9 - Early Married Life
Jonathan: All right, it’s June 22, Sunday at 4 p.m. Good to be talking with you again, Mom.
Last time we talked about a lot of different things, it was more than a week ago, I think, when we last talked.
Laura: And at that point, we’re living in the trailer and I had my first child and Bob was working at Eberhardt’s.
Jonathan: Okay. And we were going to, we talked a little bit earlier prior to starting this video about your wedding dress and.
Laura: Okay. I was, I was looking at an Agnes’s when I, when we were doing all our wedding planning and Agnes ended up making the food for the reception. And while I was living with an Agnes and uncle and grandpa and Of course, my sister Connie was going to be my attendant and we had a hard time finding a best man because Bob didn’t have any men friends and he ended up choosing Norm Meyer who was sort of a friend of mine but I really didn’t do many things with Norm. At any rate, so the plans were
Mrs. Lantinga played the piano for the service. And so there were just two attendants and it was in this little small chapel that was attached to the old Calvin campus. So behind that little chapel, there was a driveway and that led to the student cafeteria area and that’s where we planned the reception. So I had to find a dress and I was not going to go to a store and buy one. I found one at Goodwill and I took it home to Anna Agnes’ house and I rebuilt it there myself and you’ll see pictures of it and my friends couldn’t believe the bodice of it was beautiful. It was lace with pearls on it And it was short sleeved and then I made a little veil to go with it. And the skirt was just like it came from Goodwill. I probably put at the most $15 into the whole thing. And years later when we lived on Dunham and needed money really bad, I ended up selling it for $20. I advertised it somehow and I don’t remember, but I sold it so I didn’t keep it for very long. So the wedding was in the summer before the school year was about to start again. And Bob was supposedly going to go to Calvin. And Norm Meyer was going to kind of show him around the place and help him get accustomed to a new campus. And we were living in Granville in the trailer. And it was pretty cheap living.
And I was teaching at Walker.
But then I became pregnant.
Jonathan: And let me stop you there. What was your recollection of that? Were you excited to become a parent? Is that something that you had wanted to do?
Laura: I don’t think I gave it much thought. I just expected that we would have a family. I probably didn’t intend it to happen that quickly. I really didn’t intend every pregnancy to happen as quickly as they did. But I became pregnant with Teddy before I was married three or four months.
Jonathan: And do you recall what announcing it to your family was like? Or what conversation did you have with Bob about it?
Laura: I don’t recall that, but my parents were in New Jersey, so I’m sure that it was part of a letter I wrote to them telling them about it. And Bob’s mother was very open and warm and welcoming about the idea of being a grandma. And his father was distant.
But when the baby was born,
And he found out that we named our first baby Theodore John. He was indignant. Why didn’t we name that little boy Cornelius? So if our relationship was strained before the baby came, and Bob not joining his father in his business, that was another reason for a distance that remained almost the whole time that I was married to Bob and his father and mother were still alive.
Jonathan: So when, is that something he said directly to you? Like, was it an in-person confrontation or?
Laura: He said it directly to Bob. And Bob told me.
Jonathan: And that really wasn’t ever considered. You didn’t incorporate Cornelius into any of your children’s names.
Laura: No, we never did. So I moved back to the trailer. And Bob was working part time at Eberhard. And I thought he was attending Calvin.
And after about, I paid.
Jonathan: I’m sorry, the three of you were in the trailer. That must have been pretty close quarters, but workable.
Laura: It was comfortable. It was OK. It was a big bedroom and a crib in the hallway and a living living area with a table and a decent kitchen. It was OK. And it was a very nice neighborhood. Nice people that lived there.
Jonathan: Your parents were It’s hard to interrupt you, but your parents were far away. They couldn’t really help you. No, no, they were in New Jersey.
Laura: And Aunt Agnes and Grandpa sort of remained at a hand’s, arm’s length once I was married. So after about, Bob was working part-time almost evenings at Eberhard. and I was not teaching anymore. So our income was minimal and we paid the registration at Calvin. And about two months into the school year, Norm called me and said, I don’t think Bob has been on the campus at all.
So I confronted him. And it was true, he had not even attended any classes. He had registered, he had a schedule, but he’d never began using it.
At this time, I was in very close communication with my Uncle Dick and Aunt Pauline. And Aunt Pauline especially liked Bob.
So Uncle Dick was building houses and here we were in this little trailer and a baby came. Teddy Jim.
