By The River

There are two types of vacations. Exploration vacations, in which you explore new places, and relaxation vacations, in which you go to an old familiar location and simply enjoy the scenery and the climate and the people around you.

We have spent the past week in a rented cottage along Lake Michigan north of Holland. This has been a type-2 vacation. The weather has been beautiful and the water warm. Even the wind storm that struck briefly early in the week and nearly carried away my cheeseburgers and the grill they were cooking on was enjoyable in its own way.

This is a true lake cottage. It was built in the 1920s or 1930s and is uninsulated, not intended for year-around use. It is packed with beds of varying comfort, has a kitchen but no dishwasher, and no washer or dryer (this was a hassle, given that the closest laundromat is about a 7-mile drive). There is an enclosed porch with glass windows and screens, allowing you to let in the lake winds if you choose. What is best about this cottage is the view, nearly pure Lake Michigan. The lake is 80 miles wide and 300 miles long, so it seems like an inland ocean. We have 51 steps from the back yard down to the beach, not bad for Lake Michigan.

The lake can be treacherous. There were rip currents early in the week, with many rescues up and down the coast. And it can eat away at the dunes. Perhaps 25 years ago, most of the cottages along this stretch of coast, including this one, were physically moved back to keep them from tumbling down the bluff to the beach.

But people can't resist the pleasures of living here, either in summer or year-around. Next door to our cottage is a French provincial chateau, with a swimming pool and large, manicured lawn. That kind of McMansion isn't for me. I prefer a classic cottage like this one.

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If even half the allegations in Jeremy Scahill's latest article in the Nation prove true, Blackwater founder Erik Prince is in deep, deep, shit. Read the article. I'll let you be the judge. Prince, I'm always sorry to say, is from my hometown of Holland, Michigan. He graduated from Holland Christian High School, a school steeped in deeply conservative Calvinist religious doctrine. When I was at Holland Public from 1968-71, the Christian kids weren't allowed to dance, and by God look what kind of graduates they turn out because of it! At least they now have a close-to-home object lesson when they talk about the total depravity of man.

The question is whether Christian will renounce Prince if he is convicted and return any donations he may have made to the school. Same with Hope College in Holland, where his sister is on the Board of Trustees, and Calvin College in Grand Rapids, the mothership of Christian Reformed education. Can't have it both ways, folks. God or mammon. One or the other. It's bloooooood moneyyyyyyy.

Oh, and Prince's mother was a big donor in support of Prop 8, the anti-gay marriage referendum in California, and his late father, who I will never deny did many good things for Holland, helped fund the rise of the religious right in America.

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When alumni complain about their old schools, it is usually because they perceive the place has gotten too liberal. I wish that was the case with Hope College in Holland, Michigan. Hope College has become so conservative--culturally, religiously, and politically--that I would not feel comfortable sending my children there.

I attended Hope from 1971-1975, at the end of its brief moderate period, and I barely recognize the place anymore. What once was a campus of middle-of-the-road politics and religion has become a place where gays and lesbians and non-evangelicals face intolerance and Jews need not apply for places on the faculty. I knew some of this before I attended a reunion this past weekend of Hope students who worked on the anchor, the student newspaper. But what I heard from current (and tenured) faculty members at the reunion, including the part about Jews, was extremely disturbing. Most of this was spoken in the presence of the Hope College public relations director, so I don't feel I'm telling tales out of school.

Many of the problems, I'm told, came to Hope in the mid-1990s with the former college chaplain, Ben Patterson, who saw his mission as converting non-evangelicals, Catholics, Muslims and the like to his own brand of fundamentalism. This included students gathering outside the dorm-room doors of "non-believers" and praying for their souls. The Patterson era coincided with the rise of the conservative Republicans nationally.

Some of the stories I heard this past weekend:

--The former Hope president John Jacobson, who brought Patterson to campus, believed that gays try to recruit straights to be gays. Wasn't there a Seinfeld joke about something similar?

