Bert Hendriks

   Another name for Bert was Lambert.

  General Notes:

Following is the story that Bert wrote of his childhood memories.
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I was born on August 25, 1916 on a farm 4 1/2 miles north of Rock Valley Iowa. This is in Lyon County Iowa just north of the Sioux and Lyon county line on the east side of the road. The farm is still pretty much as it was then. The same old frame house stands with very little change. A careful examination will reveal the absence of any form of marker or memorial to my arrival.
Within two years of my birth the folks had a sale and left the farm. We moved to town in Rock Valley and spent the next year or two in houses of which I have no recollection. My earliest recollection is when we moved to New York. Dad had a large touring car that he fixed up to accommodate the entire family. He built beds on the running board. A lean-to tent was pitched to one side of the car where cots were set up for sleeping. As I recall one of us slept on each running board, on on the front seat, one on the back seat and the youngest slept in the tent with the folks. I remember some of the details of that trip rather vaguely. I remember the folks sending Dick and Willemina to the nearest farm to get milk and eggs. Cooking was done over a camp stove and the whole thing was an exciting vacation trip for the whole family. I remember seeing a deer crossing the road and Dad telling me it was a Jack Rabbit. The trip included a ferry trip at one of the great lakes and the first sight of Niagara Falls.
Our stay in Stanley, New York is barely fixed in my memory. Certain unusual and impressive things did leave a trace however. I remember a severe ice storm that took down most of the telephone and power lines near our home. Dad took me to a store close to home for a pair of shoes and I remember him lifting me over the downed wires to get there. Another rather vivid membory is one time when Mother was rocking Marie to sleep and I watched rather intently. She put Marie to bed and then offered to rock me to sleep. I agreed and when she started to rock me on her lap I felt a little embarrassed and pretended falling asleep and she put me to bed.
The most traumatic experience was the last illness and death of Mother. I knew something was radically wrong when she fell ill. I was taken to the home of friends and spent the first Christmas I remember there. My next recollection is the long train ride back to Iowa. I must have wondered about Mother because I remember Dad telling me she was in another car and I would see her when we got where we were going. The day of the funeral which was held at my grandparents place (The Moorlags) I remember Dad lifting me up to look into the coffin to see Mother. I must have been somewhat rambunctious since I was put into a corner until I could behave myself. Small boys poked me in the back and I was all around most miserable.
The family was broken up and farmed out among relatives; I went to stay with Dad's folks, grandpa and grandma Koning. John went to stay with Uncle Hans and Aunt Gertie Moorlag. I am not sure where Jurena went to stay. Wherever that was it was only for a short time before she was sent to the school for the Deaf at Council Bluffs Iowa. She would come home for vacations and holidays. She was almost a stranger to me since I was so young when she first went to school, and I was living elsewhere it was seldom I would get to see her.
My days with my grandparents were not the happiest days of my life. They were good to me but it just didn't seem like home to me. Within a few days of arriving there the whole family came down with Scarlet fever and were put to bed at my grandparents Koning. I was in a crib in the dining room and the rest were put up the best way possible under the circumstances. I got my fill of eggnog, which was all I could manage to eat. Willemina lost her voice and would call for attention by pounding a broomstick on the floor in an upstairs bedroom where she was put up. These must have been rough times for my Grandparents and Dad.
The days that followed were spent getting adjusted to a whole new setting for me. Grandpa Koning was in the milk business and I spent some of my more pleasant moments with him on his milk route and with the cows. I was amazed at the way he could squirt milk right into the mouths of cats that hung around the barn. My grandmother had many cats and sometime the cat population would be out of control and she would enlist the help of my Uncle Lambert, who ran a milk route for the local creamery. He would come with his shotgun and would fill a cream can lid full of milk and then when the cats were crowded around what was their last repast he would shoot in the middle of the huddle and kill off the surplus. I wasn't supposed to see this happen but I was too curious not to sneak a glimpse of what was going on. It simply made me sick to see the heartless killing of such cute cats and kittens. I was also sickened when I saw my Grandpa load several litters of kittens into a gunny sack and throw them in the river which flowed about an eighth of a mile from the homestead.
