Hanenburg celebrates 100th birthday
Pictured: Ted Hanenburg is Edgerton’s latest centenarian.
By Jill Fennema –
Ted Hanenburg celebrated his 100th birthday last week. He is currently a resident at Edgebrook Care Center, where he is content with his current situation. Of course, he would rather be living in the same place as his dear wife, Jeanette, but he knows that this is where he needs to be right now.
Hattie battled colon cancer and died when Ted was a young boy. She suffered terribly before her death, lacking the medicines and pain relievers that we all depend on these days. He was five when his mom died.
Ted’s older sister Jennie became the mother of the family after Hattie died. Ted recalls that she was always a really good cook.
Ted’s chores around the farm including gathering the cobs from the pig pen every day after school. They fed their pigs ear corn – simply throwing the ears over the fence every morning. By afternoon, all that was left were the cobs. Ted would collect those and they would be burned in the cookstove. “What my sister Jennie could cook over those cobs was a miracle,” Ted recalls.
Ted as a teenager.
One of his other jobs was to grind the coffee each Saturday. He used a small square coffee grinder and would grind enough beans for the week. (Ted’s daughter Beth, who likes antiques, still has that old coffee grinder.)
Ted attended school at Edgerton Christian Elementary School through the eighth grade. His first teacher was Jessie Harringa and all the students liked her. Later he had Esther Cleveringa and Sadie Wiersma as teachers.
There was no bus service in those days, so Ted and his siblings walked to school every day that the weather was conducive to that. When he was a young boy the family moved to a farm west of Rock River Park – it is owned by Jonathan and Darci Pap now. That location was much nicer for walking to school because there was no big hill to climb every afternoon.
During the winter, if the weather turned bad during the day, he and Clara would stay in town after school. He would spend the night at his cousin’s place – the Sam Youngsma family. Clara would stay with the Talmsa cousins.
Ted said that he mostly enjoyed school. History was his favorite subject. After grade school, he attended two years of high school at Edgerton Public School. Some parents in those days would send their older children to high school at Western Academy, a high school in Hull, Iowa. Ted’s older brother Dewey attended high school there and went on to be the vice president of United Van Lines.
His older brother Chuck mostly ran the farm. After high school, Ted helped on the farm, too. They had about a dozen milk cows and twenty or thirty hogs. The barn was a good barn and Ted recalls that when he was still in school he would have friends out to play catch in the haymow during the winter when most of the hay was used up.
He enjoyed playing sports and was actually quite good at basketball. But when Coach Brovold asked his dad if Ted could be on the basketball team, his dad said no, he was needed on the farm.
The Hanenburg family would often celebrate holidays with the Youngsma family. On Decoration Day they would go fishing at Lake Shetek and catch bullheads. They didn’t catch any other kind of fish, and those fried bullheads always tasted really good.
They didn’t have a lot of money to go fishing at different lakes all the time – so they only went on special occasions and they always ate what they caught. They were actually quite fortunate to have all the food they needed right on the farm.
Ted remembers that Sam Youngsma came out to the farm one day and asked Pete what they did with the skim milk. Pete said that they usually fed that to the pigs. Sam didn’t have access to the milk and beef and pork that farmers did. So he regularly came to the farm with two gallon glass jugs to carry home skim milk for his family.
Ted met his wife, Jeannette De Jong, when she was still in high school He saw her walking home from school one day and picked her up. They got acquainted over the next several months. They enjoyed going for rides together and rollerskating. They also attended basketball games together and occasionally a movie.
They were married on March 7, 1944, at the home of Jeanette’s parents, Cornelius and Willhemina De Jong. They lived on the south edge of Edgerton on the place that is now Linda Berning’s day care center. Many young couples got married at home back then. Rev. Baker of the First Reformed Church of Edgerton performed the ceremony.
Ted recalls that at the wedding, the men in the family could hardly wait to light their cigarettes! Just about all men smoked back then.
Ted and Jeanette Hanenburg on their wedding day, March 7, 1944
Ted and Jeanette Hanenburg on their 70th wedding anniversary.
After some time working there part time, Mr. Brink offered him a full time position as the parts man. Chuck told Ted to take the job because he was not built for farming. He would work for John Deere for just about 30 years.
When they got married, the couple attended Ted’s church – First Christian Reformed Church in Edgerton. That church was continually growing, so there was a group that was considering starting another Christian Reformed Church in town. In 1947, Ted and Jeanette became charter members of Bethel Christian Reformed Church and are the only living couple of that charter group.
Ted and Jeannette were blessed with four children, D. Jay, Terry, Mary, and Beth. When Beth was five years old, the family moved to Edgerton. That was about 1969. For the next 50 years they lived on the south end of Edgerton’s Main Street.
