Breaking Glass - Broken Barriers: Voyage of an Entrepreneurial Spirit

By Joyce Verplank Hatton

Joyce Verplank Hatton’s life has embraced community and political leadership, entrepreneurial success, love and family, and worldwide sailing adventures. Writing with courage and candor, she shares her life’s journey following a trail from a small harbor town on Lake Michigan to Aspen Colorado, New York City, Washington, D.C., and beyond, while skiing the Rockies and sailing the Caribbean.

Hatton’s entrepreneurial drive became evident in 1957 when she developed the first nursery school in Western Michigan, the first child care company to go public in 1970, and the first multi-state computerized USDA child care food program in 1976. Encouraged by a supportive family and a dynamic mentor, Hatton also established herself in media ventures that included FM radio, UHF television, and cable networks.

Hatton brought her leadership experience to state and national politics as well: she was a candidate for Michigan’s new State Board of Education in 1964, Republican County Chairman in President Gerald Ford’s Fifth District, and a delegate to the 1968 GOP national convention in Miami. And she logged over a decade of ocean sailing, charting the course with a talented lifelong sailor.

In this personal narrative, Hatton hopes to encourage other women to value independent economic status, be entrepreneurial, take risks, and march to their own drum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: May 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781480855854

Joyce Verplank Hatton

Her memoir tells the inspiring story of an entrepreneur, community leader, open ocean sailor, and mother of six who embraced change and sought out opportunities to make a difference.

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Copyright © 2018 Joyce Verplank Hatton.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-5584-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5583-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5585-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017919508

Archway Publishing rev. date: 07/09/2018

Nearly everything I did would have started anyway. In fact, people have said that Einstein was only about five years ahead with relativity, that other people were getting close, or maybe even three years. I think that the present environment, when there’s so many well-trained, smart people in science, that if you’re a year or two ahead of everybody else, that you’re doing something original. If you’re twenty years ahead, you don’t have a chance …

The Bubble Chamber, Bioengineering, Business Consulting, and Neurobiology, Donald Glaser Oral History BANC MSS 2008/168. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, Oral History Center, University of California, Berkeley.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1     The Entrepreneurs

Chapter 2     Culture Shock

Chapter 3     A confidant?

Chapter 4     Playing the Game

Chapter 5     The White House

Chapter 6     Many Bases of Operations

Chapter 7     The Year that Was

Chapter 8     …It’s In The Plan.

Chapter 9     Paideia

Chapter 10   Megatrends

Chapter 11   Breaking Glass

Chapter 12   Full Faith and Credit

Chapter 13   Bon Voyage

Chapter 14   The Dowry

Chapter 15   My Angel

Chapter 16   Broken Barriers

Chapter 17   Trumpet Voluntary?

Chapter 18   The Caribbean 1500

Chapter 19   The Millenium

Chapter 20   A Producers Academy

Chapter 21   The Entourage

Chapter 22   9/11/2001

Chapter 23   Navigating The Seas

Chapter 24   The Journey to Furthur

Chapter 25   That’s Life…

Chapter 26   Concierge Services

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

The Entrepreneurs

The story is, I fear, suffocatingly subjective …

C. S. Lewis

Preface to Surprised by Joy, 1956

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Joos Verplank and his nine sons

P atriarchal they all were. The original Bill of Rights included legal protection for landowning white males only. It would be our law for generations. And it was easy to enforce when my great-grandfather Joos Verplank’s family produced ten boys and no girls, and my grandpa Tony’s, five boys and no girls. Dad’s generation proved different when I appeared on the scene in 1932. I was able to embrace our constitutional amendments and the positive Supreme Court case decisions that changed the embedded structure. I could follow in the footsteps of my energetic and entrepreneurial forefathers.

Great-Grandpa Joos Verplank lived to be ninety-nine years old. When he died in 1943, he was the oldest living Civil War veteran in western Michigan. Joos wrote his memoir in 1921, at age seventy-six.

Joos’s courageous story begins in August 1848. His mother and youngest brother had died of Asiatic cholera in Albany, New York, while en route from the Netherlands to the Dutch colonies in western Michigan. Joos describes the scene on the beach in Grand Haven, Michigan, when carried ashore by his Dad:

It was dark when we arrived, and the crew pitched our luggage onto the shore. Father carried the four children one by one from the boat to the shore. Looking about, he found some tanbark, which he set up as a sort of shelter. However, as it soon began to thunder and lightning, he found an old barn to shelter us from the rain.

The next morning old man Nicholas Vyn walked over to where we were. He had come to Grand Haven from the Netherlands in 1847.

He said, "Ben je ook een Hollander?"

"Ja," answered Father.

You can imagine his joy in meeting and talking with someone from home. After hearing the story of Father’s trouble, he promised to find work for him. The next morning, he came with a big basket of food, and we had all we wanted to eat. He moved us into a shack of a house, where sister Jane, who was eight years old, cared for the others, while father worked at rafting lumber. He earned a dollar a day, and we would have gotten on fine, but father was not used to heavy work, and in a short time was very ill with bloody dysentery.

The family was again destitute, but soon a Dutch settler from Holland, Michigan, twenty miles south of Grand Haven, learned that Joos’s father was a shoemaker, and he urged them to go to Holland. The colony of Holland was the family’s original destination, but they had no money to get there.