Dick proposed that we sell the trailer and that that would be enough of a down payment for a house he was going to build us in Kentwood off of 44th Street on Point Setia. Now this was a house plan that he did many times so I really didn’t have much to say about the floor plan. I mean, it was just a great big jump from living in that trailer. So we moved into that trailer and we into that house and we sold the trailer.
Jonathan: And by that time you had Ted, but it was already born by that time.
Laura: I’ve got to finish while the house was being built. We walked through the house and Teddy Jim went running through the house and fell and landed on something sharp on the floor that cut his nose open.
And I took him to the doctor and the doctor said that he did not want to do any stitches that would make the scar more pronounced.
And so that was our first step into moving into poinsettia. By then, I was pregnant again with Connie.
When Connie was born, Teddy Jim adored her.
And the first two years of her life, she lived in a playpen, and Ted did everything for her. He would throw things out and he’d hand them to her and he would, he was very sweet with Connie. But during this time, Bob was not going to college and he needed a job. So uncle Dick helped him find a job.
Oh, let me think.
It’s a big factory on Godfrey near close to town. At any rate, he started working there and Dick and Pauline could see that we would not be able to afford to live in that house.
And so Dick proposed selling the house and I meantime had two children.
While we were living in that house, a committee from Walker came and I still see the, can see the fireplace and the limited furniture we had. And these men came and interviewed me to begin teaching that fall again. So I was going to teach with two children and because Bob was not working, he was going to stay home and try to start his printing business.
So we moved to the apartment behind the little shoe shop on Kalamazoo Avenue.
It was just a very simple, small place, no garage.
And I went to teach, and Bob took care of the kids. And sometimes his mom would come and help.
With my salary, he bought the first gesture writer. And I can picture his little office. When you walked in the front door, he had a long table. And he started doing typesetting for Calvin’s monthly newsletter.
And then he also got another
publication at Calvin and I don’t remember what it was. It might have been the student newspaper or the seminary. At any rate, he had two businesses.
By then, let’s see, what name did he give his company?
His dad was Paris Press. I think he started to call himself the composing room then. So I got pregnant again.
Jonathan: So I couldn’t.
Laura: This was after you had taught at Walker for a year or another year toward the end of the year, I was pregnant again. And so I couldn’t teach any longer. I had three kids and We moved then because Bob had a business with some income. We moved from there to Dunham Street, two houses west of where my grandma and grandpa Jansma lived. And Betsy was born at that place. And Betsy was a little blonde, blue-eyed girl that grandma and grandpa Jansma immediately adored as being a little Dutch daughter.
So I got a little dress with a hat that matched it and a little apron and we took pictures of her and she looked like a little Dutch girl. And so we chained, that was when we started going to church. Now, I think, I can’t remember when Connie and Ted were baptized, but Betsy was baptized at Sherman Street Church because our house was right behind the back of the Sherman Street building.
So we went there sporadically.
And Bob moved his business out of the house to an office on Lake Drive.
And he was there for a while. And then he moved to his office that he stayed in, which was the corner of Hall and wealthy.
And his business really started to boom. Bob was a very effective salesman. And one of his biggest business was a black newspaper.
And I remember that I still would see people selling that newspaper on the corner of Burton Heights area and Seymour Square area where there were little businesses, men would have piles of them in a bag and they’d be trying to sell them to the traffic as it went by. And it was all set by Bob. So his business started to pick up. By now, I had four children, soon to be five.
Jonathan: And at that point, your financial situation improved quite a bit. Is that true?
Laura: I had a decent income. My bills were paid.
Jonathan: And you were not working. It was from Bob’s income. Is that what you’re saying? Or were you working again? Yes.
Laura: No, I wasn’t working anymore.
Jonathan: OK. From then on… And you were at Dunham still? I was where? Were you still living on Dunham?
Laura: Yes, yes. Yes, we lived there quite a long time.
I remember that one of the bedrooms upstairs, Bob had a project with his little boys. He was building an electric train. And every once in a while he’d come home with more parts. He would buy this here and that there. And so when he was home, he would be upstairs in that bedroom with the little boys and playing with the train that they were building.
Jonathan: That would be Ted and Scott.
Laura: Yes.
Jonathan: Yes. I remember that train board, incidentally. It was on half inch plywood with cork board and a circle. It was, yeah, I remember or I must. But yeah, OK. What other memories like that?