--An art professor "may" have been denied tenure because of his sexual orientation, although other reasons were cited.

--A member of the Hope Board of Trustees urged the hiring of more Protestant faculty.

--A Pakistani student was shunned after 9/11--except by the evangelical students trying to convert her from Islam.

And so on, and so on. Hope isn't having any trouble recruiting students, as the public relations director pointedly noted during the discussions. Indeed, there are probably enough wealthy evangelical types in Michigan and Illinois who will send their kids to Hope that the college may never have to worry about a drop-off in enrollment.

It's sad, really. Hope has a beautiful campus and dedicated faculty. The biology department, for example, has so far kept the false theory of Intelligent Design or any of its various bastard spawn out of the classroom. A professor who kept his Intelligent Design beliefs to himself until he got tenure, then "came out," was assigned to teach only classes having nothing to do with evolution. He eventually quit, and the college maintains its sterling reputation in the natural sciences. Truly amazing given some of the members of the Board of Trustees.

Hope College was not Hope Bible College when those of us at the reunion (admittedly a moderate-to-liberal bunch) were there. We got a good education, and religion was there if we wanted it. Many of us did, but it wasn't forced down our throats and no one prayed outside the door.

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I'm in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, for a few days, enjoying a snowy Easter vacation with my parents. While out driving today, I tuned in to "Talk of the Town," a talk radio show on WHTC, the local AM station. People call in and talk about whatever's on their minds, from politics to the weather. They ask Van Oss for favorite recipes from his file, which he reads over the air. The show has been hosted by Juke Van Oss for 56 years, so long that I can remember getting steamed at snide comments about hippies and Vietnam War protestors when I was a youth.

Holland is fortunate to have a local radio station that is chock full of local content like Talk of the Town. Too many stations these days run canned programming sent in from somewhere in Texas. Nearly everything on WHTC is local except the network news breaks--another welcome retro-touch--and the Laura Ingraham Show. Holland is predominantly movement conservative and Republican, an island of the religious right in a state that votes Democratic overall.

I come from an odd town. It once was nearly entirely of Dutch descent, to the point that the arrival of a General Electric plant in 1963 was a traumatic experience for some of the old Dutch, especially the very insular Christian Reformed Church members. "Now the Americans are coming," a docent at the Holland Museum remembered an old relative saying. Today Holland City is barely a third Dutch, he told me, although the surrounding region is still predominantly populated by people who trace their ancestry back to the Netherlands.

This morning, Mayor Al McGeehan of Holland, my ninth grade American History teacher, was talking calls with Juke. McGeehan has been mayor forever, by my mother's reckoning. Callers were mainly concerned about the upcoming vote on raising the millage to fund a local airport authority, and an announcement by the Board of Public Works that electric rates are going up 15 percent. Holland has municipal power and its own power plant, but the rising price of bituminous coal and other things have forced this increase.

McGeehan plans to hold a public hearing tonight to have the BPW explain all the factors behind the increase. One thing in the favor of ratepayers of any municipal electric operation is that profit for stockholders doesn't factor into the rates. But they do have to cover their costs, and the price of coal has gone up steadily because of increasing demand from, you guessed it, China. McGeehan talked about having BPW explore alternative energy options, including wind turbines. The energy seas will be turbulent for the next several years, if not decades, and elected officials will ignore the public's desire for stable and fair rates at their peril.

But this being Holland, the most provacative comments came after the mayor's segment ended. Diehard Bush zealots called in to argue that 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq was no big deal compared to other wars, and we only thought it was because the "main stream media" had conspired to make us think otherwise. These are people who are still in denial about the massive public rejection of Bush and the Republican Party, and the reasons this has happened. Zealots in a lost cause can be dangerous, and that is worth remembering.

