10 - Back to College
Jonathan: All right, we’re recording now. It’s June 28, Saturday afternoon at four o’clock. It’s kind of become a standard time for you and I to talk. How are you doing, Mom?
Laura: I’m OK. And we’re looking back to our life on Underwood, the last years of our life there. First of all, you children were all at Oakdale Christian School.
And our pattern was we had dinner at noon, I think I’ve told you this before, because then Bob would come and have dinner with us. And your kids would walk home and walk back. So that must have been a pretty long noon hour at Oakdale.
The other thing that was going on was I was trying to get a degree. So I was continually taking classes first at JC and then when the two years were finished starting at Calvin. Now there was no income for tuition and so John Vandenberg helped a great deal in getting me the money I needed to go to Calvin and all my classes at Calvin were evening classes. So This was a time when the neighbor lady, and I can’t even think of their name, the daughter would babysit. By then, dad supposedly was working late at night, but the truth is other things were going on. And so I don’t even remember when dad would come home, but it would be very, very late. And my class was probably once or twice a week. And I think it was a class that started at 6.30 or 7 in the evening. And I was able to do my studying and my research at home and to use the local library when I had to. But I would do that during the day when you were in school and I’d have to take the youngest ones with me to the library. So those courses, they were not hard for me, but it was time consuming.
Now, also during that time, that’s when Mimi was born.
And because John and Marion Vandenberg were so supportive, they walked every day. And so many days they’d walk by my house and stop. And John enjoyed the children. So he would always say to Marion, take this girl for a walk. And I could see him sitting in the living room on a rocking chair, holding Mimi. And the kids were well behaved while he was there and most of them were in the house, not outside. And so that would be maybe a 30 minute walk of an escape of being a mother for a little while.
During that time, I connected with Kay Block at Calvin College and she was primarily in charge of the reading program because that was my area of getting the degree in the teaching of reading.
Jonathan: And now Kate Block was at Michigan State, is that correct?
Laura: No, she was at Calvin, but she was at Calvin. I’ll be jumping ahead now, but since I’m bringing up her name, she was the one who was called on to do all these weekend retreats because anybody that taught in the public schools had to take a reading weekend. It was a government requirement. It was called the area of reading. And K Block was a full-time professor at Calvin and for all of her weekends to be tied up that way, she was old and it was too much. So she was counting on me to start doing those teachers meetings on weekends. Now that was not going to be easy for me to do But my children were a little bit older by then. Mimi was not a baby anymore. And so she connected me with the professor at the University of Michigan, no, at Michigan State, who wrote the reading weekend program for the whole country. He was hired by the government to produce the contents of what those weekend meetings would amount to. So Kay Block knew him, of course, and she arranged that I would watch him teach a class. And it would be the kind of class that Kay had to teach to all the other teachers on Saturdays. So I would watch him do it instead of watching Kay, and then I would follow right on the heels of that class with a Michigan State class of students where I would do what I had just seen the professor do. So that was a semester when I wasn’t paid for my services, but I wasn’t charged for the classes either. So when I finished that program, Kay was counting.
Jonathan: Let me interrupt you just a second. That was taking place in Lansing at Michigan State? Yes. That you were having to do that?
Laura: Yes. OK. OK. So that was one day a week. And when I was finished, I went to see Kay and I told her I miss teaching children and I wanted to go back to the classroom. So after she set me all up with the proper training to begin doing those weekend workshops, I backed out on her.
So by then I had my degree. Now when I finished my degree, I did not have the money for graduation fees for the cap and gown and the whole shoot and match.
So I did not participate in my own graduation.
And that was disappointing to John Vandenberg because he had been really sponsoring me while I finished that.
But by then, I was fully prepared for any elementary teaching position that there was and um so and when you say that let me let me ask you what you had teaching experience you had by that time you had three or four years of experience oh i had much teaching experience by then i had taught at walker at westside and at oakdale and how many years total would that have been
Oh, let’s see.
