BOY AT A STREET MEETING
“I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth he shall be
lent to the Lord. . . .”
1 SAMUEL 1:28
A
smile played at the corners of her thin, stern mouth and tears of joy
welled in her blue eyes that warm morning of June 11, 1901, as Johanna
DeHaan watched fifteen-year-old John, her eldest son, leave for school.
To her, there was no finer lad in the town of Zeeland, Michigan, nor
elsewhere throughout the surrounding Dutch colony. She dabbed her eyes
with her white apron, taking care that her younger sons, Ralph and
Martin, didn’t see her and misunderstand her tears.
From a
window of the two-story red brick home on the corner of Lincoln and
Peck Streets, Johanna, a plumpish woman of thirty-five, watched her son
disappear on his way toward Zeeland High School on Main Street. Then
she returned to her kitchen chores, remembering last night’s discussion
with her husband.
“Reitze, it’s time we made some decision
regarding John’s further schooling. He’s finishing ninth grade, and
it’s not too early for us to start planning how we’ll send him to
college.”
Reitze DeHaan was the town cobbler, a gentle,
practical man who wanted the best for his family, though most of the
time he made not much more than a dollar a day, hardly enough to assure
each of his children a college education.
Johanna, who most
certainly had more than an equal vote in family decisions, suggested
they should tighten up even more on their spending and begin looking
into the matter of a loan for John’s advanced schooling, likely at Hope
College in nearby Holland, Michigan.
By the light of a kerosene
lamp, the DeHaans talked of the professions and occupations that John
might study for: businessman, lawyer, doctor, preacher. . . . Of
course, only John himself, who had not yet said what he wanted to be,
could really decide, they concluded. “How nice it would be if God
called him to be a minister,” mused Johanna. Reitze agreed that this
would be the fulfillment of their dreams and prayers.
Before
school that Tuesday morning, June 11, Johanna had shared with John the
news that they were definitely planning to send him to college.
John’s
face brightened and he looked past his mother out the window as if
trying to penetrate the future. “Let’s see, I’m fifteen now, and by the
time I’m twenty-two, the Lord willing,
I will be a minister.”
These words sent an electric tingle down Johanna’s spine, and she pondered them as John rode his bike toward Zeeland High.
That
afternoon, following school, John and a friend, Herman Boone, rode
their bikes to a lake-like stretch of the Black River west of Zeeland
called Boone’s River. With other school friends, they gathered water
lilies for botany class. The fun was over and the others were starting
home when John and Herman called, “There are some nicer lilies out
there; we’re going to stay and get them. We’ll catch up with you on our
bikes.”
What happened after that was never fully known. Harryand
Thomas Vander Pels, of Zeeland, who were fishing, saw the two boys
picking water lilies about 4:45 that afternoon. As they left to fish
farther upstream, the two boys were stripping for a swim. Then about
6:30 the two men returned to the spot where the boys had been and
noticed their clothes on the riverbank, but the boys were nowhere in
sight. Afraid that the boys might have drowned, the fishermen began
raking the bottom of the river with their cane poles. Within fifteen
minutes they discovered the boys’ bodies in about six feet of water and
about six feet apart.
* * *
For
Johanna and Reitze DeHaan, the dream of having their eldest son become
a minister had been shattered within a few hours. The gentle,
shimmering Black River had become a slithering, greedy monster,
snuffing out the lives of the two teenagers. And John’s last words to
his mother, which had thrilled Johanna’s heart, were to linger only as
memories and suggest what might have been.
While young John had
enjoyed attending church services with his family at the First
Christian Reformed Church in Zeeland and had taken his catechism
classes seriously, neither his brother Ralph, the next oldest, nor the
youngest, Martin, showed the inclinations that John had exhibited.
Eleven-year-old Ralph also gave himself seriously to things of the
church, but he was quiet and somewhat of an introvert. Ten-year-old
Martin, on the other hand, was more of an extrovert and an earthy kind
of lad who was more interested in Crackerjacks (and the prize inside
the box), frogs, pollywogs, and skunks—and following the town
lamplighter from corner to corner in the evening.
