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Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Johnson Center Philanthropy Archives
Johnson Center for Philanthropy
Grand Valley State University
Oral History Interview with Kathryn A. Agard, Ed.D., April 6, 2010
The Council of Michigan Foundations, Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley
State University (GVSU), and GVSU Libraries’ Special Collections & University
Archives Present:
An oral history interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010. Conducted by Dr. James
Smither of the History Department at GVSU. Recorded at the Johnson Center for
Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This
interview is part of a series in the Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
documenting the history of philanthropy in Michigan.
Preferred citation: Researchers wishing to cite this collection should use the following
credit line: Oral history interview with Kathryn A. Agard, April 6, 2010. "Michigan
Philanthropy Oral History Project", Johnson Center Philanthropy Archives of the Special
Collection & University Archives, Grand Valley State University Libraries.
James Smither (JS): Today’s conversation is with Kathy Agard who is Executive
Director of the Dorothy Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at
Grand Valley State University. This oral history interview is being conducted for the
Johnson Center as part of an ongoing series and the interviewer is James Smither of the
History Department at Grand Valley State University.
Alright, Kathy, can you start by giving us just a little bit of background on yourself? To
begin with, where and when were you born?
00:00:25
Kathy Agard (KA): Sure, I was born, do I have to tell the date [laughter], in 1949 in
Muskegon, Michigan. And my parents are there. We have lived there their whole lives.
JS: Alright. And what did your family do for a living?
KA: My dad worked in the shop. He worked at Camel White and Cannon as a tool filer
and fitter. He had been a farm boy and had won a chicken scholarship, judging
scholarship, to Michigan State University but he was from a big family of thirteen and
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1
�after his freshman year they didn’t have money for him to be able to finish school, so he
came back home, went to work, helped the other kids go through school and then stayed
there the rest of his life.
JS: Alright, and how many kids were in your family?
00:01:07
KA: Well in my family, there’s only two. I have an older brother and myself and then in
his family there were thirteen and in my mother’s family there were seven. So they both
came from big families.
JS: But they downsized a little. And what kind of schooling did you have?
KA: I went to, I was in the third graduating class from Mona Shores High School, which
was a brand-new suburban high school that had just been built and it was the typical
suburban high school I would say. We had a lot of advantages. One of the things that was
fun about being in the third class was that there were lots of opportunities because
everything was brand new. So we were setting the theme song, we were setting all of the
colors, we were setting the mascot, we had all of that fun of setting up a brand new high
school.
JS: And when you were going through high school, was it your expectation that you were
going to go on to college?
00:01:57
KA: Oh absolutely. Because of my dad’s experience, I never was, and I’m sure this story
is very common, was one of those kids who never had the choice whether to go or not. It
was where I was going to go or not. And then I had an unusual high school experience
that probably helped to shape some of my own background, in that Mona Shores had a
very unusual high school debate team. So I started debating when I was in the ninth grade
and there were seventy-five kids on our debate team. And I debated all during high
school ending up on a national championship team as a senior. And because of that, was
able to get a scholarship to go to the college of my choice. My parents were really high
on me going to community college for two years because of the money. So once I could
prove that I could pay to go somewhere else, I was able to do that, which was nice.
JS: And where did you want to go?
00:02:47
KA: I went to Albion College which is a small liberal arts Methodist college just down
the road from Grand Rapids in Albion, Michigan. And I went there because it had
beautiful gas lamps and because they gave me the money to be able to debate and had a
national championship team at the time.
JS: Alright and then what did you study while you were there?
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
2
�KA: I started out, I was going to be a high school debate coach because that’s what I
knew. And about halfway through my schooling, about as a junior, I took my first
political science course and I fell in love with political science. My dad had been very
active politically on the local level. Part of the advantage of working at the shop was he
was done at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and then he would start his real life. And so he was
a volunteer fireman and my mother was the person who called the volunteer firemen
before 9-1-1 existed and my brother was a volunteer fireman and my dad had been a
founder of the city of Norton Shores, had been involved in a lot of political campaigns
and so I ended up really falling in love with American political theory, had a great
professor, took every course I possibly could get from him and my original intention was
then to teach political science at, which would be civics at the high school level, and
coach debate. And then when I graduated I found out that the combination in high school
that you have to have as a teacher is English and debate not the civics and debate, so I
never was able to find a high school teaching job.
JS: At that point, was there not yet an expectation; you went through teacher certification
process and extra certification or things like that?
00:04:25
KA: I went through…I was certified to teach at high school but I think I probably got
frankly bad counseling. And because I had such a passion for political science, or I
wasn’t listening, you know, I stayed on that track rather than picking up the English
major.
JS: So you were technically qualified to teach. The catch was that you didn’t have the
right combination of fields to do what they wanted to hire. Now, what year did you finish
college?
KA: It would have been ’71.
JS: Okay, well things are getting kind of interesting in the American political scene by
then too. Antiwar protests going on, and a lot of other things going on at the same time. I
mean did you get caught up in that yourself?
00:05:04
KA: Some. I considered it a very hard time to have been in college partly because I didn’t
want to be involved politically. I wanted to learn. I thought, you know, I was so set to go
to college and I had this vision of it being a place that would be safe and that I could go
deep into a topic. I actually probably had an unusual experience. I suppose everyone in
the sixties had an unusual experience, in that I wanted it to go away because I wanted to
study and I was a serious student. Of course the University of Michigan was just down
the road and a lot of that would fall over onto Albion or we would go back when there
were protests. And there was a lot of protesting on campus. My graduation was very
politicized. We had no senior year book because no one wanted to do it at the time.
Everyone was too involved in things. And I suppose from that point of history the most
memorable time for me was that one of my jobs, I had several on campus, was to be the
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
3
�telephone operator in our dorm which was a co-ed dorm, and the day of the first lottery I
was working the telephone and watching the guys come up from the basement and tear
up, and I actually tear up even thinking about it now, tearing up their all of their
acceptances to medical school and to law school and to graduate school and having their
moms call in tears saying, you know, “I’m really sorry you were born on this day because
you were number one or number two for the draft.” I’ll never forget it. Those experiences
go deep, I guess.
JS: The draft itself is something that is now an unfamiliar experience to anyone not at
least in their 40s, to have much clue of even what that was about.
00:06:44
KA: Yeah, that someone could come and say you have to go and that was the time.
JS: And so of course, college students, in a lot of cases had deferments, or at least that
was the principal. But…
KA: These were the seniors.
JS: So they were graduating. So they were, Uncle Sam could now catch up with them at
that point. So you finished college. How long did you spend trying to find a teaching job?
KA: Really my whole senior year, so just about a year. Then, I actually had fallen in love,
which does, a woman’s job description ought to have a parallel line that says, you know,
“fell in love, got married, husband decided to move, had a kid, had a child, had the next
child, decided to move somewhere else…” because there’s this parallel structure going
on in life. My husband was in the Air Force. He had been called up for the draft, had
gone in for medical deferment, found out that his medical condition could in fact be fixed
which was a big surprise the day before he was on his way to Detroit. So he ran and
signed up right away for the Air Force and was a translator. He spent two years in
Monterey, California in the language school and then a couple of years in Turkey as a
Russian translator in the security service. So the timing was such that when I graduated,
he was on the, just getting done with his tour and so we were planning on getting
married. My first job really was hanging out at Albion as an admissions counselor and
basically, I was hanging out to get married. It was an interesting job. I didn’t know what
else I was going to do. I couldn’t find a teaching job and so this seemed like a fun thing
to do. I went and talked to high school students about going to college.
JS: Alright so you do that for a year and then what?
00:08:31
KA: Well, we decided, he decided to use his G.I. Bill to go back to school. So he went to
Hope College. We were married. We were there for his last two years and again I was
basically just looking for a job and I was hired that summer as a social worker for a
woman who had just had a pregnancy leave. I, of course, knew nothing about social work
but I was hired as a social work replacement for the regional center for people with
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
4
�disabilities, to help to, this is when Michigan was de-institutionalizing a lot of people and
so my job was to make the connection from the institution back to the home community
when mental health agencies were first being set up, and to begin to look at what kind of
supports could be given to populations as they were returning home. So I did that for the
summer and then when my husband went to Hope, as it turned out Ottawa County’s
Mental Health was just getting organized and they hired me because I had a relationship
with the institution that was sending people to their community. So while I was there, I
developed their Life Consultation Center which is meant to be a lifelong support system
for families when there’s a child with disabilities. I worked with the hospitals setting up
those connections. I did a lot of getting volunteers involved in mentoring and support for
families, and working with older families who never expected that their loved one would
be coming home again. If you can imagine at the age of seventy, when you’ve put a child
in an institution at birth to suddenly have that child be coming home to live with you was
really quite traumatic for families and so we were doing a lot of support for them
JS: What kind of instruction or guidance or direction did you get while you were doing
this?
00:10:23
KA: [laughter] None. It’s my favorite kind of a job actually, which is make it up as you
go along. I think I was well served by Albion in terms of having a general education so I
knew how to learn and I knew how to teach myself. And so I would just go talk to people
and I would go read things. I would go to conferences and basically just picked it up as I
went along.
JS: So maybe, even that initial counseling experience, or just going and talking to people
and meeting people you don’t know, sort of ties in with that.
KA: It does. Yeah, I think it does. I would say most of my life, and this is probably, I feel
fairly fearless about those kinds of things. That given some time I can figure it out, and so
it wasn’t scary. It was just a matter of trying to get in there and figure it out and do the
best I could with it.
JS: Do you think that if you were today starting out with that kind of thing, in the world,
society and government and things the way they are, could you do the same thing as
easily? Could you just walk in and create programs?
00:11:26
KA: Well, probably not because the regulatory environment is much - right then was one
of those moments in history where no one knew what should happen, and the surface
reasons for deinstitutionalizing people were about great values: about that it’s better to be
treated closer to home, it’s better to mainstream people with disabilities so that they have
a more normal life circumstance. The reality was that the real reasons were dollars, and
promises were made that money would follow the patients and that never happened. And
so, at that point, it was a bit of a mess in terms of nobody really knew how to make it
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
5
�happen. So there’s an opportunity in that then to create what you think ought to happen. I
had that chance to do that.
JS: Alright. Now, how long did you stay with that work?
00:12:17
KA: I was there two years, the same two years my husband was in school and then we
had our first child, my son, and moved back to Muskegon. And I was then, worked for
Muskegon Community Mental Health, doing the same job now for Muskegon County. So
I worked for mental health there for about two years and then had my daughter, had a
second child. And then we were trying to figure out what to do with our lives, and my
husband said “Well, why don’t I go back, since I have this great Russian language
background, why don’t I go back and get a Ph.D. in Russian language and be a business
translator?” So this sounded like a good plan. So we sold the house, packed up the kids
and went to the University of Michigan, lived in married housing. My son started
kindergarten there and again I was looking for a job. Oh, I missed a step. I missed a step.
I’ll go back.
JS: That’s alright.
00:13:07
KA: When we were in Muskegon, for about three years, I had worked as the, I was home
with the kids a little while, about 2 years, and while I was home, I decided to go back and
get a Master’s degree because I was not happy being home just with the kids. So I went
back at night and got a Master’s degree in Public Administration because it was the
closest thing to what I thought I was interested in which is this community organizing,
world changing, you know, point of view. And so I went back to get the Master’s degree
and while I was home one of my friends called and said well there’s an opening as the
Director of Planned Parenthood in Muskegon so I took a job as a half time director of the
Planned Parenthood affiliate there and then finished up my Master’s degree and then we
decided that we would move. So when we moved to Ann Arbor, they had an opening in
the regional office of Planned Parenthood Federation of America doing multi-state
technical assistance for the nonprofit organizations. So I had a great background in terms
of professional development. They did a good job with things like risk management, and
human resource development, and board development and all of the things it takes to run
a nonprofit. And then I was in a training position at that point, and I think that’s when I
really became fascinated with how nonprofit organizations operate, and became very
interested in the organizational theory underneath them.
JS: Let’s plug in a couple more pieces here. Where did you get your Master’s degree
from?
KA: Oh, Western Michigan University because it was the closest campus available at the
time.
JS: And did you have to commute down to Kalamazoo to take the courses?
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
6
�KA: About half and half. I had half here and I had half at Western that I would commute
down. I was one of those people who left work at 5 o’clock got to school at 7 o’clock,
tried to stay awake until 9:30 and then drove home and got home at 11:30.
00:15:04
JS: Alright, and Planned Parenthood, at that point in time, we’re kind of getting at early
to mid 70s here?
KA: Yes.
JS: Was their principal activity largely promoting knowledge and education of birth
control or were they involved in abortion issues at that point?
KA: I was right at the transition. It was primarily related to birth control and my real
interest going in was around zero population growth. I was very concerned about, having
read the books about, you know, what I would say are environmentalists by ilk and we
were very concerned about how many children can this world actually support. And so I
went in it from that point of view and about half way through, I ended up spending about
ten years in Planned Parenthood, about halfway through was when Faye Wattleton came
in as president, and there was much more of an emphasis on abortion rights. But of
course the abortion, the Roe v. Wade happened in ’72 so it was a year after I graduated
from college, and really, it was sort of amid the midstream, that the idea of protecting
abortion rights actually started to take hold. So I was in Planned Parenthood as a Director
in Philadelphia, moving forward a little bit, during the Reagan years and we literally had
a GAO auditor who had an office right next to mine who would sit and watch all of our
books and everything that we did. We got to know him so well we would like hold
birthday parties for his kids [laughter] because he was there all the time. We decided it
would be better to include him than not to include him.
00:16:35
JS: Alright, so let’s kind of follow your itinerary a little bit. You’ve gone out; you’ve
been at the University of Michigan. How long were you in Ann Arbor?
KA: We were in Ann Arbor about a year and a half. My husband, as he went through it,
he was expecting to learn to be a translator, to deepen is knowledge in terms of
translation. The University of Michigan teaches the history of Russian in English and so
it was not the program that he thought he was going to get. And so he said to me “You
know, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Why don’t you go ahead and do what you
want to do and I’ll figure it out.” And so we, I then went as the Associate Director of
Planned Parenthood in Philadelphia which is a multi-county… there were fourteen birth
control clinics for example. It was a big organization. And then he came along and he
stayed home and then took some photography classes, and tried to figure out what he
wanted to do with his life. So he was the stay at home dad and I was the working mom at
a time when that was not, it was new. It was the leading edge I would say of that kind of
lifestyle.
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
7
�JS: Alright, then how long did you spend in Philadelphia?
00:17:44
KA: I think it was about four years and I really became tired a) of always being on the
front lines because it was a top-ten media market. Always being on the top, the front lines
on the abortion issue because it’s not my favorite issue to be advocating. And we also
decided that we wanted our children to be raised in the Midwest. There’s a different style
from the East coast than the Midwest, and we wanted our kids to be around their
grandparents and their cousins. And so we actually made one of those choices where we
stood in the kitchen one day and said let’s go home, and sold the house, no jobs, came
back, just shipped the kids and everybody came back home. So I was literally looking for
a job. And a hospital there, a local hospital, had had a number of years where they had
had fairly bad publicity, and because I had had so much PR experience in Philadelphia,
they hired me on as a public relations director. Again, I knew nothing about public
relations. I remember bringing in the, one of our guys who was working on our
brochures. One afternoon I said, “Okay, now I need to know everything you can tell me
about print media and I have about an hour and a half.” [laughter] And, you know, only
later did I realize what an outrageous question that was. But you know I did the job as
public relations and then I was promoted there to be vice president of planning, so I did
their planning and their marketing and handled the volunteers, and was their lobbyist for
about six years at Hackley Hospital in Muskegon. And while I was there, they had this
great benefit that they paid for higher education. So I was going to go back and get a
second Masters in health administration when my advisor at Western said why don’t you
get the Doctorate in public administration that we have. So I started in the D.P.A.
program, and that was held in Lansing and I did that for two years and decided I didn’t
like it because it was mainly about state government. And at this point in my life, I knew
what I wanted to learn, and I didn’t know where I could get it. I wanted a place like the
Johnson Center and it didn’t exist. So I went back and I took six months off and then I
went into the Ed school at Western because it had the most electives of any of the
doctoral programs. And I was able to, I sat through the higher-ed finance courses that you
have to, but then I was able to pick and choose from the university what courses I wanted
to take. I really knew what I wanted to learn so I was able to piece together really my
own doctorate.
