by David DeKok
For all of Betsy’s high school dreams of going to medical school, she seems to have changed her mind by the end of her freshman year at Hope. Her transcript shows her taking classic pre-med courses only in her freshman year, when she had two semesters of chemistry and one of zoology. There were no biology, physics, or math courses on her transcript. She took far more English, art, and German than anything remotely related to getting accepted to medical school. Linda DenBesten says Betsy did well in the pre-med courses she took but decided partway into her first year that she liked her English courses a whole lot more. The idea of being a physician never completely left her conversations with friends, but she took no further concrete steps toward medicine.10
DenBesten wondered if social pressures and conventional expectations had worked against Betsy’s dream. In retrospect, she considered her friend a feminist, even though the word wasn’t yet part of the common vocabulary in 1966. “She wanted to be a doctor. I think that’s pretty feminist [for] the time. And then she talked about being a lawyer. That never would have worked out,” DenBesten said. “I thought it was kind of gutsy to say you were going to be a doctor. I didn’t know anybody else who was going to be a doctor. In the [pre-med] classes she was in, she was one of the few women.” Most women she knew at Hope planned to be teachers. Betsy wanted to be different, but literature—a safe, conventional choice for a woman in 1966—won out.11
It was probably Al Vanderbush who got her thinking about politics. Vanderbush was a crusty former football coach with short-cropped hair and a trademark bow tie. He had morphed into one of the best and most influential political science professors the school had ever known, despite not having a doctoral degree. His gift was for teaching, not scholarship. A liberal Democrat and devotee of the New Deal, he turned his National Government classes into spirited dissections of the workings of governments and politicians, and made it all absorbingly interesting. With his piercing eyes and near permanent scowl, Vanderbush radiated intensity. Like Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase, a movie that came out a few years later, he used the Socratic Method in his classes, asking probing questions of his students. Woe unto he or (rarely) she who arrived unprepared to join in the discussion. That could trigger a volcanic tirade about “wasting your parents’ money.”12
Betsy Aardsma and her high school friend Leslie Nienhuis sat together in the front row of Vanderbush’s classroom in Van Raalte Hall, and they were always prepared. “We just had a ball in that class,” Nienhuis said. “We both did well and we enjoyed him.” It is quite likely that Betsy’s mental dance with the idea of becoming a lawyer grew out of Vanderbush and his National Government class. Betsy was politically liberal, at least by Hope College standards, according to DenBesten. “She wasn’t a political nut, but she could talk on any topic; politics was just one of them.”13
Betsy spent the summer of 1966 exploring her new interest in public service and mission work. She participated in a program to teach art to low-income black children in Grand Rapids, a city about seven times the size of Holland and twenty-five miles away. Few details of her participation in this program are known, but it was mentioned to reporters after her death by people who knew her and later confirmed by Dennis Wegner, her brother-in-law.
Also that summer, she traveled on a World Deputation Mission from her church to the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico, about two hundred miles south of Albuquerque. Trinity Reformed Church provided mission support to Mescalero Reformed Church, one of five Reformed churches serving Native American communities in the American West. The church had three pastors, Reverend Frank Love, Reverend Herman Van Galen, and Reverend Robert Zapp. Love, who was an Indian himself and a graduate of Western Theological Seminary in Holland, said the poverty on the reservation was profound. The federal government had built “some pretty nice homes” for the Mescaleros in the 1960s, he said, but that barely made a dent in the problem. When church youth groups came to help, they would typically work in the church’s Vacation Bible School or summer camp or help repair or paint buildings, Van Galen said.