Once, when
Reitze asked a visiting minister to offer thanks for the food at the
dinner table, Martin had embarrassed his parents by saying, “Could you
please make it short, so we can get on with the meal?”
But there came a day when, at least to Martin, it seemed that God’s hand had touched him in a special way.
* * *
Periodically
the slow clop, clop of horses’ hooves and the creaking of a buckboard
wagon moving into town from the west, carrying a tall woman evangelist,
drew swarms of young Hollanders to Main Street in Zeeland. Dressed in
wide-collared shirts, short corduroy pants or knickers, long stockings
and high-top shoes, the youngsters scampered from their white frame and
red brick houses with steep gabled roofs and skinny windows to taunt
the woman with the thundering voice who preached from the buckboard.
Her name was Nellie Churchford, and she came from the City Mission in
Holland. She was a sort of female John the Baptist, emerging as she did
from the rural “wilderness” that separated the towns of Holland and
Zeeland and preaching a coming judgment. Up and down Main Street her
powerful voice reverberated from storefronts, carrying a clear message
on how to escape God’s wrath.
“Salvation is all of God’s grace.
You don’t earn it by baptism, catechism, or church membership! You
don’t inherit it from your parents. Confess your sin and be born again
by Jesus Christ into the family of God!” She quoted Bible proof texts
such as “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of
yourselves, it is the gift of God—not of works, lest any man should
boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9).
Ignoring the taunts of youngsters,
Nellie stood tall in her black full-skirted, ankle-length dress with
its high lace collar, shaking her long index finger at the Zeelanders
and hoping the Truth would sink deeply into the hearts of some of her
listeners.
Martin DeHaan was often among those who flocked after
the street evangelist, but it was when he was about twelve years old
that he felt as if the long, thin finger of Nellie Churchford had
singled him out as the worst sinner in town. That day he didn’t jeer
with the rest of the kids, nor let on to anyone that the message had
spoken to him. But as the buckboard creaked back toward Holland, with
Nellie’s husband at the reins, Martin trudged homeward with serious
thoughts bombarding his boyish mind and heart. And sometime that
afternoon, young Martin talked to God as he never had before. By faith,
he wanted to be saved and be the kind of Christian Nellie Churchford
talked about. He apparently didn’t discuss this decision in detail with
anyone, not even his parents or his pastor. This, he felt, was
personal—between him and God.
It’s not clear whether Martin had
a genuine spiritual experience at this time; his life exhibited no
marked change, although in later life he made occasional reference to
this convicting moment. Nor is it known whether becoming a minister
entered his mind at that time. Often when a young person comes face to
face with the Eternal, he does have such thoughts. And if Martin had
shared this news, his friends and his godly parents would have been
pleased, for he was surrounded by hardworking, God-fearing people who
delighted to see their sons and daughters become part of the church.
* * *
The
Dutch immigrants who settled in western Michigan, founding the towns of
Holland and Zeeland, had a heritage deeply rooted in the Christian
faith. The founders of Zeeland, like the seventeenth-century Pilgrim
separatists, had traded persecution in their Netherlands homeland for a
fresh start and a life of hardship in America in order that they might
worship and serve God according to their beliefs. They were rugged
individualists from Zeeland, the most southerly maritime province of
the Netherlands, who for centuries had fought the sea and whose motto
was “Luctor et emergo” (“I struggled and I emerge”).
Trouble
for them had begun in the Netherlands after the Crown established the
state church in 1816. Influenced by the radical liberal theology of
contemporary German thought, the church had developed a spirit of
reckless free thinking and a dead formalism. Finally, in 1834, the loud
protest of many pastors and their congregations resulted in secession
and the establishment of the “Christelijk Afgescheiden Kerk” (Christian
Seceded Church, later renamed Christian Reformed Church).
