must have been about twenty-one or twenty-two. LR: So she was a little older and didn’t really have to go to school as little kids would have. DK: Exactly. I think she probably only went to primary grades in the Netherlands because they grew up in a small farming community, and at that time in the Netherlands I believe they had just started mandatory elementary education. LR: So how did she meet your grandfather? 4 DK: Oh, that’s interesting. As I understand it, back then the Dutch population in Ogden and in Salt Lake had what they called “Dutch Days” at Lagoon and that’s where he met her. LR: Really? DK: Well, I’m sure they knew of each other. They had what they called a Dutch branch for the LDS church members in Ogden. It was not an official branch as we would now understand it, but they held at least monthly meetings on Sunday afternoons in the old First Ward in Ogden on 33rd and Grant. LR: I’ve actually heard that. So you’re not the first person who has mentioned that. DK: They had their Dutch meetings and I’m sure they knew each other through those, plus the fact that they lived in close proximity to each other. My grandfather lived on the corner of 33rd and Stevens. Grandma was on Wall and between 32nd and 33rd, which is just about a block away. I’m sure they both went to the First Ward. There were a lot of Dutch families that lived there. LR: So let’s talk about your grandfather then, the Koldewyns. When did his family immigrate here? DK: He came over with his mother. He left the Netherlands with his mother on the 27th of April in 1889. They arrived in New York on the 13th of May, 1889. He’s the one that I told you his father was already here, having immigrated sometime in early 1888. The day after they arrived in New York, my great-grandfather Zwier Willem, they used to call him Willem, died here in Ogden. So the day after my great-grandmother and my grandfather arrived in New York, my great-grandfather died. 5 LR: How did he die? DK: He was a miller. He had been a miller in the Netherlands and when he came here he was also employed as a miller. From some things that I have read about him, he suffered from a hernia. He had problems with hernias in the Netherlands. I assumed that probably came from being a miller because when they mill the grain, the grain and the milled grain and the flour all go in sacks and those sacks have to be lifted very often. In the Netherlands, in the old windmills, those sacks went up, so the grain as it came down through the milling process came from the top down. They went up ladders that took it up into the top of the windmill. So that’s how all of that started. When he came to work here he went to work for what they called the Phoenix Mill, which was down between about 14th and 15th on the east side of Washington Boulevard. I’m assuming from the description that was in his obituary, it said something about inflammation of the bowels and I think it was a strangulated hernia. That’s my understanding of it. LR: So when your great-grandmother and your grandfather came into Ogden they didn’t know anyone. DK: Yes, they did, because most of my great-grandfather’s other children from his first marriage were here—with the exception of his oldest son and the daughter that came with my great-grandmother and my grandfather. LR: So did your great-grandfather have a home here that they were able to come to? DK: Yes, they did. This was a kind of interesting story because when he came here somehow he made a down payment on a home on 20th Street between Jefferson and Madison. I’m still trying to figure out who he purchased the home 6 from. He put a down payment on the home and it was a woman, apparently, who owned the property. When he purchased the home she also gave him enough money or let him borrow enough to send to Great-grandmother in the Netherlands for them to come. So when she got here, yes, she had a place to live, but he had died. She didn’t speak English and she had no job skills to speak of. She knew that she couldn’t pay for the home, so she talked to the woman that had sold it to Great-grandfather and said, “This is my situation,” and the woman said, “I will take the home back and I will forgive the debt of the immigration money.” Interestingly there was a man of the name of Jan (John) Fuit that was a passenger on the same ship. John had come with a younger son and the son’s wife and I believe at least two children. When they came here the home was a duplex, and John moved in next door. I’m not sure about the time period, but sometime—it was more than a year later—Great-grandma married John Fuit and at that point they moved out down to a home that John had purchased below Stevens on 33rd Street. That’s how she survived. BK: Well did she live in that half of the duplex even though she didn’t— DK: She lived in one half of the duplex; John lived in the other half. LR: So she was paying rent to him. DK: Anyway, when she moved in, as I said, she didn’t have any way to support herself. At that time that area was in the Ogden LDS Fourth Ward, which is still there. This is an interesting twist in the story—at that time, the bishop of that ward was