My daughter and I drove up to the Grand Rapids Art Museum to see an exhibit of Andy Warhol's serial images. Among them was his Death and Disaster series, which included the Kennedy assassination. A guide was explaining the iconic images to a group of high school students, and she veered off into something that obviously worried her greatly. She asked them to think about the national trauma that would result if Sen. Barack Obama was assassinated. That was what the Kennedy assassination was like, she said.

Many of us worry about that horrific possibility. Obama seems too good to be true, and those of us from the 1960s know how quickly a Bobby Kennedy or Martin Luther King can be snatched away.

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I received word yesterday that three alumni of the Hope College anchor, the student newspaper where I toiled happily from 1971-75, are organizing a reunion of all anchor (never capitalized) alumni for the weekend of June 20-22 in Holland, Michigan.

The three organizers are George E. Arwardy, publisher of the Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger, John M. Mulder, and Don Luidens, who is on the Hope sociology faculty. While I don't approve of the current rightward drift (in truth, it's a speedboat race) of Hope College, I do enjoy journeys through the liberal past and so will make every effort to be there. Please pass the word about the reunion to any anchor alumni you know.

In e-mails this morning to Tom O'Brien, Gary Gray, Joe Courter and Jim Harris, I've suggested food from Burger King be served. Also, there could be guest appearances by former campus security chief Glen Bareman and Richard Angstadt, the alumni who did weekly paste-up of the paper in the early 1970s at The Composing Room in Grand Rapids. Plus a contest to see which of us can still fit through the tiny window into the former anchor office in Graves Hall that we used to get inside when we didn't have a key. Arwady, I'm sure, will talk about the honor of being the publisher of the newspaper that Tony Soprano walked down to pick up at the end of his driveway in many an episode.

Tom O'Brien--evidence that this event is already getting out of hand--suggested a recreation of the anchor staff "streak" (ca. 1973) through the Pine Grove. Gary Gray offered to provide photographic evidence of the original event. Former ad manager Joe Courter begged off attending, saying it was a long way to travel from Florida. But he reminded us of one of his favorite memories, a news clip (written directly from a school press release, as I recall) hanging on the office bulletin board about the installation of a new organ at Dimnent Chapel. Some of the wording was a bit, well, odd. Jim Harris reminisced fondly about a parody op-ed piece he wrote for the ranchor, the annual humor issue (printed on yellow paper) "that made Gordon cry."

All in all, it should be fun. I tried to link a pdf of the nuts-and-bolts information, but couldn't figure out how to do it, so if you're interested, contact Don Luidens at luidens@hope.edu. You can register online at http://myhope.hope.edu. See you there. Despite the fact that the events will take place on the Hope College campus, and despite connections between college and the family of a certain well-known operator of a mercenary firm, no Blackwater personnel will be present. As far as I know.

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I want to slip in something about Rev. Bill Hillegonds, who was chaplain of Hope College in Holland, Michigan, when I was a student there from 1971-75. He died Dec. 23 at the age of 85, and will be greatly missed by all the students who knew him. He was chaplain at Hope from 1965 to 1978.

Hillegonds was the Rev. William Sloan Coffin of Hope College. He was, I suspect, one of many politically liberal college chaplains in the 1960s and 1970s who were cut from the same cloth as Yale's Coffin, who was immortalized by Garry Trudeau in "Doonesbury" as the Rev. Scott Sloan. Hillegonds was smart, funny, friendly, and probably never told anyone they were going to Hell. He won you over with charm and Christian love, not Calvinist doctrine.

You won't find this in the Holland Sentinel obituary above, or the one on the Hope College website, but Hillegonds was opposed to the Vietnam War and acted on his beliefs. As I recall, the draft counseling center, where you could go to find out how to be a conscientious objector, was in the basement of Dimnent Chapel on Hillegonds' turf. Chap was a veteran of World War II, which probably turned as many American men against the idea of war (e.g., Sen. George McGovern) as fed hawks into the American Legion and VFW. He started as a 23 year-old freshman at Hope in 1945, the same year my mother enrolled. And it wasn't just the war: Hillegonds advocated many of the social changes that came out of the 1960s.