Great-Grandpa Joos tells of their good fortune once more:

Well, finally, Mr. Vyn of Grand Haven heard how badly father wished to move to Holland, and one night, at prayer meeting, he collected four dollars, which he brought over, and told us we could go. …

Our condition could scarcely have been worse. Father and four poorly nourished children, in need of everything, you might say. No bedding, no clothing, no furniture—just a big box that held all we owned.

The family arrived in Holland in the latter part of July 1849. Joos’s father found work with a local shoemaker and then quickly branched out on his own. He had the entrepreneurial instinct—the new proprietor who owned and managed, and assumed responsibility for not only the results but also the larger community that had supported him and his family.

Soon Joos’s largest community was about to ask for his help. In his eighteenth year, the Civil War broke out. Many of the Holland boys enlisted in 1861, and there was another call in 1862. Joos describes the scene:

[T]he town was all stirred up. I tried to stick to my shoe bench; but, with people running up and down, shouting and singing, this was no easy thing for a young fellow to do. Finally, I threw down my tools, pulled off my apron, and ran away to the Town Hall, where men were speaking. Dr. A. C. Van Raalte, I remember, made a good speech. He said, There are my two sons. If they wish to go, I give them free leave. Forty boys, myself among the number, enlisted that night.

I did not go home until midnight.

Father called out, Is that you, Joos?

I answered, Yes, I have enlisted.

I heard him moan. I felt very uneasy, stayed in bed until he had gone to work the next morning, and tried to keep away from him.

After celebrating and training for two weeks in Holland, Joos reports how hard it was to leave home: I shall never forget the weeping and moaning of the crowd of relatives and friends that met to see us off. I was eighteen that spring, tall and very thin. They all said, ‘Joos will never come back; if he doesn’t die in battle, he will die in the hospital.’

But Joos did come back. He arrived in Jackson, Michigan, on July 2, 1865. After loafing all through the following winter, Joos sailed on Lake Michigan during the summer of 1866, first as a cook, and then he took the mast.

When a vacancy opened up in 1872 for the office of town marshal in Holland, Joos was nominated on both the Republican and Democratic tickets in the spring of 1873:

I was town marshal until the close of the year 1876. Since the year 1876 was a presidential year, the Democrats wished me to run for Sheriff of Ottawa County. I knew there was not much use, as Ottawa was so strongly Republican. As my friends urged so strongly, I consented. I was well acquainted in all the towns south of the river. They were largely Republican, and this helped me get the nomination.

I put a mortgage on my home for all it was worth and went out electioneering. I was elected by a small majority, the only one elected on the Democratic ticket.

After Joos’s two busy years as sheriff, the new Greenback party asked him to run:

The Democrats were depending on me for their ticket. There I was; thought of it day and night. I knew if I accepted the Greenback nomination I was almost certain of victory; on the other hand, I did not like to disappoint my friends. Finally, I made up my mind that my closest friends would stand by me regardless of party, so I accepted for the Greenbackers. Mr. Vanderhoef was put up by the Democrats and Woltman by the Republicans. I was elected by a majority of five or six hundred. I needed it badly, as I had spent so much money in electioneering.

When Joos lost the next election in 1880, he had a family of five boys, including my grandfather, Tony Verplank, who was born in 1877. Joos could have gone back to Holland as town marshal, but he felt that he had quite a family by this time and not enough education for business, so he decided to buy a farm.

Unfortunately, Joos had bought an inexpensive farm on the Crockery Township border, a few miles east of the village of Spring Lake; Joos complains about the farm full of pine stumps and the land poor after they were out. Nevertheless, he insists:

By hard work, we made a good living. But soon four of the boys were married, leaving five younger ones who were in school most of the time. Then, too, there was so much work in the house, I decided that if I could sell I would go back to town.

The following spring, Joos built a house in Spring Lake. Joos thus concludes his autobiography:

We see you all married, and in your own homes, and making your own living. As parents, we are very proud of the family. You have no reason to complain, but should be thankful to your Lord and Creator. …

My father, Vernon Verplank, was born in 1907. He didn’t write a memoir, but he did give me an extended interview in 1995, when I moved back to Michigan. Dad had such a prodigious memory, especially of his childhood, that the interviews lasted all summer and, when transcribed, produced 450 pages.

Most of Grandpa Tony’s brothers were lured to Gary, Indiana, to seek work in the high-paying steel-mill town—just not in the steel mills. Uncles Gerrit, George, and Albert spent the first part of their business careers in the automobile business. They were automobile dealers and taxi and gas station owners.

There was no slowing down Uncle George (nicknamed Pipi), in business or in life. Uncle George founded the hugely successful Calumet Paving Company in Gary, and moved the company to the state capital, Indianapolis, after receiving large state contracts to build part of the new Indiana-Ohio toll road and other interstate systems.

Uncle Joe, two years older than Grandpa Tony, pursued a demanding architectural career in Gary, designing some of the biggest buildings, including the Gary Theater. In middle age, he moved to Santa Monica, California, and found a second career in astronomy that he followed passionately. When our family visited Uncle Joe in 1946, he would escort me outside every night to describe the celestial bodies. I was only thirteen, and I remember finding it rather boring, because Uncle Joe assumed I knew something about the positions of the stars, but I was totally lost. All the sailors in our family could have used his knowledge of celestial navigation as we stared down the horizons on our sextants.

