Glenn DePagter (1919-2006) Interview

Jennifer:  Your name is?

Glenn:  Glenn DePagter – please spell that with two nn’s, 16441 130th Avenue, Nunica, for the time being.

Q: Ok.  Let’s go back to the beginning –

A: Born July 6, 1919 in Hatton Hospital , which no longer exists in the City of Grand Haven .

Q: Where was that?

A: Hatton Hospital was on Fifth Street , that’s an interesting thing too, do you remember that 5th Street becomes Sheldon Road, which becomes Lake Shore Drive, you can drive on three streets without changing direction. Hatton Hospital was between Franklin and Clinton Streets and it’s right where the Presbyterian Church is now.  It was a huge wooden frame building, three stories high and where I lived, at 521 Clinton was around the corner and that is also Presbyterian parking lot, and when they finished operating, they – up on the 3rd floor there,  they would open all the windows and all the ether smell would come over to our house, which is a half a block away.  You could just smell the ether when they finished operating.  I was born there.  I lived at 521, which is between 5th and 6th Streets and I lived across the street from Vyn’s, that had the Vyn Trucking Company in those days.  I grew up with John Vyn, who is now dead, his mother was Joyce, she took us out to the lake and we had all kinds of fun.  Also, across the street was the Paul Johnson residence, the JSJ Corporation is now, that’s why I put his name down.  I grew up with him, went to school with him, and then a little bit up, next to him was Irene and Hartger Jonker, and their son Al, but Maryanne and Al, I grew up with them also.  Those houses are still there, big houses, and when I first started recognizing things, that section of street between 5th and 6th was not paved, it was dirt road and I remember big Central School was up there, the one that burned, and I remember the ice man coming down and we would get on the back.  There was a horse-drawn ice truck, we climbed up on the back and got ice.  And, we used to play in the back yard.  Joyce was an outdoor woman, she was into children and that sort, she was not a woman who stayed in the house, she smoked cigarettes, she drove a car – like 60 miles an hour, she would play, like run sheep run with the kids, and play games with us, she rode a bicycle, we’re talking about 1929 around there, uninhibited, I think that’s the word.

Q: What did the neighbors think of her?

A: Not much, oh, my mother used to talk about Joyce, outrageous, outlandish.  Well, she was getting out and doing things with the kids, but that woman is still alive, she’s almost 90, she’s out in California now.  She had a beautiful family.  In those days the carferries were still coming into town and as you grew up – my daddy, he worked for Mr. Loutit, and Mr. Loutit was the son of a lumber baron and he’s the one who actually started the Loutit Library.  His son was willed all of the money, but he could only touch the interest and when he died the will stated that all of the money would be used by the Loutit Foundation.  So, there was William H. who was my dad’s employer, and he lived in a house on the corner of Washington and Fourth, right now there’s a gasoline station there.  If we only had had a historical society then, that house would still be there, it was a four story house, and magnificent high 12 foot ceilings.  I was in the house several times with my dad.  A complete wine cellar in the basement, and then you go on the main floor and there was all of the dining areas – he entertained a lot, and he would have a butler and his maid supplemented with another woman by the name of May Cummerford and another woman, I don’t remember her name, but there was always those dinner parties, for the Hattons and the Harbecks and the Robbins and they would have pheasant under glass, all the crystal and the silverware and things and of course my father was his chauffer and in those days he was also a mechanic, there were no – you couldn’t just take your car to a garage.  I remember many times I would walk down to the garage and I remember my dad would have the hood off the Lincoln and he would have the engine all apart and the parts laying all over everything, and he would be refinishing parts and putting it back together.  I remember one time – I was still in grade school at that time – I graduated from High School in 1937, and four years before that is ’34 about the late 20’s and early 30’s, we were hard up because of the depression, but to get back to my story, my father had the key to the wine cellar and, if you can imagine, where Fourth Street ends, that was only about five blocks, my dad never rode to work, he walked to work, we didn’t have a car until, I remember getting our first car, in fact I smashed up our first car – but, he would drive for Mr. Loutit.  If we could only get back into the history of that.  My father also, now there was a fire barn, I think it’s just parking now for the court house, which way would you say Washington Street runs?  I mean going towards the river?  It’s on an angle you know, let’s call it North, just well, in that way we will be able to determine if Fifth Street runs East and West – and if you were to remember way back, one of the fire barns was on the corner of Washington and Fifth, and it was on the Northwest corner, and in it was an old LaFrance fire engine. There were two engines, but the LaFrance, my dad, after work for Mr. Loutit, he would go in to the fire barn there and he took three weeks to completely take down that big engine, clean and scrape the parts, and re-assemble that engine, so – those are the memories that I have.  I remember walking way down Washington Street to the other fire barn that was way out there, there was a pumper in that one, and I remember kitty-korner from Washington and Fifth over there, was a school for girls, Akeley Hall.  I was in there after it discontinued.  All the windows were gone and there was still some statues laying around, the plaster, and that made good chalk.  Of course Central Park was still there.

Q: What happened to Akeley School ?

A: Well, I believe it went out because the girls didn’t want to go thru a finishing school anymore.