But his opposition to the Vietnam War was front and center. My good friend Tom O'Brien, who started at Hope a year before I did, recalled coming across a demonstration against the Vietnam War in Holland's Centennial Park during the annual Tulip Time Festival, probably in May 1971. Hillegonds and about 35 students were laying on the ground with signs on their chests proclaiming that they were dead Vietnamese. Tom, who took his anti-war beliefs much further than I ever did, laid down with them, and had many conversations with Hillegonds in the years to come.

Given the sharp rightward turn Hope has taken since Tom and I were there, it is hard to believe that moderate and even liberal winds once blew through the Pine Grove at the center of campus. Speakers like activist black comedian Dick Gregory, Black Panther and now U.S. Congressman Bobby Rush (the only candidate to ever beat Obama in an election), and the Rev. Philip Berrigan (Tom had a hand in that one) have been replaced by the likes of rightwing darling Oliver North, gay "conversion" preachers, and others who flatter the retrograde beliefs of the more conservative members of the Hope board of trustees and big donors.

Those of us who attended Hope between 1963 and 1975 have President Calvin VanderWerf to thank for that all-too-brief period of liberalism, according to the book "Can Hope Endure?" by James C. Kennedy and Caroline J. Simon. VanderWerf recruited Hillegonds as chaplain and set in motion a series of reforms that eliminated compulsory chapel and made the campus more friendly to women students (and, lets be honest, their boyfriends!). VanderWerf was forced out out by Reformed Church conservatives in 1970, but the reform period didn't end immediately.

The advent of President Gordon VanWylen in 1973 brought that about. I remember those of us on the Hope College anchor, the student newspaper, writing about VanWylen's announced goal of an "all-Christian faculty" and wondering what that would mean for one of our favorite history professors, Bill Cohen, who was Jewish.

Hillegonds left Hope in 1978. I don't know if it was because of Van Wylen's conservatism or because he just wanted a change, but he eventually took up the pastorate in a church near the always-liberal University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. His son Paul, a Republican (Chap may have been as well), was elected to the Michigan legislature from Holland and rose to Speaker of the House.

Bill Hillegonds lived a long and wonderful life, and I salute him.

Posted by David at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Call me obsessed, but I can't get enough of the story, now two years-old, of how a man's body was accidentally picked up by a trash hauler at a funeral home in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, and then dumped in the nearby Auburn Hills landfill owned by Waste Management. Where amazingly, he remains (can you think of a better word?) to this day.

The latest, as reported by the Holland Sentinel, is that officials from the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth have reopened their file in the case after meeting with lawyers for Notier-VerLee-Langeland Funeral Home, Priority Arrowaste, and the family of the man in the landfill, Erwin Jordan. Funeral homes are among the businesses regulated by the department.

Now I'm a newspaper reporter, and as a group, we have a pretty dark sense of humor. It's sort of a technique for mentally coping with the murder, mayhem and other tragedies we write about on a regular basis. We'll yuck it up over weird suicides, odd accidents, and (most recently) the local woman who tried to strangle her boyfriend with her bra (underwire? Victoria's Secret?). Which segued into a discussion among the photographers over whether, if you were going to kill someone, would you want them naked or clothed?

But I struggle to find even the blackest of humor in the Erwin Jordan case, although I'll forgive you if you do. What sort of society leaves a human being's body in a landfill rather than inconvenience either the landfill owner or the taxpayers with the effort of finding it? Especially when the costs can logically be charged back to the idiots who put our Mr. Jordan there to begin with.

Hairsplitting legalities aside, find the body. If the FBI can find crime victims in Pennsylvania landfills, there is no reason what is left of Erwin Jordan can't be found and given a proper burial.