Uncle Grover was the ninth boy, twenty years younger than the eldest, Abe, and ten years younger than Grandpa. When Uncle Grover needed funds to complete medical school at the University of Michigan, all of his older brothers chipped in to help pay the tuition. Grandpa Tony, with his eighth-grade education, was only thirty years old and already the father of four boys, but he gave Grover $3,000. After medical school, Dr. Grover Verplank returned to Gary and became a busy obstetrician during the booming 1920s. By the time my brother Midge was born in 1931, Uncle Grover would brag that he had delivered more than forty-five hundred babies.

After the turn of the twentieth century, when Grandpa Tony was still in his early twenties, he went into the ice business in Spring Lake, with John Brongersma. Grandpa could see the business was growing, so he borrowed some money from Frank Scholten, president of the Spring Lake Bank, and bought out John Brongersma in1908.

Grandpa knew how to leverage his business. After borrowing $3,000 from the bank, Grandpa never paid it back; he just kept buying the local ice companies. In 1912, he bought the Frank Fox Ice Company, which had a big icehouse that took up practically a city block on Barber Street in Spring Lake—where Dad remembered circus people renting the icehouse in summer months to set up their trapezes and practice their routines.

Dad had become part owner of the Spring Lake Ice Company in 1926, when he was nineteen years old. When they had an open winter (no ice because of warmer-than-average winter temperatures) in 1930, Dad became very upset and called Grandpa Tony in Florida.

Grandpa said, We’re going to build an ice plant. Start looking around for a building. I’ll head for home immediately.

I asked Dad why he wasn’t worried about electric refrigerators in 1930. Dad explained, After we started to build the ice plant, we lacked about $5,000 to handle the whole deal, and the bankers tried to discourage us from building. Their thought was that General Electric had a refrigerator with a big dome top on it, and Frigidaire had four-cubic-foot refrigerators.

Dad emphasized, This was right in the middle of the Depression. A four-cubic-foot refrigerator was about $250 to $300. People making a quarter an hour could always find a dime to buy a twenty-five-pound block of ice, or two bits for a fifty-pound block, but they couldn’t buy a refrigerator. When the bank meeting was over, within thirty minutes, George Christman, (a Spring Lake lumber titan on the board), called and declared, ‘Tony, forget about the bank … you’ve got whatever you need.’ So George Christman financed the $5,000 for that. And a few years later, when I was about to build a new house, I went to George Christman and got the money as I needed it, at 6 percent interest.

Because the ice business was seasonal, Grandpa Tony began selling coal in 1910. But it wasn’t until the mid-1920s that the name was changed to Spring Lake Ice and Coal Company.

Grandpa Tony made a real estate purchase that turned out to be very propitious for his growing business. The purchase is described by Dr. David Seibold, with the editing help of his wife, Dorothe, in their marvelously detailed thousand-page history, In the Path of Destiny, subtitled, Grand Haven, Spring Lake, Ferrysburg, and Adjoining Townships, as follows:

In the days following the First World War, the only bridge from Spring Lake to Grand Haven was the Interurban Bridge, which had been built originally in 1866 and then reinforced in 1903 for the Interurban cars. It was used for pedestrian and vehicular traffic as well as the Interurban trains. Most teams of horses, including the ice wagon teams, had no trouble, but occasionally the Interurban cars would cause a horse or a team to balk, which made for an eventful crossing.

Tony Verplank conjectured that a new bridge might be built to replace the Interurban Bridge, not so much to separate the horse traffic from the rail traffic but because of the ever increasing number of automobiles using the West Michigan Pike after WW I. Playing his hunch, Tony bought the riverfront property in Ferrysburg between the railroad tracks and the Spring Lake Channel speculating where the new bridge might be built. As it turned out, Tony’s hunch was correct. In 1923 a swing bridge was built over the Grand River with the north approach squarely on Verplank’s property in Ferrysburg.

Dad reports a second purchase:

We always were in the coal business with the rail yard. It was 1930 when we bought the first piece of land on the river … 407 feet … and then a few years later, we bought another few hundred feet on the west end of the dock … and then back in later years after Construction Ag[gregates] quit the gravel business we ended up buying all of that so we had all of the property from the Grand Trunk Bridge clear to the Sag—more than 3,000 feet of prime riverfront property. Good deep water the whole distance. And all the Construction Ag property was sealed breakwater, and all of our property was riprap. Big pieces of broken concrete—riprap.

Both ice and coal were dropped in the 1950s to concentrate on trucking from the Verplank docks, but the name wasn’t changed to Verplank Trucking Company until 1984.

What attributes contributed to Grandpa Tony’s success as an entrepreneur? Dad’s simple answer: He was hardworking, always worked himself, right up until the end.

What about Dad’s mother, Grandma Jessie? She, too, must have been hardworking. As a young bride, Grandma ran the boardinghouse in Fruitport while nursing the first two of her five boys. During the years that Sherman, Merle, Russell (Whitey), Vernon (Tooter), and Raymond were growing up, Grandma Jessie took care of the books and collected the money for the family company. Grandma worked first from a makeshift front office in their home, and then from an actual office. In 1920, in her forty-second year, Grandma Jessie was working in her new Grand Haven office when the pen fell out of her hand, and she was rushed to the hospital. Her ability to carry on with any family role was cut short by a severe stroke.

