A Winding Road, Gil Blankespoor Memoir

By Gil Blankespoor

“A Winding Road, Gil Blankespoor Memoir”  

  

From 1939 to 2023   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Jul 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781977266484

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A Winding Road, Gil Blankespoor Memoir

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2023 Gil Blankespoor

v3.0

The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Cover Photo © 2023 Gil Blankespoor. All rights reserved - used with permission.

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TABLE OF CONTENTS

COMING FROM HOLLAND TO AMERICA

LIFE ON THE FARM

MOM

DAD

MOM AND DAD MEETING EACH OTHER

IOWA

MARRIED LIFE FOR MOM

MEMORY LANE: IOWA

MOVING TO GRAND RAPIDS

LIFE IN GRAND RAPIDS

WHEN WE GOT OLDER

PART TIME JOBS

SCHOOLS

GOING TO HIGH SCHOOL

GOING TO COLLEGE

SEMINARY

GRAND RAPIDS

AFTER SEMINARY

TOUR OF EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST, AND NORTHERN AFRICA

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

LIFE IN NEW YORK CITY

MARRIAGE

WASHINGTON, D.C.

FIRST BABY

LIFE IN HUNT CLUB CLUSTER

DURAND DRIVE

TROUBLE IN RIVER CITY

HOUSE-AND-SIGNIFICANT-OTHER CHANGES

THE KIDS

SWAN’S NECK

TRIPS WITH THE KIDS

TRIP TO EUROPE

MOVING ON

KIDS’ SCHOOLS, JOBS, AND CAREERS

JULIET

KEVIN

JILL

NEW VENTURES AND LEAVING HUD

INTEROFFICE

SECOND MARRIAGE

SISTERS

MOM AND DAD

FRIENDS

LIZ AND I TRAVELING

NEW BUSINESS VENTURES

HEALTH

THE RESTON SCHOLARSHIP FUND (RSF)

LAKE THOREAU

CRITTERS

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

THE NARRATIVE BELOW is the story of my eventful life, most of it very exciting, busy, and often surprising. In writing this, I began to see my life as full of twists and turns and quite complex. Not that my life is over, but it’s good I’m doing this now when my memory and faculties are mostly intact.

I wrote this partly to provide a record for my children, grandchildren, and perhaps others, and included a lot of scanned pictures because I’m sure no one will ever look through my 16 or so albums predating digital pix. Also, I guess I’ve done this because it’s the closest I’ll ever get to immortality.

There have been many big changes in my life, my religious outlook, and my career choices. I doubt very few siblings or cousins will make the big religious decisions I’ve made, although a few may harbor similar thoughts or adopt a more moderate religious outlook. As for me, I am happy and will very likely remain an agnostic all my life. I do think there may be a higher being, given the complexity of a human body and the immense size of the universe, but I think no one has or will ever have answers on specifics.

For reasons I don’t understand, I’ve always favored excitement and risk-taking—and benefitted from seeing certain ventures as less risky than perceived. The combination of my entrepreneurial skills, plus Liz’s caution and her insights, has made us a very good team.

I am clearly a late bloomer—most people achieve the most in their 30s, 40s and 50s, but for me my life didn’t really take off until I left the U.S. government in 1992 when I was 52 years old. I owned a few properties and half of Tuscarora Restaurant before that change, but most of my investments and restaurant activity occurred after that.

I do enjoy working and vacationing, and shun most retirement activities—e.g., making little projects big ones, lots of golfing, piddling, etc.—and hope to work to the end.

I hope you enjoy reading the parts that interest you—and who knows, it may motivate you to do the same. I read Aunt Henrietta’s wonderfully detailed autobiography, and it motivated me to write mine.

In 1990, I wrote a document called Memory Lane in bullet form that covered many events in Iowa and Michigan as recorded in two sections below, since the truth is often in the small details.

COMING FROM HOLLAND TO AMERICA

MOM’S PARENTS, RALPH and Minnie (Hermanna Gritters) Brunsting, were both very young when their parents took them from Holland to America. He was born in a town called Brunsting, a small burg of about 25 houses off of two main roads. Many people lived in town but worked farms behind the house—historically a common arrangement. We toured that town when we visited Holland, and admired its quaint streets, church, and other buildings.

Ralph was only two when his parents took him to America in February, 1889. His father had long wanted to go to America, and finally persuaded his parents it was OK to migrate. They arrived in Halifax, then took some form of ground transportation to get to northwest Iowa.

Mom’s mother, Minnie, was born in Beilen. She came to America seven years after Ralph, in 1896 when she was six, the youngest in her family. Her family then moved to Boyden, Iowa.

We do, however, know more about Dad’s parents, thanks to Aunt Henrietta’s memoir. His mother, Hilda Driesen, was the youngest of nine children and lived in a modest house in the Friesland province, in the town of Zwartsluis, which means black water. In 1908, when she was 18, she emigrated to America with her parents and seven siblings. Hilda said one reason she left was because she was being pursued by a young man who was not a Christian.

After they arrived in America, Hilda’s mother saw a statue of Columbus and said it was a pity that man survived to discover America—it seems she was not in favor of coming to the U.S. She probably changed her mind later.

