by David DeKok
But the world she saw in the news and heard about from missionaries who visited Trinity Reformed Church nagged at her and made her wonder if she should do something more relevant, something that would enable her to make her mark and ease human suffering. Dennis Wegner, her brother-in-law, recalled in 1972 that Betsy “loved America and loved its people. The fact that many people were in desperate need of food, medical attention, warmth, and understanding were sources of great pain to her.” The problems were real, and she was not alone in her beliefs among her 1960s generation. It was an idealistic time.25
By the time she reached her junior year, Betsy had decided she wanted to become a physician. Not a nurse, mind you, the traditional route to the medical world for a female, but an MD. That was still a bold, even radical, ambition for a young woman when only about 7 percent of US medical school graduates were women. Any woman who overcame the barriers and was admitted to medical school could expect a difficult and possibly lonely four years. At one time, Sasamoto remembers, Betsy toyed with the idea of becoming a medical illustrator instead, combining two of her passions. But there seems little doubt that her overarching goal at that time was to be a physician.26
The pre-med sequence at Holland High, although it was not formally designated as such, consisted of biology, chemistry, and physiology, the last a difficult and challenging full-year course taught by Dirk Bloemendaal Sr., who remembered Betsy well. “That was a class that was slanted toward the top kids in school,” he said. “And she was a very hard worker. Excellent student. I think I ended up giving her a straight A in the class, and it was not an easy class.” Not only that, in 1965 Bloemendaal named the fourth of his five children after her, according to what Betsy told her first college roommate, Linda DenBesten. Bloemendaal trusted both Betsy and Jan to the extent of giving them the key to his classroom over winter break so they could attend to plants that were part of an experiment they were doing, to measure the effect of growth hormones on plants. “Just water my plants, too,” he told them.27 Betsy could charm and impress, not through her physical appearance—although that didn’t hurt—but through her intelligence and personality.
An important part of Bloemendaal’s physiology class, remembered by all his former students, was the dissection of a cat. Each pair of lab partners—for Betsy, this, of course, was Jan—received a preserved cat from a laboratory supply house and was required to do much of the dissection at home. “We worked on learning the muscles and origins and insertions,” Bloemendaal said. “And then we did the circulatory system. The cats came all injected with red and blue. And the kids loved working on it.” The kids might have, but their mothers often didn’t appreciate what came in the door. Toshi Sasamoto made a big fuss, her daughter recalled, and so all the dissection homework was done at Betsy’s home in the breezeway between the house and the garage. “Betsy and I would spend a lot of time poking around. She was always so much more meticulous than I was. . . . So I was always happy when she took it home, because I always knew she was going to be dissecting when she had time and cleaning it up. She was very careful that way,” Sasamoto said. “Betsy was very, very bright, and she worked very hard. And she was very dependable. If she said she’d do something, she did it. We were perfect lab partners, because she did all the illustrations and I wrote out the technical procedures.”28
Betsy also participated during her senior year in what was called the Cooperative Training (or Co-op) Program at Holland High, which offered what today would be called internships. She was a nursing trainee, or Pinkie (for their uniforms) at Holland Hospital, which was a few blocks up the hill from Trinity Reformed Church, where her family worshipped. Thirty-five students from Holland High, West Ottawa High School, and, for the first time, Holland Christian High School entered the program in the fall of 1964. Holland Christian, in line with the church’s separatist beliefs, had previously operated its own Pinkie program apart from the two public schools. Thirty-three of the students were girls, and nursing trainees. Two were boys, and X-ray trainees. Just as the notion of female doctors puzzled many Americans in 1964, so did the idea of male nurses.29