Q: Was it kind of a –

A: It was a place, the girls stayed there as live in, other ones would come on a per day basis, and it was a finishing school.

Q: How old were they?

A: I think they were teenagers, a finishing school.  That’s all I remember from hearsay, the school was then closed.  Washington Street was all bricks, all the way up and down, those red bricks, and we used to go down to the foot of Washington Street and they would keep their row boats there, out in the river, and we would go fishing.  So, I guess to get on – what else, you ask the questions now.

Q: Tell us about your education, your teachers, etc.

A: Yes, well Mrs. Soule.  In 4th grade I took it over again, I was having problems with my left hand.  She was a stinker – she came to the house.  I would write with my right hand and when I finished writing, I was writing upsidedown, that was in Central School, the one that burned – and living at 521 Clinton Street and having the school right there, I only had a half block to go to school, and the school bell on the top would ring and it would toll and about the time it started tolling was the time I left the house, and swish – right there up the hill.  I remember starting at the bottom – all wood floors – and we were in the end of the school that was on Franklin Street side, and we would go out – three were doors that led out to the playground there – we would go out there and play, and then we graduated to – well we would walk up the steps, and stayed in there for the middle classes.  Before we finally had freedom, we had no more playgrounds, we were able to go to High School, which was on 7th Street, that High School is gone, they tore that down.  There we were only able to attend the classes you had and the rest of the time you had to be by yourself, walk around, you didn’t have to be in school, you could be outside.  Just the fact you did not have to – you weren’t confined – you were given the responsibility.  Mrs. Soule, when I was in that grade school, she came over and talked to my folks, and my dad said “he was born left handed – get off his back” well, he didn’t use those words, but he said if he is not learning, then keep him back a class, but he will learn it.  But, I was slower, and I was left handed.  That’s what I remember of those days.  In High School, in those days, the kids worked the celery fields.  I didn’t think I could handle it, and my folks didn’t think I could either – I was a 95 pound kid – look at me now.  I was in band, there were 90 musicians in Mr. Richards Senior High School Band.  I played the drums, of course when we had concerts everything else, but in those days, working in celery fields, I could handle that, and while I was going to school I delivered  papers and it worked out pretty good.  We had to do our own collections, but I would go down –

Q: Did you work in the celery fields too?

A: No, my dad said I couldn’t handle that.

Q: Where were the celery fields?

A: The ones that were the closest was the Kieft's, about where Robbins Road is now, but the one that was the most popular was on Fulton Street at Ferry.  Also – in those days Beacon Boulevard didn’t come right thru the middle of town, they moved a whole lot of houses out of there and everything else, but all down on the East side of where Beacon Blvd. is now, and South of about Waverly Street, is what they would call celery flats.  There were no houses there, that whole section of town has all houses now, but that was the celery fields.  You could smell celery when they started cutting it almost everywhere you went, it was just a beautiful smell.  Then,  where you’re going up Grand Avenue, when you go out Sheldon Road to Grand – to go up that big sand hill, going out to the lake – on both sides there are now houses, but there were no houses there.  We used to go there with the Boy Scouts and camp in the middle of the fields, just for an over-nighter.  Anyway, I would go down to Hostetter's and pick up the Morning Herald and I would deliver that.  My route was in the Jackson Street area, that whole section in there where they want to put in the new bridge, etc., Jackson and Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Jackson and Madison – I would deliver the Morning Herald in there, then I would go and meet the train, that’s where the train station is, and pick up all the Chicago papers.  As soon as I heard the train I would go there, and they had left the papers, threw them out.  I picked those up and take the ones I had to delivery to the downtown stores and some up on Lake Avenue wanted that Wall Street Journal, I was riding my bike all over.  Then I would go to school, and after school I would go down to – first it was the Bol – they lived up across from the City Hall on Washington St.  They had the Muskegon Chronicle and the Grand Rapids Press, and for a while I delivered them, but only for a while, I think then Hostetter's got the papers, well they offered another penny to deliver, so I then went to Hostetter's.  Then, I think I gave up one of those routes, then Arnold Braak offered me a job in the bakery, and I brought –

Q: What bakery was this?

A: Braaks Bakery.  I had to go over to Spring Lake once, but that was his dad over there, and he had started a bakery on Washington Street, I guess you call it Centertown.  That’s on the corner of Washington and Seventh, in that area.  It was North of Andre’s, a little white building there, that was the bakery, and some of the fondest memories of my life were working in there, four o’clock in the morning, and wrapping bread, and having the driver start putting up their loads of Bismarks and everything else, and you could eat anything that you wanted, and I guess I did for a week or so, but most of the time I would wrap bread.  Then I would go down and pick up my papers and deliver them and then go to school.

Q: Didn’t you get tired?

A: Yea, that’s why I wasn’t a very good student.

Q: Was that during the depression?