Edwin Stratford. Edwin Stratford is my mother’s great-grandfather, and 7 of course all of this didn’t surface until later. Anyway, he hired my great-grandmother to do the wash for his family, and Grandma and my grandfather used to go over there. I’m forgetting—I think it was Wednesdays—but it was a certain day of the week they would go over to his home, she would do the wash, and they would be fed lunch. So that was just a little interesting twist. BK: Well didn’t he marry— DK: Yes! Later on, when Grandma and John Fuit married, Edwin Stratford was the bishop that married them, and I’ve got a marriage certificate that’s got both their signatures on it. LR: So, your great-grandmother on the Koldewyn side, they survived by just finding or doing any job that they could? DK: Well, after they were married, John was a farmer. So that’s how he supported my great-grandmother and my grandfather. I didn’t know this until the other day—I was looking at a census record—and I never knew my grandfather was much involved in anything to do with farming. He just didn’t—all the time I knew him, he just didn’t strike me that way. Except he did have a garden at home and I knew about that, but it said that at age eighteen he was a farm laborer, which means that he was working alongside his stepfather doing farming. So they were farmers, which is surprising because his family—my great-grandfather was a miller and they were city people, they were not an agricultural people. LR: So he learned to— DK: I guess he learned to farm. LR: How old was your grandfather when he came with his mother? 8 DK: He was seven. LR: Okay so he actually went into the school system and learned English that way. DK: Yes, and there’s an interesting story about that too, because when he went to school his name was Derk. My grandfather’s name was Derk Koldewyn. I guess they used to call him “Derkie” in Dutch. So when he went to school, as I understand it, the teacher or someone in the school thought he was being called Dicky. So his records in the school were Richard, and he went by Richard for a long, long time. LR: No one ever corrected them? DK: Nobody ever corrected them, so he went by Richard, and a lot of people in Ogden as he was growing up and later in life only knew him by Richard. It wasn’t until—I don’t think it was until he went and filled out naturalization papers before he went on a mission back to the Netherlands that he started putting “Derk” on signed papers. So he went by Richard. LR: How interesting. So your grandfather became a citizen; did your grandmother Tingen? DK: No. When I first got into doing genealogical work—which is about fifteen years ago—that disturbed me a bit, because I found his naturalization papers but I couldn’t find hers. I was talking to somebody at the family history library and I said, “What’s this all about?” and he said that until 1921 wives weren’t required to have naturalization papers. If she was married to someone that had gone through the naturalization process that made her a citizen as well. I’ve never checked that out but it makes sense. The interesting thing about a lot of the 9 naturalization information I have looked at—at least for the family—is that most of the men did not do anything about naturalization until they were called by the LDS church to go on a mission back to the Netherlands. I’m talking about Dutch immigrants, and the reason they did it is because in the Netherlands starting, I would guess about 1811, there’s universal—what’s the word I want? BK: You have to go in the army. DK: Yes, you have to go in the army— LR: Oh, okay. Conscription. DK: Universal conscription. So when they went back they were—even though they were naturalized US citizens, they were still citizens of the Netherlands and they could be drafted. So that’s why they became US citizens because then they would go to the US embassy and the embassy would contact the Dutch government and say this person is a citizen of the United States and he’s not eligible for military service. LR: It solved a lot of problems. DK: Yes. I could tell you some interesting things about that too, from the time that I was there. LR: So when did your grandparents get married? DK: 16 October 1907. LR: Where did they live once they were married? DK: You know, I’ve been going back on the census and I’ve been trying to find where it was, but I couldn’t find them in the 1910 census for some reason. So I’m not 10 sure where they lived right after they got married, but shortly after that they moved into a home on the corner of 33rd and Stevens. LR: Is that still there? DK: Yes. The home is still there. BK: A lot of the Dutch lived on that street. DK: Yes, it was called Dutch Hollow. LR: With both of them being from the Netherlands, from the Amsterdam area— DK: Well, that’s true with Grandma. Grandma moved from the north of the Netherlands, a province called Drenthe and a very small village called Zeijen. They moved from there to Amsterdam preparatory to their coming here for the church. My grandfather was born and raised in Deventer, which is in the middle of the Netherlands and is a relatively good-sized city on the Ijssel