Dad was barely thirteen, and Raymond was nine or ten, when Grandma Jessie had her stroke. Raymond lived at home, but Dad spent his time after school with his best friend, Pie Lawton, and eventually moved in with the Lawton family until he finished eighth grade. With no one to guide Dad at home, Dad dropped out of ninth grade for a month, before a friend of the family talked him into coming back to school, which literally was next door.

Dad was the only one of Tony and Jessie’s five sons to continue past eighth grade. For Dad’s graduation from tenth grade, the final grade in the Spring Lake school system, Grandma Jessie gave Dad a coveted ruby ring, which he treasured so highly that he never took it off until his dying day.

Fortunately, Dad kept the matriculation going and attended eleventh grade at Grand Haven High School in the fall of 1924. That was where he met Mom; they shared the same desk in bookkeeping class. Mom was only fourteen but already a sophomore.

By February 1925, Dad was restless and quit school again—this time to ship out on the General Meade, a 200-foot sand sucker. At seventeen, he was one of the youngest on the ship, signing on for seventy-five dollars a month as a coal passer in the boiler room. He stayed out of trouble, loaned the rough-and-ready gamblers on the ship money after they ran out of cash before paydays, and left in the late spring to haul ice for Grandpa Tony, at fifty cents an hour.

Did he like working on a ship? "Oh yeah, I always liked that. When we were bringing coal … [from] Toledo, I remember you came along for the ride back through the straits to the Verplank Docks in Grand Haven. Was that freighter the John J. Boland?"

(It was a coincidence that I rode back as a teenager at about the same age that Dad shipped out on the General Meade. I told Dad that I remembered steering a huge freighter more than 400 feet long through the Straits of Mackinac, and the captain made me look around to see my path, and, of course, it looked like a snake weaving back and forth. The captain’s comment: Think how much coal you cost us!)

Dad then recalled, I remember that John J. Boland Jr., was on that. He said you were up on the A-frame and all over the ship. (Yes, Dad, I found it very interesting … lots of fun … I took after you. I never got seasick, so that made it easier.)

After getting off the General Meade, Dad was ready to spread his wings … but he needed his father’s help. I didn’t have five cents to buy anything with—except I was working on the ice truck at that time.

Grandpa cautioned Dad, telling him motorcycles were too dangerous. When he found out that Dad was going to buy a clunker of a motorcycle anyway, Grandpa drove Dad to the Harley-Davidson dealership in Muskegon.

With Grandpa’s check for $374 (payment in full), Dad rode away with his spanking-new Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

Hardly a week had passed before Dad took a direct hit—took it on the chin—from an elderly driver who ran a red light. After spending part of the summer in the hospital, with cuts, bruises, chipped teeth, and a broken arm, Dad was ready to get back on his dearly repaired Harley.

By late fall, Dad was ready to travel again. I probably had fifty dollars in my pocket, and we [Dad and Preston Bilz] put the tent on the back of the motorbike, with a few changes of clothes, and took off for Niagara Falls. Then we rode down to Washington, DC. After we left Washington, that was where our trouble started.

First, Pres slid off a loose gravel road and injured his knee, and then, about an hour later, things got worse:

[W]e hit about an eight-foot-[wide] strip of blacktop on this gravel road. We were riding along there, probably forty to forty-five miles an hour, and the tobacco was about three-feet high on each side of the road and came right up to the gravel. This old beagle hound came just angling out of the tobacco, just leisurely, right out in front of me. I just zoomed around him like that. Next thing, I could hear steel crashing on the pavement. Pres hit the dog and blew out his back tire. I had a .38 revolver in my saddlebag, and I took my revolver and I had it on my side walking around the dog. I was going to put it right up to the dog’s head because he was lying there badly injured. Just as I was walking around there, someone hollered, You shoot that dog, and I’ll shoot you.

A black man was standing at a little old cabin with a step to get into the cabin. He was standing on the step there with his double-barreled shotgun. The dog was down alongside him. Everybody just stood there like that. I never opened my mouth. I just went back, put my revolver back in the saddlebag, and asked Pres, What do we do now?

Pres returned home to Spring Lake, and Dad continued on to Daytona Beach. While trying to sleep in his new pup tent, he was invaded by baby lizards crawling all over him and his tent, and he headed home fast. With no rain in sight, Dad hit the hard clay roads on the westerly route through Georgia and Tennessee. Dad said clay roads were slippery when wet—so slick no one could ride a bike on them until they dried out; maybe use a horse and wagon, but never a bike.

Dad was greeted at home by Fred Nienhouse, who announced, I’m leaving for California tonight. How about going along?

Fred, I’m flat broke. I just got back from Florida.

Fred pressed Dad. Well, how much money have you got?

Dad replied that he had thirty-five to forty dollars, and Fred said, Well, forget about that. I have $300. I have a brand-new car.

If you want to foot the bill, why, I’m ready to go.

And so, after a week of sad good-byes, they took off. We just drove night and day.

