Morning Rounds and Evening Musings

Dad apparently did his homework and sent my plea for stories to his family. My uncle Tom emailed me with week with a photo of my grandpa and his siblings 8 years after they came to America from the Netherlands. He also included the following from his cousin Larry (Not sure what that makes Larry to me...2nd cousin?). I tried to identify the relationship of each of these people to me in parentheses:

The Ten Harmsel clan came to America in 1920 when a whole bunch of brothers, including our grandpa (my great-grandpa), Herman, left the small town of Nijverdal and got on a boat to come across the Atlantic. They left tow sisters in the Netherlands--both of them single--Tante Dena and one other sister whose name I don't know. The sisters lived into their nineties, and I know that Grandpa Herman visited them when he went back to the Netherlands in the late sixties.

The brothers came with their aged parents. I think their mother died on the boat on the way over (although I"m not sure about that--she may have died just before they left). Their father (my great-great-grandpa) died shortly after they arrived in Iowa, and is buried there. The six or so brothers, with their wives and kids, all settled in northwest Iowa, around Hull (Perkins Corners, Doon, some other small towns in the vicinity).

After they were in this country nine years, when they were just starting to get on their feet, the Depression hit, and devastated all of them. Some were able to go on making a living, but Grandpa (my great-grandpa) was thrown out of work and plunged into terrible poverty. My dad (my great-uncle, I think) still remembers as clear as a bell the time in 1936 when the family had to auction off everything they owned in the world, and take what little money they could get for it and come to Zeeland, Michigan where Grandpa had found work. It was a very dark time for them, although it began getting a little better after 7 or 8 years in Zeeland.

But then World War II came along. The Ten Harmsel family had three sons in the army at the same time, and the whole gang was worried about their safety. As it turned out, my dad (great uncle again) didn't go overseas, but you dad (my grandpa) and Tony (another great uncle) did. And they were part of some of the worst action of the war--both on D-Day and, in the case of your dad, in the Battle of the Bulge, too.

As you may not know, I (dad's cousin) worked with your dad at De Leeuw Lumber Company from 1959 until '62 or '63. I rode with him from Zeeland every morning of the summer in those years. He was driving a '57 Chevy with a straight stick--a cool car as far as I was concerned. He never talked much about the war--said a few things, but the general impression I got was that he didn't care to linger too much on that experience. He came unwounded, while a lot of guys he knew didn't come back at all. And it was a sobering experience, not the sort of thing you take lightly or discuss much. (that car is not the actual car, but I wanted to see what a '57 chevy looked like).

He (my grandpa) was always cheerful, full of jokes (some of them off-color) and he was far and away the strongest guy at the lumberyard--a place where everybody was fairly tough. Herm could haul lumber off the boxcars with his bare hands (which were like leather) while everybody else wore gloves. He would handle 2x12's two or three at a time, while I had to grunt with just one. Yes, back in those days we unloaded boxcars full of lumber by hand. Nowadays it's all containerized and mechanized. We used to have little contests at the yard, where people would make guesses about, say, the length of a 2x4 laying on the ground a hundred yards way. Herm always won those bets. I remember one time when people were betting the 2x4 was either 14 or 16 feet long, but your dad said it wasn't either--he thought it looked like about 15' 3''. We sent a guy over with a tape measure and sure enough--it was a sixteen footer that had had 9" cut off. I was always amazed at the accuracy of his eye.

I don't think the De Leeuw brothers ever paid your dad all that well, but he really seemed to enjoy the work, and I never once heard him complain. He was, all in all, a real pleasure to work with, and to get to know in that way.

I think I know someone else with leathery hands who would probably put everyone in a lumberyard to shame. Hmmm. Wonder where he gets it? Also, I went online to see if DeLeeuw Lumber still existed. And they do! And they had a little history section on their page that talked about them starting up 1947 and being the first ones to use some kind of dump-truck technology or something. So, I swiped some pictures from their site.


This story makes me curious about even more, though, I must say!

-What was the town of Nijverdal like and what's it like now? Why did the Ten Harmsels leave the Netherlands? And why did the two sisters (my great-great aunts?) stay behind?

-Why Iowa?

-What happened to the other brothers who came over on the boat?

-Who are all the people in the photo and which one is my grandpa?

Also, just as an interesting and terrifying side note--please notice that the photo above has two sets of twins in it! None of my Grandma and Grandpa's kids (my uncles) were twins, but isn't there some idea that twins skip a generation? Oh crap! Hopefully, Grandma's genes and the Van Goor and Henricksen genes are dominant!