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Interviews with news makers and discussion of topics important to Southwest Michigan. Subscribe to the podcast through Apple itunes and Google. Segments of interview are heard in WestSouthwest Brief during Morning Edition and All Things Considered

Kalamazoo 92-Year-Old Grew Up Farming Celery, Then Went to War

Carl Bussema, who turns 93 in May, remembers things about Kalamazoo most of us only know as history.

Bussema, who grew up on G Avenue north of the city, studied at Central High School, now Chenery Auditorium. He worked a few months at the Kalamazoo Vegetable Parchment Company. His grandparents on one side farmed celery – and their native language was Dutch.

He also served in the army in Europe in the last year of World War II. At one point Bussema was assigned to the Netherlands, his grandparents’ homeland. 

When he returned he married, started a family and became a carpenter, eventually retiring from Western Michigan University. Bussmea sat down with WMUK in February at his home in Kalamazoo, to talk about his memories of the city and his experiences in the war. At the moment he is living in the Grand Rapids area.

Interview with Carl Bussema

Sehvilla Mann: Tell me a little more about where your family came from.

Carl Bussema:  My dad’s family grew up in the Netherlands. My dad was nine years old when he came and he was one of fourteen kids in that family. And my mother came to Kalamazoo because there were family members living in Kalamazoo when they came this way and they chose to go to Kalamazoo to have some relatives that had arrived here earlier.

SM: So they all ended up in Kalamazoo.

CB: Yes. I grew up working for two grandfathers. One was a celery farmer, the other was a vegetable farmer. And they sold their products, mostly to markets, the market people would buy the products. So like I told you earlier, my school day was finished at three in the afternoon from high school. But then I had to hurry home because I had to work on the farm.

SM: And so you worked on both the celery and the vegetable farm?

CB: Yeah, both farmers. They were – celery farmers had to be in that soft black dirt, and a vegetable farmer worked on high ground where there was no soft stuff. It was a different working condition.

SM: Was one easier than the other?

CB: One was hotter than the other. That muck, that black dirt really reflected the sun in the summertime.

SM: And that was the celery field.

CB: Yes, that was the celery fields, yeah. It was a long process from the time it was planted to the time it was harvested and in my day we bleached all the celery. It didn’t come out green like celery was when it started. When it matured it would mature between rows of boards on each side of the plants of the whole row and we’d cut it out and it would be yellow or yellow-green, a light color. Now todays if you buy groceries, you go to the store, you buy big stalks and they’re green. Which – it didn’t taste good to us going from yellow to green.

SM: The yellow celery tasted better –

CB: Sweeter. I worked, I went to school all the time, but I graduated in June ’42 and instead of getting a job or further, I stayed right on the celery farm and instead of going back to school in September I worked a month or so longer in the celery field and from there I stayed locally by hiring out to KVP, Kalamazoo Vegetable Parchment. They made paper. So I was a part of the Celery City Michigan and also Paper Cities, Michigan.

SM: So you spent every summer of your childhood –

CB: Every summer, every summer. On Fourth of July, the Meulman family that you mentioned [Carl’s mother’s family] rented a place at Little Long Lake. There was a road between Little Long Lake and Gull Lake. But our Meulmans family rented a place from people that owned land on Little Long Lake. Very small lake.

SM: So that was kind of a special holiday after all the time in the fields.

CB: Yeah, we got washed clean once a year. Going into Little Long Lake.

SM: Finally get all the dirt off I guess.

CB: Yeah. And of course my parents, from both sides of the family were from the Reformation people leaving the Catholic church and becoming Protestants and so, that was a very important part of our week. Bible class, church worship services and doing good jobs and helping move the good news of the Gospel into the ears of people near and far. Supported by missionaries far away and locally from house to house.

SM: And you spoke Dutch with both your sets of grandparents?

CB: Oh yeah, they were – Netherlands has one common language, the school language, but those countries, every province had their own dialect. So when I was, went into the army and we invaded, we came up through the Netherlands, and those people had a hard time understanding me because they had a dialect just opposite the dialect of where my family came from. In the military I was in the southern part of the Netherlands. And my, all my family came from the northern part. So the northern part had some German in it.