A: Yes it was, but I’ll tell you one thing – my dad worked for Mr. Loutit and people were on the streets, they were dependent on church for hand-outs, depending on relatives, etc. for something to eat.  We closed off one part of our house – the big parlor, left the piano in there, took the rug and nailed it up to the big arch, which was about 8 feet wide, 6 or 8 feet high, hung that rug up there and didn’t use that room.  There was no reason to, we were just pretending, because he worked for Mr. Loutit for $35.00 a week and he worked for him all during the depression, and during that time, he bought the house next door.  There were two houses on one lot and the driveway was between, and that house was first owned by Simpson and then DenHerder, John, who was the County Treasurer, in the old County Courthouse, which has also been torn down.  Getting on to another section of this interview, my opinion, I think they should have established a heritage society that would have preserved all these old buildings.  Not the courthouse, but I can’t see the whole middle part of down town Grand Haven becoming an asphalt parking lot.  Those historic houses, and the loss of the Loutit house, well, it’s depressing.  Likewise, to jump ahead, when we thought of and designed the Musical Fountain, we had visions of people coming to see the fountain, sitting on the grass there and watching the fountain, absolutely free of charge, on the waterfront.  Then the city fathers got into it and decided we should have a stadium.  Well, everybody is cooperative, and you wind up with an $80,000.00 stadium there and then they wanted to charge.  Well, then five of us who were on the committee said that we were done, find somebody else to do all the technical – the improvements and everything else, then they backed off.  We had designed the fountain and about $50,000.00 had gone into it from different industries, and one heck of a lot of night work.  I was over there until three o’clock in the morning and working at Gardner Denver, and we did it because we wanted the people of the City of Grand Haven to enjoy something.  Yes, if they would bring in their friends, fine, but we certainly didn’t have any minds that it was going to become a tourist town.  One more minute of digression – right now, you go down to the water front and it’s like walking in any other tourist trap, Mackinaw Island, or anywhere else. You can’t enjoy the peace of the river because there are people, crowds, they have put up a monstrosity of a thing, that obstructs your view.  They put the Coast Guard building on the wrong – that beautiful building – it’s a landmark.  I think that everybody tries to create an empire, and I think we have people in the City of Grand Haven that are trying to do that.  Their intentions may be good, they like their job, but they are trying to create an empire, and they are destroying the peaceful, tranquil, high quality education, low personnel police force.  We have – well, before you could walk up to the City Manager and talk to him.  Now, the personnel director, assistant City Manager, etc. you can’t get to – it’s getting so high, the police force has – there used to be five people on the force.  There was no crime, nobody locked their doors or nothing.  They say, more people, more industry – this helps us, they are going to pay taxes.  I don’t know of a single person in Grand Haven that has not had their property assessed, and re-assessed and their taxes are way high.  The crime rate is up.  You can’t go out and sit on the bank without having a dozen people walk in front of you.  That’s just a personal observation.  We are becoming a Saugatuck, or a Mackinaw Island and for some people that’s great, maybe for you, for your generation, do you like it? But me, I don’t know, but there comes a lot of problems with a lot of people.

Q: Coming to Grand Haven is not fun for me, I don’t know.  I like to go to the beach, but now the beach is dirty and too many people –

A: The people out there leave their trash and if you say something to them, they ask “What’s it to you?”

Q: When the boardwalk was first built, it was nice to walk down there, but now –

A: Well, on the other side now Jennifer, these people that are putting in the lights and are contributing to the boardwalk and everything, are the very same people who would do anything and everything for better education.  There are always givers for the community and the city fathers know that.  We knew that when we built the fountain.  We went to Foster Poe, went to people and said that we have somebody that’s going to give a full carload of pipe to build this fountain – how would you like to contribute a little bit of money for all of the lights for it.  And they agreed, so then they went back to the other people and said they were going to give us money for the lights, how about you giving us money for the pipe, so they too agreed and that’s the way the story went, and that’s how we got the fountain built.  But, R. V. Terrill was the City Manager and the boys went to him – I worked for the city one summer, and if I had a problem, I would say “Mrs. Van, I’d like to see Buzz”, she would tell me to go on in and I would go in and talk to him, maybe 45 minutes.

Q: How long did it take for the fountain to be built?