00:20:16
JS: So you were kind of in a program geared towards people who were superintendents
and things like that, and to what degree did you sort of fit in or not with the people who
were in your classes?
KA: Not at all. In fact my dissertation took me about ten years. And the reason was that I
was educating my committee all the time because they were not in that discipline, in fact
no one was in that discipline. And I was trying to say to them, you know there is this
whole field called nonprofit, and so I had two educators and a political scientist on my
committee that I’m not sure, I think the only reason that I actually got my dissertation
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
8
�was that my chairman wanted to retire, and he finally one day said to me “We need to
wrap this up.” And I thought this sounds like a good thing. Let’s wrap this up.
JS: What kind of schedule did you have while you were doing that because you’re having
to juggle dissertation, work and everything else?
00:21:04
KA: Yes, It was a lot. I mean not only was I working full time at the hospital but then two
days a week I was driving to Lansing for classes during the early part of this, and then
when I left the hospital, I had finished my coursework at Western, and was ready to start
my dissertation work, and I decided that I was tired of hospital work. And I actually had
an interview here to come in as a faculty member in the Communications school. In the
morning I had that interview and I met with the Dean at noon, and then at 1 o’clock I met
with this woman named Dorothy Johnson. And I asked Dottie, I talked to Dottie. One of
my friends said that before you take the job at Grand Valley you have to talk to Dottie
cause she has a job that should be interesting. So I met Dottie and she said to me, why
don’t, I have this job its doing organizational development work for community
foundations. I didn’t know what a community foundation was, but she said, “And it will
only be three years. You’ll learn about foundations which will be interesting and then you
can go teach at Grand Valley.” So I said okay, I’ll do that. And that was a twenty year
span that I spent at the Council of Michigan Foundations. So while I left the hospital I
went to the Council of Michigan Foundations and then while I was there was when I did
my dissertation work.
JS: Alright. Explain a little bit, what is the Council of Michigan Foundations.
00:22:25
KA: Yes, the Council of Michigan Foundations is a membership association of the
foundations in the state of Michigan that make grants. So you might, for example, have a
school foundation that raises money for a school, they would not be members of the
Council of Michigan Foundations. So it’s Kellogg, Kresge, Mott, all of the community
foundations, corporate grant makers like Steelcase, and what they have in common is
their role as grant makers. And it was founded in ’69 following the ’69 Tax Act. Because,
at that point, Congress had put a lot of restrictions on foundations, and the foundations
came together to act politically to begin to roll back some of those restrictions that had
been placed on them.
JS: What kinds of restrictions had been placed on them?
00:23:09
KA: Well, it was interesting. Partly it goes back further to the 60s, in that the Ford
Foundation had been using its money to register voters in the south, and the Congress did
not like the fact that all of these black folks who hadn’t ever been able to vote, suddenly
were able to vote, knew where to vote, knew that they had the right to vote. And so
Congress got upset with Ford about that. And then they also got upset with Ford because
they had put majority ownership of the company into the foundation so that it couldn’t be
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
9
�touched by anybody else coming in wanting to buy the foundation, I’m sorry, buy the
company. So they called in Ford and the Ford president, at the time, said to them, “Who
are you? You have no right to control us. We were here before you were. The nonprofit
sector existed before government did in this country.” And we both argue over the
Mayflower Compact, whether it was government [laughter], whether it was a nonprofit
association and Congress said, here’s who we are. So they put a whole bunch of
restrictions. One of the restrictions was, for example, they required a payout that if you’re
having a private foundation that gets tax advantage, you have to give some of the money
away. You just can’t sit on it. They put restrictions on the amount of money that can be
spent on your own overhead or on travel, on what they call self-dealing, so you can’t hire
your own children at exorbitant salaries. And there were, in fact, abuses at the time. So
the regulations weren’t unwarranted, and the field, the mature part of the field like the
Council of Michigan Foundations, when they responded, basically said some of this we
like, some of it we think went too far. Let’s roll back what we think went too far. And
some of that was taxation that they thought would erode the value of the asset over time.
And so what they did instead was they rolled back some of the requirement for payout
and then they gave, private foundations gave some of the money to the IRS to help
support regulating the industry. So the Council of Michigan Foundations started out very
small and ended up, and still is the largest association of its kind in the country, and is a
national leader.
JS: Alright, and now what range of things did you do for them?
00:25:30
KA: I had a little project that was going to be three years and it was funded by the
Kellogg Foundation, and it was to encourage the foundations to engage young people
under the age of 21 as grant makers. This was really the beginning of youth
empowerment and the healthy youth, where instead of always looking at young people as
problems or always looking for distress in young people, the Kellogg Foundation’s
philosophy was, you know, young people are very strong, very healthy, very smart. Let’s
use that energy now. Let’s not wait for them as potential leaders. Let’s use it currently.
And so the community foundations, and at the time there were about thirteen of them in
Michigan, got together through the Council of Michigan Foundations and asked the
Kellogg Foundation for a grant to build youth advisory committees, and also to help them
build their assets. At the same time, there was new research coming out of Boston
College, that talked about the largest inter-generational transfer of wealth in the history of
mankind which is the fact of course that the United States had the only major industrial
economy in the world post WWII for lots of years. So there’s a generation that had a
tremendous amount of wealth, and still is in the process of transferring that over to their
children who are now in their fifties and sixties. I mean the children are getting up there.
But that, there was a lot of conversation in the field about, Muskegon is a good example,
about how at one point in time, Muskegon had more millionaires than anywhere else in
the country, post the cutting of all the white pine, and that money totally dissipated. And
it would, we think how could we go from being one of the most wealthy places in the
world, to having almost nothing in a couple three generations. So the community
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
10
�foundations were talking how do we capture some portion of this intergenerational
transfer of wealth, and keep it working in our communities forever?
So Kellogg gave this grant. We tested this theory that young people would be good grant
makers, and what we found out was that they were fabulous grant makers, and we went
back to Kellogg and said we think we now have a model. What if we do this in a big
way? And the proposal that we gave to Kellogg was they should invest sixty million
dollars over five years as challenges to Michigan’s communities, and we promised that
we would cover the state of Michigan with community foundation service, and that every
community foundation would have a youth advisory committee that would have real
power over money, not just advisory power, and that they, we would bring each
organization up to a minimum level of organizational viability. So for the next six years
that was my job. I would drive into little towns in Michigan and I would say, have you
ever heard of a community foundation? Let me tell you about it. I have a million dollars
in Kellogg challenge for you if you can raise two million dollars, and one of your
commitments has to be that forever there will be an advisory committee of young people.
And Kellogg’s million dollars would go into that fund that the young people would
advise on the giving, so that young people would be giving away fifty or sixty thousand
dollars a year of interest earnings on that endowment, and then the money that was raised
locally, the two million to match it would be unrestricted or very broadly restricted, so
the community could make decisions about urgent needs.
00:29:02
JS: Now, when you’re saying young people, what age range are we talking about?
KA: Under the age of twenty-one. Most of them were high-schoolers, and most of the
community foundations made the decision to try to build community capital in that
generation by having young people from various schools. And we used to have a phrase
that would say leave your letter jacket at the door because when you come into the room
you need to be looking at the whole community not just your own high school, and would
engage young people then from every high school in the community. And then Kellogg
really encouraged us, and smartly so, to encourage young people and bring them in, draw
in young people who were not the normal kids that you might put on that kind of
committee, particularly if you were concerned about handing them fifty thousand dollars
a year. So we would go after the kids who might be leaders but are leading in the wrong
way...kids smashing mailboxes. You know, they haven’t murdered anybody but they
were headed the wrong direction. And we have fabulous stories of young people that this
experience helped to turn around, because it was the first time adults had ever given them
real authority and real responsibility to make decisions. And what we found was that the
youth committees were incredibly honest outside of the normal politics of the
community. So they didn’t care who you were that was asking for money and then they
would ask hard questions. Can’t you get this copying done somewhere else? Why are you
spending $5.50 on postage when you could hand deliver it cheaper? Really, I have great
stories of one sheriff that, the Grand Haven Community Foundation is right next door to
the Council of Michigan Foundations, so one day we were coming in, all of us, and the
local sheriff was standing in the hallway, shuffling papers and looking nervous and we
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
11
�said well, we know, hi. How are you? What are you doing? I have this proposal to make
to the youth committee and I’m really afraid they’re not going to fund it. They’re going
to ask me hard questions. And they did. I mean, they were really terrific. And that still is
going on. That is a forever commitment on the part of the Community Foundations.
00:31:15
JS: Is that something you find across Michigan in a lot of different communities?
KA: Oh yes. We met our goals. Every community is now covered by a community
foundation. Almost all of them have a youth advisory committee, and almost all of them
are doing well. They have had a professional staff. They’ve begun to grow and they’ve
begun to capture some of this inter-generational transfer of wealth.
JS: And the youth committees themselves. Are they still kind of made up of the same
kind of people or have they gotten more conventional over time?
KA: Well, you know, I don’t know. I haven’t watched them lately. But my guess is that
those who, not every committee ended up doing unconventional kids, but those who did
have stayed that way. One of them, for example, held their meeting at Juvenile Justice
Hall up at Traverse City because the chair of the committee had been picked up for grand
theft auto. [laughter] So a really nice car that he thought he’d like to take for a spin and
ended up having his committee there. But many of them, of the kids have ended up, who
would not have normally gone on to school, or even those who had other career paths,
have changed their career path because of this experience of being able to give away
money.
JS: Alright. So that’s kind of the first thing that you go and develop for the Michigan
Foundations and what does that grow into or lead in to?
00:32:34
KA: Well, it led a lot of, it led into a lot of different things and one of them that it led into
was that, we became–we do a summer camp for the young people because we were,
actually we weren’t, but a lot of the community foundation board members, who as you
can imagine are the bankers and the lawyers and the more conservative people in the
community, were concerned about turning a million dollars over to a group of seventeen
year olds. And so we would have a summer camp every summer for the young people
and begin to talk with them about grantmaking, about evaluating budgets, you know,
what kind of questions to ask. And at this summer camp what we began to realize is that
they didn’t have the background or the depth of background, they didn’t have a language,
they didn’t have a way to think about the nonprofit sector.
And on a parallel course to this project was the development of the IU Center on
Philanthropy at Indiana University which was really the first big academic center that
began to consciously build a field of study. So they had a historian looking at the history
of philanthropy, they have an economist looking at the economics; they have a
geographer looking at the spread. I mean they really took all of the major academic
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
12
�disciplines and said, okay let’s put our focus and really begin to build a field of
knowledge. So that was happening at the same time, and as we were working with the
young people we thought we ought to be teaching them all of this great material that’s
being created, and the Johnson Center started, sort of, in the middle of all of this. And so
we looked at whether we could infuse into the curriculum of the K-12 school, the
teaching of philanthropic principals. That was my next project for the Council of
Michigan Foundations.
I had gotten tired of doing workshops and seminars on Saturdays and evenings which was
when the Community Foundation boards are available, and so really my passion has been
around these ideas, so we created this project called Learning to Give. And it was taking
the content, the graduate level at this point, content on philanthropy and looking at where
the connections were kindergarten through 12th grade, and knowing that the teachers have
way too much to teach K-12 than they possibly have time to do. That we couldn’t add
another course called Philanthropy, and actually we thought that probably wasn’t the
smartest way to do it because philanthropy is woven throughout our culture. So we took a
look at everything that’s taught and said, how can we begin to infuse philanthropic
messages? And so we started with the social studies because they are our most natural
home. So we started with history and geography and civics and began to look at every
place that’s taught. And we would, again I went to teachers and said I don’t know
anything about your lives in the classroom. You’re the experts on that but we have this
content. We think it’s really important because our thesis, at the time, was that having
knowledge about the sector, also would have an impact on student behavior, because
people would begin to think of themselves as philanthropists, students would. We had a
group of thirty-five teachers from various ages and various kinds of schools who helped
to shape the curriculum and we built a whole standards and benchmarks and learning
outcomes for philanthropy K-12. And then off of that we built a set of classroom lessons,
lesson plans, and because of Kellogg’s support they were always, they are currently still
all available for free to teachers on the website and they’ve all been recently coded to
every set of state standards. So a teacher, a third grade teacher, I want to teach about the
Underground Railroad, I can go online and find a lesson plan that talks about the
Underground Railroad because it’s required by my state, and on the M.E.A.P. test, but
this lesson plan talks about the fact that they were all volunteers, and who were the
abolitionists and how did they organize themselves, and why do they think they have a
right to confront government, and who were the Underground Railroad conductors, and
what was this role as volunteers that they held? So we tried to take this theory of
philanthropy in every single thing that was taught. The next big area we picked up was
English, because there’s a lot of philanthropy in the normal books that are taught in all
the way through the K-12 curriculum. And then we did a high school level text book that
has been out there. I don’t know how many copies they’ve sold but it’s available and
available online and that project is still continuing.
00:37:26
JS: Now, a text book in philanthropy or is it an English textbook that has philanthropy in
it?
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
13
�KA: It’s a textbook in philanthropy, but the chapters are in civics. So it’s philanthropy in
history—American history, philanthropy in U.S.—in world history, philanthropy in
government, philanthropy in world government, world governments, politically plural,
philanthropy in geography, and so we went—I think it’s a seven chapter book. It was
about the discipline that is required to be taught in high school, but it’s from the
philanthropic slant.
JS: You’re combining the different disciplines in the one volume?
KA: Yes. It’s one volume.
JS: Is that designed actually for student use or for teachers?
KA: We did both a student volume and then we did a teacher volume. And of course at
high school it’s a little difficult because the teachers are in their own slot; you know they
don’t teach across the disciplines. But it was cheaper to do them as one volume for each,
so there’s a teacher guide and a student textbook.
JS: Was there any way to measure the extent to which anybody is using it?
00:38:33
KA: Only on the sales and I don’t think it has sold very well. Most people are going to
the website and downloading lesson plans, and they were downloadable so that, every
classroom, they always want to make them their own, so you can download the lesson
plan into a word document and then actually manipulate it and add your own content.
JS: Are the lesson plans set up to be geared towards specific topics that are in these
different fields? You mentioned the Underground Railroad for example. You’re trying to
look for material on the Underground Railroad that you can go use in your class. You can
find this and in its design to work for them that it has the philanthropic part of it
emphasized or woven into it.
KA: There’s a search engine and you can search by academic strand or requirement. So
like the Underground Railroad, that’s how you would search, or you can search by
philanthropic topic, or you can search by grade level, or you can search by keyword. So it
has a lot of ways to be able to get at the material.