Maybe seven.
Jonathan: That’s amazing. And only then did you get your bachelor’s degree from Calvin. Am I following it correctly?
Laura: Yes. And from there, I went on evenings driving to Kalamazoo to Western Michigan. to get my master’s in a teacher teaching a reading. All this while, you kids were going to Oakdale.
Ted played baseball and we would go to Martin Luther King Park to watch his game. The kids began a lot of music lessons and I don’t know where that money came from. I think that dad was certainly supporting me, not with divorce. He never supported me that way, but he supported the children. And so that was my income. And I did get a scholarship to continue with my master’s program, and that was going just once a week. That took more than a year to finish that, and I don’t remember exactly how long it was. It was during that time that West Side Christian suddenly had someone disabled the middle of the year and I was hired in January. And I was teaching right next door to Kay Hoidinga, who was the biggest pain in the ass you can imagine. She knew everything about everything. Kay Hoidington, what was her last name? Hoidinga.
Jonathan: Hoidinga, okay.
Laura: Hoidinga, yeah, and she still goes to the grave. But her room and my room, we had each of us a doorway into the hall, but we had a doorway between our two glasses too. And so I could overhear a lot of what she did. And one thing that bothered me, we had a Mother of Parents Day and her children were so rigidly controlled. When they walked in the classroom, each one knew which square on the floor they were to stand holding their bag and their lunchbox until she gave the word that they could put their things. We didn’t have the lockers, but they had a shelf and a hook under it and then another place, a shelf below. So they would hang up their coat, put their carrying bag and their lunch boxes up and then come back to the square and at no talk. It was just totally regimented. Well, this parent day, the door happened to be open and I heard her say to this one little boy, Richard, now, When everybody sings, you just move your mouth, but don’t sing because you sing wrong notes, okay? So Richard, when we sing for the parents, don’t sing.
Well, that was the kinds of things I overheard. And so I did not respect her at all. And I really wanted to get out of that. I was not happy teaching at Westside.
Jonathan: However.
Laura: There were beginning of the new year. There was an opening and Dan Day, who was teaching at the junior high in West Side, was called to be the principal at Seymour. And they had a first grade opening and he took me with him.
Jonathan: And how did you, you had some common lunchroom? Dan Day, I think has been an important person that you’ve worked with. You admire him a lot, but you first met while teaching together at Westside, he in junior high and you in elementary.
Laura: Uh, yes, that’s when, that’s when I met Dan.
Jonathan: And just, I know you’re modest about these things, but he sought you out. He wanted, he was going to be a principal somewhere. He wanted, he deliberately picked you. Is that how I should think of this?
Laura: Yes. Well, what he, what he, he took on the role of the new principal and the first thing he had to do was fill the empty first grade opening. So he called me.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Laura: So that’s how it happened. And he was a wonderful principal. I did a lot of unusual things that other teachers don’t do, things that attracted public articles in the paper. I remember one of the things that happened when I got to Seymour. Somehow I got that rickshaw.
And I think it came from Peter.
Jonathan: Peter’s fans.
Laura: Yes, yes. And nobody had ever seen one of those before, and I brought it to school and.
The children took turns pulling and riding, and that attracted a press article. Then I was awarded Teacher of the Year. That was another Press article. And then there were some occasion where I used older students to teach my little students, my younger students. There was a period of the week when I had fifth grade, fourth grade kids in my classroom for maybe 40, 45 minutes each assigned to one of my students. So it was those kinds of programs doing that sort of unusual thing that got me publicity.
Jonathan: And you would have been teaching first grade. So that was, that was an age spread between the first and fourth and fifth graders.