A: I think we dedicated it in 1964, but this was before that.  Boy, is this the opportunity to get something straightened out – and I’m going to break a long time promise.  Creason, this was during World War – according to all the reports I’ve read, this is pretty good – he saw the fountain when he was overseas and he came back and he talked to Bill Booth who was in his chair one time.  Well, Bill Booth happened to be my boss in the engineering laboratory at Gardner Denver, at that time it was Keller Tool.  He asked me to come on the committee, Bill Booth did, and when I went up there in the City Hall, we started talking about that fountain, there was a few lines on a piece of paper.  This is a conception of what it would be, and so this man said “I designed the fountain, and this is where everybody that was on the fountain, and there were many, you can find this out in your historical stuff, they were all there, their names are all there and a few of them who did not contribute, one of them was Tom Fullerton, he came to one meeting and left and B.P. Simms was the head of the Board of Light Works, he came to a couple of meetings, but he could contribute nothing to it.  So, anytime anybody talked about the fountain – well, there were a whole lot of people, there were thirteen that actually did all the design work and everything else, so – I don’t want to be singled out to give you an interview like this to say that I did this on the fountain.  You understand.  Except for one fellow and that was Bill Booth.  And all I have seen in the past five years is some people who pick up stuff out of the Tribune file about Bill Booth – we can’t find out, none of us can find out how he does get his name in the paper with all this self glory and nobody wants to say anything.  I have talked to Doc Creason, we talk quite regularly.  He says he don’t want to say anything about it, I don’t know anything about it.  You know that people have come up and talked to him and he just says “if you want to know anything about it, just go and talk to Bill Booth”.  Then they’re stuck, it’s all Bill Booth and I don’t understand why the man wants to continue with this type of thing because he’s just two years younger than I am, he’s – he might be doing a bit of consulting yet, I don’t – it isn’t right you don’t need that self image – but that’s the way it goes.  We talked, and one time we were going to put the fountain – that was Tom Fullerton’s idea, that’s why he left, he wanted to put the fountain on a barge at the foot of the thing and the bunch of pipes and everything else and pump the water out of the river and display it with lights.  He didn’t say how he was going to get water to the lights and we finally – we were talking gallons of water and lights and everything else, we finally went across the river and put up balloons on a string and stood on this side of Washington Street and said well, that’s about how high it could be, then we worried about sound.  The lights are going up and down, and showing, but sound travels at 88 ft. a second and one day we would see the lights and then later here comes the sound – well, that isn’t any good, so maybe we better figure out how to do that.  Then we had a fellow saying that you can’t pump 3300 gallons thru this pump without – you know what happens to a bath tub when the water’s running down the hole and you are trying to regulate that water – any if you have this type of pump and you get air in the system, the pumps will blow up.  Well, the first thing to do would be to get something off the ground, so we went to Welded Products, took a piece of pipe 2-1/2” diameter, and they bent that pipe around and we drilled holes in it and put nozzles in it and went over to the coal dock, and we finagled – Buzz Terrill did, he said he’d like to have a pumper down there to see how much water we could pump, to make sure it’s operating alright.  We hooked the pumper up to that thing and sure enough water went up in great shape and about that time we could figure out how much water it was using.  That was in 1963, we started out there and got a bulldozer out there on the hill, and just at the last minute the guy that had part of the North Shore Marina, who had given it to us, said no – he was going to give it to us for five or six thousand dollars, sell it, and we would raise that money, but then he said he didn’t think he wanted to do that now, you got a big project going over there and so we asked how much he really wanted and he said he’d take twenty grand for it, it was a lot of money in 1963, and Paul Johnson of the Loutit Foundation said “we will buy that and give it to the city for twenty thousand, so Buzz Terrill did all the engineering over there, and I mean drawings of foundations for the building, we’re talking about concrete, got all the contractors over there, that little dip where the fountain is now, was the side of a hill, but they did dig that all out, made it flat.  We were worried about sand coming down from the overflow and they had that beach grass all up and down there, then they asked me to do the pump house and I designed that building.  Then we, Pres Bilz and his boys lay out all that piping laying on that cement pad out there.  Then we had conceived the valves and things inside and Pres Bilz said he wasn’t about to touch the inside until I get some drawings.  Then it fell to my lot to design the hydraulic and the pneumatic valves and how they would be spaced and how they would be connected to the pipe inside the building.  Along about that time, because of the control valves being operated by air, Doc said why don’t you see Vince Erickson, at Gardner Denver and ask him what – if we can have a compressor.  I thought about that for a while – he was the President you know, the big boss, so I went to him and told him that we would like very much to have a compressor for the fountain, he said alright, how big?  I didn’t know, so I told him I would be back and he said “next time come prepared” so I went back to my desk and figured, I talked it over with my boss and with a fellow in sales, and I went up and told him we needed a ten horse compressor.  He asked how soon we needed it and I said whenever we can get it.  He said he would have it for us next week.  And here come a truck from Quincy, Illinois, they made the compressors there, and they brought it up to the fountain.  In those days you were able to say I was going to sign out, well, when the truck arrived at Gardner Denver, he said that I might just as well take it up to the fountain site and I called Doc Creason right away, and we went to the site, and nothing would do but when we got it off the truck, he wanted to take it down the steps and put it in the pump house.  We got it in the pump house and he wanted to take it out of the crate and set it up.  I told him we couldn’t do that with just two of us, but he said we could, so by golly, he twisted and monkeyed around and he got it out of the crate – you never saw a man with such dedication.  He said “I know it can be done”.  That’s his whole attitude.  So having had the design all fixed and Bilz had done his job and put the pipes all in, we had a work bee and they painted all the pipes, then started with the wiring.  Well, we had decided that it would be an IBM system, and then that would be put on Frieden tape, and in those days the Frieden tape wouldn’t take whatever you had to do, so you would punch in some numbers and then back up to where you were and punch in different numbers and then punch the punch again, so you get more numbers as you go along.  Then we had the tapes for the Frieden, and then we were doing the wiring and we would work nights until it was cold.  We worked after the house was up.

Q: This was all free gratis?