JS: Have you got then additional programs or initiatives, or kind of what after you’ve
developed this, what then did you kind of get into?
00:39:41
KA: I was there ten years. That was a long haul for me. That was ten years. And we were
ready to take it to, we were beta testing it in Michigan, with the idea that it would be a
national model, and we were looking for ways to make it national. And there are all kinds
of issues, as you can imagine, between being able to do something in depth in one state,
versus trying to go broad in multiple states, especially in K-12 education because it’s
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
14
�state by state. I had a very wonderful group of advisors, Michigan advisors. And I bet we
looked for two years about how to take it national, when a young guy came in who has
done these kinds of projects before, and he was very interested in service learning, which
would be a teaching methodology for all of this content. And he had asked if we couldn’t
partner in it. As we talked more and more with them, we decided that we would merge
Learning to Give with this project called The League. And that we would be the academic
content, and then he would have a sort of jazzy marketing. And it allows, what happens is
there’s a calendar during the year in The League, that starts with a fall cleanup and then
young people earn so many points for doing these kinds of acts of kindness and
philanthropy. And so they would learn about it in their classroom and then they would go
out and do the service learning and get points for it and then they would be set up in
leagues and there would be league play and national reporting on it. And I think maybe
this spring will be the first time in Parade Magazine they’re going to start to talk about
how The League is doing in different parts of the country. So it’s gone to that level. So
we were ready to, we merged with them; we were ready for it to go national. The
organizational role was that I would become the chief operating officer and Bill would be
the CEO and then I decided that I a) didn’t want to be a chief operating officer. That’s not
really my good skills. And that I was at a point in my life where I didn’t want to do a
national launch because it would mean not only working hard but traveling a lot
nationally. And this job was open at the Johnson Center, so every time it has been open I
would lay it face down on my desk and I would look at it and think, ooh, that’s a really
nice job. I really like that job. And this is the first time that it’s happened to be open at a
time when I could leave a project and it’s just a place where I wanted to be so I was
fortunate enough to come here.
JS: And then when was that exactly when you started?
00:42:10
KA: Four years ago in April. So I’ve just been here four years
JS: Alright. Now tell us a little bit just about the Johnson Center itself for people outside
of here. What is it designed to do? What is its function? What kind of function does it
have?
KA: Yes. We’re one of forty-four, what are called academic centers on philanthropy, that
are university-based. We’re probably the second or the third largest depending on what
you count, and we’re maybe the second or the third oldest depending on which programs
you count. Often some of the programs are a faculty member or two, who have had an
interest in philanthropy and have built their own scholarly work in that field. But once
those faculty members retire, probably that program will go away. So the Johnson Center
is different in that we’re institutional. And it really doesn’t matter who’s here. The
institution will continue because the university and the Kellogg Foundation have both
made a commitment to it. So we started when Kellogg looked at the IU Center and said
we really like what’s happening there. We’d like one of these for the state of Michigan.
And the president of the Kellogg Foundation at the time, Russ Mawby, brought together
all of the university presidents from the state of Michigan, had a meeting, and said we
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
15
�would like to fund one of these, but university, we want you to make a commitment of
money, and a real commitment that you will develop a center. And of the fourteen
universities, two put in proposals and Grand Valley’s was the strongest so it ended up at
Grand Valley. There was a $990,000 challenge grant from Kellogg matched by $900,000
from Grand Valley which launched the Center. So in our early years, the first director,
Thom Jeavons, again this was the start of service learning, he really stressed bringing
service learning to the faculty members at Grand Valley, trying to introduce this as
teaching methodology, as a pedagogy, and that they would begin to embrace it. He left
and our second director was Dott Freeman and she came out of the corporate
philanthropy side of the family, and so she was really stressing work with corporations.
And then when she left one of the faculty members from our School of Public
Administration, Donna VanIwaarden, came, and Donna was the third director and really
stressed more of the scholarship and the research. At that same time, Joel Orosz, who had
been the head of the program officer for philanthropy and volunteerism at Kellogg, came
here as our distinguished professor, and really helped to launch the Center as a national
presence. Before that, we were pretty Grand Valley and pretty West Michigan focused.
And Donna, because of her ties in the community, launched one of our main services
which is the Community Research Institute.
So taking them kind of one a time, the Community Research Institute, the Grand Rapids
Community Foundation wanted to do data-based decision-making and they had to make a
choice, do we build this capacity inside our own organization or do we build it at Grand
Valley, so it’s available to everyone? And they made the choice to do it at Grand Valley.
So the Community Research Institute started doing research first for the Grand Rapids
Community Foundation, and now we do it for most of the foundations in West Michigan.
And we’re looking, it makes us a little different from the other centers on philanthropy,
because they’re looking at doing research about the sector, so their research says how
many volunteers are there, how much are people giving, what kinds of organizations are
in the sector. Our research is more research for the sector. So we’re looking at what are
the rates of child abuse, then giving that information to the nonprofit organizations, so
they can use that data to make data-based decision-makings, working with the food
pantries to find out where is hunger. And we do a lot of geo-coding and mapping, so
where does hunger exist in West Michigan? And then we work with the food pantries to
help them look at where they should be delivering services. So that’s the Community
Research Institute.
00:46:24
JS: So you have, sort of, organizations or groups or whatever, who have an idea, they
think they want to help in a particular sector or do something but they’re not sure where
exactly to put the money. This information helps them figure out how to do that.
KA: We’ll do regular program evaluations, so some of them get grants and we do the
program evaluation for them. But the more interesting work is this work, and the food
pantries is a good example. We did research about where do senior citizens live in Kent
County, who are hungry, who need food support. And then on the geo-mapping what we
overlaid were the pockets of concentration of those populations, and then we overlaid
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
16
�what are the public transportation routes, and then we overlaid where are the food
centers, so where can they get food. And immediately, you can look at the map and say,
Oh my gosh. Here’s a group of senior citizens who don’t have access to transportation
and who don’t have access to food support. And then we can take that and work with the
food pantries and they, we would then overlay where are the churches and synagogues
and religious communities, and where are the schools, the elementary and public schools.
So the pantries could begin to say, who could be our natural partner where we could
deliver service and we do that kind of work for foundations and for nonprofits all the
time. And so that’s the Community Research Institute.
When Joel came in, we really became involved in providing support and doing research
and training for foundations, for grantmaking foundations. And that again makes us very
different from our peers because most of the other academic centers don’t touch the grant
maker’s side of the family at all. We launched The Grantmaking School, which is a
national school to help grant makers learn their craft. A problem for grant makers is that
most of them when they’re hired are hired, because they have deep content knowledge.
They may be the premier water quality person in the world, and the Annenberg
Foundation can hire them. They’re hired; they know everything there is to know about
fresh water quality in rivers in the upper Midwest. So they have this deep, deep content
knowledge and suddenly their job is to look at budgets, and make decisions about how
the money ought to be given away, and how do I strategically look at six grants to make
sure that they interact with one another. In some ways, it’s a difficult job in that the
person loves the content, and often they’re making grants to people who have very good
project ideas, and they have to say no to more than, what ninety percent of them. So
they’re saying no to things that they care about to people who know are doing really good
work, and they have to say no just because there’s not enough money to go around. And
they really need help. And what is this transition from being, from having deep content
knowledge to being the person who’s giving the money away, and we do that in The
Grantmaking School. We do that all over the country, we do it in major cities, and that
part’s been going pretty well.
00:49:26
JS: How would you characterize your own job description right now? What is it that you
do here day-to-day?
KA: What do I do here? A little bit of everything. It’s a cook and bottle washer kind of
job. I raise money. I do strategic planning. I have, there are seven program directors. I
have a lot of staff supervision. I handle all of the, or most of the relationships,
relationship building, I would say both within the university and outside in the
community. Because we are not an academic center, in a sense that we don’t give the
degrees. You know, the School for Public Administration is the place that actually gives
the degrees. So I partner, we partner with them. We have a lot of graduate students
working here, and a lot of what I do is trying to keep it all headed the right way, you
know, as things pull you other directions and to be able to raise the money to be able to
support it. We’re mainly supported by outside money to a great extent.
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
17
�The other, the third thing we do is, so that we don’t loose that piece, is that we also do
training and support for nonprofit organizations. Grand Rapids had a program called the
Direction Center. It was one of the first in the country that had been designed and funded
by the area foundations to support nonprofits, and it was supposed to become selfsufficient but they never could charge enough to be able to do that. So when it failed, it
came into the Johnson Center, and we still do a lot of training on how to be a nonprofit
board member, how to be a CEO, and mainly we’re doing that for smaller, midsized
nonprofits. Spectrum Health doesn’t need our help. They go and hire whoever they want.
It’s the women’s shelter, it’s the neighborhood association, it’s the Paws for a Cause, it’s
all of the, you know, it’s Latin Americans for Progress, those kind of organizations who
are coming to us for assistance.
00:51:22
JS: Alright, now, to back up a little bit in another section. You talked about the Johnson
Center being created and so forth. When this got set up at Grand Valley who was
instrumental in terms making that happen? Was this one of these ideas that captured
President Lubbers’ imagination?
KA: Yes. It was launched from Russ Mawby, the president of the Kellogg Foundation,
whose, I would say his 30 year tenure at Kellogg would be typified by being a builder of
the infrastructure organizations to support the whole sector. That’s really how he’s
known. And so when he launched it, he made the offer to President Lubbers, who had the
right kind of entrepreneurial spirit and the vision to be able to say, I could see what this
would look like twenty years from now. We’ll be twenty years old two years from now.
So that was a natural, a natural combination, and the university has continued to be
extremely supportive, even as Kellogg’s support has gone up and down. The university
built this new space for us, and built it to our specifications. They want it to a place where
the community comes in and interacts with the university. So we’ve been very fortunate
to have the kind of support that we do.
00:52:35
JS: Okay. What’s the relationship with the Johnson family?
KA: Oh, yes. What happened was that when Dottie Johnson retired from the Council of
Michigan Foundations, they were looking for a way to honor her at that point twenty-five
years of service. And she really had built the Council of Michigan Foundations from
nothing. She was at half time in a closet, basically when she started it. And is a well
known national leader; she started the Foundation Center, she was involved with the
Council on Foundations, was on the Corporation for National Community Service Board.
When Dottie retired, we were trying to, I was at CMF at the time, we were trying to find
a way to honor her. And the thought was that we could talk with the university, because
her family’s been involved and she’s been involved with Grand Valley, about naming the
Center after her. So the CEO at that time of the Council of Michigan Foundations, Rob
Collier, raised the money to be able to bring over all of the library resources of the
Council of Michigan Foundations, and a half a million dollar endowment for the library,
and then the name, the Center was named in her honor. And no one deserves it better. She
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
18
�really has been a great leader both for Grand Valley and for the field. Now, the materials
that came over, some of them were videotapes, original videotapes of people like Mr.
Kresge talking about his philanthropy that are irreplaceable, and those are all out at the
archives. So this tape that we’re doing is a part of a continuing effort to say, let’s capture
this rich Michigan history. Michigan is known nationally as being a very unusual state
because we’re so well, our philanthropic community is so well organized and works so
well together that we’re somewhat the envy of the rest of the country and we want to
capture some of those stories.
00:54:33
JS: Alright. And finally, I would like to ask where do you see this particular center going
after the next decade or so? What are you going to be trying to accomplish from here?
KA: I had three goals when I started. One was our own building, a twenty million
endowment, and a Ph.D. So far I have the building. (laughter) I would like to see us selfsufficient, on our own, so if we were self-sufficient with an endowment, a large
endowment, then we would be able to continue to help these smaller organizations that
have no where else to go, and I, we’re continuing to do that even though that’s the part of
our budget that struggles. And the reason is that I think that it keeps us honest. It’s very
easy to come into a very nice building and a very nice university and be taken care of,
and forget what its like to run the neighborhood association where you can’t get a copy
machine and you don’t know how you’re going to pay people for the next payroll. And so
I want us to stay rooted deeply in the community and to become a place where nonprofit
leaders can always come and always feel supported and that they’re getting the
knowledge that they need. We, in partnership with the School for Public Administration,
are just proposing a new Master’s degree in philanthropy that we’re hoping that we can
launch in the fall. And that would be a first step towards the possibility of a Ph.D. Now,
Grand Valley is not a Ph.D. granting institution, so I’ve been talking with IU about
whether we could do their Ph.D. here by extension. Or there is some conversation on
campus about an Ed.D. and if we did an Ed.D. whether there could be a major in
philanthropy and nonprofits, because where our counter part academic centers are really
focused on producing academic research and academic practitioners and faculty members
for centers on philanthropy, we are much more applied and so the Ed.D. would make
sense for us because we would be preparing, what I call reflective practitioners, people
who want to be out in the field running nonprofits but also want to do it with, within the
scope and scale of a discipline and with deep knowledge about what they’re doing, and I
can see us preparing that kind of a professional here and would like us to be on the
cutting edge of that.
00:56:53
JS: Alright. Now let’s see. Do you think that there is anything significant about what
you’ve done in your career that we’ve managed to leave out at this point?
KA: No. The kids grew up. My husband became a teacher [laughter], a sixth grade
science teacher. So yes, the life went on, but yes, I think that’s a good coverage.
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
19
�JS: Alright. Well, thank you very much then.
KA: Thank you, Jim. Good.
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
20
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/aa10b790082faa25d40504056ef5df6d.mp4
83a33cc988eafb1345a03dcdec8986fc
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project Interviews
Subject
The topic of the resource
Philanthropy and society--Personal narratives
Family foundations--Michigan
Charities--Michigan
Description
An account of the resource
The Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (MPOHP) was initiated in 2006 as an innovative partnership between the Council of Michigan Foundations, StoryCorps, Michigan Radio and the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at Grand Valley State University to create an oral history of Michigan philanthropy. Additional video interviews were created by the Johnson Center for Philanthropy to add to the depth and breadth of the collection.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (MPOHP) (JCPA-08). Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-05-02
Rights
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
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Sound
Text
Moving Image
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
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audio/mp3
application/pdf
video/mp4
Identifier
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JCPA-08
Coverage
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2006-2008
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Johnson Center for Philantrhopy
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
StoryCorps (Project)
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (JCPA-08)</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Agard, Kathryn A., video interview and transcript
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Agard, Kathryn, A.
Description
An account of the resource
Kathryn A. Agard, Executive Director of the Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University, 2006-2010. She discusses her early life, education, family, and work in the Mental Health field, at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Hackley Hospital, Council of Michigan Foundations, and the Johnson Center. She discusses developing Youth Advisory Committees in Michigan Community Foundations, Learning to Give and the development of philanthropy curriculum for grades K-12. She shares the history of the Johnson Center, development of its programs and partnerships, efforts to capture Michigan’s philanthropic history and her goals as director.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Smither, James
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Philanthropy and society
Personal narratives
Charities
Michigan
Associations, institutions, etc.
Muskegon (Mich.)