Persecution
followed, though a royal decree in 1836 eased matters somewhat. The
abused separatists began talking of emigration, and in September 1846
Albertus Christiaan Van Raalte, an enthusiastic young minister of the
secession, sailed from Rotterdam for the United States with his family
and forty-seven followers. In February 1847 they settled in western
Michigan, founding the city of Holland. Next a body of prospective
colonists in Zeeland completed a church organization, called Cornelius
Van Der Meulen to be their pastor-leader, and 457 of them sailed for
the States in the spring of 1847. Such a move by an emigrating
group—coming as a complete church—had not been known since the days of
the Pilgrims.
On June 27, after many had died from hardship and
disease, the homesick Zeelanders arrived on a flat boat at Van Raalte’s
Holland. Jannes Van De Luyster, who had been a wealthy land owner in
the province of Zeeland, then set up headquarters six miles east of the
Holland settlement and proceeded to buy land at $1.25 an acre for a
village to be called Zeeland. In his journal, Van De Luyster recorded
the reason for the name: “Because it was founded by the Zeelanders, who
called upon the name of the Lord to prosper His work, and that His name
might be called upon there forever.”
The Zeelanders worshiped
for the first time there on the third Sunday in August 1847 under
Dominie Van Der Meulen. Coached by those who had already conquered the
wilderness, these Dutch settlers, with patience, perseverance,
industry, and common sense, slashed out a rectangular village whose
lots sold for $6.48 each. Here, for years to come, they would live
under the able leadership of Jannes Van De Luyster, “the proprietor of
the village of Zeeland,” and Cornelius Van Der Meulen, the sympathetic,
resourceful “Apostle of Zeeland.” Over the years, stories of the
advantages of living in the Dutch colony in Michigan enticed more
immigrants from the Netherlands, including twenty-two-year-old Reitze
DeHaan, who came to Zeeland in the fall of 1881. The same year,
fifteen-year-old Johanna Rozema, with several sisters and brothers,
settled there.
In time Reitze became the town cobbler, but in
those early years his thoughts were focused more on winning the hand of
lovely Johanna than on mending shoes. A young man with an oval chin, a
rather wide mouth, long sideburns, and oversized ears, he admired
Johanna’s industriousness and little stubborn Dutch ways. There was
nothing giddy about her and she loved the church as he did. Besides,
there was much attractive about her: rather large blue eyes, a
determined mouth, skin as delicate as a rose petal, and dark hair
pulled tight and worn in a little knot; her figure pleased him, though
she was ever so slightly taller than he was.
Reitze left his
pedal stitcher and the smell of leather as he closed shop one day, and,
with excitement surging within, hurried to ask Johanna the magic
question. They were married in 1885, when she was nineteen and he,
twenty-six. John was born a year later, followed in 1889 by a second
son, Ralph.
Although Johanna longed for a girl, their third
child, born on March 23, 1891, was another boy. She and Reitze decided
he would be named after Reitze’s brother, Martin, who worked with him
at the cobbler’s shop, and their third son was given the full name,
Martin Ralph.
“Marty” was not quite ten when a daughter, Anna,
was born to the DeHaans, but she died in infancy. Then a short time
later a daughter was added to the family through adoption. It was the
day before Christmas 1901 that Wiebe Vander Velde lost his wife in
childbirth and found that five children were too much for him to care
for by himself. The baby, Peter, went to relatives, while
three-year-old Ada came to live with the DeHaans and was later legally
adopted.
Ada was too young to remember her oldest adoptive
brother, John, or his tragic drowning death, but years later she
recalled the day-and-night difference between her brothers Ralph and
Marty. “Ralph didn’t care about worms and bugs and things like that, as
Marty did. Their natures were different and they didn’t even look
alike. Ralph was thinner-faced and a little taller. In temperament he
took more after my dad while Mart took after Mother, who was higher
strung than Dad.”