A: Oh yes, nobody was paid.  Then, Buzz Terrill said he knew where there were some pumps, down in the junk yard.  The city had just picked up some new pumps and sold the others to Padnos, no it was Gerry Weavers, so we went down and got those pumps and took them to Gardener Denver and they rebuilt them and braised them all up, like they were new, and we put them up there.  3300 volts of electricity, well, you have all the facts – how many gallons a minute and how it can light up a city – and 1964 is when we dedicated that thing, but before we turned it on – we had the whole gang, the working crew over there and it was at night and we first turned on one set of lights and then another, and the first thing we did was blow fuses, because there was so much power and then the relays, we had Alan Bradley relays, they would start sparking and burning out, and we had fun finding the lights, we finally found some lights for $1.00 each, that came out of WWII bombers, landing lights, and they were 12 volt, and we had 110 volts, so we strung them all in series, if one blew, then – before we got done, the lights cost $10.00 each, so that night over there when we turned it on, it worked.

Q: Did you guys go out and celebrate afterwards?

A: Yea, that was good.  Well, the fountain went on, and then of course, the Loutit Foundation got busy and started working across the river and they put in all of the – well, that was quite an emotional thing.  At that time Bill Creason was mayor, he’s the dentist.  We had a real good thing going.  The mayor, the city manager, and we had the crew from Gardner Denver and the baking of Gardner Denver, we also had the backing of Dake Engine.  The crew has all died off, Foster’s gone, Pres Bilz is gone, Marshall White, the electronic genius of this thing, deciding how the programs – we had to have a tape, high fidelity, and we then tried to decide how those two channels of music, how we would be able to get the fountain to relate to the moods of the music, so we decided we would put on that channel of voice count and that would be as long as the program.  We made a tape of the voice count from 1 to 100 and we played it and kept on repeating it until we had a tape we could put on with the old music tape and count 100 – 200 – 300 – well that count was at slow speed if you played it at the regular speed it sounded like – well, we used that count then we would put pulses on another channel of that tape, 1, 2 or 3 pulses and every pulse that Frieden tape moved once, if it had 4 pulses, the Frieden tape would jump 4 spaces.  We could get up to 6 spaces a second.  Then the Frieden tape had holes punched in it and all of those holes had little fingers and the fingers would make contact with the electrical relays and the relays would be what the fountain would do.  The relays closing electrically would close the pneumatic valves or the electric relays for the lights, so we would play the tape back and forth, like this recorder, we’d play it back and forth and write down that we wanted the fountain to do by code numbers.  Then, Bernie Boyink would go there and listen to – he had our choreographed sheet, and he had a console in front of him that had 6 buttons, and if we had three things down there, he would listen to the voice – and he would be punching that thing, three pulses, 5 pulses, for the whole length of the program, and that’s how the thing was synchronized.

Q: You talked about a newspaper route – I’m wondering how much you got paid for that?

A: I think it was, we collected and we got a percentage of it.  We had to pay for our papers, but I don’t remember.  All I know is that I would be making maybe five or six dollars a week, if everyone paid good, but some of those people down there, they would give me – they would pay for their papers sometimes in pennies.  And when you would go up on the other end of town, up on Lake Avenue , they were never home, and that’s where I had the bad time, the people that bought the Wall Street Journal etc.  Downtown business people were very good.  I guess – well, I used to save 50 cent pieces, I would put them in my room – I would judge with all three routes that I would make about twenty bucks a week.

Q: That’s very good.  Someone I previously interviewed worked at Braak’s Bakery for $15.00 a week.

A: Well, when I was in the last year of High School I gave up the bakery – well, I was trying to graduate, my marks – well, at that time I worked for the Robinhood Theatre.  You probably don’t even know where that was --.  There were three theatres, the Grand, which is still there, the Robinhood, which was where the Old Kent Bank is now, and the Crescent Theatre – do you know where, Prins Heating Company was in there – the best way to describe it is to go down to Ferry and Washington, it was on the North East corner, that big brick building there.  The bicycle shop is in there, and also the back is used for storage.  That was a huge theatre, that’s where they had a dish night and you would buy a ticket and I won a set of dishes.  I had to set them down at least twelve times before I got them home, walking home.

Q: What did your mother say?

A: Oh, she was delighted.  In those days they used to have ice cream wars.  Right across from Braak's Bakery where they are remodeling all those things, there was a drug store, Presley’s Drug store and our favorite thing, I had a friend – I would pick him up because his house was where Bekin's appliance store is, and we would go to the Crescent Theatre, watch the movie, it was 15 cents, and we would come back and each of us would get a pint of ice cream and some topping and we would sit there and eat that whole pint of ice cream.  I think it was McDonald’s who had the price war.  And we walked everywhere.  I had a bicycle and rode it down to the Grand Theatre and a young fellow stole it – I know who it was, but my dad wouldn’t – yea, he’s still living too.  It was a nice bicycle, he just rode it away.

Q: You would think that in a town this small, everyone would notice –

A: Well, yes, they found him right away.  His mother turned him in.

Q: And you got the bike back?

A: Yes I did, but that fellow went on and he was quite well liked and had a very good position here in town – that’s enough of that.