Laura: That’s right. And it was during that time, that I ended up Seymour School was right in the same neighborhood as a house that the Christian Reformed missions owned where missionaries who came for just six months at a time would live. So the Kortenhovens moved there and Aaron at age nine was moved into a first grade class. Now that was very awkward because he was much older. And he was very bright about nature and science, but he just resisted his mother teaching him how to read. So he didn’t have a background in phonics. He didn’t ever have a training in sight word lists. And so I put him in a corner every day. The students and I hand him a stack of the sight words that every child was supposed to know. And then my other students would have to go and one at a time, Aaron would hold up the cards and they would read them to him. And that drill for weeks and weeks got him reading. And pretty soon he was enjoying reading, which his mother said never would have happened. And they were six months in the States and ready to go back. And that’s when she begged me, would I consider going to Sierra Leone? So it was Mimi’s year to graduate from Dutton. It was your year to become a senior at the Christian High. And so for me to haul both of you away at such notable times in their life was a hard decision to make. And I was surprised that you both were gung-ho about going. It meant we were going to be flying to Europe. We would get a chance to rent a little car. And I did I did not have an income. I did not have a salary. But the mission board paid for our travel expenses and the car rental.
Jonathan: But you were acting as a like a volunteer. That was more of a volunteer. That’s correct.
Laura: OK. And that was.
Where are we already?
Jonathan: Yes, we were already on Lake.
Laura: We were already on it for an Apple river. Yes.
Jonathan: Before we get too deep into discussion about that, I think that that deserves a conversation in itself, but I think that lead up to that is just totally appropriate for everything else we’re talking about. But I just at a certain point, let’s, let’s pause the deep discussion of the trip there till another did we cover when Mimi was born? You know, I don’t know that we’ve really talked about the many of the, many of the kids birth. So, but I, we have not talked about Mimi.
Laura: Okay. Well, when you were born, I was seeing Gellman Nord every Sunday and my marriage was on the rocks.
When Mimi was born, Bob had officially moved away. He had left us. So Mimi never lived in the same house with her dad. And Dick and Pauline were always there for me. So he’s the one who took me to the hospital to give birth to Mimi.
My doctor knew of my marital situation. And so in those days when you gave birth, you were put into a multi bed ward with maybe four beds. They weren’t single rooms and you would be there for maybe two nights.
Well, my doctor alerted the nurses that I should not be put into that kind of a setting. So they gave me a private room. And the van der camps came as soon as I was placing at home. I’ll never forget, there they came with flowers for me. And then a couple hours later, the nurse came and said that my husband was in the hall.
and he went to look at Mimi and he stuck his head in the door of the room. He didn’t really walk into the room and said, she’s as beautiful as ever and left. Now in the next years,
The issue of divorce was so uncommon in the Christian Reformed circles. It was a disgrace. And I resisted it. And that’s why I saw Gelm every Sunday afternoon. And Gelm had assured my dad that since he was far away, Gelm would take his place, helping me and advising me.
Jonathan: And he was a psychologist by training. He was a good listener and introspective, thoughtful help to you, I think.
Laura: Absolutely. Absolutely. So most of those sessions, he just listened to me talk about what had happened in that week.
And he realized that I didn’t know all the things that were going on until I got that letter from the man who was the husband of one of the girls he was sleeping with, asking me to go to court and verify that his wife was unfaithful so that he could claim the children. And I refused to do that. At that point, I went to see Galm, and Galm said, look, it’s time for you to start your life over again. You’ve got to make a new beginning, Laura, and it’s going to start with getting a divorce. And he connected me to Roger Boer.
Jonathan: You covered a lot of incredibly emotional things there, Mom.
That is a vivid memory for you, being in the hospital, having given birth to Mimi, and to have have Bob be that detached? I mean, that must have really hurt when that happened.
Laura: Well, there were so many things that hurt. And when we were going to Fuller and I was ashamed because the word was out what was happening in our house. And I remember people at Fuller would look at me like, you poor thing, but they wouldn’t say a word. But then I heard from some of my children, that people would ask them, did your dad come to your house this week? And that made me furious.
So looking back later, I realized that I was not only dragging my feet, I was dragging my children’s feet. That lasted three years. Three years before I dared finally to file for divorce. And Gail and Vinod helped me to do that.