Gijsbert (Gijs) Blankespoor lived in Barneveld on a 20-acre farm, part of a large family of nine children, including his stepbrother Maas who had previously gone to America. After living in the U.S. for five years, Maas returned to the Netherlands to urge his family to join him in America. His father agreed, sold their farm for 16,000 gulden, and paid 140 gulden per person for boat passage from Rotterdam. The family shared a cabin on a ship called Potsdam, and everyone got ill on the nine-day voyage, arriving in New York on November 13, 1901. Gijs was 13 years old.

After the Blankespoors arrived in New York, Gijs remembers the children walking the streets with their klompen (wood shoes) dangling from their necks, wowed by the sights but put off by the strange language. From there, they took a train to Chicago, and on to northwest Iowa.

Here they rented a farm and paid $3.12 per acre for rent. Gijs worked for another farmer and started to save money. When he was older, his mother persuaded him not to get serious with the girl he was dating, but instead to meet Hilda Driesen—which he did, and later married her.

LIFE ON THE FARM

LIFE ON MOM’U and Dad’s farms as youngsters was a lot of hard work, especially since there were very few conveniences—no running water, no indoor bathrooms, no central heat, no drains—only outhouses, and those had Sears catalogs with slippery paper for cleaning up. I never understood why there was no absorbent paper. Yuck!

When the women peeled potatoes, they’d throw the pan of water and potato peelings on the ground near the kitchen door, and chickens would come running to eat them. When they wanted to eat a chicken, they’d grab one, and a parent or one of the older kids would decapitate it by cutting off the head on a stump. Seeing this was disconcerting, especially because the headless chickens fluttered about even when dead!

The farm was like most other farms then—it included chickens, pigs, cows, horses, and sometimes sheep, in other words, almost everything. The boys and sometimes the girls had to milk the cows, whose tails were often tied to their legs by a metal brace, and flies were everywhere despite all attempts to limit them—e.g., sticky, coiled streamers. One reason for so many types of animals was the number of mouths to feed on the farm.

Later on, farmers specialized since that allowed them to more skillfully raise one animal type. In fact, Uncle Aaron, Dad’s brother-in-law and husband of Sally, specialized in dairy cows as early as the 1950s—he was prescient. I remember seeing cows always come into the barn for milking and feeding in the same order and using the same stanchion.

The soil was very dark and rich. Mom’s younger brother Ray, who tried growing crops in nearby South Dakota, didn’t do as well, as reflected in the lower price of land there. (Similarly, the muck fields near Grand Rapids were formerly low-level swamps or marshes, and tiny particles of wood could be seen in the soil.)

At that time in Iowa it was considered very good to get 60 bushels of corn from each acre of land. Now with genetics permitting two or three ears of corn on each stalk, and at lower points on the stalk, Iowa corn fields yield 200 or more bushels per acre. Wheat grain productivity has also dramatically increased.

Milk would be run in a separator, where it swilled around with the cream rising to the top. The cream was used mostly at home, and the milk went into large three-foot-high metal cans to be picked up by the local farmers’ cooperative. I often saw my cousin squeezing the cow’s teats into a stream that ended in their cat’s mouth. I tried milking too—it was harder than I thought.

I remember helping my cousins pick eggs from the hen coop, reaching under the sitting hen and pulling out the eggs—and trying not to be pecked too much by the hen who was naturally was irate. Only some of the eggs would lead to chicks—it depended on whether a rooster had mated with the hen.

The fall harvest was always a very big deal. All the neighbors would come—plus a hired thresher who had the equipment to cut wheat—to help both sets of grandparents and the boys harvest corn and grain. The women would make large breakfasts and noontime meals; the air buzzed with excitement! I couldn’t believe the size and variety of the meals—hard work meant big appetites.

The wheat stalks became hay, which was used everywhere on the farm—in chicken coops where hens laid eggs, in stanchions where cows stood while being milked, in pig stalls, and in stables if they had horses.

Both sets of grandparents would spend considerable time canning not only vegetables, but also beef and pork—all held in tall Ball jars. Bottles of these items would be stored in the fruit cellar for use throughout the year, and potatoes were buried in the ground for later use. Sometimes a cow or pig would be butchered, and these foods were eaten, put in a frozen cooler in town, or canned. Very few people then had refrigerators or freezers.

MOM

GRANDMA AND GRANDPA Brunsting had nine children, not counting the two who died in infancy. They were Della, Al, Margaret (Mom), Ruth, Louise, Edith, John, Ray, and Larry. They lived on a farm about two miles from Hull, Iowa, near a corner of two dirt roads. Almost all roads were exactly a mile apart, and everything was square and geometrical, following the geometry and land division used in the North Territory.

I remember Grandpa and Grandma as very easygoing, good-natured, nice and pleasant people, and this was reflected in Mom’s relaxed personality and that of her sibs. I always liked Mom’s parents and sibs, and they bonded a great deal with each other and their kids as they grew.

Mom was born May 13, 1914, the third child. When she was six, she walked to school about two miles away, got there early—later she cleaned the school and started the furnace. For doing that extra work, she was tutored in piano-playing by her teacher.

She went to a Christian school (unlike her neighbor kids who went to the public school in Hull) for eight grades but then dropped out because she was