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership
Women
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
JCPA-08_AgardK
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Moving Image
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
application/pdf
Relation
A related resource
Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-04-06
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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c3a049d0e33c849ec1c1a34e316ea311.pdf
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Grand Valley State University Special Collections
Kent County Oral History collections, RHC-23
C. Bennett Ainsworth
S. P. Bennett Fuel and Ice Company
Interviewed on October 1, 1971
Edited and indexed by Don Bryant, 2010 – bryant@wellswooster.com
Tape #24 (31:59)
Biographical Information
Calvin Bennett Ainsworth was born 3 December 1890 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Calvin Bennett Ainsworth married Agnes M. Warnick on 20 March 1922. He was
married to Emily L. Hine about 1926. He died 6 October 1974 leaving a widow, Florence
J. He is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Grand Rapids.
C. Bennett was the son of Arthur Sardius Ainsworth and Ella Elizabeth Innes who were
married 18 August 1887 in Grand Rapids. Arthur was born about July 1862 in Rome,
Henry County, Iowa the son of Calvin and Harriet (Fairchild) Ainsworth. He died in
Grand Rapids in January 1950. The mother, Ella Innes was born 18 March 1861 in
Pueblo, Colorado, the daughter of William and Elizabeth (Brennan) Innes. Ella died in
Grand Rapids 11 April 1916. As his second wife, Arthur married Amye Firth on 5
October 1918. Amye died in Grand Rapids in 1940. Interments in Oak Hill Cemetery in
Grand Rapids.
___________
Interviewer: Were you born in Grand Rapids?
Mr. Ainsworth: Yes, yes I was. I was born in Grand Rapids. I don‟t remember the house
because I was too young, moved away from there as a small boy or as an infant probably.
It was on Washington and we moved away from there to James Street, two fifty-four
James. And that is where I grew up-my early, early days of my life. In fact I… after I left
college, my family moved to five forty-nine South College, and we lived there and sold
that house to the Park Congregational Church. It‟s kind of unusual because I had another
house on Madison. I sold that to the church-the colored church and Mayor Parks lives
there now. He‟s a minister of this church and also the mayor of the city-a very nice
house. Well, then I moved out here three years ago and been living here ever since. I can
remember many of the old things about the city. I can remember Cherry Street, which I
was kind of close to on James, being paved with blocks-not blocks- they‟re some circle
pieces of wood made from a tree. They‟re about six inches deep and maybe a foot in
diameter or so, depending on the tree that was cut. This was packed in with gravel, as I
remember, and then… and then covered with tar. And that was a street. And Lower
Monroe was a… had the same sort of a pavement and, I don‟t know, maybe other streets
were paved that way but I can remember those. And when it… when they wanted to do
away with the street and put asphalt or cement in, they tore it up and anybody who
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wanted any of these blocks of wood would get them free and they made good firewood
because they were certainly well-seasoned and they had some kind of oil or tar in them.
Interviewer: When was, when was that street torn up?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, I don‟t know but I would guess, let‟s see I can only guess from
my age, probably I was twelve or thirteen and that would make it nineteen hundred and
two or three-around in there.
Interviewer: What kind of a street did they put down after that?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, I‟m not sure. I think it was probably brick or tar some kind of… it
was an improvement on the wood street. Although a street made of wood like that was
awfully nice for the horses, and they had a lot of horses in those days. Milk trucks and
people were going around in, in vehicles hauled by horses and it‟s a lot better for them
than the paved street.
Interviewer: Why, why is that?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, on account of their hoofs. I was always taught that you shouldn‟t
run a horse on a hard paved street if you could avoid it. It‟s hard on the shoes and on
their legs. It‟s so hard whereas the wooden pavement would take up some of the shock
and it‟d be a lot better. I also remember about the lighting system in Grand Rapids in …
I think that would be about the same period. We had steel towers and there were quite…
oh, I would say they were t- at the base anyway, they were probably twelve, fifteen feet
in diameter and they rose to maybe, oh I‟m just guessing but I would say, four to five
hundred feet. And they had several lights up there that were made with carbon- carbon
sticks they looked like. And they‟d have to replace these every once in a while and they
would throw them down to the ground below and we boys would pick them up and use
them in place of crayons-except they made a black mark instead of a white mark. But
they tore that… I don‟t know when they tore those down and replaced them but, at that
time, it was a good lighting system although I don‟t think it ever was quite as good as
they claimed it would be. You would be able to read a newspaper anywhere in the citythe city then being probably one-fifth the size it is now. I remember at one time there
was a flock of geese that came either going north or south I don‟t know which, but there
was a fog and they flew into this…one of these towers and I think it was on the corner of
Paris and Logan. I‟m not sure of that, but anyway, the… it killed several of the geese and
they were dead at the bottom of the tower and they were there for the grabs-anybody that
wanted them could have them. I don‟t know, maybe, that‟s about all I can think of.
Interviewer: These towers… were the towers kind of ringing the city or…
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, they were spaced in logical places so that they would distribute the
light throughout pretty well. But I don‟t think it was nearly as good a system as it is now
and they claimed a lot more than they claim now. But we had a lot of trees and these
lights were way up and the trees would shadow them and make dark places so I‟m sure
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they would have left them up until now if they were practical. But they‟re gone and, of
course, they have a different system of… we don‟t have any carbon lights, maybe you
can remember those. They kind of fizz once in a while. They‟d make quite a loud
singing sound. There was a spark going between the carbons is what it was-that made
that noise.
Interviewer: Well, when you were growing up on James Street, was that on the outskirts
of the city?
Mr. Ainsworth: No, but Eastern Avenue was pretty well on the outskirts. I suppose it
was named Eastern because it was the east, more or less, the eastern limits of the city.
And I remember just beyond there on Wealthy, they used to have a big open space there.
That would be from Eastern east of there and well east there-pretty close to Diamond.
Where Diamond is now was all open and they use to have the circus that came to town
would put up tents there. There was plenty of room for them. It was… it was all open
territory.
Interviewer: Would the shows be there?
Mr. Ainsworth: Yeah, the shows-they put the big tent there and the show would be there.
Interviewer: How would, how would people get out to the circus if it was on the outskirts
of town?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, they had streetcars, I suppose. I know… I know they did because
they had streetcars running out to Reeds Lake. As a boy, I use to go out to Reeds Lake in
the summer and my mother would put up a sandwich or two and some milk and then
we‟d go out to Rose‟s swimming beach and take our lunch and we‟d stay in the water all
day long-swim all morning and afternoon. The water was clean and clear. And then in
the winter, we use to do the same thing only we‟d take our skates out and they cleared a
space out there and we were in…I can‟t tell you the name of it, but it was a big open
saloon, that‟s what it was and a couple of stoves in there, these pot-bellied stoves and
we‟d get cold and come in there and we‟d…I think we had our lunch in there. They let
us have our lunch there. I can‟t remember much about it being a bar but I‟m pretty sure
that was what it was. And we‟d put up our… put our feet up against this iron stove with
our skates on, you know, and it would thaw them out and get warm then go back out and
skate. It was quite a trek out there for us, either bicycle or streetcar. So you wouldn‟t go
out there for just a little while, you go out there for the whole day-the entire day. I
remember shooting squirrels right down by Fisk Lake and around in there. It was
beginning to be a little inhabited there and this-right here where I am used to be a track
here. Mr. Bonnell, as I recall, had some horses, and he had a track which he would run
„em around here. Jefferson Avenue was-in the winter- was a place I think they blocked it
off and some of the rich people with horses and sleighs would have races down there.
They raced down Jefferson Avenue.
Interviewer: Did you ever go down to see them?
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Mr. Ainsworth: I don‟t think I did. I remember hearing about it, but I wasn‟t particularly
interested. But on Washington Street they used to block that off for us kids and we‟d
start at Madison with bobsleds and slide down there and then walk back up. We use to
do that a lot. I can‟t remember those horse races at all, seeing one. I can remember
hearin‟ „em, talking about them though. I‟m sure they had them.
Interviewer: Did you go to school in Grand Rapids?
Mr. Ainsworth: Yes, I graduated from Central High School in nineteen-ten. That was
the last year of the old high school. Then there was the new one which I guess is the one
standing now-was built in, I think the class of eleven [1911] got into that school. I was
the last one there and… I graduated in nineteen-ten and remember hearing I was the last
class in the school.
Interviewer: Did everybody in those days graduate from Central?
Mr. Ainsworth: I think they did. I don‟t think we had another high school.
Interviewer: Another four year school?
Mr. Ainsworth: No, I don‟t believe we did. Of course, you got how many now-three,
four…?
Interviewer: Well, there‟s Creston, Union, Central, Ottawa Hills-I guess they‟ve got
four, plus the Catholic High School.
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, I guess there weren‟t a lot of kids never went to high school, you
know, in those days. I don‟t suppose over half of them went. And so, of course, the city
was so much smaller so that you didn‟t need as many.
Interviewer: Who were the kids that went onto high school and who were the ones that
didn‟t?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, some of them had to go to work and they didn‟t. Some of „em just
weren‟t interested. There wasn‟t the importance put on an education in those days as it is
today. So… and the world wasn‟t as sophisticated. I mean you… you have to have an
education to run these machines now and the computers and everything. Most every kind
of work there is takes a good deal of education. In those days, we didn‟t have those and
the work that was open for you didn‟t require it so you just didn‟t spend the time and
money on it. I went over to the University of Michigan and it seemed to me there were
nine thousand there then and they thought that was a big, big school. My granddaughter
is going over here to Central Michigan at Mt. Pleasant, yeah, Mt. Pleasant. And I think
she said there were something like twelve, fourteen thousand, and they, they consider that
a small school now. I never, I really never heard if it until she went there. And yet that‟s
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much bigger than the University of Michigan was in those days. And the University of
Michigan was-and is today-well recognized as a big and good college.
Interviewer: What… what kind of business were you in in Grand Rapids?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, I was in the coal business-the Bennett Fuel Company. My father
worked there first and got to own the company, and then I took it over when I came back
from college and I ran it until sixteen years ago when I retired. It‟s about that time gas
kept came in and there‟s very little coal sold in the city now, very little. Even the
industries are not buying it because of the smoke that they‟re creating. So, it‟s been hit
very hard but my son is running the company as best he can and he‟s gone into oil…
selling oil along with coal for heating and other purposes. So he‟s struggling along with
it still in the city. It‟s over-it‟s about ninety-eight years old now. It‟s almost a hundred
years old-the company is. And we had an interesting thing about that. We were on the
corner of Fulton and Ottawa. I think we were there for eighty-eight years and the
property was owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad. We rented it from them and we rented
it for eighty-eight years and all we had was month-to-month lease. The railroads are a
little different than other people. If you ship over their lines, they won‟t sell to you and
they give you cheap rent. They won‟t sell to you because they want to hold you on
their… they want to have something over your head. It‟s to make you stay there and ship
over their road. And on the other hand, they give you very, very reasonable rent. In fact,
they‟d give it to you for nothing if they could but the Interstate Commerce Commission
won‟t let them do that. They have to charge at least, as I understand it, six percent the
valuation, assessed valuation of the property. But that‟s all they charged. Well, I think
that‟s all they charged us. Now, now that the railroads are having a hard time, maybe,
they‟re… they‟ll get into the more equitable rent.
Interviewer: Well, if people were burning… would that be the predominant fuel in
homes-coal?
Mr. Ainsworth: Yes, it was up to about nineteen forty, I‟d say. nineteen forty then gas
started coming in, oil, there was, some oil in… there was some gas but not anything like
what it is now. Though I would say an eighty percent or eighty-five percent of the heat
was generated from coal at that time. And there were over a hundred coal dealers in this
city at one time-at least a hundred licenses taken out. Now there is just our own, that‟s
the only one left. And we‟re… we just can‟t, I don‟t know how he can live off what he
gets there. There‟s just nobody‟s burning coal. I don‟t burn it myself …and fewer every
year. But he‟s got little other outlets that, like oil, trying to go into the fertilizing
business, too. Doing a little of that he can, that goes a very little investment necessary if
you have oil trucks, you can just clean „m out, put the water and the chemical in there and
then you got your own pump, your spray and the whole thing so all throughout the
country quite a few coal yards have gone into fertilizing by liquid spraying.
Interviewer: Well, if most of the homes were burning coal, was there… was there much
smog or smoke in the city?
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Mr. Ainsworth: Yes, there was, there was no complaint about it but there was at times. I
know that in the winter you get a nice clean fall of snow and all, everything would be just
as white and pure and clean as it could be in the morning maybe, and then by the next
morning you‟d see these globs of soot around. And the snow would get real dirty mostly
from… of course, it gets dirty now but it‟s largely from coal. It seems to me as though
the air should be much cleaner now than it used to be due to the fact that there‟s no coal
used but, of course, there weren‟t very many automobiles in those days and they say
they‟re responsible for 60% of the pollution-air pollution. So maybe we got a worse
victim in the car than it was in coal. I don‟t think coal will ever come back as a home
heating.
Interviewer: Well what, what, how would these homes that were heated on coal, what
was the operation involved in keeping your house warm.
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, at first it was really just hand fired. You just didn‟t… you never
had a fire furnace with coal? You didn‟t?
Interviewer: Well, I did at my parents‟ cottage at one time. But…
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, it‟s merely shovel in the coal usually in the morning and set your
drafts and you‟d get over-runs and under-runs and, it was good, good and cold you
couldn‟t keep the house at an even temperature-or it was very difficult to. Then they had
the… they would get an automatic thermostat for the furnace and it was much better than
without one. It would open and close the draft itself. When the temperature went over a
certain degree, it would drop the draft so that the fire would die down and when it got
cold it would be the reverse. And then… then they introduced the stoker and the stoker is
much cleaner burning. It burns fuel much cleaner than the hand fired by means of a
screw it pushes the coal in so that the fire is fed from below and as that fresh coal comes
in from below, it gets hot and it begins to release its volatile matter as smoke. The smoke
has to go through the bed of flames and it gets burned off. So it burned the coal more
efficiently and cleanly-but it isn‟t. I hate to say it as a coal man, but it isn‟t as clean as
the gas or oil. But, of course, you‟re just practically unconscious of the furnace and then
I… just, your house is held at seventy-two degrees with either coal or oil. So you‟re
unconscious of it.
Interviewer: Well in other words, before they developed the thermostat, it was pretty
difficult keeping your house at an even temperature.
Mr. Ainsworth: Yeah. You had a little dial up here that you could operate around and it
had a chain on it and the chain would close or open the drafts down below. So if it gets
cold, well, you walk over to this operator and just turn it one way or the other and it
would adjust the drafts instead of having to go down below to do anything. You boys
missed a lot of hard work.
Interviewer: Well were there, when people were burning coal in their houses, were there
any coal strikes?
�7
Mr. Ainsworth: Yes, I can remember one but they- the contracts were all written so they
expired, I think, on April first. And we did have coal strikes but the season was pretty
well along for one thing and we could load up on another thing and I remember one year
they had a strike and they had this coal… they loaded cars. Of course, the miner was
anxious to get all the money he could so he was trying to put in all the time he could and
some-so most of „em were on a tonnage basis so the more tons you got out the more you
got paid. And he was trying to build up a nest egg to protect him against the strike. So
they were trying to get a lot of coal out in shipping and we‟d load up and they‟d have
sometimes… there‟s every miner had maybe a hundred cars loaded with coal and they
would… all during April they would ship that to you. And I can‟t remember any time
when, oh yes, I did too, was that a strike? There was one time here we were in real bad
shape one winter. We…we had the supply turned over to the city. I think that was… that
must have been a strike. I remember George Welsh was mayor, I believe, at that time or
city commissioner and the city confiscated all the coal there was in the city. I mean they
came to your yards and now, “You cannot deliver any coal except on an order from the
city.” And then the people had to go to the city hall and declare their need of coal and
they‟d get a certificate and they… we‟d come down and deliver them a ton. We did have
quite a serious shortage one year, I can remember.
Interviewer: Do you remember what year that was?