Marty, his sister said, once embarrassed his
mother because of his keen interest in the insect world. As a boy of
seven or eight, he was visiting with his mother in a home that was, as
with many of the Dutch women, “crazy clean.” Johanna DeHaan herself
kept her home spotless, regularly brush-scrubbing woodwork and floor,
and doing a thorough spring and fall housecleaning. But this woman went
even further, washing the clothesline poles every week and keeping her
house almost antiseptically clean. Thus both women were horrified when
they discovered that Marty had brought flies in his pocket and was
releasing them one by one, until the house was buzzing with the pests.
* * *
In
a real sense the Holy Scriptures were the center of the DeHaan home.
With pious regularity Reitze read from the family Bible before each
meal, followed by a substantial prayer, thanking God for supplying
their needs and invoking His divine blessing. There was also a prayer
of thanksgiving after every meal.
Around the table it
was sometimes a babel, with three languages being spoken. When Reitze
talked with Johanna, they usually spoke Frisian, their native dialect,
a Low German tongue closely related to Anglo-Saxon. To the children the
parents spoke Dutch, and the youngsters responded in English, which the
parents understood but spoke with difficulty.
Like most other
Zeelanders, the DeHaans were strict in their observance of Sunday.
Reitze and Johanna regarded that day as the Sabbath, holy unto God, and
all weekday activities ceased. The children dared not even play in the
yard. On Sunday mornings the children were likely to awaken to the
lusty voice of their father singing hymns and Dutch psalms as, with two
fingers, he played the wheezy old reed organ downstairs. The family
faithfully attended church three times on Sundays—morning, afternoon,
and evening—where the relatively long services were in the Dutch
language. The children went to catechism classes on Tuesdays, and
these, too, were in Dutch.
During the first sixteen years of
their married life, Reitze and Johanna were members of the First
Christian Reformed Church in Zeeland. But following their eldest son’s
tragic death, the minister of their church didn’t come to see them to
offer comfort and help, whereas the pastor of the First Reformed Church
showed special kindness to the family. The DeHaans soon placed their
membership in the First Reformed Church, which dated back to the
founding of Zeeland, its first pastor having been Dominie Van Der
Meulen.
From time to time young Marty would visit his father’s
cobbler shop and chat with him and his Uncle Martin, who was a man with
fascinating ideas. Uncle Martin talked of his religious beliefs, ideas
that weren’t generally heard or appreciated around the local Dutch
community. He was considered a bit of a heretic and took pleasure in
it. Christ, he said, was going to return someday in bodily form, just
as He had been received into heaven following His resurrection; He
could come any day. When that happened, believers were to be taken up
to be with Jesus—the dead were to be raised, and the living were to
follow them to be forever with Him. After a seven-year tribulation
period on earth, Christ, with many of His followers, would set up a
thousand-year kingdom on earth, over which He would rule from
Jerusalem, asserted Uncle Martin, who shared with his nephew proof of
his beliefs from a well-worn Bible.
While all this intrigued
Marty, he didn’t become a follower of Uncle Martin and his ideas.
Instead, he loved exploring and learning what life was all about. He
continued to collect insects and look for frogs along the edge of the
cedar swamp in back of his house. He enjoyed studying the habits of
animals and watching birds in flight.
He also enjoyed talking
with his friends, though he was generally regarded as something of a
loner. He and his buddies would gather at the railroad tracks, where
they sat and discussed everything from the facts of life to theology.
One boy from the gang ran away to the nearby city of Grand Rapids and
returned with the story that he had heard a minister who seemed to
doubt that the Bible was truly God’s inspired Word—at least not all of
it.
“We began to bat that around, and it was one of the most
helpful discussions in this teenage period of my life,” recalled D. J.
(Dirk) De Pree, a boyhood friend of Martin DeHaan. “This conversation
made us wonder if everything preached in our town was right. I don’t
definitely remember Martin in these conversations, but I imagine he was
there. We had a gang and he was in it.”
Martin was “one of the
best students in the class,” De Pree said. “In our day, students
usually took four years of Latin and two years of German. Martin did a
minimum of homework and preparation, but our teacher, Miss Wilhelm,
herself a German, was really impressed by the way he could stand up in
class and give a free translation of German. Actually, he knew the
Frisian language so well that when it came to German he had little
problem, because of its similarity. This particularly appealed to the
teacher.”