Until they got to Texas, that is. First, they had to be pulled through mud up to their tire hubs by a team of horses. Next, they had to use their jackets to cover the radiator after it froze overnight.

They found Tucson quite a city, but after arriving at 4:00 a.m., they left at 9:00 a.m. They were eager to get to Los Angeles. When we got down there and found out the number of people lined up to be employed, and not ever having any experience on the ocean, or maritime cards, or anything to show, it just was hopeless to try to ship out of there. So we decided we would head for San Francisco, a bigger seaport.

After an overnight visit with Uncle Joe in Santa Monica, Dad and Fred left for Frisco. When they stopped in Santa Barbara on Christmas Eve, they were invited to a roaring party at a transient boardinghouse. They looked around and realized that the city was still a mess from the 1923 earthquake, so they offered to be laborers on a construction site.

After a few days of scary earthquake tremors, Dad received a letter from Whitey’s wife, Aunt Minnie, saying that she had a proposition for him. Aunt Minnie ran the office for Grandpa Tony, and she told Dad that Grandpa Tony wanted him and Uncle Sherm and Uncle Whitey to come back home to work, and if they did, Grandpa would make the three of them equal partners in the business. Dad knew that Uncle Merle was never coming back, and he knew that Uncle Raymond was too young to become an equal partner at that time.

I asked Dad if he was bummed out about coming home right away.

No, there was no bummed out about it, he said. I’d been on the lam long enough to know that if you didn’t have five cents in your pocket, well, you were just out of luck wherever you were. The opportunity there was to get my feet on the ground someplace where I could make a few nickels. This looked like the best chance I would ever get. So, naturally, it didn’t take me long to make up my mind to get back home. Get home and get right on the ice truck and continue right on from there."

There seemed to be quite a few young guys who went to sea from Grand Haven and Spring Lake. Dad affirmed this: Oh, practically all of them. … My brother Sherm got off to come to the ice company after the war [World War I] was over. Les Hannah and Sherm got on the car ferries because, after the war started, they were both going to be in the draft, for sure. Both of them stuck right to the car ferries all during the war. …

Dad came back from California in the spring of 1926. He would turn nineteen in July. I asked Dad if Grandpa brought him into the business then or if he had to work for a few years.

Dad replied, No, no, when I came back, we organized the partnership between Sherm, Whitey, Dad, and me. I think our deal was completed in ’26, or somewhere along there. … Anyway, first thing we decided to do was to tear down the old icehouse on the bayou and build a new, modern icehouse.

I was curious as to how they divvied up who did what and who ran the place.

Dad explained, We punched a clock just like the rest of the men. We worked for fifty cents an hour. Sometimes, in the early part of the season, we hauled coal. We delivered coal, along with the rest of the drivers and some of the other drivers we paid on a tonnage basis. They made more than fifty cents an hour. It was not … reasonable that we weren’t paid on a tonnage basis too. So, if we delivered an extra few tons of coal during the day, we made more than fifty cents an hour. We worked by the time clock … until the day we started to build our ice plant. Our wages were reduced to forty cents an hour to conserve our capital investment. We worked at forty cents an hour all during the season the ice plant was being built.

I asked Dad where he got this drive, this work ethic. I got that when I was off on trips to California and Florida. When you were on your own, and you didn’t have money, your name was mud.

After a full decade exploring life on his own, Dad found his anchor to windward; Mom would keep him in good shape … for many, many decades.

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Now to Mom’s side of this history. … Mom was not as loquacious as Dad when I interviewed her in 1995. I had to ask specific questions about her childhood in Minnesota and Michigan, and I was happy I did.

When Grandma Bessie Jirele Secory, an only child, inherited her family’s farm in southern Minnesota, Grandpa Louis Secory left bartending and bricklaying work in Mason City, Iowa, sold the Jirele family farm, and bought a new farm five miles outside of Brainerd, Minnesota. Now Grandpa Louie could be his own boss, make his own decisions, and produce what he wanted, when he wanted.

According to Mom, Grandpa Louie made all the decisions for the family too—all of them: There was nowhere that Mom [Bessie] ruled the roost. … Whatever Dad [Louie] said, was law. Men at that time didn’t pay any attention to children. He [Grandpa Louie] was just like your dad, who never changed a diaper on you children.

If Grandpa Louie wanted to farm in the godforsaken cold of Brainerd, Minnesota (home of Paul Bunyan)—where average January temperatures were five degrees Fahrenheit and average July temperatures only sixty-eight degrees—then that was what his family had to endure. Mom—born Lydia Secory—was the next to youngest of nine children, but only the four youngest were still living at home in 1915 when the family moved north to central Minnesota from Iowa.

Grandpa Louie had to have an English-language newspaper delivered every day, and a Bohemian-language newspaper at least once a week. Grandpa was well educated, having gone to college to study for the priesthood. After matriculating for a year and a half, Grandpa decided the celibate life was not for him. Grandma Bessie only finished eighth grade before being whisked off to marry Grandpa, four years her senior. And by the year 1912, before celebrating her fortieth birthday, Grandma Bessie had given birth to twelve children. Only nine would live to adulthood.