River. At one point, Deventer was a part of the Hanseatic cities that were all in the central part of the Netherlands, and it was one of those cities. LR: So with both of them being from Netherlands, was it important for them to keep that heritage alive with their children? DK: Now you’re asking for a family secret. Or a point of contention. LR: And the contention is? DK: It’s that, both being Dutch and being Dutch converts, being LDS, family and Grandma and Grandpa continued to speak Dutch of course in the home. That worked well with their oldest child, Bill. There were never any problems there. The next child was the daughter, Alice, and she didn’t have problems—and then my dad came. As my dad was growing up, I think he had the feeling that he was 11 an American and he was proud to be American and he didn’t want anything to do with the Dutch culture. So a big point of contention in the family was family prayer. In LDS families, family prayer was important and in my grandparents’ home, my dad’s home, they prayed in Dutch and my dad resented it. So it was a bit of a problem. The other thing I’ve noticed, and I’ve talked to a lot of Dutch families over the years—there are special occasions for Dutch families. Birthdays are a big deal in Dutch families, New Year’s Day is a big day, and then Sinterklaas is a big holiday. That’s on the 5th and 6th of December and that’s actually where the American “Santa Claus” came from, is the Dutch Sinterklaas. My family made a big deal of things around New Year’s. They didn’t, to my knowledge, have much to do with Sinterklaas, which a lot of Dutch families do, and not much with birthdays. There’s a big focus on birthdays and there’s a song they sing and all of it in Dutch. That didn’t happen in my father’s family. LR: So your father wanted to be American? DK: He wanted to be American and to think back about it, I think maybe it was—he grew up in a Dutch community really and I’m not sure he appreciated it. LR: Did you know if, when he was going to school, if he was maybe discriminated against or had issues? DK: If he was, he never said anything about it, but my dad was pretty quiet and he didn’t say much about anything. LR: So for your father and for your family, it was more important to be American than to be— 12 DK: It was more important for him to be American. I think the rest of the family were very comfortable with being Dutch and making the transition, but they didn’t have any problem holding onto the Dutch. In fact, they all spoke Dutch with each other and in the community, I’m sure, all the time that they were alive. LR: So did you ever learn Dutch? DK: Yes, but not here. LR: So where did you learn it? DK: I was a Dutch missionary from 1960–1962, and that’s where I learned it. LR: So did your father have a hard time with that? With you going back to the Netherlands? DK: No. He didn’t. He was quite proud of the fact that I was going. Interestingly enough, at that time, that Dutch branch was still going on once a month in the First Ward and they used to invite returned missionaries to come back and tell about their mission in this meeting. They invited me as a returned missionary and he went with me and I discovered—I probably knew it before, but the real discovery was—he understood all of it. LR: So he still understood Dutch? DK: He still understood it and if I remember it correctly, I think he said a couple of things in Dutch but I’m not sure about that memory, whether I wanted it to be so or whether that’s a true memory, but he understood it. There’s no question about that. He understood it very well. 13 LR: So let’s go back just a little bit. I’m curious as to how your grandparents managed to live through a lot of the hard times of the 20th century, the Great Depression, World War I. How did they survive in that sense? DK: I think I told you last time we were together that initially my grandfather and my grandmother struggled a bit. He had trouble keeping employment and it wasn’t until—and someday I’ll go back and find the exact day—but it wasn’t until he was employed by the post office that things really kind of leveled out and things were good, which carried them through the Depression. Federal employment—the post office was a necessary service—carried them through the Depression. The only thing that bothered my dad during the Depression is that he was, of course, of the age that he could be looking for work and he could not get into the CCC and he could not get into any federally-funded employment because his dad worked for the post office. So that caused him a little difficulty. BK: They weren’t poor enough. DK: Well it didn’t have anything to do with being poor. It had to do with federal subsidy. They had income, so the deal was it wasn’t really necessary that he have federally-supported employment to further supplement that income. LR: So how did your father survive then? He was living— DK: Well, he was living at home and he picked up odd jobs. My dad was the hardest worker of any man I have ever met in my life. It was no question when we were growing up that if you wanted to get ahead in this world, you worked and you worked hard. BK: Tell her the ditch-digger story. 