Born in Grand Rapids on Quarry Avenue, a little way north of Leonard Street, on April 11, 1904, I led a simple life with our small family. My older sister and brother attended Christian School on the west side of Grand Rapids. My father was a foreman in a furniture factory, making five dollars a day. By the last year we were in Grand Rapids, my parents had saved up $1000.
In 1906 they bought a farm in Borculo. It took my father and mother a good many years to pay off the mortgage of $5,000. My father was not a farmer. His folks wanted him to be a minister; he wanted to be a lawyer; so he got to be neither one!
The main crops on the farm were oats, wheat, corn, potatoes, and pickles. On a 50-acre farm you grew just enough to support a growing family. There was lots of wood to burn: rail fence and stump fence were fuel for a good many years. The first cash crop was pickles. They were not very high in price. One could put in 3/4 acre in pickles, pick for a couple of months and make $130, plus you had to take the pickles to Zeeland. After some years there was a pickle station in Borculo.
The next cash crop was potatoes. My father would peddle them in Grand Rapids. He would leave around 9 p.m.; spend all night on the road; stop in Jenison for one hour; and get to his destination about 6 a.m. When I was a boy, I went along several times. Father would get 35 cents a bushel for a 50 bushel load. When he had all the potatoes sold, we made our way home. We had left home in the dark and arrived home in the dark the following day.
My father's brother, who lived in Grand Rapids, had a wife and two children. They would come to the farm to visit for a few days at a time. We would pick them up in Zeeland where they had arrived by the Interurban. One Sunday noon we were eating dinner and the chickens were cackling. My aunt asked, "What's that noise?" She didn't know a thing about farming. Father said, "The chickens are doing that - they are laying eggs." She remarked, "You are making your chickens work on Sunday?"
This article was published in the Zeeland Record on 10/18/84 under the title
Thumb Nails by Antonia