Jonathan: Three years, three years from the birth of Mimi? Is that approximate?
Laura: No, no, it would have been maybe the year. Let’s see. Well, very close, very close to Mimi’s birth. But when I was pregnant with Mimi is when he left.
Jonathan: I got you.
Laura: So after that uncle Paul and aunt doc came and stayed with you kids for two or three days while I was in the hospital on Underwood.
Jonathan: Okay.
Laura: Yep. And And then I came home from the hospital and was back at my motherly duties and seeing Gallum every Sunday.
Jonathan: Okay. I want to, I want to pause here and fill in a couple of details if you can, unless you have immediate things you want to finish up.
Laura: No.
Jonathan: Okay. So some of the things you talked about earlier, the logistics. of you getting to even JC, but then Calvin and then Western Michigan, that was a trick to the time balance for that many kids at home. And you were pregnant through many of those years. And you were teaching for six or seven years by the time Marion was born, so you were, you would teach a year and then you would take leave to have a kid. And then you’d teach at a new school at a different grade sometimes. I mean, it must’ve been just chaotic.
Laura: Yep. And it’s amazing that in that era, if someone was pregnant, they could not teach anymore. And Marion Monsma had a nervous breakdown.
Three times I was hired mid-year.
The first time I taught and again at Westside and again at Seymour. I mean at Oakdale.
Jonathan: Well, it sounds like you may have been working and had to quit. Mid semester, is that because you were pregnant? No, that never happened.
Laura: OK, I never quit in the middle of the year. OK, but I but I started in the middle of the year three times.
Jonathan: Yeah. OK. So during that time, I’m thinking of I’m thinking of when Bob was born or earlier, you you had moved from Dunham and you were on Underwood. That would have been like, tell me, tell me roughly how old kids were when we moved from Dunham to
Laura: Well, I had eight children in 11 years.
So knock off three of that for Bob’s birth.
Um, that would make Ted eight and go on and write down the list, you know?
Jonathan: Yeah.
You had, you had all, you had Mimi and me while we lived on Underwood, but you had everybody else while at Dunham. Would that be accurate?
Laura: Yes. Okay.
Jonathan: Okay. Okay, so during that time, I would like you to reflect about, I think, financial stability and was the early years were really dicey, right? Like when Ted was born and when Connie was born, I think money was pretty scarce. But as dad’s business got going, did your financial condition improve?
Laura: Well, Dad was supplying me with money every week to pay my bills. I mean, we weren’t owning a house. I don’t know that he even had insurance. I’m thinking that somehow, Galm got me help for hospitalization. And Roger Bohr, too. Roger Bohr came on the scene at least two of those three years.
I did not sign a divorce paper, though, until the very last.
I just can’t. I just kept hoping Bob was going to come back.
Jonathan: But when you say Roger Borah came on the scene, that would be a conversation with you and Bob or?
Laura: Well, well, that was arranged by Gail the Nord when he got to the point where he wanted to be his me to start thinking the legal consequences and how to resolve the mess I was in. And so He was the one that connected me to Roger. And Roger was very accommodating. I’ll never forget when he was born within a week or two, I went back to Roger’s office. And he was right in downtown across the street from Herbalsheimers in a big building. A lot of people, a very large law office. And he picked up Mimi, and he walked the hallway to all the secretaries, show them this sweet little new baby. I remember that about Roger. Yeah.
Jonathan: Yeah. That’s neat.
Laura: But at any rate, when it came down to the final court hearing, Bob didn’t even need to be there.
Jonathan: You had arranged your degree to what? The arrangements were before that date. It was a formality just to be in front of the judge. That’s right.
Laura: And then as I was teaching, I was, I mean, you kids, we ate simply. And I never bought new clothes. And we had a tradition, the day that school got out in June, we took off.
Jonathan: I want to talk about that in detail with you, Mom, because that’s a huge memory for all of us kids, the traveling that we did. But I wonder if it would make sense.