SM: Where did you go to school before you got to Old Central?

CB: In the half-mile south on Westnedge was a two-room schoolhouse, grades kindergarten through eighth grade. We had two teachers, one for the younger kids, one for the older. And after they finished the eighth grade, through the school system we were allowed to go to – because in the country there was no high school – we would go to a junior high for the ninth grade, in those days and then high school was 10, 11 and 12. And our school was Kalamazoo Central High School from out where I lived. Four miles to school.

SM: How’d you get there?

CB: Bicycle. What cars the parents had didn’t amount to much.

SM: Did you like school?

CB: Some of it I liked, and I was a good student. But I didn’t have any motivators at home to go on to higher education although I did become part of a business college after I returned home from service, from army service. And so I got a good education in accounting. But I liked that work, as well as working with my hands but my hands worked – started there in January, Parsons Business College, worked until about May, and the nice warm weather, that was no place, that schoolroom, for me. Typing in “business English” and all those subjects, relating subjects. I had an opportunity to move into a building company, homebuilders so ended up being a carpenter almost all my life.

SM: I know you spent your summers in the fields. What did you do after school when you were a teenager?

CB: Naughty stuff.

SM: Well now you have to elaborate.

CB: No (laughs) just boy stuff.

SM: Just hanging out, or?

CB: Yeah, we would tell jokes under the corner power pole, electric power pull that would have had a light up there. And you could stand and talk in the light at the corner pole in the country.

SM: Did you have any free time as a teenager or were you pretty busy with the farming and things at home?

CB: My free time included church-related things, took a lot of time. They figured a knowledge of the Bible and relationship with the Lord Jesus was the most important, more than any schooling for future living here on Earth. So it was a Christian upbringing that was strict. Weren’t many things we could do that wasn’t naughty.

SM: The services you attended, were they in English or Dutch?

CB: When I started going to church as a boy of young, school age, the morning services were in Dutch, which I didn’t understand. But the afternoon and the – or the afternoon was also Dutch. The evening service was English.

SM: You mentioned that after you graduated high school you worked at the Kalamazoo Vegetable Parchment plant. So what was your job there?

CB: Making paper. I didn’t really manufacture, I was toward the finished end of the product which is finished paper and we had to make it marketable size-wise and things like that. And I did that until Uncle Sam got me at the end of the year. I only had about three months of working in the paper mills.

SM: Before we talk about what happened when Uncle Sam got you, what – was the mill, was it loud, did it smell like anything in particular? I’m just wondering what it was like.

CB: I worked in the wax finishing, so you had a – smell of wax, they waxed the paper. And made it marketable by cutting it to various sizes and wrapping it and sending it to the people who used it.

SM: And KVP was a huge plant.

CB: It was. It a livelihood for a lot of people, yeah. And papermaking was for all of Kalamazoo, other paper mills also. KVP was on my end of the city of Kalamazoo, or that part of the town, county and so we didn’t go to the other paper companies. We just went to the one closest to us.

SM: And by that time did you have a car or were you still riding your bike?

CB: I was riding my bike all the way through high school. But at the end of my high school year I looked at the advertisement in the paper and I ended up buying a, that was in ’42 I ended up buying a ’32 Chevy. And that became my car and that’s the one I took girls riding in.

SM: So you graduated from high school and you worked a few months at KVP and then you were drafted?

CB: Yeah, at the end of ’42 I was drafted. I was – I went in, was sworn in in December of ’42.

SM: Well when you got drafted, did you have a choice of what branch of the military you went into?

CB: Yeah, we did. Up until that time, to get into the navy, you had to enlist. You weren’t drafted. If you were drafted you had your choice, and you passed the physical, you could go either way. And Bud, or Wesley [Deboer] my friend, he passed, he could have gone either way. But they didn’t want me in the Navy because I was colorblind. So we both went in the army.

SM: The army didn’t mind that you were colorblind?

CB: No because we didn’t use signals by flags. That what navy – they’re out there in those big vast oceans. They could see the flags, get messages that way. We had long lines, telephone lines and so on land you know.

SM: What happened after you were drafted and you went into the army? Where did they send you first?