Sunday was dress-up day and off to church. I seldom went and spent most of my Sundays with whoever stayed with me. I remember one Sunday I was home with Grandpa Koning and followed him around like a puppy while he did the chores around the place. I got to playing with something when all at one I realized he was nowhere around. I panicked and ran to find him. In doing so I fell over a jagged piece of concrete that had broken away from a ramp leading up to the barn. I struck my head on a sharp corner of the cement and put a nice little hole in my head that bled profusely and when Grandpa heard me cry he came running to see what was wrong. He was at a loss as to what he should do for me so he just ripped up a dish towel and wrapped my head with it. When the rest of the family came home form church they saw from a distance that I was wrapped in a very bloody head band and ran the short distance to see what was wrong. Uncle Henry, Dad's brother, did the best he could to remove the hair that was lodged in the wound and fixed me up the best he knew how. I still carry the scar as a reminder of this little episode.
The next event that had the most bearing on my life to this day happened on my 5th birthday. It was August 25, 1921, when Grandma thought it would be nice to have some of my cousins and brother John over for my birthday. We had fun until it was suggested we play hide and seek. I must describe the setting for this episode by describing the barn on the farm. It was a long barn built on a hillside with the lower level facing the river and the side facing the house was the upper level where hay and grain was stored. There were small trap doors along the back side for throwing feed to livestock in the lower level. My brother John and cousin John Hubbling urged me to crawl through one of the trap doors to a ledge off to one side. They lowered me to the ledge, which was not directly below me, and when the one was 'it' called out "here I come" they let me go and I fell all the way down to the lower level and straddled a threshing machine wheel. Things are not clear as to what followed. I remember them helping me to the house and fainting a couple of times during the ordeal. Years later X-rays revealed that I had broken both hip sockets. It was a long time before I was able to walk at all and when I did start walking I had a pronounced limp. Dad was of the opinion that I was mimicing my Grandpa since he also had a limp. The years of treatment by Chiropractors and medical doctors was a long and very unpleasant period of my life. In 1925 Dad took me to Iowa City hospital for treatment by orthopedic doctors. I spent 13 months in traction followed by many checkups in the following years. Escorts would show up at the most unexpected times and pack me off to the hospital for further treatment.
My memory is spotty with regard to the years from 1925 to the early thirties. Dad remarried in 1931 and it was decided that I would live with them and two brand new stepbrothers. Lowell was a year younger than I, and Wayne was about two years younger. It was a difficult adjustment for me. I had spent the year before with Clarence and Willemina on the farm they rented near Orange City. I spent the most miserable year in the eighth grade in a county school a half mile from their farm, I was a town kid that just didn't fit in with the country kids and I was the brunt of all sorts of jibes etc. Getting down to the adjustment with the folks in Sioux City was something else. Dad wanted me to set an example for the boys and not to make waves in getting along with them. This was almost impossible since their life style just wasn't compatible with what I was used to. For an adjustment period the folks took us on a short vacation trip to Minnesota where we camped out and did some fishing. I enjoyed the trip and felt that things were not going to be all that bad. But we just didn't get along and it seems Dad was usually taking the side of the boys. I started high school at that time and made the best of things as long a I could and then on a nice fall day I packed my gym case with a few personal belongings and ran away from home. Most of that first day was spent hitch-hiking to Des Moines, Iowa, where my brother Dick was stationed in the army. I arrived late in the evening and spent my last dime for a ticket to a movie and hoped I could stay for the night but an usher saw me and put me out of the theater where I found myself all alone with no place to go. There was a cabstand on the corner near the theater and one of the dispatchers saw me and asked who I was and where I was going. He soon gathered that I was a runaway and suggested I go home with him. This I did and the hospitality of he and his wife will never be forgotten. The next morning she sent me to a nearby food store to get some fruit and snack for her. Then she insisted they were for me to eat on the way. The next thing on the agenda was getting to the military base where Dick was. I knew his address and