"Grandma Los" from CRC Family Portrait (i)

Here's the first half of a story I wrote about Hattie Los forty years ago. It's one of 35 feature stories I wrote for The Banner, a weekly magazine of the Christian Reformed Church. Generally, I asked friends and acquaintances for possible subjects, then interviewed ordinary people they'd recommend, men and women, old and young from all over the continent, members of the CRC. "Her story is a chronicle of American history," I wrote. It was and is. I've never forgotten the stories she told me, always treasured them.

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The living room of Hattie Los's home is little more than a cubicle; the ceiling is low and the dark brown paneling shows that someone has tried to make one­hundred-year-old plaster walls look suburban. It's the kind of place where you might guess a great­grandmother would live--there's not a right angle in the house.

Grandma Los lives alone, but the room is crowded with chairs--straight chairs, a captain's chair, maybe a rocker, a sofa, and at least one big soft one in the corner opposite the TV stand. All the chairs are for Sunday, of course, for that one hour after church when her children, and their children, and their children's children drop by for a '' goodie.'

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Paint-by-number landscapes line the walls. "Pete did those," she says. Pete was Mr. Los. He died just a few months before their sixty-third wedding anniversary. There's a card from President Ford on the china cabinet, framed, a picture of the President pasted on. "That was for our sixtieth," she says. "Cut the picture out of The Banner." Hattie Los smiles continuously, but when she talks about her Pete, her smile brightens even more. "He's dead now, two years. He's where he always hoped he'd be someday," she says.

Just outside of Grandma Los’s kitchen window stands a massive oak, strong and dignified, its gnarled branches and twigs grown in a thousand crooked angles; yet, somehow, all together, they create a nearly perfect circle above the thick, proud trunk. It's an old tree, full of stories probably--if trees could talk--stories of how the men once laid the brick that makes your tires grumble when you drive down the main street of Delavan, Wisconsin. It's a scrub oak, a second-class oak, the kind of oak that's not as clean, perhaps not as pure, as its cousin oak trees. But it's straight and strong.

Oak was once the wood of the people. Few midwestem families had kitchen tables that weren't cut from open-grained oak. Hard wood. Wood that could put up with years of coffee, dinners, coffee, suppers, generations of milk-spillers, entire lifetimes. Grandma Los's scrub oak is that kind of oak. In early October it ignites as if set afire by a natural torch, turn­ing yellow and orange and brown in a spectacular ritual that only Grandma Los could recount exactly. As beautiful as it is in the late spring, its green leaves un­furled in the warm southern breezes, autumn is the scrub oak's showcase.

Grandma Los--almost everyone calls her "Grandma" --is, in her own way, not so much different from that big oak outside her window. She's over eighty now, brimming with stories. She doesn't get out to church anymore; but she listens to tapes of four sermons every week, two from the local preacher, two from her son in Michigan. Her rheumatoid arthritis has swelled her joints, all of them, with stiffness, and her lumpy hands portray her lifelong battle, her fingers thick and angular like the branches of the scrub oak. "But I do just fine," she says, her left hand patting the arm of her wheelchair. "Aspirin keeps the pain down," she says, smiling, as always, "and I don't feel it at all like in the old days." She raises her hands in front of her face, touching her fingers pointer to pointer in a kind of gesture. "When I was fifteen, I spent three months bed while it just spread from one place to another. “Couldn’t even get up.”

Later, she and her husband had nine children. "But you know," she says, "that whole time I was never bothered by it, not until I was close to fifty. Nine children. Pete on the farm. All the kids. “And I was just as active as anybody. That's a miracle."

Hattie Los had to be active. Her story is a chronicle of American history: a South Dakota childhood, her parents an immigrant Frisian couple, the Logtermans of Springfield; married before she was twenty to Peter Los, son of a good, middle-class merchant from Leiden, the only member of a strong family to feel any urge for the adventure of a new country. "I’ll be back in five years," Pete had told his family when he left in 1911. 

Then came the war. Then he met Hattie. He finally did return, but not until after World War II, when both mother and father had recently died. There was no medicine during the Nazi occupation.

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Tomorrow, the second half of the story of Hattie Los.