CB: We had a point right close to home, Fort Custer, between here and Battle Creek. But they sent a whole bunch of us from Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana, we all started our trip down to the bottom part of Texas for training in anti-aircraft. So I went from Kalamazoo to Chicago, spent two days and then got on the train and we went all the way down through the states, way to the bottom of Texas. That’s where our basic training was for the military.

SM: You had a friend of yours, Wesley who joined or who was drafted at the same time as you. But he didn’t actually make it to Europe. Can you tell me about what happened to Wesley?

CB: Yeah, we were down in Texas, we were playing war you know. Learning war. And we were mobile outfit so we got from one place to another with trucks pulling our big guns and on maneuvers, training maneuvers, a truck that Wesley was – he was in C Battery, he didn’t stay right with me in B [battery], you go where they tell you to go, he went to C Battery and – the truck he was on, traveling from on maneuvers during the night, no lights, very narrow road in Louisiana, and the driver got too close to the edge and rolled the truck and he was killed in that rollover.

SM: And he was how old then?

CB: Oh, 19. Yeah.

SM: Was he your closest friend that you had in the army?

CB: We started school as kindergarten and went all the way through that nine years of schooling. Then we both went to Kalamazoo Central. And our classes separated us somewhat there. But we were reunited with age, we were drafted at the same time.

SM: So you finished up training, and then you said you went to England first?

CB: We got off a ship, a passenger ship out of New Jersey and landed in Scotland. To avoid the submarines, the German submarines. But then by train we went from Scotland down into England and there we as an organization we got organized and got on a boat called the LST, landing craft, for big items like trucks and trailers and that way we crossed the English Channel into the continent of Europe.

Bussema says he landed in France in August 1944, a couple of months after D-Day. By December it looked to the Allies as though the war was winding down. But the Germans thought they could reverse their fortunes. In Belgium, they launched a massive surprise attack. The fight to repel the Germans became known as the Battle of the Bulge, and while the Allies prevailed they suffered heavy losses. Carl Bussema says he was nearly sent to Belgium, but his orders changed and he went to the Netherlands instead. Not everyone he knew was so fortunate.

CB: The anti-aircraft that we trained with in Texas, they got the job in Belgium, to guard a big air supply in an air force organization. Bastogne, Belgium – there was a big battle right in Bastogne. The Germans decided they were going to split the Allied forces and that was really a bad war time. Lots of 554 people were killed in that. And so, because of the change of orders instead of going to Bastogne in Belgium we went right through the country of Belgium into the Netherlands, to get the, push the Germans out of Netherlands back into Germany. Otherwise we didn’t have to really do any fighting. Except, yeah that would have been our situation.

SM: You really didn’t ever have to shoot at anyone, and they didn’t shoot at you?

CB: We just shot at their airplane. Yeah. We didn’t have to shoot at any bombers but we had to shoot at fighter planes.

SM: Where were you sleeping in the winter of 1945? Did you stay in buildings?

CB: We had to be careful where we stayed, too – they were booby-trapped a lot you know.

SM: The buildings?

CB: Yeah, the Germans made it difficult for those Allies.

SM: So if you came a cross an empty building you couldn’t assume that you could stay there.

CB: Oh yeah, you could go but you had to be careful. Make sure that it was safe.  A lot of people were injured by just going in you know, opening a door and bang. You didn’t know which door was booby-trapped.

SM: Was it hard to stay warm?

CB: Yeah. That Battle of the Bulge, they either froze to death or they got shot. It was that cold.

SM: You were pretty cold too.

CB: Yeah I was uh – but I had a pup tent and I had dug out so you’d be below the, even with the top of the ground. And I filled it with a bale of straw and my GI blankets and I stayed, I kept from freezing to death that way.

SM: It wasn’t very comfortable though I imagine.

CB: Oh, you cuddled up in the – those GI blankets were wool, you know.

SM: So you managed.

CB: Yeah. I survived the cold.

SM: Didn’t get any frostbite or anything like that.

CB: No. Those people who were involved in that Bulge battle, they were out on the streets in Bastogne. So they were freezing to death. As well as bullets.

SM: You came pretty close to that. It was a pretty close miss.