Apparently Martin’s keen mind was not as challenged as
it might have been in school. Since occasionally he wasn’t prepared
with his lessons, he devised a standard trick to avoid looking bad
during oral quizzes. Questions were written and displayed, and the
teacher went from student to student to obtain the answers. Martin
quickly calculated which question would be his, and if he didn’t know
the answer, he held his handkerchief to his nose and asked to be
excused. “I have a nose bleed,” he said. Those who knew him well
snickered at his pretense.
During his high school years, Martin
concluded that he should drop out of school and go to work. For at
least a semester he worked for an aunt and uncle, but getting up at
4:30 a.m. to begin chores appealed to him less than the boredom of
classes. So, heeding his parents’ urgings, he returned to school.
By
the time he was a teenager, Martin was a husky young man, stocky,
thick-necked, with muscular legs and arms and shoulders that let you
know he was a football player. His high school football team was
coached by a young man from Hope College in nearby Holland, a brainy
fellow named Paul De Kruif, who would later write such books as Microbe Hunters and Hunger Fighters.
Martin
was a 180-pound combination of power and speed. But according to De
Pree, who was also on the team, “We couldn’t get Martin to keep in
training as he should and play regularly.” The climax of his last year,
1908, in high school athletics was a post-season game with one of the
two city high schools of Grand Rapids. The city team’s star player that
day was, a year later, named center on the Michigan All-State High
School team, but that day the big-city team was held scoreless while
Martin continually plowed through their line, scoring the only two
touchdowns of the afternoon. It was said that he almost single-handedly
won the game for the Zeeland High School against a formidable team.
* * *
During
his high school years Martin showed little indication of what he might
do as his life work. If Johanna and Reitze DeHaan hoped their youngest
son would become a minister, as they had dreamed for their eldest son,
they had little on which to base those hopes other than faith that God
would someday call him. However, three men in the community, besides
Uncle Martin, undoubtedly sowed seeds in his mind and heart that would
later influence him.
One of these men was a veterinarian with
whom Martin enjoyed riding and talking as the vet made calls on his
animal patients. Another was Dr. Huizenga, a Zeeland physician, and the
third was Huizenga’s son George, a talented fellow who began writing
stories for The American Boy magazine when he was still in
school. A would-be minister who in 1911 dropped out of seminary because
of an eye affliction, George was another Zeelander who had become sort
of a heretic by Reformed standards. In seminary George had been
assigned to write a paper against premillennialism, but his research
convinced him that indeed the return of Christ would be premillennial.
This affected his own life to the extent that he became a fervent
Christian, doing personal witnessing on the streets of Zeeland and
sharing Christ over fences with his neighbors. George told Martin
things that he never forgot, things that later became especially
meaningful to him, adding to what he had learned from Uncle Martin.
* * *
One
day a slick character came to town and set up in a hotel, hoping to
make a few bucks off curious farmers and gawking schoolboys. The sign
he displayed provoked interest: “How smart are you? What is your main
talent? What does the future hold for you?” According to the sign, the
world-renowned Doctor X. Y. Smartz (or some such name) could “tell all”
by a simple reading of one’s head.
Martin DeHaan and Dirk De
Pree gazed with awe at the sign and couldn’t resist the temptation.
Soon, with great ceremony, the phrenologist was deftly feeling the
conformation of the skull of one lad and then the other. To Martin he
pronounced, “Someday, my boy, you will be a great public speaker! I
predict great things for you. You will be eloquent, and many people
will listen to you.”
Later, the boys decided they would put the
phrenologist to the supreme test. Returning to their homes, they
changed into entirely different clothing, then again visited the skull
reader. Would his predictions be the same? To Martin’s amazement, the
man uttered the same pronouncement. He was to be a public speaker.
But Martin shrugged it off as a lot of foolishness. “Me? I’m going to be a doctor,” he told Dirk De Pree.
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