I marvel at your managing all of those things going on and running a household because dad was busy with his business, right? And out of the picture for much of that, it sounds like. But the logistics of getting to campus and putting, I mean, the older kids, Connie, Ted and Betsy must have been indispensable for
things in the house. Is that true?
Laura: Well, we had a system that every Saturday morning we had assigned jobs.
And I don’t remember what they all were, but everybody knew what they had to do on Saturday morning. And if all the jobs were finished, we went for Chinese lunch on Saturdays. That was the deal. And there was another deal.
Jonathan: That was on Thornapple for sure, but was that also on Underwood?
Laura: Oh, on Underwood, everybody had jobs, yes.
Jonathan: But the reward, I don’t remember that.
Laura: No, I don’t think so. Although it might have started there because we were living closer then. And by then, Dad was paying child support. And then I was getting an income. So it was much easier to pay the bills, but I wasn’t able to save much, but I was able every year to buy some kind of a camping equipment. I would buy it in the fall when the hunters were done hunting. And after I used it, no, wait a minute opposite. No.
Jonathan: Mom, I want to, I want to get all the details about this, but I want to circle back to something though. So you, you were driving a car at some point, you went from not having a car to absolutely needing a car. And, and dad gave dad got me a suburban. Okay. But there were vehicles before then, I think, right? Like in order for you to get down to JC, were you still riding the bus to go to night school at junior college or?
Laura: I don’t remember. I’m sure we had an old, old car, but I don’t remember what it was.
Jonathan: Okay. And trucking kids to medical appointments and stuff like that. I imagine there must’ve been a
Laura: Well, it was during that time that it was important to me that my children be musicians. And so that became as soon as I was employed and dad was supporting the kids, I could afford very expensive music lessons. We never got cheap teachers. We always got teachers that were recognized in their field. You and Bob with Ross, and Mimi with the teacher that lived right by the library on, oh, I don’t know what that street was. But at any rate, the only one that didn’t take lessons was Betsy because she was a singer.
And as it turned out, she did pursue that in some ways. There’s a funny story about that, but I think that that ought to be something we talk about later. It happened while we were living on Underwood. First, your kids were at Oakdale. So there were Oakdale programs, one in which Scott Glass did a large amount of singing in a program that was the gym was full of people. and Scott was sitting in the very front row, and he never moved his mouth once. He didn’t sing one note. And he was disciplined by his teacher for it, but I think I disciplined him too, and I don’t remember how much. So at any rate, but my kids who took lessons became very good musicians. Heidi on the viola, but in her case, her basketball career conflicted sometimes with her viola, but she still played and had a good position in the orchestra going all the way through high school. And Connie on the flute and you two boys on the cellos, those were lessons that cost a lot of money.
Jonathan: Sure. Well, I remember Ted on the cornet and Ted and Connie going on a cruise that was somehow related to a musical band.
Laura: Yes, American something or other. I remember that too, but I don’t remember the details. And I hope that that’ll turn up when I’m digging for little journals.
Jonathan: Would that have been in middle school or in high school?
Laura: Um, I think Ted would have been in high school and Connie would have been just at the end of junior high. Yeah.
Jonathan: That just seemed like a extravagant sort of thing, honestly, for to, to do that in our family. But it’s, I’ve always been curious about that.
Laura: But I don’t remember paying a penny of it. I think they were both scholarships.
Jonathan: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Laura: And they were probably, um,
led there by either their private teachers or maybe there was a promotion at the school where they were. I don’t remember the details of it.
Jonathan: I just, I wonder if it would be useful just to immerse yourself in the years at Underwood before you moved to Caledonia. And you’ve already mentioned the Vandenbergs as being just pivotal for helping you in many ways and supporting you. What other?
Laura: The Vanderkamp’s across the street.
Jonathan: Okay.
Laura: They were the first ones at the hospital when Mimi was born.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Laura: And Pete Spanstra was always available to repair things for me.