Mr. Ainsworth: No, I can‟t. No, I can‟t. I just have to guess it was the late thirties or in
the forties. We did have quite a serious shortage at that time, but I don‟t think anybody
froze. I remember greenhouses got preference, hospitals got preference and some
institutions that were vital were… got the first chance. There were… there always…
when they have a strike, there‟s always a few miners at work-they‟re not unionized so
there‟s a trickling of coal that comes out always, even in spite of a strike. There‟s a strike
on right now, isn‟t there? I know that their contract expired last night at midnight.
Interviewer: Oh, I don‟t know about this.
Mr. Ainsworth: I, I didn‟t turn it on there… the television this morning… and so I don‟t
know what happened.
Interviewer: Was the Grand River used for anything when you were a kid?
Mr. Ainsworth: I can‟t remember any of those boats going up and down. I… I can
remember seeing pictures of the boats and I think there were some boats there and they
docked right down there by Fulton Street, but I can‟t remember very much about them
but I‟ve seen pictures. I think maybe most of my memory of that is from pictures rather
than from the actual boats although I can remember a very bad flood we had one year. I
was only a kid. Gosh, I don‟t know. It was probably nineteen-I‟m guessing again but
probably in nineteen-let‟s see, probably nineteen hundred and five or six… around in
there. I remember the… in the Pantlind Hotel in the barber shop-in the basement-they,
they had water right up to… almost to the ceiling. And they used to have a mark there
�8
and then years afterwards they‟d come in and say, well, right up there is where the water
was on such and such a date. And the west side was quite badly flooded. There was
some water over there.
Interviewer: What did… what did happen? Why were there such serious floods then and
not now?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, if you don‟t, there was no wall there at that time and it was the
year in which we had a lot of snow and it melted all fast. Maybe even today it comes up
pretty high. We have walls of protection but if you get a lot of snow and then you get a
warm rain with this two or three feet of snow on the ground, it‟s just running off
everywhere, just in rivers. All over the country, every tributary is feeding into Grand
River and it goes way up and it depends on the condition at the time and at that year. We
were not protected as well as we are now and we had a big run-off of snow and water.
Interviewer: You said you mentioned that your family had a home down on South
College, five forty-nine South College?
Mr. Ainsworth: Yes.
Interviewer: Did you grow up or did you spend any time…
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, I spent a few years there, yes. Most of my time was spent on
James Street. Then they moved out to eighteen thirty-nine Lake Drive, but then I was
married and I didn‟t live at eighteen thirty-nine Lake Drive. They kept going east as most
of us do-east or out in the outskirts.
Interviewer: What kind of a neighborhood was James Street, what kind of people lived
there?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, there were colored people on the south side of Wealthy and they
used to have what we called the Wealthies and the Cherries. I belonged to Cherry Street
and most of the Wealthies were the people on the Wealthy side. South of Wealthy were
colored… were half, about half-colored and half white at that time. And we used to have
snowball fights and so forth. At that time was more or less a pleasant relationship. There
was rivalry and then sometimes it resulted in bloody noses and so forth but that was the
extent of it. But we… we were… we were divided even then in those days between…
and Wealthy Avenue divided us off. And we got our names from the…from the two
streets, Wealthy and Cherry.
Interviewer: Did they go to the same school?
Mr. Ainsworth: Yeah, we went to the same school. It‟s there now, Henry Street School.
It runs from Henry over through to James and just a little bit south of Wealthy. It seems
to me… I know it‟s there yet, isn‟t it?
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Interviewer: Henry School? I think so, yeah. Yeah, I‟m sure it‟s there. Did, well… did
the… the Negroes and the whites get along alright together?
Mr. Ainsworth: In school we did. I can‟t remember anything… any difference or having
problems or even giving it a moment‟s thought. We had no serious trouble, we accepted
each other as we were and we didn‟t have a football team or baseball team I don‟t
think…at least I know I didn‟t-wasn‟t in it. But I had some friends. I can remember two
or three of „em down there and later they got to be waiters at the Pantlind Hotel and I
used to get pretty good service over at the Pantlind Hotel. The boys would… quite a few
of them became waiters in various places. Do you have this thing going? Is anybody
going to listen to all this?
Interviewer: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Ainsworth: Are they?
Interviewer: Yeah, I think so.
INDEX
A
I
Ainsworth, Arthur Sardius (Father) · 5
Interstate Commerce Commission · 5
B
M
Bennett Fuel Company · 5
Bonnell, Mr. · 3
Mayor Parks · 1
C
P
Pantlind Hotel · 8, 9
Central High School · 4
Central Michigan · 4
R
F
Reeds Lake · 3
Fisk Lake · 3
U
G
University of Michigan · 4
Grand River · 7, 8
W
H
Henry Street School · 9
Welsh, George · 7
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�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/8c09728a2dc129661aa8a36f3e572527.mp3
a44bf0baae9471a406f703cd9bd0f7eb
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Grand Rapids Oral Histories
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Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Local histories
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Michigan--History
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An account of the resource
Taped and transcribed interviews conducted in the early 1970s primarily of the children and grandchildren of many of the founders of Grand Rapids, Michigan; many of whom were residents of the Heritage Hill neighborhood. Interviews were collected to develop a significant collection of oral resources that would supplement other primary and secondary local history materials. Initially funded as a private project, Grand Valley State College (now University) assumed responsibility for continuing the project until 1977.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/452">Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)</a>
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1971 - 1977
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RHC-23_24Ainsworth
Title
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Ainsworth, C. Bennett
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Ainsworth, C. Bennett
Description
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C. Bennett Ainsworth was born in Grand Rapids on December 3, 1890. He graduated from Central High School in 1910, and attended the University of Michigan. He was the owner of Bennett Fuel Co. He died October 7, 1974.
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Michigan--History
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Grand Rapids (Mich.)
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Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Grand Valley State University
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Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)
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1971
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PDF Text
Text
Day by Day
Diary of Camelia Alten Demmon
Daughter of Mathias Alten
January 5, 1917-July 2, 1917
Friday, January 5
I am rather late as usual so I am starting this little tale of woe to-day, instead of last
Monday. I went to school to-day as I do once in a while and managed to get through
everything somehow or other. Mike [girlfriend] came up to school after me and we
walked home together and stopped to buy some cream puffs and cakes. There was a Beta
spread at Mrs. Wagner’s to-night and after that Roberta Cassidy, Frances VanLeeuwen,
Mary Alice Wren and I went to the Majestic Gardens. Norm Jones called for Ella and is
down stairs now. 11:30 PM.
Saturday, January 6
I am writing this Sunday morning about ten o’clock in bed. I washed my hair S[unday]
morning with egg and lemon. L[emon] makes it a dandy color but I’m thinking that if it
doesn’t stop coming out pretty soon, I won’t have any left. Frances VanLeeuwen, Mike,
Kathryn [Katheryn] Baert, Donna Baert, Harriet McKeon and I all went to see “Twin
Beds” yesterday afternoon. This was supposed to be a Gallery party but seeing as though
they didn’t open the Gallery we sat in 35-cent seats in the balcony. On my way to
Schroeders afterwards I met Russell Burr and he asked to come. He came but I suppose I
will get killed Monday if Mildred finds it out. I wish I knew whether it is wrong for me to
let him come out.
Sunday, January 7
This morning Mamma and Ella went to church. In the afternoon Lucille and I went to the
Majestic to see Mary Pickford in “The Pride of the Clan.” I cried all during the show, and
after I came out, we met John Stacey and I was still crying. We met Dick Miller and
Norman Jones across the street and they came over for lunch. Mary Alice and Ray called
up and wanted us to go coasting Wednesday night.
Monday, January 8
I didn’t have a single lesson this morning so I skipped my first hour class to study. I went
over to LaVanche’s [LaVanche Vinkemulder] after school and played on her Weja
[Ouija] board after we had stopped at the little bakery. Gee their stuff is good. The model
didn’t come, so I poised [posed] for the class and earned $1.50. Papa just finished an
awfully cute picture of me in my pink dress.
Tuesday, January 9
I got up at six this morning to study, but I must say I don’t like the idea very much. I
walked down to school with Mike and went to J.F.E. meeting after school. Harriet
McKeon and I walked home together and stopped at the bakery as usual. Mr. and Mrs.
Cusick went to St. Joseph to-day to see if they would like it. I got a new skirt that E[lla]
finished for me to-day in exchange for some Christmas waist material.
1
�Wednesday, January 10
I am writing this up the next Sunday instead of last Wednesday so I will test my memory.
It seems to me we were going to have a tobogganing party to-night, but the [weather]
wasn’t suitable so Dick Miller and Norm Jones just came up. We had a pretty good time,
but I imagine I would like Dick better if I understood him more. He asked me to go to
“Civilization” next Tuesday night and here’s hoping I don’t cry and make a hag out of
myself.
Thursday, January 11
School
After school I took Ella down to the station for she went to Detroit, and Papa told me we
were going to get our Ford Sat[urday], hooray!!! I got home about six and Papa told me I
would have to pose again, so I hurried and got dressed and went down there. I don’t
remember, but I don’t think I stayed up to study that night.
Friday, January 12
School
Friday night after school I went down town with Mike and we bought two awfully cute
dresses for her, seeing she is going away to school the first of February. I stayed over
there for supper and then came home and tried to read the whole of “Crawford” but a
fourth was as much as I could stay awake for that night.
Saturday, January 13
This morning Viola had an appointment with Dr. Beeman at nine o’clock to have her
eyes tested so I took her down. I wasn’t well anyway and after I had been there an hour, I
got sicker and sicker until they lay me on a couch and I got as white as a ghost. I don’t
remember ever feeling worse, but about 12:30 I felt better and went home. This
afternoon, 7 of us went to Powers [Theatre] to see “Fair and Warmer.” And on the way
home I stopped in at the library to get my book review.
Sunday, January 14
This morning I got up at 8 and read till 12, but I finished “Crawford.” From two until 4, I
took a lesson at driving the Ford. It certainly is the best looking little car you can
imagine. It is upholstered in gray and is awfully cute I am just crazy about it. Hugh came
up then and stayed until lunch. While I was gone, Dick and Russell Burr called up. Tonight I wrote my book review, got my German, physics and now I guess I’ll read the
funny paper. Mamma, Papa & Mr. and Mrs. Cusick have gone to the Empress.
Monday, January 15
I haven’t written in this in over a week so I don’t remember much that happened. I went
to school as usual and Lucille and I stopped and got a pie on the way home, and came
over here to eat it. Mrs. Serarach was here from Minneapolis and told us all about “Billy
Boy” [the adopted son of Mrs. Alten’s younger brother Frank Schwind]. She says he is
the cutest kid one can imagine. After supper I went down to the class to pose.
2
�Tuesday, January 16
School
After school I went down to the studio and Papa and I had another lesson in driving.
Tuesday night I went to see “Civilization” with Dick Miller.
Wednesday, January 17
School
After school I went to K.E.E. meeting [Central High club], Lucille and I went coasting
that night.
Thursday, January 18
Thursday morning I took my German exam and I certainly never saw a harder exam in
my life. Thursday afternoon Lucille and I thought we would start the machine, but didn’t
know where to pour the hot water and somehow or another we froze the thing all up.
Friday, January 19
Friday morning John Stacey came over at 9:30 and we tried our level best to start the
machine but couldn’t so called Mr. Eckberg and he came up and started it. Then John and
I went around town and did some errands. About 12:30 we went to Ada and ate cookies
outside the hotel (Coach Stop Hotel) for our dinner. When we came back, we got Lucille
and drove to Plainfield. The rest of the day was spent on looking for skates for me but we
couldn’t find any.
Saturday, January 20
Saturday Mr. Eckberg came up and started the machine and I took mamma out riding.
She had been real sick for a couple of days. Saturday night I studied for my physics
exam.
Sunday, January 21
Sunday morning mamma was sick in bed and Papa was just about as bad. I studied all
morning and in the afternoon, Hugh Utley, Lucille Cusick, and John Stacey came over.
Monday, January 22
Monday morning I took my English exam and then Frances Carr and I went to the
Monroe. The picture lasted so long that we couldn’t get any lunch and had to run all the
way up the hill. At 1, I took my physics exam. Frances VanLeeuwen, Kathryn Baert,
H[elen] McKeon and I went to the Strand and Jandorf’s [bakery]. Aunt Louise was here.
Russell called me up that night.
Tuesday, January 23
Tuesday morning Mamma was sick and I went down town. Mr. Nelson took the machine
out for me and in the afternoon I went down with Lucille, Kathryn, and Harriet and then
Lucille and I served at the German Coffee. When we got out we couldn’t get started so a
man pushed us a little way and then we coasted down the hill until the engine started.
Thursday night I didn’t do much of anything. Ella wrote and said she would be back in a
3
�couple days. Tuesday night M. Utley, L. Cusick and I took Nute [the car] and went
coasting over at John Ball.
Wednesday, January 24
This morning I was down at school making up art until 1:30. This afternoon I went to the
Empress with Hugh.
Thursday, January 25
This morning mamma and I went down town. I got some blue taffeta for a Russian
blouse. And some shoe hockies. This afternoon, Frances Carr went skating over at
Wilcox [Park]. And then came home and had some hot chocolate and cake. Thursday
night Russell Burr came over and we had a dandy time They brought the machine home
from the garage at about 10:30, and then Russell and I went down to Sweet’s
[Sweetland’s?].
Friday, January 26
This morning Lucille, Frances and I went down to Dean and Hicks[?] and poised [posed]
for some furniture pictures. On my way home just as I left the girls, I met Russell and he
took me over to the car. After dinner I went down to school for a while and Hugh was
helping decorate for the Sock and Buskin party [Central High club], but I wasn’t invited.
Then I went down to Papa’s studio for a while. To-night I went skating with H[elen]
Wren, and met Joe Osgood, I skated with him all the time and then he took me home.
Pretty nice.
Saturday, January 27
Saturday morning I cleaned up the house. We got a letter from Ella saying she was in
Sturgis. Saturday afternoon we bought some skates for Viola, and then met Frances Carr,
L[ucille] Cusick, Kathryn Baert, Harriet McKeon and we all went to the Orpheum. “The
Toughest Show in Town.” Saturday night I went skating.
Sunday, January 28
Sunday morning I washed my hair. In the afternoon we took Nute [the car] and went to
the Strand. We met John Stacey in front of the Empress, and he took [us] up. We saw
Ella Hall in “The Souls Inspiration.” Dick call[ed] up when I was gone but that didn’t do
me much good. Hugh took Louise Fay to the Sock and Buskin party. Papa and I have
been trying to get the machine in for an hour and at present he has gone for some gas.
Monday, January 29
This is the first day of the new term I have Mr. [Burton E.] Smith for S[cience]. Miss
Christ for G[eography], Mrs. [Cornelia] Hulst for E[nglish], Miss [Dorothy] Crosby for
interior decoration. 2,3,4, 6. Ray Gregory was elected Pres[ident]. Helen Bloomer (Betty
Ford’s mother) Vice Pres[ident], Betty Rood Sec[retary], Laurance Frost Treasurer.
Hugh has been acting awfully funny so I sent his pin back to him to-day. Dick called up
three times yesterday, but as usual I wasn’t at home. He called up again to-night and
asked me to go on a sleigh ride Sat., and to the Maj[estic]. Wed.
4
�Tuesday, January 30
School
After school Mildred Matheson (Russell’s girl) came over. We intended to get the
machine and have our fortunes told but mamma didn’t like the idea so we went to the
Strand. After supper we had Beta meeting at Eleanor Stinchcomb’s and I took Nute [the
car]. Somehow I didn’t have any trouble with him and it certainly was encouraging.