Q: During the depression –

A: Yea, that particular house had an entry way, a front porch, which we screened in with the exception of the right end of it and we would walk up that porch and in the door and as soon as you got in, there were steps going upstairs and there were two bedrooms upstairs.  Then alongside the hallway if you went to the left, you entered what we called the living room and if you went on down the hallway, you would enter into a dining room which was – well, if you went on past that there was the kitchen and then left of that was the bathroom.  There was also a room, about half the size of this rec room here, in there we had the piano, and in those days no television, a radio that dad had an antenna strung from the house to the barn so you would pick up Walter Cronkite, etc. and we would listen to Father Caughlin, he was a very controversial figure at that time, and in that parlor was a large settee – we also had one in the living room and my daddy’s big chair, wing back and another rocking chair for my mother and the piano, a big Baldwin upright piano.  My sister played the piano and my mother played the piano and all the kids would come from Grand Rapids and they would sit around there and we would drink my father’s beer that he had made – or they had been fishing in the morning and they would come back with a whole mess of perch, the women would be cleaning the perch and the guys would all be sitting around drinking beer and sing songs on the piano.  Then they would all go back – see my daddy was one of 13, and he came from Grand Rapids.  At one time in my youth I remember spending a whole week on the North Shore in a tent, that was the first place I learned to drink coffee.  There was a coast guard station there, and that was it, there were no houses there.  We put up a tent and it had a piece of canvas for the fly, and even my mother and I stayed in that tent for a week.  My dad would come out, we loaded his car and we played on the beach and slept in the tent.  It was about 60 feet from the pier, and back up on the beach.

Q: Were you an only child?

A: I had a sister and she died when I was 11 years old.  She went thru High School, and they all ran down to the Grand Theatre because there was a Blossom Queen contest, the forerunner of Miss Michigan contest, and when she came back it was raining and she caught cold.  In those days they didn’t have penicillin or sulfa and she contacted strep throat and it went into spinal meningitis and she was dead in 17 days.  She died in the house, and they had the funeral service in the house.  They checked the house to make sure the joice and things would hold the people, but most of the people stood outside, the windows were open.  Then, because you had no insurance or anything, Mr. Loutit came and said that he would take care of it, so he paid for it.                 

Q: I never got straight why you nailed that carpet up though?

A: Well, mostly it was impression.  In those days we heated the house with coal heater that was in the living room – no, the dining room.  When you heat the house, we had registers in the ceiling and the heat would go upstairs, but the house was heated with a three foot square stove that sat right alongside the door to the bedroom, and the chimney went right straight into the wall into another chimney, so we closed that off so we wouldn’t have to burn so much coal.  The coal truck would come and my mother would close all the doors and hang a carpet over the door of the coal bin and just be beside herself because when they put the coal in the dust came up everywhere.  We got 12 ton of coal and it would cost him about $50.00 and that was a lot of money.

Q: And he was getting paid $35.00 a week?

A: Yea, but in that time he bought that house next door, but later he sold it.

Q: Can we go into Industry?

A: Well, that was Garner Denver, from High School I went to Junior college in Muskegon, that’s when it was in the old building, after 2 years I went to Ann Arbor to the University and it was there the war picked me up, and after the war I came back to Gardner Denver.  I started as an aeronautical engineer and because of that I went into the Air Force.  I wanted to go to officer’s candidate school, applied for that, first I was teaching people how to fly blind while they were on the ground, then I wanted to go to parachute school, weather school, that was in Grand Rapids, and I was in Illinois at the time, but, I didn’t get it, and my second choice was field artillery, so I would up in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, that’s where I became a second Lieutenant and it was just about when I was leaving that I made first Lieutenant.  Then I went back to school and then I was working for Eastern Airlines and I was also in the laboratory, the engineering laboratory doing research work for the first metals that were being used for the turban blades of the jet engines, that’s when jet engines were first being started, and I was running horsepower, butting speeds and everything else in the lab, and getting paid for it, and working for Eastern Airlines and studying.  Then my father died and I came back to Grand Haven.  Went to work then – I bounced around Grand Haven, two or three places before I landed at Keller Tool, in fact I was working for Van Zylen Lumber Company and I delivered lumber – that’s right where Meijer's is now – and I delivered a load to Keller Tool at the time and I asked Jim Brown if they had any openings, and he said you look pretty good to me, I’ll talk to the boss and call you.  He called me at home and I went there and I interviewed McNaughton on December 28th or something, and he said that he wanted me to come to work for him, start in the engineering laboratory, a test lab, and I started to work on January 2nd, right after that week-end, that was in 1951.  I went up from the test lab, test engineer, senior test engineer, then they were developing some things and I went to design/development and that’s where I got my three patents.  I got patents for impact wrenches, mechanisms and for this trolley that runs like electric trolleys, like the street cars used to run, well this thing ran down on air out of a tube.

Q: This was at Gardner Denver?