Laura: OK, so now wait a minute. Now this was by this time, Ted and Connie were ready for school and living on Dunham Street. We were close to Baxter Christian and they walked. Teddy would walk with Connie holding her hand the whole way. And I remember Mrs. Banchus, the first grade teacher, telling me that she thought Teddy was a little overboard in protecting his sister.
And that they didn’t need to walk hand in hand all the way there.
But Ted and Connie really got along well and did a lot of things together.
I’m not sure if Betsy ever got started there, but it was after a few years of probably Teddy was third grade and Connie was kindergarten that we had been renting. We did not own the house on Dunham. We bought the house on Underwood.
So at that point, school children changed to Oakdale.
And also at that point, our schedule became such that we had our dinner always the middle of the day because Bob said he had to work over the evening. He would come home 11 or 12 at night. So he did very little about caring for the children. The train project was over and The kids got pretty involved with their own friends in their school.
There was some playing, I remember Ted playing softball. We had Saturday teams and we would walk to Franklin Park because that’s where they played.
I remember that every 4th of July there was a great big parade that went along the route down Franklin, past the park and up to Burton Street. We would all go out there. It would be a four or five hour family event that we would do on the holidays. At that point, we had very little to do with the Bartleson family. and only letters with my family. Although when my father, my father would come back to Grand Rapids, not my mom, but he would come back on business sometimes at the, at the seminary. And then he would stay with us.
Now on Underwood, that meant that we had one, two, we had four bedrooms upstairs. And one bedroom was really tiny, and that was where the crib was. And it was sort of a closet rather than a bedroom, and it led to the bathroom.
Then there was another bedroom on the front of the house that had two twin beds. Then the other bedroom on the front of the house was my bedroom with Bob’s. And then there was another bedroom on the back of the house that had cots, children’s beds.
By then, we were up to six children.
And I’m sure that four helped me with the tuition because tuition was very expensive. And by then, I think even Bobby was in kindergarten. Scott was a rascal at Oakdale. And there are a number of funny stories about that. But the one that I can’t help forgetting was we needed a repair on the downstairs half bathroom of the Underwood house. And so the plumber came early in the morning. And when he arrived, Scott was in the bathroom on the toilet. So we waited and we waited and we waited. Finally, he walked into the bathroom and said, can I help you? And Scott slid off. And I guess he must have wiped himself. And he was standing there. And the plumber flushed the toilet. And Scott said, oh, you lost it. He was admiring his work in the toilet. It was at that house that we tried to make an ice in the yard for skating.
And the kind of skates we had were strap-ons, and I would get them at surf stores.
And we had a family directly behind us. who were, they had a son the same age as Ted and they were not friends. And their mother, yes. And the mother complained about the ice pond and the noise.
And so we didn’t have such a happy relationship with the Navy right behind us. However, right next door to us was a family that their daughter became my babysitter and they were, I wish I could think of their names now. Can you remember? Well, I’ll think of it. I’m sure that it’s going to be in the journal somewhere. But she admired all the children and her daughter, babysat for me because I started going back to junior college at night and taking classes.
The first thing I had to do was erase my terrible record of failing French. So for two years I took French in the evening classes and the deal was
Every other day of the week, everybody had to be in bed by nine o’clock and I was also in bed by nine o’clock so that I could get up at one to study when the house was quiet.
But also during that time, my children started studying music and Oakdale was very welcoming and provided instruments that you didn’t even need to rent at first. And it wasn’t long that Heidi and Connie both got music teachers. Now, this was over and above tuition. So Bob’s income must have been pretty good because I was not playing organ then. I didn’t have an income at all.
So the other thing that was interesting was, particularly my boys, best friends at Oakdale were from the black community. One of the things that Bobby couldn’t stand was every lunch, I always had these little packaged donuts and everybody, and I forget what they’re called, but there’s just one or two little bowls and it would be in every single lunch.
Jonathan: Zinger.
Laura: Okay. And maybe. And at Oakdale, the clothes were hung on hooks, and the shelf above the hooks was where the lunch boxes went. And Bobby had his zingers stolen repeatedly. We injected a hot sauce into a set of zingers and he put them in a prominent place. And sure enough, they got stolen, but that was the end. It didn’t get stolen anymore. Um, one of the favorite teachers there was Mrs. Snapper. And I think most of my children had her.
And she was very demanding. She was an excellent, particularly in English language usage. She required them to write quite a bit. And of all of the teachers at Oakdale, I felt the one that prepared my kids for high school the best was Mrs. Snapper.