CB: We were fifty miles north of the real action. But they pulled us out of our ninth army job in the Netherlands for backup to the Bulge battle. But after the serious part was over the Germans hightailed it back to Germany. So we didn’t have to fight them at the Battle of the Bulge. But we did leave the Netherlands for a time for backup support. You needed backup, so if your team was losing you’ve got to have replacements.

SM: Well I have to wonder, were some of the Dutch people that you met, were they surprised that you spoke Dutch?

CB: Yeah, that I did that well. But I had a mind that worked pretty well, I picked up on things pretty fast. I had that dialect from my grandparents you know as I worked with them. But that was, that dialect that they had was similar to the German, low German. They called it low German or German. It wasn’t exact state proper, but you could converse.

SM: What did you use your Dutch for when you were there? Did you just have conversations with people? Was it useful?

CB: Yeah, when we got there our mode of washing our clothes was a five-gallon bucket, and soaking our clothes and that and doing that ourselves. When we got into the Netherlands situated with our gun position as a ninth army guard, we became acquainted with the people and those people were deprived of a lot of good things because of the war too. And we became acquainted with at least, my gun crew became acquainted with the neighborhood Dutch people and the mother in the home did our washing for us, in her washing machines. We’d give them soap – they couldn’t buy soap that well. We’d give them our issue of soap, you could wash your own clothes in a bucket, you know.

SM: Must have been nice to have someone doing the laundry.

CB: Yeah. And I myself ate many a meal in a Dutch home. By table with the people that lived there. Everybody didn’t do that, but this Dutchman did.

SM: And did you tell them about your Dutch background?

CB: Yeah, we talked about common things like that. One of the first ones I met in the Netherlands, the southern part, he had a little difficult time understanding me but he spoke the Dutch and down in the southern part, the province of Limburg, they had a completely different-sounding Dutch. But it was all background. We got along. You had to get used to the pronunciation and everything.

SM: So the war ended and then when did you actually leave Europe?

CB: I can’t remember the exact day. It was right at the end of ’45. We almost didn’t make it back to the states – it was such a rough ocean! Terrible out of France. And there were small ships and we bounced around so much, you didn’t know if you were going forward or backward, first few days in the ocean. But all of a sudden we got passed the storm and we sailed into the United States, New York harbor. Beautiful day. It sure was nice.

SM: You ended up back at, was it Camp Atterbury?

CB: Yeah. We went to a camp, an army camp in Atterbury for our discharge. We went to that as long as that took, it didn’t take long – a week. And we got on a bus and headed for Kalamazoo.

SM: You married and you raised a family here. You’ve pretty much been in Kalamazoo since you came back from the army in 1946.

CB: We never left. My wife was from Kalamazoo too. She worked for a paper company, that was a big – when we all graduated in ’42 there was paper companies galore. They were looking for high school graduates.

SM: Your grandparents were celery farmers on one side but the celery industry kind of dried up after a while.

CB: Yeah. California and Florida became the big producers. You know they didn’t have challenges weather like we do.

SM: What do you think of the celery that’s for sale in the stores right now.

CB: It’s good.

SM: You do like it?

CB: Yeah. It’s different than what we were used to but – when we first, we wouldn’t buy that green stuff. Its quality has gone up.

SM: Since you spoke Dutch with your grandparents, did you say celery or did you say ‘selderij’?

CB: You know, I don’t think we had a Dutch word for celery.

SM: You just said ‘celery’ like in English.

CB: I think so. I can’t remember calling it anything except celery.

SM: Along those same lines I was curious. When they pronounced Kalamazoo, did they just say ‘Kalamazoo’ or did they say it with a Dutch accent?

CB: They’d say ‘Kalamazoo’ [like ‘Kalamazoe’ – ‘zoo’ rhymes with ‘go’]. That’s the way they the pronounced it like – like they would – wanted to say it right. That’s the way of pronouncing the ‘a’ and the ‘l’ and ‘mazoe’ – they didn’t ‘zoo’ they said ‘zoe’.

SM: Carl Bussema, thank you so much for your time.

CB: That’s what makes life worth living, if you can do something for someone else.

Sehvilla Mann joined WMUK’s news team in 2014 as a reporter on the local government and education beats. She covered those topics and more in eight years of reporting for the Station, before becoming news director in 2022.
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