That fall, Betsy made a presentation to her church about the trip, as did three other young people from the congregation who had visited other mission churches. She thought about joining the Peace Corps when she graduated from college.14
When they were all back in Holland for the summer, Betsy and her friends did what most young women their age did: They went out dancing. She and Jan Sasamoto were still inseparable, and they were often joined by Peggy Wich, Judi Jahns, and Leslie Nienhuis. One of their favorite destinations was the Edgar Allan Poe Club, a dry teen hangout that occupied the former Nibbelink-Notier Funeral Home at the corner of 9th Street and River Avenue, next to the National Guard Armory. The proprietor was Verne C. Kupelian, a former history teacher at Holland High School who opened the club in 1965. He kept it open until 1968, when he moved back to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Kupelian was another favorite teacher of Betsy and her friends, and he would remember them fondly four decades later. The Poe Club was open to young people between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four. On a typical night, he drew two hundred young people, but on a good night, when a popular band was playing, he could draw as many as six or seven hundred customers from as far away as Muskegon and Grand Rapids. Sometimes Kupelian hired bands from Chicago with Top 40 hits, such as the Buckinghams (“Kind of a Drag”) or New Colony Six.15
Betsy and her friends roamed far and wide to dance. Jan Sasamoto recalled driving as long as an hour, or even ninety minutes on occasion. But often, if they were headed out of Holland, it was to Saugatuck, a rollicking, gay-friendly resort town just ten miles away by highway but light-years distant from Holland in social attitudes. Downtown Saugatuck, which was built along the Kalamazoo River about a mile before it entered Lake Michigan, was full of bars like Coral Gables that offered dancing and were open seven days a week. In summer, the village was choked with visitors, both straight and gay, from Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest. Some drove there and others arrived by boat, docking at their favorite riverside watering hole.
Betsy and her friends were still underage, but Kupelian also had a summer teen club, Noah’s Ark, in Saugatuck in a shed used to store cabin cruisers and sailboats during the winter. In the summer it was empty. One side of the building was open to the river, and the noise from the bands tended to annoy cottagers in Saugatuck’s sister city of Douglas, on the other bank. “It was a corrugated building, and the water magnified the sound,” Kupelian said. Betsy and her friends would go there, sometimes after a visit to Laketown Beach, which was between Holland and Saugatuck, or Oval Beach in Douglas.
Kupelian didn’t remember Betsy for her beauty so much as the way she was. “Her personality was super, and everybody gravitated around her,” he said. He thought for a moment, then added: “And you know, those kind of people probably never saw anything evil in anybody.”16
In the fall of 1966, Betsy began her sophomore year at Hope College with a new roommate and a new dorm, Durfee Hall, just down the street from Voorhees. She was still on good terms with Linda DenBesten, who moved to Phelps Hall, and would have been willing to room with her again. “But she said, ‘I just think it’s important to have lots of experiences.’ So she roomed with somebody else,” DenBesten said. Their friendship endured. Betsy was a bridesmaid in Linda’s wedding in June 1968 and gave her one of her paintings as a gift. Linda came to Betsy’s funeral eighteen months later.
Abandoning pre-med and changing her major to English, Betsy dove into humanities courses, studio art, and art history. She never took another science course. Even with her dedication to her studies, though, there was still time for fun. She joined the cast of Winnie the Pooh, the sophomore class play in the annual Nykerk Cup competition at Hope. Nykerk pitted the sophomore and freshman girls against each other in singing, oration, and drama. Betsy’s class lost that year. Hope’s boys had the Pull, a brutal and physically demanding tug-of-war across the Black
River between carefully selected and trained teams from the freshman and sophomore classes. Each puller had a reinforced pit about two feet deep in which he could brace himself and a Morale Girl at his side to cheer him on, wipe his brow, and give him water during the ordeal. The event could last for hours before one team broke and was dragged across the river. As much as Hope College tried to combat racism during the Vander Werf years, feminism was definitely a novelty. There were still well-defined roles and rules for men and women students.17
Student demonstrations on the Hope campus were rare but not unknown. In November 1966, approximately forty women students “slipped out of the back door of Voorhees Hall at midnight,” the Anchor reported, and walked to the nearby home of President Vander Werf to protest the lack of fire safety in their dorm. They sang Christmas carols and chanted, “We want fire escapes!” They had a point: Voorhees had a single, inadequate fire escape, plus a fire alarm system that could not be heard on all floors. A request from students on the second and third floors for rope ladders for emergency escape had been turned down, according to students interviewed by the Anchor, because the college administration feared they would be used to sneak out after closing hours. Vander Werf later claimed to have slept through the commotion. The Voorhees housemother was furious, and the dean of women, Isla Van Eenenaam, condemned the “thoughtless, inconsiderate, and immature way of getting their point across” used by the girls, who, she said, should have gone through “proper channels.” She vowed to discipline them for leaving the dorm after closing hours.18
DenBesten said that the longer Betsy was at Hope, the more she wanted to leave. She applied to transfer to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor during her sophomore year and moved home for the second semester to save money. Both her brother-in-law, Dennis Wegner, and her close friend, Peggy Wich, said she transferred for “academic reasons.” Leslie Nienhuis believed it was because Hope College did not have what she wanted but was a good place to go for a couple of years. David L. Wright, who would become her boyfriend at Michigan, believes it was for the richer course selection and the much larger campus and student population. “For a better education,” he said.