A: Then it became Gardner, it was first Keller's, yes.  Being in the lab and close to these things, a lot of the new stuff was made in the lab by some model makers that we had in there, we had some machines in there and we had booths and labs and equipment, and we would make up our own test fixtures etc. for tools.  The new tools that were designed, were first made – only two or three were made, and they were made in that lab, these were new tools that were going to be shown on the market and who would know better to go over to the Pantlind Hotel in Grand Rapids and help set up the show and get the booths and things ready – I did some of that.  If new products went out in the field, if they became troublesome, I would fly out to California or wherever it was and help the sales people understand what had gone wrong and how to fix it.  We did a lot of training there.  Then it became Cooper and I gave up on the design/development thing and I became a product engineer.  I had five products for which I was responsible for making sure they were made right and that they didn’t cost too much, keep the cost down, and that they were sold, and it was about that time that Susie said that this place was folding up, that was 1982, and they had called me and asked if I would like to take early retirement and I said no, that I was going to be 62 next year, I have about 6 or 7 months to go and then I would bow out, and that was alright with them, otherwise my job was eliminated they said.  Jennifer, in those days, probably still is, you are in the office and there is no union, and they eliminate your job.  All the time that you have put in there, I put in 29 years, and you build up what you hope would be a real nice retirement – they just give you a cash settlement, and you’re done.  You don’t get anything from then on.  I’m still receiving a pension from Gardner Denver, but the important thing is I’m getting all of my hospitalization paid, and that’s a big chunk.  Anytime you have anything wrong, the doctor, hospital or anything else, it’s paid for.  That was 30 years to the day and I was 62 on July 6, 1982 and I left, and the following fall they began closing down the door and that’s when Sue left, and she’s getting a pension also.  And that’s about – Oh, I was going to tell you, I worked at the Robinhood Theatre for 25 cents an hour there, I was the manager-usher, the whole thing.

Q: Was that pretty good pay?

A: Oh boy, in those days it was.  That theatre was condemned and the State Bank bought it and then – doctors’ offices are all up there – Mr. Loutit was director of that and that’s another place he made his money.  When the banks closed he knew all about it, in fact he hold my dad to take his savings out.  He was also instrumental in me working at Keller Tool one summer between University of Michigan, on second shift, because he owned 52% of Keller Tool.

Q: He made quite an impact on your life didn’t he?

A: Yea he did.

Q: He seemed to be a very nice man?

A: He was a huge man, about 6 feet tall, he must have gone 250 pounds, and a real financier – he would walk into a place and everybody would stop and look.  He would just stand there and look around.  He would do that at Keller Tool, and he smoked a cigar.  He was a typical tycoon.  One time we had a fellow by the name of Boomgaard, he was the plant manager, and when Vin Erickson first came to town -- oh, by the way, JSJ also had some interest in Gardner Denver – they thought they could go a bit better if they had a real hot shot and they called Mr. Erickson in from New York, and the first thing he said was, we can’t work with the old school, we’ll have to get in some new blood right away, I’ll hire somebody, but in the meantime, I think I’ll get rid of you Jim, nothing wrong, but you are just from the old school, and we have to start fresh here.  Well, Mr. Loutit would just walk in the place and say hi to Jim Boomgaard and ask him how things were going, and they would talk and then he would go upstairs and parade down thru the business section of the thing, well, he walked into Vin’s office and asked about Jim Boomgaard, and Vin said that he had gotten rid of him.  Mr. Loutit said to get him back, well, he’s from the old school, well, I don’t care, I like Jim, he’s a nice guy, I think he’s been doing a good job, I like the bottom margin on the profit sheet, get him back. Vin said he didn’t think he wanted to do that.  Well, Mr. Loutit told him if he didn’t want to do that, then he was done.  He said well ok, I’ll get him back, and Mr. Loutit told him to get him back by tomorrow night.  Well, Vin called the house and Jim wasn’t there, he was fishing.  Vin went and got a row boat and went out in the boat, and I don’t know what it was all about, but Jim came back and Vince kept his job and everyone was happy.  Jim stayed there until he retired.  The politics in industry is terrific, and if you go into industry, you had better well have a doctor’s degree, and I would stay out of industry.  In industry today, there are no ethics.  There are people who decide that they will buy this place with junk bonds and get this and that done, and when they get it done, someone of those outfits are gone, and all the people with them, and that’s not fair.  When I left – I was in a meeting and I heard engineering manager name of Yedinik speak of units, and I asked him about it and he said that he figured if we have this amount of production go thru here, then we can do this, and could probably save ourselves 14 or 15 units during a 30 day period.  I asked what are units, and he said – people.  About that time I knew it was time to leave.  What do we talk about next?

Q: I still don’t know about the celery fields, and where did all the stock go?

A: Oh, it was all sent to Chicago as soon as it was harvested, it all went into these crates, like the strawberry crates and they would drive all night to hit the market in the morning in Chicago, and they would just hope and pray that the price was right.  They would have three or four trucks unload their whole harvest, we’re talking about a field that was maybe four to six city lots.  Do you know how they do the celery?  They go – in those days without machinery, you just went along and had your back bent with a little bag of celery plants and you would put them in and pat it and put the next one in and pat it, and you stayed bent until you got the whole – the lines were about 2 feet apart.  Okay, then as soon as they came up and got started pretty good, you would keep the dirt around the sides of them, this was for the white stalks and when you couldn’t do that anymore, they would – they had old boards, those boards were first used to walk on because it was muck, mud and the kids would come back from work, after working all day, they could hardly walk, they were so tired, and they were full of mud and that’s when my dad said he didn’t think I could handle it, but then they would put the boards up again, up against the side and now, when they got them there, we would keep checking and we would say “oh boy, I think we are one of the first”, the first to get their celery cut and get them to market, got the best price.  They would load that and work all day long and the trucks would take off their whole crop and away they would go.  Off to Chicago.