Wednesday, January 31
School
I was excused at 3:00 and a bunch of us went to see John Drew in “Pendennis” at Powers.
Lucille came home with me then to say goodbye because she was going to school the
next day and I wouldn’t have another chance to see her. After dinner I went to see “The
Crisis” at the Maj. with Dick Miller.
Memoranda [Humor later published in yearbook]
H. Wren: I’m learning so much in cooking.
L. Vinkemulder: What did you learn?
H. Wren: I don’t know I put it on a piece of paper.
L.V.: I guess that’s why you can wear such small hats.
There is something I don’t like about you, I guess it’s your face.
Stop your swearing, not that I care a damn, but it sounds like hell to strangers.
Thursday, February 1
Lucille went this morning at 7 o’clock, but I didn’t see her off. Mamma has been sick all
day, and couldn’t even get out of bed. I came right home from school and tried to start the
machine, but couldn’t so I called the man up. I never had a worse time in my life. I had to
have someone come and crank it twice and then I could hardly get it home. I get it half
way up the drive and it stopped. But I was so blamed mad at the darn thing that I’m going
to have to leave it out all night.
Friday, February 2
School
After school the “Sock and Buskin” club gave a little play, and I stayed for it. We got a
letter from Ella to-day saying that she was coming home either to-night or tomorrow and
bring Esther with her. [Esther and Elsie were relatives on Mrs. Alten’s side of the family.
They lived with their parents in Sturgis]
I intended going skating to-night, but it’s so dreadfully cold that I changed my mind. I got
a card from Lucille from Jackson to-day that she had written on the train. Dick called up
and said the sleigh ride was all off, but asked me to go to the Empress.
5
�Saturday, February 3
This is Frances Carr’s birthday and she gave a 1 o’clock luncheon. We had an awfully
good time and afterwards I went down to the library to get a monologue. I met the Peet
girls and they didn’t recognize me at first. Saturday night Esther came home with Ella.
The girls went to the Empress together and I went with Dick. I like him allright, but I
wish he were more exciting. Maybe it’s just me.
Sunday, February 4
Sunday morning Ella, Esther and I went to the Methodist Church. It certainly is pretty,
but the old man made me feel like a sinner. Sunday afternoon I stayed home all alone
with Grosmama [German for grandmother] & studied. I don’t know yet just what the
trouble was. Later on I made some dandy fudge with walnuts in it. Sunday night Dick
came over and we had a lot of fun.
Monday, February 5
Monday morning I got down as far as VanWestenverg’s when I found I had forgotten my
theme and came way back after it. After school I came home and read and studied, and
Norm and Ella went to the Empress in the afternoon and then had a little lunch over here.
Norm has been awfully sick and he certainly is thin. I never saw a person change so
much, but still he is the same old Norm. I went skating with Russell Monday night.
Tuesday, February 6
School
I got my first letter from Lucille to-day and find that she can only write on Sundays and
Thursdays. She said she cried quite a bit at first, but was beginning to like it better now.
Tuesday night Harriet McKeon went skating up at Cherry and Eastern[?] and we
certainly had a dandy time. We met Norm Schuldt, and Dave Mendols[?] and skated with
them all the time.
Wednesday, February 7
School
After school we had a K.E.E. meeting and Donna Baert was taken in. I studied after
supper.
Thursday, February 8
School
After school we had J.F.E. meeting over here and planned a stag party for a week from
Saturday. All that bothers me is where I am going to get some clothes. After supper I
went skating with Harriet and Ella and wrote my theme. Howard Sneide[?] is working
over at the drug store now and it was his night off so he showed us a pretty good time.
Friday February 9
School
6
�Instead of coming home after school and trying on my blouse I went to the Maj. with
Francis VanLeeuwen, and saw “Wallace Reid.” Wonderful man! When I came home I
found that my blouse had been started, but far from finished. H. McKeon and I went
skating to-night and picked up Dave, Norm, Jack Pluene. I can’t say that I think much of
Jack. Dick called up before I left and asked me to go to the Empress Sat. night, and to
come up Sunday night.
Saturday, February 10
This morning I helped around the house part of the time and Ella went to see some people
about pictures. About 10:30, I started to sew on my blouse and sewed steady until supper
time, but I finished my blouse. Saturday night I went to the Empress with Dick and sat
right in back of Leon Petsch.
There was a little Jew named George Washington Cohen who had never told a lie and
wanted to be President of the U.S. One day he was forced to tell one good then he said,
“Now I am such a dam liar that I can never be President of the U.S. but then, Secretary of
State isn’t such a bad job either.
Sunday, February 11
This morning I was surely going to church, but my hair needed washing so badly and I
had so much studying to do that I didn’t go, but Mamma and Ella went. Sunday
afternoon, I reread a book that I had to review in school the next day, and did the rest of
my studying. Ella went to Githa’s (the girl that is going out west with us) and had my
mandolin strung. Now if I could play it. Sunday night, Norm and Dick came up, and Dick
froze his ear too, by the way, it was 23 below zero Sunday night.
Monday, February 12
I wore my new blouse to school this morning and told my story in English. I didn’t even
get scared, that’s something wonderful for me. This afternoon Harriet, Katheryn, Frances
VanLeeuwen, and myself went to the Strand. Harriet and I were going [to the Strand
crossed out] skating to-night but it is so dreadfully cold that I backed out. I got a letter
from Lucille to-day and also answered it.
Tuesday, February 13
School
I stayed at school until about four o’clock to-night fooling with H. and K. I got a letter
from Lucille and it looks as though she was beginning to like it. After supper H., Helen
W., and I went skating at the Lake [Reeds]. It was just great and they even had music.
Wednesday, February 14
This is Valentine’s day and I only got one valentine from Viola. Hugh gave me my ring
but not my pin so I asked for it and he said he would bring it to-morrow. I came home
from school with Helen and LaVanche and we bought an angel food cake and divided it
into three pieces and ate it on the way home. A lady talked to us to-day about being
patriotic but it appears to me that if there was less patriotism, we wouldn’t have war.
7
�I went skating with H. McKeon again to-night and Paul Tansley[?] asked to take me
home but H. and I always come home together.
Thursday, February 15
School
Ella met me after school and we went to see Githa’s baby. It certainly is a wonderful
baby! We got home awfully late so we just took a bite and ran all the way down to the car
because we wanted to see the soldier boys come in. We just missed the Lyon car so we
ran all the way over to the change and missed that but just caught the Wealthy. We saw
Avery in the lines and shook hand with him when they were marching past. Afterwards,
we went to the Majestic with the Degans.
Friday, February 16
School
There was a “Good Cheer Vaudeville” after school that certainly was good. After that
Frances VanLeeuwen, Ella, and I went down town. Ella had some shopping to do so Fran
and I came home to-gether. Avery came up to see Ella to-night.
Harriet and I had intended to go skating to-night, but it’s so warm that everything (ice)
has melted.
Saturday, February 17
Everything went along as usual as it usually does on Saturday. They brought the Ford
back and supposing all was well and we were going to take it out this afternoon. We
cranked and cranked and cranked some more and then the d--- thing wouldn’t go. Papa
certainly did some cussing that I never heard before. This afternoon Frances Carr and I
went to the Maj. and saw the “Wax Model.” To-night I cranked at that thing again, but in
vain. It’s giving me muscle and it is increasing my vocabulary. There was a Kitchen
Shower for Gladys Zink to-night at Eleanor Stinchcomb’s and we just had a picnic.
Turned somersaults and slid down the banister and everything!
Sunday, February 18
I am several days behind again so it will be rather hard for me to remember just what
happened. Sunday morning we had the man come to start the machine and in the
meantime he blew off the muffler so that it made so much noise everyone stared at us. I
took the folks to church and then was afraid that it wouldn’t start if I left it outside so I
rode around until they came out.
About four o’clock Avery Gilleo and Duke Ferguson came over to have lunch and spend
the evening with us. We drove over to Bernice’s about five o’clock and brought them
home with us. We danced and had a lot of fun.
Monday, February 19
I can’t remember much as to what just did happen to-day. After school Dorothy Cowin
and I went downtown and I bought some rubbers ($1.00) It just poured when we started,
8
�but before long it hailed and then snowed. We stopped in at Jandorf’s and got some pie a
la mode. Gee! I love it. I guess we got some candy too and then walked all the way home.
I think Hugh gave my pin to me to-day.
Tuesday, February 20
School
LaVanche and I came home from school today and on the way a perfectly strange fellow
in a big machine asked us to go out Friday, but we didn’t go. LaVanche wouldn’t. Ella
and I entertained for Gladys Zink to-night and got her an electric toaster. We just had a
peach of a time. We danced, roasted marshmellows [marshmallows], ate, and Helen
Wren, Katheryn Baert, and Vera Forshund even smoked. We gave them some real strong
cigarettes that these fellows brought from Mexico It didn’t even make them sick.
Wednesday, February 21
School
There was a K.E.E. meeting tonight and I had a peachy time. We danced afterwards and I
am some leader. It’s lots of fun to dance with girls if you just have sense enough to
realize it and put those fool boys out of your head. They’re not half good enough for girls
anyway and then we lose our heads over them. The machine was brought back today and
it starts (can you imagine that).
Thursday, February 22
This is Washington’s birthday and we celebrated by going to see Annette Kellerman in
the “Daughter of the Gods.” Eight of us went together and sat in the 11th row of the
balcony. She certainly has a wonderful body and isn’t bashful about showing it. Mama
says I take after her in the latter. I hadn’t written to Lucille for a long time so I wrote her
a nice long letter. I took the machine out this morning and it was pretty good.
Friday, February 23
School
After school I went over to Frances Carr’s and told her everything that I didn’t want to. I
took the car from there down town and bought some silk net for my party dress and then
went home. Avery and Duke came up Friday night to bring their soldier suits for the
party. We tried them on which they [?] have and I’m just wild about them. They look
awfully cute and I hope we can get some like them for out west.
Saturday, February 24
We called for Helen W. and Hazel Clark in Nute [the car] and took them to the wedding
this afternoon. Gladys looked awfully sweet but deliver me! When they were getting into
the taxi they slipped and the groom sprained his ankle and was unconscious and Gladys
fainted. Tonight we had a stag party and I never laughed more. Some of the girls were
dressed so funny that I thought I would split and others were real good looking boys. I
had Duke Ferguson’s soldier suit on and I never saw anything I liked better, it looks
awfully cute. We had soft drinks, weenies, sandwitches (sandwiches), salad, pickles,
olives, pie a la mode and loads of everything.
9
�Sunday, February 25
I hope everyone doesn’t feel as badly as I do after a stag party. I never felt worse. I’m
sick-- such a cold. I can’t even think, say nothing about breathing, talking, smelling etc.
It’s 1 o’clock and we just left the supper table but I guess I’ll go to bed.
Monday, February 26
I never realized how time flew until I started this diary. It has been almost a week since I
wrote in this last and it seems only yesterday. I did not go to school today. I guess the
effects of the stag party and wedding were too much. I had the worst cold I ever had, ever
hope I have. Right after dinner I went down town [following text crossed out] [and had
the best] & bought some films and then Ella and I took some pictures of each other in our
soldier suits.
Tuesday, February 27
Nothing important.
Wednesday, February 28
School
I came home right after and studied for an English test that we were going to have
Thursday. After supper Duke and Ave[ry] came over and we had a lot of fun as usual.
Ave brought some new dance records up so that we could have a little change.
Thursday, February 29
School
Fran VanLeeuwen and I were going down town to-night but Miss James had Fran’s coat
so I sneaked in the office and got it. Then we went to the Isis and saw Carlyle Blackwell
some Man! Afterwards we went to Jandorf’s and got some pie a la mode. I wonder if I
will ever get sick of it.
Memoranda
This is Friday and I am caught up at last. We had our first class meeting to-night and it
certainly didn’t lack any pep. Govett’s orchestra even played for us. Some orchestra. I
came home with Harriet and was surprised to see that Ella had already made my
sandwitches. Harriet met me at Carlton and we went to Anna Broene’s for a K.E.E.
spread. We initiated some girls, danced, and had lots of fun.
Saturday, March 1
Saturday started out fine, but Oh how it ended. I got sick about 10 o’clock and I was the
sickest I ever came to be. I didn’t get up until about 5:00 and was feeling pretty good.
That is better. Russell called up and wanted to come up, but I didn’t feel quite that well.
Norm came up and I went to bed at 8 o’clock.
10
�Sunday, March 2
I really intended to go to church Sunday morning but when I was all ready I thought I
would finish up by putting at little toilet water on my hair and the cork flew out and part
nigh drowned me. Avery, Dona, Don Mussen[?], and Duke came over for lunch. We had
loads of fun dancing etc. and I think something pretty good has started.
Monday, March 3
School
I don’t remember if anything in particular happened during the afternoon. Monday night
there was a little informal dance at the All Soul’s Church and Ave, Ella, I went in Newt
[the car]. I had lots of fun as usual and afterwards we went to Sweets.
Tuesday, March 4
I received 2 letters from Mike [written above the date]
School
I was informed of the fact, Monday night that I was to give a little speech in K.E.E. on an
Alten exhibition at the Pantland [Pantlind] so I went down Tuesday afternoon and looked
at the Pictures. It is a mighty good bunch of pictures and I enjoyed it ever so much.
Tuesday night Russell came up and I made him that long promised candy. By the way
this is Duke’s 20th birthday.
Wednesday, March 5
School
We [had a] K.E.E. meeting today and I gave my little talk. As it happened I didn’t get a
bit fussed and was quite pleased with myself. Conceited! We served Marqueritas and
cocoa. Umm! Wednesday night Ave, Duke, Ella and I went to the Empress in Newt [the
car].
Thursday, March 6
This is Thursday and I am caught up again. I got our marks to-day E.G.G.G. Isn’t that
great. After school LaVanche, Dorothy and I bumed [bummed] around downtown and
got some pie a la mode. I wonder if I’ll ever get sick of it.
Friday, March 7
It has been just exactly one week since I have written anything in this so I guess it will be
rather brief for a few days. It seems as though we planned a hike to Sparta Saturday but
seeing this weather was so bad we didn’t go. Duke called up Friday night and I probably
would have gone Sat. if I hadn’t thought I was going on this hike.
Saturday, March 8
I helped around the house Sat morning until about 10:30 and then went down town with
Ella. I picked out a suit I liked in the Royal and bought a black hat. If I remember rightly
we went down quite a few times and spent the day bumming. I didn’t do much of
anything Sat night.
11
�Sunday, March 9
Sunday morning was an awfully busy time but I can’t recollect just what we did Sunday
afternoon Duke and Ave came over and we went out in this barn and shot. The boys
stayed for lunch and then we went to the Maj. and saw Marguerite Clarke. I lost my
muffler in the meantime, but I don’t know how it happened unless it was kicked out of
Newt [the car].
Monday, March 10
I had 2 subjects and a theme to write before school so I got there rather early. I can’t
remember just what did happen the rest of the day. It was so long ago and my memory is
terribly poor.
Tuesday, March 11
We had a J.F.E. meeting after school at Ester Attwood’s. We discussed having a house
party spring vacation, but somehow or other it fell through. I received a nice long letter
from Lucille but I’ll bet she’s fibbing when she says she likes it. Duke called up about
7:15. Went to see Allyn Stinchcomb.