It was her last English teacher at Holland High School, Olin Van Lare, who made Betsy wonder if she had made the right choice of career. She took Van Lare’s English literature course the second semester of her senior year and was captivated. He became her favorite teacher, at least after Bloemendaal. Judi Jahns, in the class with Betsy, remembers Van Lare’s intense love of poetry and him taking the class to Chicago to see a production of the Oliver Goldsmith play, She Stoops to Conquer.30
Everyone remembered Van Lare as a character. He had grown up in the small town of Wolcott, New York, along Lake Ontario. After graduating from Hope College in 1937 with a degree in English, and from the University of Michigan with a master’s degree in music in 1942, he had taught elsewhere for fifteen years, including in postwar Japan as the music director of the American School in Yokohama. The Holland school board hired him to teach high school English in 1957. An excellent teacher, he spoke in an epicene voice that some boys found off-putting and was prone to classroom histrionics. Van Lare referred to his students as “kiddles” in class. His will—he died an early death in 1975, at age sixty—contained a bequest for an Olin C. Van Lare Scholarship at Hope College for a deserving student, preferably from Holland High School, who wanted to pursue the study of literature. It was too late for Betsy.31
Betsy had a near-perfect grade point average in high school, scoring As in most of her classes and Bs only in advanced algebra, physics, gym, and in her nursing co-op program. She ranked fifth in her class and was inducted into the National Honor Society as a junior, which required a minimum 3.5 grade point average and the good opinion of one’s teachers. Her SAT scores were 625 verbal and 598 math under the old scoring system. In the spring of 1965, she was one of several Holland High students, including Jan Sasamoto, to win Michigan Competitive Scholarships, a generous state grant that could be used at either public or private colleges in the state.32
She was going to Hope College and Jan was going to the University of Michigan. Betsy also had applied to Michigan, had been accepted, and wanted badly to go. The girls had already talked about rooming together on campus. But in Hope College families, the pressure to go to Hope can be intense. In Betsy’s case, her mother, father, older sister, and several aunts, uncles, and cousins had gone to Hope. They argued, they negotiated, and she finally agreed to go if she could live on campus. She could have done worse. Hope was strong in pre-med. Her career goals would not suffer, and at least two of her friends would be there, Leslie Nienhuis and Margo Hakken. Betsy told Linda DenBesten that in the end she agreed to go to Hope to please her parents. They, in turn, took out loans to pay the extra cost of the private school.33
The culture of the 1960s had barely touched Holland in 1965, but that was about to change. Radio from Chicago brought that world to the transistor radios of Holland teenagers. In the spring of 1966, the director of the seventh-grade band at E. E. Fell Junior High felt the change in the air and arranged a Top 40 radio hit from the previous fall, “Hang On, Sloopy” by the McCoys, for the marching band to play during that May’s Tulip Time parades, instead of a traditional Sousa march.
Something indeed was in the air. A group of antiwar protesters from Hope College joined one of those same Tulip Time parades that spring, demanding an end to the Vietnam War. Anyone who thought Hope College would stand as a bulwark against a fast-changing society would be sorely disappointed. Anyone who expected it to be as liberal as the University of Michigan would likewise be frustrated.
Chapter 15
Way Station to the World
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
—Tom Hayden, opening lines of the Port Huron Statement, Students for a Democratic Society, 1962
At Hope College, Betsy moved
into Room 69 on the third floor of Voorhees Hall, an aging, creaking, three-story dormitory for women students built of red-orange bricks in 1907 in the style of traditional Dutch architecture in the Netherlands. Her freshman-year roommate was Linda DenBesten from South Holland, Illinois, a Chicago suburb that was another center of Dutch settlement and only six miles from the Roseland neighborhood of Chicago, where Betsy’s father grew up.