Education was important to Grandpa Louie. Pretty little five-year-old Lydia Frances Secory, nicknamed Toots, walked with her older siblings a long way to their one-room schoolhouse in Minnesota. In the winter, she climbed over drifts that were three times taller than she was; in the spring and fall, she walked near bulls that she thought were coming after her. Mom confessed, You never could trust a bull; they could be mean sometimes.

Mom and her two brothers and older sister were so scared of the howling wolves at night that they never dared leave the house. They couldn’t go into town, except to buy groceries, because it was too far, and in the winter, they were forced to go by sleigh.

There were advantages to living on the farm. For one thing, there was healthy food. With no electricity, no refrigeration, and no ice cream, there were no cavities. Mom reported that she never experienced being hungry when she was growing up on the farm. A typical supper that Mom just loved was homemade bread soaked in fresh milk.

I asked Mom if she thought her family was rich or poor. She replied, Well, they weren’t rich, and they weren’t poor. They were mediocre, I guess.

If accidents happened in Minnesota—teenage Al with a broken leg, or six-year-old Frank with a rupture—Grandpa had no way to communicate for help. They had no telephone, no electricity, and no automobiles. Grandpa would pile the boys into a cart or sleigh, hitch up a horse, and drive them into the hospital in Brainerd. Mom’s analysis: Grandpa must have had money somewhere to pay for that.

Grandpa Louie decided to buy a fruit farm in western Michigan in 1920. After the family moved to the farm in Robinson Township, it took only a year or two for Mom’s older sister, Martha, (Aunt Mart) to earn enough money to buy a car—the only car in their country neighborhood. Aunt Mart would become the saving grace of her little sister and brother, eight and ten years younger, respectively.

The Robinson Township single-room elementary schoolhouse was located on a corner of Grandpa’s farm. Mom loved the school and the teacher and preferred the classroom to the long summers in the field, where she was forced to work all day, every day, from the age of ten until graduation from high school in 1927. Grandma Bessie made Mom’s dresses out of old flour and grain bags when she worked in the field, but once Mom started high school, Grandma made her dresses from patterns and fabric chosen by Mom.

Mom and her younger brother, Frank, felt very lucky. They were probably the only students in their one-room school who would continue past eighth grade. None of the others even contemplated it. How could they? The high school was almost ten miles away. There were no buses, no public transportation. The students would have to take the Interurban from Grand Haven to Spring Lake after eighth-grade graduation just to take a test to see if they qualified for study at the nearest high school. If they passed, they would have to pay twenty-five dollars per year to attend Grand Haven High School, because they lived in Robinson Township and not the city. Mom, whose birthday is March 9, was only thirteen when she started high school in 1923.

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With all the requirements for entering high school, it was no wonder that Grandma Bessie didn’t want Mom to bother with it, declaring that Mom was just going to get married anyway.

Grandpa was different. Mom explained, My dad liked reading and stuff because he had more of an education than my mother did. He was the one who inspired us to go to high school. Mom didn’t think that we needed to go to high school, but Dad said, ‘Oh yes!’

Mom emphasized, If it hadn’t been for Mart! … Of course, Dad knew that we could go in with her.

Grandpa Louie had a tough career playing baseball in a minor league in the nineteenth century. They had no gloves. They had to catch everything with their bare hands. Both Mom and Uncle Frank inherited Grandpa’s athleticism and love of baseball. They played baseball every summer in the township. Uncle Frank played football too, but Mom said the girls didn’t play. Mom was a star basketball player in high school and continued her career in a Spring Lake basketball league after she was married.

Uncle Frank was noticed as a really good baseball and football player as soon as he started high school. He was offered a scholarship in football and baseball at Western Michigan University (Western), but he first needed to work for a few years and also supplement the scholarship with additional summer work for Kellogg’s, the giant cereal company located in Battle Creek, just a few miles from Western in Kalamazoo. For his ten-year career in the major league and twenty years umpiring in the National League, Uncle Frank was often recognized by Michigan sports enthusiasts, Western Michigan University, and the Grand Haven School Foundation’s Hall of Fame.

Mom did not think about attending college. She knew she couldn’t afford it; she was happy to get through high school.

When I asked Mom, in 1995, if she thought about the feminism of today, she answered, No. Because we all were in the same boat. Not any of us even thought about going to work. It was just a way of life at that time in our lives.

It was a way of life if you were married and had children. Mom worked for almost three years as a telephone operator in Grand Haven and Grand Rapids before tying the knot in South Bend, Indiana, in February 1930. A year later, Lurelle Jay, nicknamed Midge, was born. Two years later, I, named Beverly Joyce but called Joyce, was born. The caboose, Gary Lee, was born in 1940.

Aunt Minnie, who was married to Dad’s older brother, Whitey, never was able to have children. Aunt Minnie helped Grandma Jessie Wills Verplank run the office of the Spring Lake Ice and Coal Company until Grandma Jessie suffered her stroke in 1920. Then Aunt Minnie took over and practically ran the company for about thirty years, according to Mom.

Although Mom and Dad were married during the worst of the Depression, Mom said she never knew what the Depression really was. They were in the ice and coal business, and that was what people needed. Especially several years later, during World War II! The huge Verplank coal dock supplied most of the coal to the war industries in Muskegon, and those industries, in turn, stole many of the best coal-truck drivers, with sky-high wages. Even Mom drove a truck, hauling a conveyor behind it, when called upon by Dad. Other women would help drive coal trucks too. Mom remembered a young mother who would strap her fifteen-month-old baby to the front seat of the coal truck so that she could help her husband fill his small coal yard in a rural northern Michigan town.