In February 1967, the Anchor ran a story examining the reasons that students gave for transferring from Hope to other schools. The number-one reason cited was the Hope academic program, notably the limited course selection and too many required courses. Second was the “all-encompassing regulations,” i.e., the nannylike regulation of women students, on and off campus. Third was the quality of the campus social life. Students who were surveyed commented that if one was in a relationship, social life at Hope could be fine. If you weren’t, it was a bore, and Holland had little to offer. All of these applied to Betsy Aardsma to some extent. She was eager to leave.
And there were personal reasons as well. Dick Aardsma, her father, who was a serious alcoholic, separated from his family in 1967 and moved to Douglas, the small town across the river from Saugatuck. He was fifty-one years old. The reason may have been his alcoholism, or that may only have pointed to something else. The full story remains a deeply guarded family secret. In the fall of the year, he wrote out and signed a will at the office of a family law attorney in Plainwell, Michigan, in which he stated that he lived in Douglas and was leaving all of his estate to his wife, Esther; if she was dead, his estate was to be divided equally among the four children. He named Betsy the executrix of his estate, passing over Carole, the eldest child. If Betsy was dead (a routine provision in a will), the executrix would be his lawyer, not another family member.19
The summer of 1967 was the Summer of Love in San Francisco, a flowering of psychedelic rock music and hippie life, but in Holland it began as just another West Michigan scorcher, hot and humid and, for Betsy, filled with longing for Ann Arbor. She worked at least two jobs to raise money for school. One was at the Wooden Shoe Factory, an old-line Holland tourist attraction that actually did carve wooden shoes to sell to tourists and the Dutch Dancers at local high schools. One of Betsy’s jobs was to run out and slap Wooden Shoe Factory bumper stickers on cars in the parking lot. Her other job, later in the summer, was at the H. J. Heinz pickle factory, where her grandfather, John Van Alsburg, had been a foreman on the ketchup line in the early years of the twentieth century, before becoming a coal dealer. Heinz only made pickles and pickle relish at the Holland plant by this time.20
It was miserable work, made tolerable only by its short-term nature. Green season, when the regional cucumber harvest was in progress, began in late summer and lasted three to four weeks. Truckload after truckload of “cukes” arrived daily at the plant. They soaked in huge wooden vats of brine before being turned into dill pickles, gherkins, and other condiments. Heinz hired large numbers of temporary workers during green season, often young people eager to earn some summer cash. A typical job was to stand on the line for a ten-hour shift (there were short breaks) and shove pickles in jars as they passed on the conveyor belt. You could never escape the smell, which was overpowering. When the shift ended, every piece of clothing you wore smelled like pickles.21
One wonders why Betsy felt the urgent need to earn money, since she was moving to a state school, albeit a great one, that cost considerably less than Hope College. Total tuition, room, and board for an in-state undergraduate at the University of Michigan was $1,400 in the 1967–68 school year, while at Hope it would have been $2,100. Were her parents unhappy about her change of schools? Did they refuse to pay, or pay as much? Or was this tied to the Aardsma family turmoil and worries that her father might lose his job? Perhaps she was simply being a good daughter and helping out with the cost. Whatever the reason, Betsy transferred to the University of Michigan and was accepted into the honors program. She made plans to move to Ann Arbor and began picking out her courses from the plethora of choices.