14 DK: Oh! That’s somewhat of a success story. My dad, out of all the children—or the two other children in this family—was the most successful. My mother’s father, I told you, had a plumbing business and he invited Dad to come to work there. So he worked there and then when my mother’s father—my grandfather on my mother’s side—decided to retire, he sold his business to his brother and my father. So the two of them had a corporation together, and my father was a major part of the plumbing company because Dad liked to do what they used to call big jobs. So he did the plumbing for the two water purification plants, the one in Ogden Canyon, which they’re just now redoing, and the one out on Hill Field Road, numerous schools in Davis County, and other large construction jobs in the Ogden area. Dad liked large construction and that made business very profitable. Unfortunately, at age fifty, my dad died of leukemia. So that was the end of his part of the business which was set up so that my mother’s uncle (my grandfather’s brother) bought out my father’s part of the business. Sadly—or maybe not so sadly—it wasn’t too many years after that that the business was closed when my grandfather’s brother decided to retire. BK: Yes, but when you were in the ditches working for your dad— DK: Oh, yeah. I forgot that part. He always said, “Fill up the front of the shovel and the back will take care of itself.” BK: No, that’s not the story. DK: That’s the one I remember. BK: No. He used to say to you, “Do you like”— 15 DK: Oh, that. My dad never felt that he had a good opportunity for education. He graduated from high school but I guess always wanted more. So whenever I was out on the job with him and it got really ugly, and there can be ugly times in plumbing— LR: Oh, yes. I can imagine. DK: Six inches of sewage in the basement, cleaning out drains, or the one that I really used to like was when we used to lay clay tile sewer pipe. Clay tile sewer pipe is laid by caulking around the joint with what they called oakum, which is something to make it watertight. Then, to keep the oakum in, they used to pour hot tar around it. Because it was clay pipe it was not perfectly round, so invariably a little piece of hot tar would shoot out, and would catch you on the arm. So you would say some words and he would say, “Do you like what you’re doing?” and I’d say, “Oh, it’s pretty obvious that I don’t like this,” and he would say, “Get an education.” That was always the word. If you don’t like what you’re doing, if you don’t want to do this kind of work—which doesn’t require an education—then get an education. BK: And you did. LR: What was the name of the plumbing business? DK: Bachman’s. LR: Okay, I remember you mentioned that. So education was really important to your dad? DK: It was. Absolutely. And it’s kind of sad that he never had the chance because a lot of what he did in plumbing was very inventive. I remember one time we were 16 doing some radiant heating and the pipe needed to be turned in a U shape. So he invented and built a pipe bender to do it. He learned how to weld—acetylene welding, not electric welding—and he built all kinds of things. He built a horse trailer once and you know, he had that kind of ability, and as I said earlier, he believed in hard work. Sometimes I thought he believed it was lazy if you had to use a wheelbarrow to move dirt. BK: How else would you do it? LR: So doing it by hand was— DK: Yes, it meant you weren’t being lazy. So out of the Dutch background at least came some success in business. LR: Hard work brought about success. DK: Yes, exactly. He was the hardest worker. LR: So was your grandfather, during World War I, was he ever drafted? DK: No. He wasn’t. LR: So he managed to stay home? DK: He managed to stay home. Then during World War II, and this is interesting, of course the Netherlands were occupied early on in the ‘40s and weren’t freed until May of ’45. Things were very difficult, and I have found through a lot of letters that my grandfather had written to family who were still in the Netherlands, he sent a lot of packages and food and clothing to them after the war. LR: Did it actually get to them? DK: Oh, absolutely. LR: Oh, that’s good. 17 DK: Yes, it got there. They wrote letters back saying thanks for the help. LR: So if you had to somehow sum up your father, your grandparents, their legacy with their heritage, the legacy that they’ve managed to pass on, what would you think that would be? DK: I think that they had the courage to leave and come. Of course, it was religiously motivated, but they had the courage to leave. I cannot fathom my grandmother and her mother and brothers leaving this small farming community and going to Amsterdam so they could make enough money to come here. I have a hard time understanding it. I’m glad they did and that they had the fortitude to do it. I guess that’s what impresses me—they were strong people and if they had an idea that that’s something they wanted to do, they did it. I don’t think it was easy for them. Another thing that I’m happy with is that they’ve stayed. I’ve done a