I reminded Mom that I had been very active in politics; where did that interest come from?

No doubt from your Dad, because he was always interested in everything in the newspapers and on the radio.

When I asked Mom if Dad was like that since they were married, she laughed. I would say so. Always, even when we lived up on the lake, if we were going out for dinner or anything, Dad would say, ‘Oh, I’ve got to read the paper first before we can go.’ We were always late because of that.

But did Dad pursue anything political, like his grandfather? No, he said he just didn’t have the time to do it. …

Mom learned discipline and responsibility from Grandpa Louie, and organization and respect and care for the products of their farm labor from Grandma Bessie. And the coeducational team sports in which Mom participated at a very young age sharpened her competitive skills. She excelled on and off the field, winning top honors in card games, especially duplicate bridge.

I consider Mom’s most remarkable trait her innate politeness—to everyone. She was not guileless, but gossip and witchery were never part of her modus vivendi. That may have been the result of a semisolitary early childhood in the harsh north country of Minnesota. Or, perhaps, it was because of her appreciation of a rewarding life with her anchor to windward.

Chapter Two

Culture Shock

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers

and how one remembers it in order to recount it.

Gabriel García Márquez

Living to Tell the Tale, 2003

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Great-Grandpa Joos (in his ninety-ninth year), Joyce, Grandpa Tony, Vern. 1943

I don’t remember much about my early childhood around our houses in Spring Lake, Michigan.

But school was different. I loved it. Hated summers because I couldn’t go to school. Bo-o-o-oring I was always a good student and better at math than all the boys. For four of the six elementary grades I had straight As. I was salutatorian of our high school class of 150 students (yes, I did have two Bs).

And I loved politics. After being elected president of my class from grades one through six, I envisioned greater things. …

And then, wham! In high school, the entire landscape changed, and I was not prepared for it. My competitive spirit did not like being subbed (subordinated, suppressed, submerged, or submissive), especially to guys I’d bested in school.

Initially, I was furious with Dad. During my entire twelve years of school, he had cajoled, goaded, and teased me: You have an A-minus?

Stop teasing her! Mom would shout.

During my senior year, Grandpa Tony stopped by the house, pulled Dad into the garage, and inquired, Are you spending money to send her to college?

No answer.

She’s just going to get married. Save the money for your two boys.

With that attitude floating around our tight-knit patriarchal Dutch community, I decided to look for a girl’s college. Without consulting Mom or Dad, I applied to Smith College. As a backup, I applied to the University of Michigan as well.

Smith’s tuition was three times the University of Michigan’s. What an incredulous proposal for Dad this would become. Dad hadn’t finished high school, although he was obviously very bright.

I begged, Just see if I can get accepted.

He liked the challenge.

But not the next one. On a clear, cold January afternoon in 1950, I was driving to my piano lesson when I was hit broadside by a speeding furniture truck in the outskirts of Grand Haven. I was fortunate to be driving Dad’s new huge Cadillac Coupe de Ville.

(Less than three months old! Dad would remind me.)

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The force of the impact rolled the truck on its side and the car over twice. During the second roll, the car smashed a city light pole, breaking the pole and squashing the car in the middle, like an accordion. I was thrown back and forth across the front seat and ended up under the steering wheel column, where the police discovered me fifteen minutes later. I woke up in the emergency operating room at our local hospital.

Poor Dad. When he rushed into the hospital, the attendant stopped him and asked, Is yours a boy or a girl? The boy was in the hallway, fully covered by a white sheet. He was my age, the son of the owner of the furniture company, riding shotgun in the truck. He flew under the truck when it rolled.

Dad said he would never forget the scream of the boy’s mother when she entered the hospital. I would never forget I couldn’t stop in time. The other driver may have been speeding, but I couldn’t stop. And another fact I have to live with—had we been wearing seat belts, that accident would have left the boy alive and me dead.

Our high school had a college prep course, but an Ivy League school like Smith had requirements totally out of our school’s purview. I had some Latin, but no other language or other classical studies. Fortunately for me, half of our SAT test was math, and science teacher Frank Sanders (in his habitual chalk-covered maroon jacket) had prepared us all very well during our junior and senior year math and physics classes.

I was accepted at Smith College—with a small caveat: I would have to make up the requirements that were missing from my transcript. No problem.

My problem was Dad. He controlled the purse strings and worried about the college tuition for my two brothers, especially Midge, who was just completing his sophomore year at Kalamazoo College, a small, well-respected private institution about seventy miles away. How could Dad justify paying more for my education? I pleaded for just one year at Smith.

Dad finally caved. Okay … one year only. Then, back to the University of Michigan. I’m sure it’s just as good at one-third the cost.

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The beaches and sand dunes that line the western shore of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula have provided a summer playground for tourists from Chicago and St. Louis since the turn of the twentieth century. I never wanted to travel or work elsewhere during summer vacations.