It was a strange summer in many ways, and Betsy was probably glad when it came to an end. What normally made the hot and humid Holland summer bearable—few people then had home air-conditioning—was the beautiful Lake Michigan beaches. She and her friends could be at Oval Beach, Laketown Beach, Ottawa Beach, or Tunnel Park in a half-hour or less, and often were—but not this year. On June 15, 1967, a scientist from the US Water Pollution Control Administration was flying over the lake looking for pollution sources when he spotted an endless white carpet of dead fish, all belly-up. The carpet was about fifty feet wide and stretched nearly forty miles, between South Haven and Muskegon. Holland was in the middle. The dead fish were alewives, a silvery member of the herring family, and the wind was blowing them toward shore. Within days, beaches up and down the Michigan coast were fouled by billions of dead alewives. Many also drifted through the channel at Ottawa Beach into Lake Macatawa. The stench was unbearable, extending a mile or more inland. Then the wind shifted and the dead alewives began piling up on Chicago beaches. It was like a biblical plague, and all that could be done was to bulldoze them into trenches.22
The fish were not the only catastrophe in Michigan that summer. In late July, a raid by Detroit police on a speakeasy where a welcome-home party was under way for two black Vietnam veterans triggered a week of rioting that engulfed the state’s largest city, and ultimately led to forty-three deaths and untold looting and property damage. It was one of the worst urban upheavals in American history. Governor George Romney, father of Mitt, sent thousands of troops from the Michigan National Guard, including Company B from Holland, to help the Detroit police. Company B was “assigned to a completely burned-out riot area to protect firemen from sniper fire and to guard against looting,” the Holland Evening Sentinel reported. The paper’s first major headline on the rioting, negroes on rampage in detroit, was spread across the top of page one on July 24. The gulf between white and black residents of Michigan was wide and unyielding. President Lyndon B. Johnson, at Romney’s request, also sent units from the 82nd Airborne Division—federal troops—to back up the National Guard. The show of force ended the riots by July 2
8. It was little wonder that young Americans like Betsy Aardsma were “looking uneasily” to the world they stood to inherit.23
Chapter 16
A Desirable Young Woman
Betsy Aardsma was not the only member of her extended family to enroll at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1967. Her second cousin, Chris Van Allsburg, the future author and illustrator of such popular works of childhood fantasy as Jumanji (1982) and The Polar Express (1985), both Caldecott Medal winners for their illustrations, started there as a freshman, majoring in art. Neither knew the other very well. The son of a Grand Rapids dairy owner, Van Allsburg (his branch of the family spelled it with two Ls) said the two families were not close, even though the ties are mentioned in the 1953 obituary of John D. Van Alsburg, Betsy’s maternal grandfather, and in the Van Allsburg Family genealogy on file in the Herrick District Library in Holland. Some families just drift apart, and this apparently was one of them.1
Arriving at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1967, Betsy would have realized almost immediately that she wasn’t in provincial Michigan anymore. This was a big school, with nearly forty-five thousand students. The Doors played the homecoming dance on October 20, renowned in the band’s history as a spectacularly bad performance by a very drunk Jim Morrison. Many of the five thousand students in the Intramural Sports Building left in disgust. One student, though, was enthralled by Morrison’s stumbling, incoherent performance. Jim Osterberg, later Iggy Pop of the Stooges, credited the birth of his punk rock persona to that show. He, like Morrison, would end up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was all part of the craziness of University of Michigan homecoming, which in those years could feature go-go girls, elephant races with real elephants, and a big, loud parade through the streets of Ann Arbor. There was something for everybody. Those who didn’t like the electric rock of The Doors could have heard folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie perform that weekend in an Ann Arbor coffeehouse.2