Oostburg CRC - 150 years - vi

The second World War put people back to work, but it also brought men into war.    First Orange City had as many as 40 men in the armed services at a time during World War II. I don’t know the totals from Oostburg, but there must have been close to thirty. In fact, in the front window of the parsonage, right downtown, there were five stars, meaning five children gone to war. Reverend Schaap—my grandpa—lost his wife in 1943, my grandma, middle of war, to a lingering illness. She was just 61. I have letters that he wrote to family—here and abroad—that witness to his Calvinist faith and his stoic grief.  Both of them too are buried in Hartman cemetery.

My dad went to the Pacific.  I found this picture in the bible he toted back then. My mom would be angry for a year if she knew I had it up there.

Mom had two babies during the war, two babies when Dad came home on a train in Milwaukee. She told me she got anxious about just how to greet him, and how he would react. He’d seen Judy, but not in two years, never seen Gail. How would he act—would he pick up Judy first, or the daughter he’d never seen? Should she greet him first? 

What did you do? I asked her. “Finally, I just decided to go alone.” I love that story, told at both my kids’ weddings. But I know very well that she wasn’t the only young mom who went through the same decision-making when a dad who’d been gone to war finally returned.

I’m a “baby boomer,” a massive generation created when my father and hundreds of thousands of others, dozens in Oostburg CRC, returned from World War II and started families. My dad built a good chunk of his own house himself and worked in Oostburg for Gilson Manufacturing, where a factory, among other things, turned out cement mixers affordable by the millions of men building theirs.

I was born in 1948, Sheboygan Memorial Hospital, the third child of Calvin and Jean Schaap, and I lived, for as long as I remember, at 714 Superior Avenue.

Here's the three of us what we called “our back porch,” a slab of concrete. I was baptized in the downtown Oostburg Christian Reformed Church, by my grandfather the preacher, who had only recently retired. He lived with us, I remember, but he died in 1956—and I don’t remember him, except as a grouch.

He was a strong proponent of Christian education, as were my parents. The Christian school began the year I was born, I believe, so I attended—I was close enough to walk home for lunch. Often, I made my own—I must have eaten a thousand boiled hot dogs—because Mom was giving piano lessons at noon, to people who probably still worship here. I still love hot dogs.

    Mom lost a sister in the very first years of the Christian School’s operation in a freakish accident in thick lake fog. They were going to Milwaukee in weather her parents told her was dangerous. In that pre-seat belt era, she was thrown into the windshield and sustained injuries that took her life while no one else in the car was hurt. Gertie Dirkse was one of the first teachers in the brand new Christian school. Starting a new Christian school was no picnic; Oostburg people went to war. I can’t help but wonder how my own parents--dear, dear Christian believers--felt about the death of their sister so quickly into the life of that school.

 In eighth grade at Oostburg Christian, at the end of a long Friday, I took out a slip of paper, stuck it into my mouth, let it get wet and soggy, then whipped it up against one of the big windows on the south wall, where it sat like a monster. That was what we did. I wasn’t the first, and I likely wasn’t the last.

But I got caught. And a man named Phares LeFever, our neighbor, in fact, shook his head angrily. “You did it?” he said, pointing at me. “You did it? You—a Schaap?”

It was the worst thing he could have said. I hated him for it. It was entirely unfair for him to say something like that because he wouldn’t have gone after any other kid in the room in the same way. “You—a Schaap?”

But it was also the best thing for me. I don’t doubt that some educational psychologist would say it was an awful thing to say, but when I went home that night, angry as sin, I came to realize something I’d never really thought about—that, in a way, I am not my own because I belong to something bigger than I am, not just a family of Mayors and Pastors, but a bigger family. I wasn’t just "Jimmy"—I was something far less and far, far more.

I grew up in this church, listening to four different preachers

There was no Christian High back then, and when my dad suggested I could board with someone in Waupun, I wasn’t interested. So I’m an OHS grad, one of those who spent far too much of his time and strength in sports. But it was a good experience. When I went off to college, I just wanted to be a coach.Right here in Oostburg, between the Onion River and Lake Michigan, I had a wonderful boyhood.

 But that was the late 60s, a difficult era for families and a church. I got radicalized by a war I thought wrong in Vietnam. My parents didn’t like my criticisms, but that was true in families throughout the church and the nation. World War II values didn’t look good in beads and bell-bottoms.

I left Oostburg and have lived, for the most part, in Iowa. Whenever I’d come home to visit in those years, I’d attend, with them, and often go over to the parsonage where a group of honest-to-goodness adults would have adult Sunday School. It used to get a little heated in that basement because people didn’t want to listen to their hippie kids, but I remember always feeling good about being there, never being repulsed or not tolerated. It was, at the time, church at its best, I think.

And that’s just about all I know about Oostburg and Oostburg Christian Reformed Church, all, at least of any historical value.