After World War II, veterans were eager to return to fun summers racing sailboats on Spring Lake. Our neighborhood gang hung out on the public swimming dock at the end of our block and watched longingly as veteran Chet Vink cruised up and down Spring Lake in his huge A boat—a thirty-eight-foot inland racing scow—always hoping he would stop at the dock and give us a ride. And when he did, we were hooked.

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Dad was the authentic old man and the sea, fishing until the age of ninety-four. And his love of boating and fishing was quickly transferred to us. Midge and I were comfortable around the water from the time we were born. I can’t remember Dad, Midge, or me ever seasick (just poor Mom), no matter how long we rocked around in a small boat, fishing in Lake Michigan and Lake Superior or canoeing in the wilds of Canada.

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Boathouse

Just across the lake from our house in Spring Lake was a historic ramshackle boathouse that belonged to the Spring Lake Yacht Club. It became my second home. Midge and I paid our dues learning how to sail on boats that were smaller than the racing scows found at the Yacht Club. We owned an old Crescent, a small keel boat with a main and a jib. It was not part of the Spring Lake Yacht Club’s one design racing fleet, which in the 1940s and ’50s were mainly scows.

By the summer of 1948, Midge and I could race every weekend on an old Palmer design twenty-foot cat rigged C scow. We were forced to take turns at the helm, which resulted in constant shouting at the skipper from the designated crew. The poor third mate on board suffered through our bickering, commenting that we spent most of our time arguing instead of following the course. (That poor crew member, Paul Eggert, would become a trophy-laden E scow sailor and part of our family.)

The Western Michigan Yachting Association (WMYA) had been organized in 1930 to sponsor sailing regattas during the month of August on lakes bordering Lake Michigan. We often towed our sailboats up or down the coast from Spring Lake, which flowed first into the Grand River and then entered Lake Michigan. Four road and train bridges had to open before our flotilla of small boats with high masts could leave Grand Haven harbor. There were no fixed bridges. Waterways were still important for commerce as well as yachting.

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Joyce, left; Al Jacobson, on knee; Ham Berry, striped shirt; Nancy Moriarty, hoop earrings; Carol Berry, standing; Albie Gibson, straw hat; Jack Batts, mask; Nancy Batts, big hat; Jule, bear rug; Pip Gignac, sitting on right. Spring Lake Yacht Club, circa early 1950s

The summer before college, I taught sailing at the yacht club during the day and partied into the night with much older guys, mainly the veterans of World War II who were still college students. Some attended Amherst; others went to Ivy League colleges near Smith. I looked forward to visiting their schools on fall weekends.

When I arrived in Northampton, Massachusetts, in September, wearing Mom’s western jacket with leather fringe on the shoulders and sleeves, the new Smith freshmen from the East Coast wondered when I had left the Indian reservation. They really believed—in the middle of the twentieth century—western Michigan was the West. I couldn’t believe their apparent naiveté. I traveled in my early teens with our family for an entire summer throughout the western states, camping at all of the large national parks. But then, I hadn’t traveled abroad. …

The majority of our freshman class had been educated in girls’ prep schools. They seemed awkward and immature around the college boys who appeared early on to check us out. By comparison, I felt comfortable in a coeducational environment.

In elementary and junior high school, girls and boys played baseball, football, and basketball together. During the summer, we traveled together as a ragtag tennis team to tournaments in Kalamazoo; during the winter, we skied on snow-covered hilly sand dunes and skated on frozen Spring Lake.

My first semester at Smith College was culture shock—mentally, emotionally, and socially—especially French class. I took a double French course, six classes six days per week for six semester credits, to catch up on foreign language requirements. The teacher walked in the first morning and announced in a haughty, austere voice, "Bonjour!" sounding just like Julia Child (Smith class of 1932).

The class appeared to answer in unison, "Bonjour!"

I had no idea what was happening. I asked the girl on my right. She explained that she understood some French because she had spent the past summer in France. I turned to the girl on my left and touched her kneesocked leg. She screamed. The teacher glared. I blushed … and got a D for the first marking period in French. I’d never had a D before.

And then there was English. The second week of class, the teacher asked us to write an essay comparing six Shakespearean plays. I complained that I had not read any plays by Shakespeare in high school.

Too bad. Read six … before you write the essay.

Another fall weekend away from campus disappeared. That classwork earned me a C. I’d never had a C before.

Next came art. Studio Art was the course name. I thought it would be fun. It was a disaster. What did I know about drawing, or Picasso? (Was he French? Spanish?) At least I passed.

Finally, an easy subject: economics. I signed up for the most advanced course, a senior survey course that required much reading time—time I didn’t have. I would be forced to rely on my street knowledge learned at the dinner table from Dad. (He was quite the energetic entrepreneur, especially during World War II, when he had to find and deliver coal from the Verplank docks to Muskegon industries that had switched from building trucks to tanks.) I got my best grade for the entire semester: a B-plus.

At Christmas break, I took a train home and stepped off the platform in Grand Rapids, looking rather ridiculous yet preppy, in new plaid Bermuda shorts, kneesocks, and a three-quarter-length muskrat fur coat. Although I hadn’t quite figured out how to put that together, I had concerns that were more serious: I badly needed this vacation to catch up on schoolwork.

For the first time in my life, I worried about passing a course or two. Dad thought I was very industrious (my brothers weren’t studying), but Mom