Q: The neighborhood, were there designated neighbors up there?

A: Designated?  In a way.

Q: What about the East End?  I’m not quite sure where that – why it was the East End , that it got it’s own name?

A: The shopping center they call central – people didn’t use cars like they do now, you walked every place, so I guess the town was kinda divided up like that.  I don’t know why.  I don’t know what they call that out there where the Tannery is, of Beechtree Street.  Finally Tammen decided – I mean Deitjen said that he would improve their lot out there, pave the street and pay a little more attention to the businesses that are developing out there, because they said they were a part of this city too – they were kinda out there in the East End .

Q: What about native Americans?

A: There again I’m thinking of the Robbins and the Hattons and the rest of those.

Q: Oh alright, not Indians?

A: I didn’t know of any Indians.  I was just thinking of the first people – we went thru that a little bit Jennifer.  I remember streets that weren’t paved, and the carferries, we used to go down and watch.  I caught heck so many times for going down and watching the trains switch cars back and forth to load them on the car ferry and I caught heck for walking down by the river alone.  There was good fishing and the tugs used to come in and they would dock against those flimsy little poles with a couple of boards laying on them to unload the fish and we would go down there and watch.  I learned to swim in Grand River.  Wouldn’t want to swim in there now, but at that time we did.  I almost drowned trying to swim across Grand River.  We would land right where the North Shore Marina is now when we swam across.  There wasn’t anything there, just a little cove in the river and a little sand beach.  Do you know that when my dad and I wanted to go fishing on the North pier, we would walk on the South pier to about across from the Coast Guard station, and there was a ring in the cement and my dad would pick that up and bang it and pretty soon somebody would come out of the Coast Guard Station and dad would ask them how about a ride, and there was a row boat there and he would row across the river and give us a ride and we would go fishing.  He did that a couple of times.  They can’t do things like that now because of insurance.

Q: Did you get a lot of fish?

A: Oh boy, perch, I remember going out, not early in the morning, but before breakfast, when dawn was breaking, and fish on the lake side, use minnows, cane poles, and they used to say that 50 perch were the limit, and the perch were about 7-8 inches long, and if you ran out of minnows then you would use cut bait, but a Gang would come from Grand Rapids, my dad, mother and myself would go out.  I don’t remember my sister and we would come home, clean them, but then we would have the perch fry.  In those days all you had was an ice box, and it was a great thing.  My dad decided to tear the old shed off the back of the house and put a new little shed, but the old shed was for horses, had a steep front and a sloping back and inside were all stalls – it went from the house almost 2/3 back and in the back of the house was a great big barn, which was eventually torn down.  Then he built another little shed in there, and also, we could now go down into the basement instead of going outside.  That then is where the ice box was put and that is where he decided to drill a hole in the floor and take a tube and put it up in the pan, for the ice, then we didn’t have to empty the ice pan anymore.  I remember the ice man coming and put 50 pounds of ice in there and take his money, maybe 20 cents and away he would go.  There were a lot of jokes about the ice man coming to the doors and things.

Q: As bad as the milkman?

A: Yes I believe it was.  And then – VerPlank’s Ice and Coal, I remember where they stored the ice and I watched them cut the ice in Spring Lake.  I don’t know if Whitey is still around.

Q: I don’t think so, I have the name of Vernon .

A: Whitey VerPlank had a structural steel building on the other side of where Barrett’s is, right along the channel and he called me one night and said he wanted to build a house.  I went over to see what he had, a lot on Spring Lake, so I sketched up something for him – he told me the bulldozers were coming tomorrow morning.  I worked until three o’clock that night and dropped it off the next morning.  I had no idea if he would like it or not, but I came by there the next afternoon and the ground was level and the foundations were in – that’s very low ground.  I never heard another word from him.  I would design a 3 bedroom house, it would take me about 20 hours, and I would get about $20.00 for it, and now, the last one I did I collected $100.00.  It was nothing to stay up until 2 o’clock in the morning designing, or drawing up a house, and go to the people, no charge for interview time.  I have about 130 houses here in the tri-cities area that I have designed.  That was all pin money and helped a lot.  You know I was married before I married Susan and it was thru the purchasing of houses and moving that you gradually build up your equity, then when you decide you can’t get along together, you give the equity away and start over.

Q: What about men’s roles – is that how you were raised, men do this and women do that?

A: Very seldom – that I did much with my father.  Once in a while we went fishing.  I remember many times when I went astray and he would just look at me and say live and learn, you’ve done it once, all is forgiven.  Like the time I ran my dad’s year-old car under the train and he asked if I was hurt, and I said no.  He said thank the Lord, and that was the last I heard of it.

Q: How in the world did you –

A: Two o’clock in the morning, coming back from my date in Muskegon, 1937 Ford, and at that time the old Grand Haven Road was the highway, a two lane highway.  Coming home you would come right into 7th Street and right there at Fulton.