One of the third grade class did a, well, I think it was probably more than the third grade class, but it was when Scott was in third grade.
And the class had a very prominent part of the show that night. And they were on two different levels. I don’t know how you explain that. The wood boards, they would sit on them. And Scott was sitting in the front row. And they sang a very long group of songs. And Scott never sang one word. He got disciplined for that, but I don’t remember how, but I told him I was ashamed that he publicly defied his teacher that way.
One day he did something and I had spoken with the principal because Scott had a history of misbehaviors and I just, I told the teacher there that I trusted him whatever he decided as far as discipline was concerned.
One day Scott did something and he was called into the office.
And he knew that the principal was going to call me for a meeting to decide what to do after so many history of misbehaviors. So he ran away from school.
And I got a phone call from the principal saying Scott ran away and we don’t know where he is. Well, he snuck into the house and he was hiding in the closet in the back little room where we all watched TV.
Jonathan: How old would he have been?
Laura: I think third grade. It was the same year when, or maybe it was a little older. It was close to the time of the music show that he didn’t participate in. At any rate, he was scared to death of this meeting that the principal was going to have with me and him and what the punishment was going to be.
The principal said to me, you know, Scott says he would like to be a landscaper someday. And I don’t know if you are aware of this, but the area where you live has a school which has a future farmers of America club, particularly teaching them about growing things. And it seems to me that this is not a good place for Scott to be in school. I think you ought to investigate that. So,
He had to go to the board to get permission because they had a policy that if you taught in the Christian schools, your children always attended Christian schools. And he was proposing that Scott go to Caledonia Public. So Scott got picked up by the bus and that had to happen before I could leave with all the other children. So our arriving for school was always right under the wire. It was a rush. Once Scott got on the bus that we could go.
Well, the first day he got on the bus, he came home and nobody was home because we came later than he did. When we came home, the first thing he said to me was, You’ll never guess what happened first thing in the morning. I couldn’t guess, she says. They opened with prayer.
But that was the Future Farmers of America meeting he went to, which met before school started. That’s where they opened with prayer.
So that became a better fit for him. And that’s when he and Boyd mesh and also the high jinx didn’t stop.
Jonathan: Now I want to pause you for a second because we jumped ahead in time a little bit. You’ve talked by that we had relocated from Underwood to Thornapple. And I think by that, by the time that when Scott transferred to Caledonia.
Laura: We had been living in, we’ve been living in, in Caledonia at least two years.
Jonathan: So there’s some things that have happened between, I’m just saying from a chronological perspective.
Laura: Yeah. I have a guess that that music program was fifth grade, because I know that the decision for him to leave happened soon after that.
Jonathan: Let’s pause there because we’re getting a little bit, it’s getting a little disjointed.
Laura: The other thing is, the other thing is the last two children were born on Underwood.
And by the time I was pregnant with Mimi, I was totally in the dark about what Bob was doing, but he was not coming home at night. And eventually it became public and particularly Uncle Dick and Aunt Pauline got into my life again. So
At that point, all my children were born.
And maybe there were two still home yet, you and Mimi.
And I needed advice. I was finding out things I didn’t want to know. And there was a whole lot going on, including I got a letter from a father asking me if I would be willing to go to court to help him get custody for his children because of his wife’s affair with my husband. I still have that letter. I refused to do it, but then I started counseling every Sunday afternoon. I went to pine rest. to visit with Gelm van Noord. Gelm and Dutch Walkus, who was the judge, were my dad’s best friends, and they told my father that they would help me and be sort of a substitute dad.
So at that point, I dragged my feet for three years, because in those days, the word divorce was absolutely unknown.
And particularly at Fuller Avenue Church, which really did not come to my aid, there were three families.
John Vandenberg, the Vandercamps across the street, and Peter. Yes, those three people reached out to me. But when I went to church, nobody talked to me. And my kids reported more than once that people would come up to them and say, did your dad come to your house this week? And they looked at me like, you poor thing. And they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t speak. And I didn’t feel comfortable there.
So, It was while I was living still on Underwood. Mimi was born and she never ever had a father in her house. She never lived with a dad.
It was then after Mimi was about two that
I started using a lady that was two houses away to babysit because in the middle of the
Kent Monsma. Mrs. Monsma dropped out and Oakdale desperately needed a teacher in first grade and I started teaching then. I was still learning.
Jonathan: I’m gonna need to stop the recording and restart it. What? I need to stop the recording and restart it. It’s uh hold on just a second.
Laura: Okay well at any