Wednesday, March 12
Dorothy Cowin came home with me after school and we put the chains on Newt [the car]
and went down to Allyn’s. She is going to the Sanatorium next Monday, but I must say
she has just as much pep as ever. We drove out to the Boat club, etc. I had just loads of
studying to do until Duke called up and wanted to come over. Ave came up too and we
spent most of the time playing poker.
Thursday, March 13
I just became aware of the fact that my days and dates don’t jibe, but it’ll be all the same
a year from now. Went down town after school & bought a sealing wax set for Mike.
When I got home at five, I found out that Mama expected me right home and had wanted
me to take her away. Went to Fannie’s to take my material over. Went to South High to
see an entertainment. Viola danced there.
[March 14 – 16 left blank to correct dates]
Saturday, March 17
Mrs. Hoffman [who lived on the corner of Fulton and Baynton] died this morning
[written above the date]
Made a stab at cleaning up the house. Fran VanLeeuwen, Fran Carr, and Dorothy all
called me up and asked me to go to the Maj. so we had a regular party. We saw Mary
Miles Minter in the “Innocence of Lizette.” We giggled, laughed, and made perfect fools
of ourselves all afternoon but we certainly had a dandy time. You know you can have lots
of fun doing nothing if you have the company. Monday is Lucille’s birthday so I made
and sent her a box of candy with a sealing wax set.
12
�Sunday, March 18
This morning Ella, Newt [the car], and I went to the All Soul’s Church. After dinner I
took Viola to Kathleen’s, Mamma & Papa to Kindels, and Grosmama over on the west
side. Dorothy went along and then I stopped in there a few minutes on the way home.
When I got home Duke & Ave were here and Duke brought me a dandy bag of candy.
We rode out to the Boat Club but it was all closed up so we took some pictures and came
back. Had lunch and went to the Maj.
Monday, March 19
Mike’s birthday
School
After school the senior Sorosis [Central High club] gave a party for all the senior girls.
Had a good time & came home with LaVanche and Harriet. After supper Ella, Viola, and
I went over to F & M’s to lengthen my suit. The machine was only running on 2
cylinders but it went like hele [hell].
Tuesday, March 20
School
I went downtown with the bunch, if I remember rightly. After supper Avery came over
and then he and Ella took me over on the West side so that I could have my suit fitted.
It’s dark brown, but dreadfully good looking. On the way back we stopped for Duke at
the armory and then came up here. I called for the folks at Kutsche’s and went to bed at
about 12.
Wednesday, March 21
This is the first day of spring and it certainly is wonderful. Ella was going to Alma this
noon, but the pictures hadn’t gone she waited until Thursday morning. There was K.E. E.
meeting after school and of course I had a good time. I believe I could have a good time
doing anything. Harriet and I watched the boys practice for “Hip-Hip-Hooray” and then
went home together. I went to bed at 7:45.
Thursday, March 22
Ella took the six fifty train to Alma this morning and Ave went down to the station. Talk
about your good kids. I took Newt [the car] and went down to get the lining for my suit
this afternoon. I bought some awfully good looking gold skinners satin and then took it
over. Duke, Donna, Dan and I went to the Empress to-night and sat in the box. We had
Newt [the car] and stopped in at Sweet’s. I’m afraid I bust [bussed] Duke.
Friday, March 23
School
There was a J.F.E. spread at Roberta Cassidy’s to-night and we took Virginia Campbell
and Katherine Spencer in. They all went to the Maj. afterward but [I] was going to a
dance at the Armory so I didn’t go. Helen called up and said that there was such a jam
that they couldn’t all get in so we went to the movies instead. Don, Donna, Duke and I.
Donna and Don went home afterwards and Duke and I went up to the Chop Suey. Some
life!
13
�Saturday, March 24
Dorothy, Mama, and I went down town in the afternoon and I got 2 awfully cute waists
(blouses). Saturday night Ave came up and Duke and I went to see “Hip-Hip-Hooray”
with Newt [the car]. I[t] certainly was good.
Sunday, March 25
Ella and I really were going to church this morning, but the machine got stuck out in back
and by the time we got it out it was too late. That’s a fact. Ave and Duke came up in the
afternoon and we went out to the club. It hadn’t been opened up yet so we came back
home over lunch and then I took Ave and Ella to the Maj. and then we went to Donna’s.
Monday, March 26
I went down town this morning and met Norm Chamberlain at the Studio. Gee! I like
him. Then I made an appointment with the dentist and Ella and I took Lessa and the baby
out for a little ride. Dorothy and I had our pictures taken in the afternoon and then I came
home and took Grosmama, Mama, and Ella down town.
Tuesday, March 27
I took Mama down town this morning and she bought a hat. This afternoon Dorothy and I
went down together and got some stuff for a black net hat. We left the machine on
downtown and when we came back there was a little slip pasted on the windshield,
stating that I should appear at the police station at 9 in the morning. What am I coming to
next!? I stayed over at Dorothy’s for supper and we sewed on our hats.
Wednesday, March 28
Wednesday morning I went down to the police station the first thing. Seeing I had never
been pinched before he said he would let me off this time but I would have to pay double
($20) next time. This is the first appearance I have ever made in the police court.
Finish[ed] my hat and sewed in the afternoon, cute hat. Went to Beta meeting and Duke
called for me.
Thursday, March 29
This afternoon I went to the Maj. with Dorothy and I had an appointment with the Dentist
at 1 o’clock afterward we all went to a peace meeting at the Theater. Dr. Freeman was
chairman of the meeting and he is a wonderful broadminded man. They wouldn’t let
them have it at the Armory and Mrs. Bellman was even threatened for giving them the
Theatre. Theater for peace. I am for peace heart & soul but it looks like war now.
Friday, March 30
Fran VanLeeuwen called for me to go to Fran Carr’s this morning. They have a dandy
new Hudson Super Six. We stayed at Carr’s for lunch and went to the Maj. in the
afternoon. Ave, Ella, Duke and I went to the Empress that night. I got my suit today.
14
�Saturday, March 31
Sat morning I cleaned up the house and washed a couple of waists. In the afternoon I took
Grosmama to Powers Theater, came home and took Mama and then Ella and I went out
to the boat club but it started to rain as soon as we got out there so we came right back.
We had a terrible rain and hail storm on the way home.
Sunday, April 1 Memoranda [skipped date and corrected it on the 12th]
Sunday morning Mama, Ella and I went in the All Souls Church. As soon as Mr.
Freeman finished his sermon he hurried away to catch a train for Washington to tell them
that a great many of us were for peace. Friday afternoon I went to see Mr. Beneker’s
[Gerrit Beneker] pictures and to a Socialist meeting at Power’s and if I ever get to vote I
hope I know enough to vote Socialist. Mr. Debs spoke. Sunday night Duke came over.
Monday, April 2 [written on page for April 1]
School
Almost everyone is certain that war is going to be declared when congress meets
tomorrow and Hugh is glad as anything. Duke wants war too and somehow there seems
to be something brutish or wrong about people like that and I won’t have anything to do
with them no matter how nice they are otherwise. Ella and I went to a Samaritan meeting
Monday night and Avery called for us.
Tuesday, April 3 [written on page for April 2]
Hugh came up and said goodbye to everybody this morning and thought sure that they
were going to Chicago by train. I went down to the dentist after school and had a nerve
taken out. Duke came up after supper and we were going to the armory but it got too late
so we went to the Strand instead.
Wednesday, April 4 [written on page for April 3]
Hugh was back at school today and can’t go to until war is declared. Too bad! We had
K.E.E. meeting to-night and then I went down town to meet mama and had to wait 2
hours. Ella and Ave went to the Empress to-night. I guess Duke is broke, as usual.
Thursday, April 5 [written on page for April 4]
I went to the dentist after school and then met the girls. Went to a church supper and then
saw Jack Pickford in “The Dummy” at the Idlehour with Donna.
Friday, April 6 [written on page for April 5]
Came home after school and made Mama’s hat. Friday night we all went to a dance at the
All Soul’s Church and had lots of fun. I went with Duke but there were a lot of extra
fellows so they had “robber” dances. Great.
Friday’s news. [written on page for April 6]
This is good friday and war with Germany was also declared today.
Saturday, April 7 [written on page for April 6]
15
�Went down to the K.E.E. pictures taken this morning. Stayed down for lunch with
Dorothy and then and bought some blue pajama cloth. Cut some one piece pajamas out at
Dorothy’s and started them. Cutest things I ever saw.
Sunday, April 8 [written on page for April 7]
Sunday morning Easter, by the way, Papa, Ella & I went to church. Mr. Freeman talked
on war and peace and certainly had a fine sermon. I think I could get an education
hearing him talk. Duke sent me some beautiful sweet peas and roses. Didn’t do much of
anything Sunday afternoon and Sunday night Duke came up without even calling up.
Monday, April 9 [written on page for April 8]
I haven’t written in this for a week and don’t remember what I did do.
Monday, April 10 [written on page for April 9]
Same as Monday
Wednesday, April 11 [written on page for April 10]
Lester Newman asked me to the Central Hop but I said that I was going to a theatre party.
Pervairikator (liar). [prevaricator]
Thursday, April 12 [written on page for April 11]
School
Got excused at 12:30 and took Mama to a funeral. Got a flat tire in front of Aunt Julia’s
[Mrs. Alten’s twin sister] but I hadn’t anymore than thought about it when I [a] young
man came across the street and fixed it for me. Lucky girl.
April 12
Must have skipped a day [April 1 was skipped].
Friday, April 13 [dates are now correct]
School
After school, Dorothy, Fran VanLeeuwen and I went to the Empress. We bought 10-cent
seats and the man let us sit down stairs and we marched way down in front. More luck
and nerve. Went to the Sock and Buskin play Friday night with Duke. He also asked me
to go to the Central Hop.
Saturday, April 14
This morning Mama & I burned the dry grass on the side of the house. Went down to get
some shoes later on but they didn’t have their oxfords in yet. Saturday night Fran Carr
and I went down to the Liberty.
Sunday, April 15
Papa, Ella and I went to church this morning and Mr. Freeman talked about the new
Russian Republic. He seems to think that it is a wonderful thing. Dorothy and I went to
the Lib. this afternoon. She came over for lunch and Ella, Ave, Dorothy and I went to the
Strand.
16
�Monday, April 16 [this entry continues from April 16-April 19 although she wrote in the
day next to the date on each page]
Came right home intending to make a waist but no one was home to cut it so I studied.
Went down town later in the afternoon and brought the folks home. Went to Samaritan
meeting at 7:30 but it was postponed. All you hear around hear [here] is war and I never
had more enemies in my life, because I am a pacifist and more over of German descent.
Almost every boy in school has enlisted and there
[written on page for Tuesday, April 17]
are very few girls that are not [moving?] or doing some relief work. I don’t know whether
I am wrong or not but I haven’t done anything of that sort yet. I see where there is going
to be a terrible winter before us and I guess the best any of us can do is to raise as much
food as possible. I guess our Western trip is knocked in the head. Emma, Frank [younger
brother of Mrs. Alten], and Billy [Frank’s adopted son] are going to move to Houston
Texas and
[written on page for Wednesday, April 18]
are going to get in here Sat. We had patriotic assembly today and it certainly aroused all
the patriotism there is in one. It just made me sick. I can’t see enough reason for war and
I think it is terrible for us to get mixed up in this terrible slaughter too. The boys are
enlisting and do farm work now and they look a little better to me. At K.E.E. meeting
several of the girls gave talks on the war and I certainly had to bite my lip more
[written on page for Thursday, April 19]
than once. They don’t seem to think that the Germans are even human and all they want
to do is killem. I never saw such narrow-mindedness or insanity. Ave proposed to Ella
last night. She hasn’t been feeling well for quite a while and today Dr. Wells said that he
had to go to bed for a week. Nervous and poor heart. Poor Kid she wants to be healthy
like I am.
[April 20 – April 21 left blank]
Sunday, April 22
Frank, Emma, & Billy came.
[April 23 – April 27 left blank]
Saturday, April 28
Saturday went down town & did a little shopping. Sat. afternoon Em, Billy and I went
over on the West Side. Saturday night Duke and I went to the Art club party. Letter from
Lucille.
Sunday, April 29
Got up at 9:30 & Mama, Ella and I went to church. They are even urging the girls to drill
so you can see the feeling around here. Quite a few of the boys have already gone on
17
�farms. The conscription bill has been passed including all men between 19 & 40. Duke
and Ave came up in the afternoon. Ave traded in our old car & $25 and got a Hupmobile.
Duke & I went to the Strand and then the Sweets shop.
Monday, April 30
School
I found out that there is going to be a Helios party next Sat. and now I have to ask
somebody again. Billy is running around in his diaper and shirt and now is too cute for
words. It’s only 8 but I ‘m tired so I guess I’ll go to bed.
Tuesday, May 1 [written on Memoranda page]
School
I asked Thorn[e] Brown to the Helios party this morning and he accepted. He acted
awfully glad too. There was a J.F.E. meeting after school at Ruth Chamberlains and we
planned a picnic up the river in several weeks. Duke called up and asked me to go to the
Maj. and I went. I like him a lot better than I used to and he’s awfully nice to me. Duke
asked me to go to Miss Hollister’s party at the Pantlind the same night as the Helios party
so I guess I won’t be able to go.
[May 1 left blank]
Wednesday, May 2
School
Special K.E.E. meeting. Hugh was up at school with his uniform on and he certainly
looked dandy but I feel awfully sorry for the poor kid I don’t understand him. I wish I
knew how he felt toward me. Dorothy came over after school & we talked war. Her
brother is going to enlist. I took Mama over on the west side and then the whole bunch
went over to Cusick's. I am here with Viola taking care of Billy.
Thursday, May 3
School
This afternoon Dorothy and I went to the Empress and sat in the 10-cent seats. It was one
of the best bills I’ve ever seen there. We bought an awfully cute combination suit pattern
together and some material on a sale. Mr. Jandorf has been accused of being a German
spy several times and everyone is boycotting him. He found a yellow paper on his
machine the other day, representing a yellow streak. I wonder what will happen next.
[Saturday crossed out] May 4, Friday
School
Went downtown with Dorothy and then came home and took Emmy on the west side.
Went to the Maj. with Julia, Emma, Viola, and saw Pauline Fredrick.
Saturday, May 5
18
�I was down at school all Monday decorating for the Helios Party. In the afternoon Ella
and I stopped in school for a minute and met Duke and Jack. We went down town, did
some shopping. I then came home. Went to the party Saturday night with Thorn[e]e
Brown. After this party we went to Miss Hollister’s party at the Pantlind and danced until
12. Had a peach of a time.
Sunday, May 6
Sunday morning Harriet and I broke into the school with a skeleton K.E.E. and took our
junk home. Duke and Ave came up in the afternoon and seeing as it was raining we
didn’t go up the river. Duke and I had a sort of fight, at any rate I had a perfectly rotten
time. Learned a little about cribbage Sunday night.
Monday, May 7
School
A wonderful case started on Thorn[e]’s side and that’s all I’ve heard all day. Saturday he
asked me to the Senior Play and a Masonic party Friday night. Saw Marguerite Clark this
afternoon. Cut a combination and started it to-night.
Tuesday, May 8
School
I came right home after school and picked up a little and did my studying. After supper I
took the folks out to Blanchard’s and then when I got home Harriet, Jack Fowler, Duke
and Ave were over. We had a lot of fun.
Wednesday, May 9
School
There was a K.E.E. meeting after school to-night and I gave a little article on world
citizenship. Took Billy out for a while and then went over on the west side with the folks.