Linda remembers Betsy as an easy roommate, willing to give her first choice of bunks and seemingly unconcerned about her untidy ways. “I would come in from class and I would always take a nap in the middle of the afternoon. I would flop down on her bed,” she said, referring to the bottom bunk. More than once, Betsy came back to find Linda sleeping on her bed. “I’d hear her kind of groan,” DenBesten said. “But then she’d just go up on my bunk. If I had garbage all over the place, which I frequently did, she ignored it.” Musing about Betsy’s fate, she wondered, “Who could she have annoyed? She just never annoyed anyone.” Linda found her bright and artistic, as did most everyone else, and an interesting conversationalist about nearly anything, but especially literature and theater. The only thing that bored Betsy was dorm gossip. “That was just not her thing,” her former roommate said.1
She was not a complete grind, however, and her first year included typical college activities and hijinks. Margo Hakken, Betsy’s classmate at Holland High School, lived at home and commuted to classes at Hope. But she often hung out with Betsy and other friends in Voorhees, and she recalled the pranks, such as the time juniors and seniors in the dorm put wet leaves in the beds of first-years. Betsy and some of her classmates retaliated later in the semester. They broke off icicles that hung from the third-floor roof, put them in the beds of their tormentors, and then taped the doors shut so the icicles would have plenty of time to melt.2
Betsy dated a number of men that year, including George Arwady, a budding journalist and editor of the Hope College student newspaper, the Anchor, who remembered her as “smart and pretty.” He recalled being in an honors English class with Betsy that employed dance movements as part of the learning process. She also dated a boy named Darryl and had an angry breakup with him that her mother remembered after her death, even though Betsy by that time had long since reconciled with him. Tom Bolhuis, her date for the Horizon summer formal in 1964, was also a freshman at Hope and ran into her once or twice, although they never went out again. DenBesten said Betsy dated a lot of guys and wasn’t exclusive with any of them. That was the pattern of her young life.3
Young women at Hope College in the fall of 1965 were still bound by rules from a different era, which were enforced by the housemother in their dorm. Women students—this didn’t apply to men—had to be back in their dorms by 9:00 p.m. on weeknights, with lights out at 10:00 or 10:30 p.m., DenBesten remembered. On weekends, women students could stay out until 11:30 p.m. “The idea was that if the women were in, the guys couldn’t get into too much mischief,” she said. All first-years, female or male, had to attend 8:00 a.m. chapel services at least two days of the week. That was an improvement, depending on how you looked at it, from earlier decades, when daily attendance was required. Men were barred from ever going past the lobby in Voorhees, except on homecoming weekend, when male family members and friends could visit the girls in their rooms. It wasn’t unusual to see couples making out in the darkness outside the main entrance of the dorm. DenBesten remembers visiting Columbia University in New York in the summer of 1967 and wondering at the lack of amorous couples outside the dorms. “I later learned that men were allowed in women’s rooms and everything became immediately clear!” she said. Women students at Hope were even barred from traveling alone to other cities unless they could provide the name of a relative they were visiting. The paperwork alone was daunting.4
Betsy Aardsma certainly had doubts about staying in Holland and enrolling at Hope College. But she was fortunate to arrive at a unique time, when Hope was slowly moving toward a more culturally and religiously diverse faculty, a new moderation on student life issues, and a student body that was both larger and included students, especially from the East Coast, who were political liberals and willing to apply their Christian principles to trying to solve America’s social problems. Betsy Aardsma, so eager to embrace the world outside of Holland, found herself shaped by these new liberal currents at Hope College. She gravitated toward the civil rights struggle and opposition to the Vietnam War.