lot of genealogical research, and not long ago, I was going through the branch records for Amsterdam during or about the time that my grandmother and her brothers and mother were in the process of coming. The reason I was doing it was I wanted to find their actual emigration date and on the side of these old records, on the one side are dates of when people left, it said “emigrated,” on such and such date from the church record. The other thing that I saw that had never ever crossed my mind; I began to see “returned.” I thought, “Oh, so there were some that didn’t stay.” That had never occurred to me. If you went through all the trouble to come, why go back? But there it was and I thought, “I’m glad they stayed.” LR: Do you think your father was proud of his Dutch heritage? 18 DK: I know he had a great love for his mother and in that sense, yes. I’m not so sure about his father. The reason that I say that is—well, I talked to him and I guess maybe these things should not be shared, but I will share them anyway. I told you he didn’t like the family prayer in Dutch, the other thing he had a lot of trouble with—and I’ve got to go back and check just how old he was at the time—but at one point his father was the ward clerk in his LDS ward and apparently the man that had been there before him hadn’t kept the records up. So my grandfather, being the dedicated church member that he was, felt that he needed to get it straightened out. He spent a lot of time, Saturdays, Sundays, I’m not sure about weekdays or not, but he spent a lot of time doing it. Consequently on a Saturday when it was time to go do something together as a family, Grandma took the kids, and my dad resented it. I shouldn’t say this either, but when we were kids growing up, if he wanted to get my mother really upset, just jokingly, of course, he would say, “You know, you kids”—and that would be me and my two other brothers—“you kids are half Dutch and half mongrel.” Because she was Swiss, Welsh, and English. Yes, he had a little appreciation for his Dutch heritage. LR: Oh, that’s funny! DK: So I’ve always remembered I was half Dutch. LR: Is there any other story you can think about with your grandparents or your dad that you would like to share? DK: They always had a garden and consequently that kind of carried over with me. BK: He’s a rabid farmer. 19 DK: Not a farmer, a gardener. They had something which they brought with them, a kind of family heirloom, whatever you want to call it. Anyway, they brought with them what they called Dutch beans. And what they are is a pole bean. I don’t know if you’re familiar with gardening at all. LR: No. DK: Okay. It’s a pole bean that’s about an inch wide and up to six inches long. They grew those all the time I was growing up, and they had a slicer that was made in the Netherlands, and the slicer French-cut them. So they kept those seeds for years and years. It must’ve been only two years or three years where we didn’t plant them and we subsequently lost the seed. I don’t know if it was when I went back, but we got new seed from the Netherlands and the tradition has been carried on. My brother and I still plant the pole beans and slice them. LR: Was there any other food, cultural food, that was kept going? DK: Well, not really. I brought a recipe book back from my mission and I make my own sauerkraut. BK: The recipe book has split pea soup that has the pig’s ear in it. DK: But we don’t do it that way. LR: Sounds appetizing. DK: That’s another thing that other Dutch families do. There’s a little tiny donut type thing that they call oliebollen and is part of New Year’s. LR: I’ve heard of that. DK: That’s one of the things that they kept. 20 LR: Now that we’ve talked about your family, what can you tell me about the Dutch community in Ogden that you’ve researched? DK: I don’t know that I’ve researched it, I’ve just grown up with it. LR: Okay, well let’s talk about that for a few minutes. DK: Okay. As I’ve said before, during the early days of immigration into Ogden, a lot of the Dutch families settled into an area around 33rd and Wall, 33rd and Stevens, Pacific Avenue, along Wall Avenue over to about 30th Street, in that general area. Some people called it Dutch Town; I’ve always heard the name Dutch Hollow. If you go down Stevens from where my grandparents lived on the corner, across the street you’d find de Boer, next to my grandparent’s place were the Buckway family, which the original Dutch name was Boekweg, Neuteboom, de Mik, and Cevering. Who else was down there? BK: Was van den Bosch down there? DK: No, van den Bosch was up the street a ways. Anyway, a lot of Dutch names. Sometimes when we’d go visit my grandparents on Sunday afternoons, the adults would sit around and talk and I guess we kids just kind of sat around too. They would talk about their Dutch friends. So I got a feeling about who was related to whom and so on and so forth. But I’m still being constantly surprised. I can tell you a little story. Last Sunday—well, no, let’s start before that. A couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago, I was going through old Standard- Examiners they have on the