found his barracks building but did not see Dick. I sat down on the steps of his barracks and sat rather forlornly waiting for Dick to show up. I could hardly hold back the tears when I saw him coming down the steps toward me. I got a gentle bawling out for running away from home and then when he saw I was not going to go back he extracted a promise that I would go to Grand Rapids, Michigan to my step uncle who had indicated an interest in making a home for me when mother died. He was sure I would be welcome there. So that is what I did and spent the next two years with them. At that time my hips were giving me so much pain that I realized I would have to do something about it. The only thing I could come up with was to go back to Iowa. The first night I arrived in Chicago and found a cheap hotel to sleep. During the night I became aware that someone was in my room. There was whispering between two individuals for some time and when they left the room I got up and looked through the door and saw that my visitor was a policeman and the desk clerk. They did nothing to detain me so in the morning, which was Easter Sunday, I left the hotel and made my way to Chicago Heights to catch highway #30 heading west toward Iowa. The first car to come along turned out to be a ride with a very nice gentleman who asked me questions about where I was going and where I had been. It turned out he was a plain clothed policeman. He seemed satisfied with my answers since he let me go on my merry way.
This was not my first experience with the police. On the way to Grand Rapids I arrived in the town of Dixon Illinois, the home town of President Reagan, where I asked a man on the street how I could get to highway 30 going East. He said "Never mind, you come with me." He took me to the police station and he and another cop asked me a lot of questions: "where are you going?" Answer: "To Iowa to visit an Uncle." And so on for more than an hour. Finally they left me to go my way very shook up by having to tell some white lies to get away.
I got home after two days on the road to a not too welcome homecoming. The first thing Zenithe said when she saw me was that she would never trust me again. She mellowed in time however and we got along quite well.
Dad would do nothing about my hips so I went to the League of Nurses in Sioux City and got a physical examination and admission to University hospitals in Iowa City. Dad gave me a choice of a ticket to Iowa City or the equivalent in cash and the permission to hitch hike there. I took the cash and it gave me some spending money while I was hospitalized. A few days later I submitted to surgery on my left hip on which they did an ostiotomy. This involved breaking the femur below the hip joint and resetting the ball of my hip joint in a different angle. After three weeks in the hospital I was sent home and spent the next three months in a hip spike cast most of the time in bed Zenithe was really good to me and made me feel that she really cared. The last month Dad took me to stay with Grandma Koning in Rock Valley. I spent this month on the couch in the living room. I was getting very impatient with this confinement so my cousin John Hubbling carried me out to his dad's car and took me to a soft ball game. I stood at the backstop fence all excited by the game and promptly broke the foot portion of my cast off. I will never forget the odor of a foot that has been confined in a sweat soaked cast for two and a half months.
For the next two and a half years I wore a body brace that limited my activities but was a terrific method for improving posture. The brace was a form of corset that squeezed my tummy in and a pair of restrainers forced my shoulders back. I got the nick name "Chesty" for a time.
There ae many things left out of this rendering and most of it would involve various mischiefs I have been guilty of. Many happy events that mean nothing to anyone but my own memories. All in all life has been good to me and although there is nothing I would like to live over I don't believe I would change anything. I remember a story about the opportunity a man had to study the lives of all people arranged on a clothesline and he was given choice of any he would like to have for his own. after carefully studying all the options he finally chose his own. That's the story of my life. I have many regrets and many things I would like to forget but the final conclusion is the acceptance of God's grace in dealing with life and looking ever upward and onward and cheerfully accept whatever life has to offer from now on.
O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from thee of death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 7:24-25
For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory of which shall be revealed. Romans 8:18
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Bert married Zeena Postma on 12 Jun 1941. (Zeena Postma was born on 16 Aug 1913 and died on 8 Sep 1992 in Sheldon, O'Brien County, Iowa, USA.)