Thursday, May 10
School
Skipped 3rd hr. and Thorn[e] and I went down to Sweet’s and then out to the Lake. We
caught a little mud turtle and brought it to school. After school Mrs. Utley, Harriet
McKeon, and I went up the river. I paddled about 4 miles and sure am some strong girl. It
was just wonderful. Flower [flour] is $19 a barrel.
Friday, May 11
School
Well, I’ve found someone to sympathize with me at last. Thorn[e]e is strongly proGerman, but about the only person I know of that is and it certainly is encouraging.
Friday night Ella, Ave, Thorn[e] and I went to the Empress and it certainly was good. I
sat right next to Louis Edison too, my 6’6” friend.
Saturday, May 12
19
�I accomplished an awful lot to-day. I did a lot around the house this morning and then
washed the machine. Went down town this afternoon and to a K.E.E. entertainment tonight. Received a letter from Lucille sent through her mother and it seems to me as
though she were in little less than a prison. Has been quarantined for months & can only
write 1 letter a week.
Sunday, May 13
Went to church this morning & so did Thorn[e], Mama and Papa drove to Greenville with
the Kutches. Ave, Ella, Thorn[e] and I went up the river this afternoon. Duke called up
and asked me to go up but I had allready planned on going with Thorn[e]. Duke asked me
to the opening party providing he was still here.
Monday, May 14
School.
Played tennis for the first time at Thorn[e]’s the fifth hour today. I am some player. An
English woman [spoke] to us in assembly to-day and she certainly did picture the
Prussians as heartless Brutes. No wonder the people over here are so one sided. We never
hear any truth. Went to the Maj. to-night and saw a picture in which they made fun of the
pacifists.
Tuesday, May 15
I had a sore foot to-day and didn’t go to school, but more fun why I never had a better
time. I intended to go in the afternoon, but the bunch was over at Tom’s court and we all
decided to skip. J. Stacy Harriet McKeon Thorn[e] and I went out to the lake & fiddled
around in an old row boat with a couple of boards. Came back & went to mock elections
& little party afterwards with Thorn[e]. Sweets. Played at playgrounds at Lincoln Park.
Wonderful time.
Wednesday, May 16
School
Played tenis 5th hour. Thorn[e] asked me to Rifle Club party. Went over to Dorothy’s and
planned house party. Thorn[e] asked to come up. Duke & Ave came up.
Thursday, May 17
School
Came home after school and took the machine down to the garage. Took the folks out
riding. Duke came up to-night. The mock elections were as follows.
K. Barton – smallest girl
Harriet McKeon – wittiest girl
Helen Bloomer – most popular girl.
etc. [complete list is published in yearbook]
Friday, May 18
School
20
�Went out to the Boat Club and played tenis with Margaret Utley, Ruth Minor and
Katheryn Baert. I sure am some rotten player. Went to the Senior Play with Thorn[e].
Saturday, May 19
Skipped third hour and saw the parade. Played tennis 5th hour. Took folks out riding after
school. Duke came up after supper. [Box around following text] Harriet is going to leave
school and go down on the farm Sat. Shoot it!! [end of box] I guess I’m mixed up. Did
my smock. Went out to the Imp. with Duke, Dorothy, Jack.
Sunday, May 20
Washed the machine. Took Emma and Ella to church. afternoon Went up the river with
Duke and Jack. Came home and fried winnies [weenies].
Monday, May 21
School
Rain. Majestic with Thorn[e], Eva Prince, and Jack Pluene.
Tuesday, May 22
School
J.F.E. meeting at Helen Bloomer’s. Planned House party at Macatawa for next weekend.
Duke came up. Told him I was coming down the river with Thorn[e].
Wednesday, May 23
School
Thorn[e] took me downtown. Met Mrs. Cusick & bought some clothes for Lucille. Wrote
to Lucille. Went out to Dorothy’s.
Thursday, May 24
School
Dorothy came home with me and asked Thorn[e] down on the house party. Took Emma
& Bills over on the west end to say goodbye. Got some clothes ready to take to the house
party. Emma and Billy left on the 11:55 train and I took them down.
Friday, May 25
School
Skipped after the 3rd hr. and came home to get ready for the house party. Dorothy and
Helen Bradford rode down with the Cassidy’s and Fran Carr, Fran VanLeeuwen, Donna
and I went down on the 3 o’clock car. The weather just cleared up at about noon Friday
and it sure was great. Roberta, K. Baert, and I left together the first night.
Saturday, May 26
Well, I should judge we went to bed at about 3 o’clock last night, or rather this morning.
Taffy Spence came down on the eight o’clock car and we certainly did chum up. I’m just
wild about her. Had a peach of a time Sat. went to Holland etc. The $50,000 cement walk
that was built there last year is almost all washed down & if the water doesn’t stop
21
�coming up there won’t be any Mac. [Macatawa] in a couple of years. Taffy and I lay
down and the swing with our clothes on and stayed awake all night. Never slept a wink.
Sunday, May 27
The boys came down Sunday.
K. Baert – John Stacey
D. Baert – Bob MacKinsey [Mackenzie]
Ella – Ave
Dorothy – Thorn[e] Brown
Fran Carr – Jack Fowler
Roberta – Mac Marshall
Taffy – Doug McCall
Doug is a peach
Monday, May 28
We just had a peach of a time Sunday. Had a big wennie [weenie] roast and went home
on the 8 o’clock car. I heard that Duke & Jack got drunk Sat. night and that rather spoiled
it for me. It makes me disgusted and I wish I knew what to do. I had a peach of a time
with Douglas & Taffy though so that rather made up for it.
Tuesday, May 29
School
Monday night was the big opening party at the boat club and I went with Duke. I was
rather lame[?] after the house party but I soon forgot that and had a peachy time. I am as
strong as an ox, nothing phases [fazes] me. After school I went over to Roberta’s for a
while and Taffy was there. Took Mama to the cemetery and then put up our lunch for the
Lowell Trip.
Wednesday, May 30
Decoration day.
Thorn[e], Ave, Ella & I left on the 6:35 train this morning with the boat club bunch. We
paddled down from there, about 38 miles, Paddled up the Thorneapple on the way and
went to Ada. Got back to the club at about 7 and Duke & Jack were up on the porch to
greet us. On the way home our street car & a machine bumped & had an awful smash up.
[May 31 left blank]
Friday, June 1 [written on Memoranda page]
School Night
Roberta, Judy Muir, Taffy, John Hancock, Doug and I went out to Ramona and [rode] on
the Derby about a dozen times. I like Doug awfully well.
[June 1 left blank]
Saturday, June 2
22
�Downtown twice bought the best looking blueish [bluish] green sikls [silk] for a sport suit
I ever saw. Fran Carr, Duke & Jack came up Sat night. Doug called up and asked to come
up Wednesday.
Sunday, June 3
I went to church and there sure was some excitement. Some wanted Mr. Freeman to talk
about the convention he attended in N.Y. for terms of peace and some didn’t. Everyone
talked and a lot [swore] in the church right there. Papa included. Fran Carr and I went out
to the G.R.Golf club and played tennis.
Monday, June 4
Came home & helped sew on my graduation dress. It was decided to only have one dress
instead of three this year on account of the war. My dress is white net with while taffeta
bodice. I’ve gotten two cards from Malcolm and from what he says I guess he’s awfully
lonesome. He is [at] Great Lake Training Camp in Chicago at present.
Tuesday, June 5
To-day we had to practically make my dress & we sure did do some tall hustling. Was
out riding in the afternoon as it happened it was raining and Ella and I didn’t have any
coats or hats when the machine busted & we had to borrow Papa’s and Ave’s coat &
walk home. Tuesday night was class night & now I suppose I’m almost grown up, who
knows. I don’t.
Wednesday, June 6
Sprained my ankle & didn’t go to school today. Went on a H.G.L. Winnie [weenie] roast
tonight with Doug Mcoll[?] Mr. Freeman spoke at Powers on the convention on terms of
peace and the repealing of the child labor act that he attended in New York. I think that
some of the people are beginning to appreciate him, but not nearly enough.
Thursday, June 7
School rained & has been raining every day for just ages. Taffy and I went over to
Roberta’s after school & made candy. I sure am crazy about Taffy. I wrote 4 letters
Thursday night. One to Harriet, Lucille, and Malcolm.
Friday, June 8
School
After school Taffy & I went over to Dorothy’s & acted silly. My but I had a good time.
Made my sandwiches over there & then went to a Kee [K.E.E.] spread at Alta Thomas’.
Went to a meeting at church to vote whether to keep Mr. Freeman or not. Duke came up
afterwards & we walked home together.
Saturday, June 9
We got the news this morning that Mr. Freeman and quite a few others had been arrested.
It’s makes me sick, he’s the most wonderful man I know. Took Mama over on the west
side & went out riding. Went on the Derby Sat night & out riding with Taffy, Tubhy
Muir, Alworth Christian, and Dwight Coulter.
23
�Sunday, June 10
Went to church and got Fran to go with us. Never spent a bluer Sunday in my life. Duke
asked me to go up the river but I couldn’t go. Went over to Taffy’s instead. Duke may
have had a rotten reputation once but I think he’s alright now. Mama doesn’t want me to
talk with him or have him up so I’ll have to do the next best thing. Some people are
unreasonable but we must humor them.
Monday, June 11
School
Duke wrote a letter to me in care of Gladys Goldsborough Tuesday. I pretty nearly got
canned out of school to-day. John Stacey and I were playing tennis and we got caught
going back. Miss Daniels took me to Miss James and talked to me for 35 minutes but it
all just seemed like a joke to me at the time and I didn’t care a bit.
Tuesday, June 12
Still Tuesday
Pounded square into her on the way back and didn’t know what else to do so I ran and
she sent John after me but I snook [snuck] where he couldn’t get me, in the girlsroom. It
was really loads of fun. Went over to Allyn Stinchcomb’s, she just got back from a
sanitarium but is looking fine. Mighty pretty.
Wednesday, June 13
Had a dreadful headache today and didn’t go to school. Mama[?] and Julia sewed on my
silk suit. Lucille came in on the 1 o’clock train & I went down to meet her. London[?]
was [?] so Mr. Cusick couldn’t go. She’s looking great and is [a] pretty girl. Took Allyn,
Lucille, Roberta & Taffy over on the West side with me.
[June 14 through June 30 skipped]
Sunday, July 1
I got so sick of writing in this old diary that I thought I would take a little rest. Sunday
morning Avery, Ella and I left G.R. for Sturgis at 9:30. We took a bunch of pictures
along and went on business. It was raining a little when we started and before long we
had an awful rain storm. It soon cleared up and everything was dandy. We came down
straight through Kalamazoo and the roads as a whole were good, but there were a few
awful pieces. We didn’t have a bit of trouble with Newt [the car] and arrived at 4:30.
There wasn’t any train out that night so Ave stayed and took the 3:46 A.M. train.
Monday, July 2
Monday morning I washed the machine [car] and then carted Ella around. Did the same
Monday afternoon & writing a bunch of cards.
[last entry in diary]
24
�25
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
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Image/jpg
Language
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eng
Type
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Image
Identifier
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RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_Diary_of_Camelia_Alten
Title
A name given to the resource
Diary of Camelia Alten
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, Camelia
Description
An account of the resource
Diary kept by Camelia Alten, daughter of artist Mathias Alten, during her senior year at Central High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan from January 1, 1917 through July 2, 1917. In it she chronicles the details of her school, family, and social life. Camelia discusses the sentiments and activities in Grand Rapids during the days before and after World War I was declared.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
World War, 1914-1918
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1917
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2b6ea2737f96f4ed62aa6e224831f463.jpg
518f59aec4feaaf88b1b6a1345d18c2a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00035
Title
A name given to the resource
Stained glass window designed by Mathias Alten for his home in Grand Rapids
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Description
An account of the resource
Stained glass window designed by Mathias Alten for his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/24519754835fedc5216426c51f879850.jpg
46d4e7cf252fff08232758e565c44907
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00036a
Title
A name given to the resource
Cover of Commonwealth magazine painted by Mathias Alten
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Description
An account of the resource
Muskiteeto and Modern Home Heating May 1921 cover illustrating an article in The Commonwealth: A magazine for workers painted by Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1921
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/9c205b28433f6e8180218dde300ca550.jpg
6145a3a500e3abf7563355eb464dcc7a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00037
Title
A name given to the resource
Illustration from The Commonwealth magazine painted by Mathias Alten
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Description
An account of the resource
Illustration of scene from Wolverine Brass Works in Grand Rapids Michigan from February 1921 cover of The Commonwealth: A magazine for workers, painted by Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1921
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/21288a764917a6a33625db6488cd51cb.jpg
22e7a95f82e6f5c8e387f2faa892fc2d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00038a
Title
A name given to the resource
Cover of Commonwealth magazine painted by Mathias Alten
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Description
An account of the resource
Man repairing machine, December 1920 cover illustrating an article in The Commonwealth: A magazine for workers painted by Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1920
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/85db49d66ef09b3e41a97fcec1c829a3.jpg
209efff4b8c70df405512bb493c5305e
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00039a
Title
A name given to the resource
Cover of Commonwealth magazine painted by Mathias Alten
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Description
An account of the resource
What I get out of Making School Desks September 1921 cover illustrating an article in The Commonwealth: A magazine for workers painted by Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1921
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/28c94d7573073538fd426d1fc171881b.jpg
281522296f1e257766d99210e16985ae
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00040a
Title
A name given to the resource
Cover of Commonwealth magazine painted by Mathias Alten
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Description
An account of the resource
John Segar, cabinet maker Grand Rapids Chair Co. October 1921 cover illustrating an article in The Commonwealth: a magazine for workers painted by Mathias Alten
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1921
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a85d2a2ce3175bc9427f2221f5961968.jpg
3a215663e2a831b9e0ffbb7406c1f47f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00041a
Title
A name given to the resource
Cover of Commonwealth magazine painted by Mathias Alten
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Description
An account of the resource
The making of automobile tires August 1921 cover illustrating an article in The Commonwealth: A magazine for workers painted by Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1921
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5550253ea229c56b92669d5ce5af2bea.jpg
23ed0b65e9c78f3caaa098a79ef2e0cf
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00043a
Title
A name given to the resource
Cover of Commonwealth magazine painted by Mathias Alten
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Description
An account of the resource
Scene in Wolverine Brass Works Grand Rapids, Michigan, February 1921 cover illustrating an article in The Commonwealth: A magazine for workers painted by Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1921
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/099aef73b51075a510c9b677b5d19b17.jpg
79005379d6ac10a9ada7b901b2a44195
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mathias J. Alten Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Description
An account of the resource
Digitized photographs, artworks, and diary transcript from the papers of West Michigan painter, Mathias J. Alten (1871-1938) represent one of the most important collections in the holdings of both the University Library's Special Collections and the University Art Gallery. Alten, a German native who came to Grand Rapids as a youth, is a celebrated American regionalist often referred to as the Dean of Michigan Painters. The photographs and papers document his family life and career and support the collection of Alten paintings owned by the University.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers (RHC-28)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Image/jpg
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1893 - 1929
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/456">Mathias J. Alten papers, RHC-28</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-28_MAlten_00044a
Title
A name given to the resource
Cover of Commonwealth magazine painted by Mathias Alten
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Description
An account of the resource
Wheels--The world's oldest, greatest and simplest invention"" April 1921 cover illustrating an article in The Commonwealth: A magazine for workers painted by Mathias Alten.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Alten, M. (Mathias), 1871-1938
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Artists--Michigan
Painters
Photographs
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
image/jpeg
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1921