Surrounded by history

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, June 1st. Thank you for joining us for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next: stories from WJI.

We’re twelve days into this year’s collegiate WORLD Journalism Institute—held once again at Dordt University in Sioux Center, Iowa. Just a few days left—so our 28 students are hard at work: reporting, writing, and editing. These young journalists are getting a taste of everything we do at WORLD —whether online, in print, or on the air, television and radio.

For my part, it’s a highlight of the year for me to get to be part of the teaching team. We’ve had a dozen staff here from WORLD and WORLD Watch to work with the students—one of whom is Paul Butler, who joins us now.

Morning, Paul.

PAUL BUTLER, EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Morning.

EICHER: Paul, your idea was to give them a good weekend break from being in the classroom and getting them into the field for something you called “the pocket-sized profile.” Tell about how that went.

BUTLER: This past Saturday we gave each student an audio recorder and sent them out into Northwest Iowa to find someone to profile. They needed to write and produce a short vignette—highlighting the truth that everyone has a story, or a mission in life, and they each experience obstacles to overcome. The students have 3-minutes to tell the story.

EICHER: A few students returned with stories they’ll flesh out a little more that can use as full-length features in the weeks ahead. But today, we’ll highlight two delightful short stories, the first comes from Koryn Koch—she’s from Barrington, Illinois. She discovered that sometimes stories from the past can be easily overlooked. But for two women, history isn’t just their past, it’s their pastime.

KORYN KOCH, REPORTER: The Sioux Center public library is in the middle of a small, predominantly Dutch community in northwest Iowa. It’s not just a modern library. It’s also the home of what’s known around here as the GSCGS – the Greater Sioux County Genealogical Society.

MARJ: I’m Marjorie Bronstein and I'm the president of the greater Sioux county Genealogical Society.

WILMA: Wilma Vandeberg, and I'm currently corresponding Secretary researcher and art archivist

These two have been with the society almost since its founding in 1980. For Wilma, it was photos that first drew her into genealogy research.

WILMA: I would see an old photograph of mine, for instance, my husband's family and then I saw that our son look just like what would be his great grandfather…

For Marjorie, her interest in genealogy started very differently. She realized there were no records of the cemeteries in the county.

MARJ: And so a bunch of us started going out with a pencil and notebook before computers and went to the cemeteries and we just walked all through the cemetery and wrote down every name on every stone, with the dates and everything…

Marjorie and Wilma sit at a table between two shelves. On each shelf are what appear to be hundreds of books and folders all neatly packed together, surrounding the women with history. Everything is meticulously labeled with family names.

WILMA: And here we have some files with old pictures in them. And all of these files are surnames and research that we have done or it has family histories in it and there are probably well over 8000 files. And over here…

The society certainly finds interesting things—some they don’t necessarily want to find.

MARJ: I just think if people think they're going to do their family history and not find any skeletons, they maybe don't want to do it. Because you're gonna find something. You're gonna find first cousins that got married, you're gonna find children out of wedlock, you're gonna find people that maybe did prison time. I mean, there's all kinds of things you can find and if that's going to bother you, you probably shouldn't start.

But for those brave enough to jump in, learning new things about your family tree can be exciting, finding new relatives, discovering connections to historical events. It’s a real-life treasure hunt. But have our genealogy experts ever hit a dead end in their search?

WILMA: No, I never hit a dead end…

MARJ: (laughing) she lies. We call them brick walls. Sometimes you could have a frame with a picture and say it's all bricks and say this is my fifth-grade grandmother, because you don't know who she is. Yeah, you hit them but you learn more, you go to workshops, you listen to videos, and you work around it. There's usually some way you can get around it. Yeah, you don't always find it. But sometimes it takes years and you just keep going. It's just a mystery to be solved.

Learning about the past is a lot of work. These marriages, these deaths, these family lines—why are they so important to these women? Marjorie answers this question with one of her own.

MARJ: If you don't have any roots, then what do you have? If you don't know where you came from, how do you know a sense of yourself?

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Koryn Koch in Sioux Center, Iowa.

BUTLER: One more short profile. This one from Elizabeth Russell—she’s from Austin, Texas. While reporting on the annual Dutch Heritage Tulip Festival in Orange City, Iowa, she stumbled across a man who is the keeper of a well-loved piece of local history. Here’s his story.

KLEINWOLTERINK: Well, we’ll hope this book plays. Sometimes you don’t know. (Music)

ELIZABETH RUSSELL: That’s Galen Kleinwolterink. And this is his Dutch street organ.

Kleinwolterink was born and raised in Orange City, a sleepy little town of about 6000 people. He’s lived here for 68 years. As a boy, he participated every year in the town’s Tulip Festival. He’d scrub streets and dance in wooden shoes.

And, he’d come listen to the organ. The operator would wheel it out to the back of the courthouse. Kleinwolterink would crane his neck to look at the brightly colored front with its painted tulips and sunflowers. The carved lady in the center mechanically conducted the music as it switched from Yankee Doodle to the National Anthem.

The music book of patriotic songs has always been his favorite.

The organ was built in Paris and bought by the Netherlands in 1908. It’s been in Orange City since the 1950s. About eight years ago, the previous operator of the organ asked Kleinwolterink to take on the task.

KLEINWOLTERINK: And it's, it's a motorized thing that pumps up the ballasts, bellows here…And this kind of when this is running, this goes up and down, creates air, which goes into this chamber here. And then it comes out of this chamber, to these different tubes and hoses, which provides the different notes. And then when you're playing the book that we put in, each one of these slots will create a different note that goes into the pipes.

Kleinwolterink likes the music, but his favorite part is watching others enjoy it.

KLEINWOLTERINK: I think some of the funnest things I've seen, especially this year, was three little girls that they just couldn't help – they just had to dance with the music. They just, they just thought it was so cool.

But Kleinwolterink has been marked by more than Tulip Festivals and idyllic small-town life. In 20-12, he lost his wife Rebecca in a car accident.

KLEINWOLTERINK: I think she was killed instantly. I had—I didn't know—I had a little scratch on my forehead, but that was it. It's like God, what's what's happening here and how, why why is this happening? And why am I still alive? And why is she—she dead? …It’s, it’s tough. You keep going, but it takes time. It takes time.

He used to ask himself that question a lot. “Why am I still here?” But time has brought healing. A new role in the Tulip Festival. And a marriage to his second wife, Laurie.

KLEINWOLTERINK: I think I think God still has a reason for me that I'm here and then–I'll be married to my beautiful wife now as part of that, I think, and just, I just want to be a good witness to who I meet, too.

Does Laurie like the organ? He smiles and says, “She doesn’t mind.”

AUDIO: [ORGAN MUSIC]

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Elizabeth Russell in Orange City, Iowa.

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