Internet, the digitized newspapers, and I was looking for Tingen names because I didn’t have a lot of information about some of my grandmother’s brothers. So I was going through and I found an article in a 21 Standard-Examiner about the Mother’s Day program in the First Ward. The reason that I found it was one of the participants in that program was Henry Tingen. Henry was the son of John Tingen, my grandmother’s brother. It listed him as giving a recitation for the Mother’s Day program. I also saw there a name, Walter Prothro, and it said that he gave a tribute to his mother. He was a recently returned serviceman. This was in 1919 after the end of the First World War. There’s a fellow that lives in our ward whose name is Allen Prothro. So I asked him, “Who’s Walter Prothro?” He said, “Well it’s either my great-grandfather or my grandfather.” I said, “Okay,” and I told him what I found. He said, “Well, if you make a copy of it I would like to have it.” Then the other night, I got thinking about Prothro and a program in the First Ward and I wonder if there was any possibility there’s a Dutch connection. The wife of the great-grandfather was Dutch, and the last name was Schaart and I got looking for her parents and siblings, and she only had one sister, so the name didn’t go on in Ogden. I’d never heard that name before, so there’s another one. They just kind of pop up. LR: So do you think there were any—do you think the majority of the Dutch people that came here to Ogden came because of the LDS Church? DK: The majority that I know about did. But there are a lot of other Dutch families that did not. BK: The Remkes. DK: The Remkes are Dutch and they’re Catholic. There are a couple here in our neighborhood. They came, I think, after the Second World War. A lot of people 22 came after the Second World War and so there are a lot of other Dutch families in Ogden that did not come for the LDS Church. LR: Do you think the majority of those came after World War II? DK: I don’t know. I would say yes, just for the few that I know of; I can’t be certain. LR: Tanner, do you have any questions to add? TF: I was just wondering if there was any sort of celebration after the Netherlands were liberated. DK: Here in the community? TF: Yes. DK: I don’t know. I have no idea. I will tell you about a moving experience that I had though, on Liberation Day in the Netherlands. It was on May 5, 1961. I was in Amsterdam and had just been transferred from Assen, Drenthe, the province where my grandmother was reared. So I had been living in a small rural city and was now living in Amsterdam. At that time Amsterdam had a million inhabitants. So I was transferred out of this little farming community and I’m riding my bike through the middle of Amsterdam with all the traffic, people, noise, and it’s almost overwhelming. I’m not a city person, so it was kind of unnerving. Anyway, it’s the 5th of May and I’m riding in Amsterdam which had a large Jewish population at the beginning of the war. As I’m riding it suddenly occurs to me that Germany killed six million Jews or six times the population of the city I was riding through. I had never ever imagined what that really meant and then I realized what it meant. It just—you know, six million, six times the population of Amsterdam. LR: It’s hard to fathom. 23 DK: Yes. If you’re looking for some other good interviews, Carla Merritt is part of our Netherlands Research Society and she and her parents came after World War II. Her grandmother and grandfather on her mother’s side were Jewish. She has a story about her mother who was pregnant with Carla. There was a commotion in the street, and her mother and father went out the front door to see what it was, and the commotion was that her grandparents were being taken by the SS. Her mother had to be restrained by her father so she wouldn’t get involved, because if she had, they would have taken her too. So Carla very proudly says, and has every right to say, that she’s a survivor of the Holocaust because her mother was pregnant with her and if they had taken her mother… LR: Joe has a similar story. Just the fact that he was born at all is crazy. DK: Well, he was born and raised in Amsterdam, and in the winter of ’44 there were thousands upon thousands of people who died of starvation in Amsterdam. The reason is—and I heard story after story of this in the ’60s—when the Germans started leaving, or retreating, they took everything. In one story I heard, they took cobblestones off the street. I’m not sure why that was necessary. Anyway, it was a terrible time. Last night we were watching—oh, what was it called? BK: Finding Your Roots. DK: Finding Your Roots; it’s on PBS. Anyway, they were doing three Jewish people that had roots in Poland and Russia. It was just a terrible time. LR: Indeed. Well, do you have something else you would like to add? DK: No. I don’t think so. I’m proud of my Dutch heritage, in case you couldn’t already tell. 24 LR: I think that came across. Let me just say thank you again. This has just been awesome. The stories you have given, the perspective you’ve given, it’s wonderful and I thank you for it.