The man behind Hope’s transformation was Calvin A. Vander Werf, who became president of the college in 1963. He had been an organic chemistry professor and chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Kansas in Lawrence for more than twenty years. Even though he was a Hope graduate, the valedictorian and commencement orator of the Class of 1937, and the son of a Reformed Church minister from Wisconsin, Vander Werf and his wife, Rachel, had belonged to a liberal Congregationalist church in Lawrence. She had been raised as a Quaker. They were deeply committed to the cause of civil rights and improving the lives of black people and had been frustrated for years by the stubborn persistence of segregation in Lawrence in hotels, restaurants, and movie theaters. Vander Werf and others in the Kansas chemistry department recruited blacks from the South as graduate students in the 1950s, and several received master’s or doctoral degrees. Perhaps his most famous black undergraduate recruit was the Philadelphia high school basketball star Wilt Chamberlain. Together, Calvin and Rachel Vander Werf founded the Lawrence League for the Practice of Democracy to promote civil rights. With the League’s help—this was Rachel’s project—the local YWCA opened the first interracial residence for students at Kansas.5
Vander Werf carried out a number of reforms at Hope College before, during, and after Betsy’s time there. His mantra was that “piety is no substitute for excellence.” As one geology professor, J. Cotter Tharin, put it, “He took Hope College from a college that was somewhat sleepy and backward and tried to make it into a first-rate liberal arts college.” Vander Werf believed that religious-based liberal arts education was an antidote to many of the world’s ills, whether racial discrimination or nuclear proliferation. But during his tenure, he took the control of the college board of trustees away from the Reformed Church clergy and gave it over to businesspeople and other non-clerics who could provide more of the financial support Hope College needed in order to change and grow. He also hired the first non-Protestant faculty, including Catholics and nonbelievers (the first Jew was not hired until 1971, after he left), and strengthened Hope’s already strong reputation in the natural sciences.6
But the changes students remembered most applied directly to their own lives. Vander Werf ended the ban on dancing on campus (1963); opened the college library on Sundays (1967); invited black comedian and social activist Dick Gregory to speak in Dimnent Chapel, where he delivered a mildly profane, eye-opening look at the black condition in America (1968); eliminated mandatory chapel attendance for students (1970); and started the ball rolling on the end of parietal hours for women students (it finally happened in 1972, after he left). Parietal hours were rules governing when women students could be visited by men students.7
Vander Werf also hired Reverend William “Bill” Hillegonds as college chaplain and alter ego. Hillegonds opened a draft counseling office in the basement of Dimnent Chapel, where any young man, whether a Hope student or not, could go to learn his options if facing military induction for the Vietnam War. In the spring of 1966, when some four hundred thousand US troops had already been sent to South Vietnam and heavy bombing of North Vietnam had commenced, he brokered negotiations between thirty students and the Holland city attorney that allowed the students to carry signs protesting the war in one of the Tulip Time parades.
Hillegonds found himself at the center of Hope’s social, racial, and political tensions, striving to keep the lid on the cauldron while still letting it simmer and endeavoring to stay in the middle of the debate. It wasn’t always easy. Many more blac
k students were recruited to Hope during Vander Werf’s tenure, which Hillegonds considered a good thing, but they were not the “scared . . . Uncle Tom types” of the late 1940s when he was a Hope student. “We had blacks that were very aggressive, very hostile, very suspicious,” he said, adding that many of them especially distrusted white clergy. “We had strikes on campus, we had mass meetings in the chapel, we had late-night sessions trying to keep the peace.” He understood. And there were First World problems on his plate, too—students who would rather be marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but couldn’t find the nerve. White, middle-class young men came to Hillegonds in anguish over the conventional futures their parents demanded of them, saying they wanted a chance to change the world, not work in their father’s insurance agency. He heard it all, and listened with a kind ear—unless he thought a student was bullshitting him.8
Conservatives on the board of trustees and in the Reformed Church were agitated by many of the changes, and faculty, especially in the social sciences, sometimes felt left out of Vander Werf’s promotion of the natural sciences or steamrollered by his personal style. One political science professor, Al Vanderbush, who was a liberal Democrat, criticized Vander Werf for allegedly wanting to turn Hope College into “the Colgate . . . or Reed College” of the Midwest, which he felt would hurt average students. But his harshest criticisms were reserved for what he saw as Vander Werf’s tendency to be a self-centered autocrat. “He didn’t work with people; people had to work with him,” he said. Vander Werf ultimately was deposed—not exactly fired, but not exactly urged to stay on, either. But from 1963 to 1970, he changed Hope for the better, and most of his reforms were not rescinded by his less-contentious successors. It was Calvin Vander Werf’s Hope College that greeted Betsy Aardsma in the fall of 1965, doing much to turn her focus to the problems of the outside world.9