Jonathan: That’s nice.
Yeah. What, what other K block I think has been a important mentor for you at a certain point and academically, but she never was involved at all with any, any family things.
Laura: She knew the load that I had. But by then I had a reputation and that’s what she was using to make contact.
Jonathan: You had a reputation. What does that mean? As being an innovator and being a creative educator?
Laura: Being an effective teacher. Yeah. Elementary teacher. I many times
Calvin, what is his name now? I still see him.
There was a man in the education department who would assign me student teachers and he would come off and just sit in the back of the room and observe me. So at one point he and K Block asked Seymour’s permission for my class to go to Calvin for a semester. So every morning when everybody went into the building, my class got on a bus.
And what ended up happening was they could go to the canteen for lunches. They could buy ice cream and things like that. They, in gym, got to swim in the pool. Being at Calvin gave them a whole series of privileges that could not have happened at the Seymour complex.
Jonathan: And was that for a semester or for a year?
Laura: I think it was for a year. And Bob Ipple was my student teacher of one part of that.
Jonathan: So these Kay Block and this other sounds like a professor from Calvin. Did you ever let on that you had flunked French or was that kept as a secret?
Laura: Oh, I’m sure that was part of my record. It had to have been done. Don’t they keep. Maybe.
Jonathan: I’m teasing you.
Laura: It never came up.
Jonathan: The lady that flunked French, it sounds like she sort of made good in the academic setting eventually, right?
Laura: Yep. Yep.
Jonathan: Was that a good source of pride? Do you think back on that people called you out and recognized you for your innovations and your dedication?
Laura: Yesterday, John Boy from the Potter’s house came here because they’re going to take all of my books. And so Heidi and Gene came because they used to do work with him. And so we had snacks and sat around the table and talked. And then he said, well, Laura, I was very aware all through the years about your reputation as a teacher.
I didn’t even know him. I don’t know how that happened.
Jonathan: That’s nice. That’s neat, Mom. All right. So we’re at a point in time. Underwood approaching.
Laura: I think that talking, we are at the point where the divorce is final and support of the children is coming in regularly. And I am so Every time I bought a camper, I sold it for more than I bought it. So I was continuing to accumulate savings, and I started drawing the plans for the house. And one of the things that happened as a result of the divorce was Bob was not interested in the thorn apple. There was nothing going on out there. It was country. And he did not want me to lay claim to the composing room because he knew my salary had paid for all his initial machines. So at the time of the divorce, he agreed to give the land to me if I erased any claim to the business. And I didn’t really want to do business with him. So that was a very good agreement as far as I was concerned. But then for about a year, we would just ride out here and kids would walk from the road across the field down to the river. And we have a picnic or something. But there were no houses going up then. But I was drawing the plans then. So that was the end of our underwood living.
Jonathan: I think that would be a great place for us to start in our next conversation because that is kind of the end of a maybe stressful and depressing time in many ways.
Laura: A new beginning.
Jonathan: Yeah. That’s not like a plan.
Laura: Yep.
Jonathan: Good. Good. And let me ask you one thing. The Underwood home recently came up for sale. It was fun to see the inside photos of that.
Laura: I know. And they showed the floor plan and the rooms are exactly the way they were when we were there.
Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah.
Laura: Go ahead. I end up selling that thing for just, oh, I don’t even think it was a hundred thousand. I sold maybe 11,000.
Jonathan: So you own the Underwood home? Yes. OK. That would have been $1976. What, $72, $73? Early 70s.
Laura: Yeah. I’m not sure. See, I’m going to have to dig in all those. Right now I am, my next project is boxing books. Heidi’s trailer and Bob and Heidi and Jean are going to move everything to the front door of the Potter’s house. And they’re taking it all and they’re going to do the sorting and the books they don’t want, they’ll provide to the library. And they are, they came here to a huge low income population and single mothers. So I said to him, for example, there’s a box of cookbooks, think all you have to do is put a box