Posted by David at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been having fun going through albums of old family photos while visiting my parents in my hometown of Holland, Michigan. The one at the top of this post, probably dating from about 1931, shows my very young mother at left, her younger sister, and their mother, my grandmother, next to a late 1920s car in the countryside. Is it broken down? Are they in Wisconsin (likely) or Iowa? My grandfather was probably the photographer, using a Kodak box camera popular at the time. My grandparents are long gone, but I remember seeing the camera in their house.

One of the albums is full of snapshots like this, mostly black & white but a few in color. Most of the Kodak color photographs have faded to a horrible yellow, but a few--made with a different company's film, perhaps?--have survived. They have faint splashes of real color on black & white, almost as if it was dabbed on later. I carry a portable Canon flatbed scanner, the best $50 I ever spent, when I visit the homes of relatives. If they are willing, and they usually are, I take it out of the suitcase and make digital copies onto my Apple laptop. The software often noticeably improves the black-and-white photos, taking away the effects of time. It can't, I found out, bring back the colors of a faded color photograph. I would need the negative to do that, and they are also long gone.

Albums of old photos are like time machines, taking you back to when your parents were children and your grandparents were vibrant young adults. They are full of "old" cars, farming scenes from another era, and hopeful and smiling school classes and young brides. I see my incredibly thin father in the Navy after World War II and during the Korean War (he was called back). I see him on the streets of Shanghai before the Communist takeover. And I see both of them as students at Hope College, where I also went. He and my mother are 80 now, worrying about whether they will be able to sell their house into Michigan's real estate depression if they need to move into an assisted living center.

Holland is beautiful this Thanksgiving. There hasn't been much snow--none is on the ground now--and many of the trees still have their colorful leaves because of the warm autumn. I asked my mother if there was much talk here about Erik Prince, scion of the prominent local Prince family, and his controversial Blackwater security firm. No, she said. Just the stories in the paper. That's typical Holland. The uncomfortable topics don't get talked about. Life goes on.

Posted by David at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm taking a break from politics today to write about my hometown of Holland, Michigan, and some of the changes that have taken place there since I left 32 years ago.

I was inspired by this article in the Holland Sentinel about the local police testifying in the state capital about Holland's gang problem. And we aren't talking about roving bands of Christian Reformed toughs rumbling with Reformed Church youth gangs over who are the more pious.

Yes, my hometown is a weird place. Settled in 1847 by Dutch religious dissidents--they were dissenting from the Dutch king's grant of religious freedom to Catholics and Jews--Holland for nearly a century was one of the more homogeneous outposts of old Europe you could find on the North American continent. The Holland telephone directory was nearly indistinguishable from that of Amsterdam, except for the ads in English.

Tall blonds and blondes are everywhere in Holland, bearing family names like VanEenanaam, Ver Hage, VanSlooten or VanderWoude. Not to mention, DeKok, DeLeeuw, DeHaan, and DenHerder. Holland for the past three-quarters of a century has celebrated an annual Tulip Festival in which the inhabitants put on 18th century Dutch costumes and parade down 8th Street like a VerMeer or Rembrandt painting come to life. Politicians marched, too. I've seen a picture of young Mitt Romney with his father, Michigan Gov. George Romney, in which both are in Dutch costumes. Some of the marchers even wore wooden shoes.

But in the early 1950s, names like Ramirez, Ramos, Rodriguez and Rios started appearing in the Holland telephone directory. Mexican migrant laborers, some brought in to pick cucumbers by the giant H.J. Heinz pickle factory on 16th Street, and others coming on their own to work in the many fruit farms that surround the city, began changing the complexion of Holland. Some of them liked what they found here, got jobs in the factories, and put down roots.

By the time I entered Montello Park Elementary School on 22nd Street it was common to have one or two Mexican kids in the class, but rarely more. They made up a small minority of Holland residents, adding a welcome dash of black-haired Latin Catholic spice to an overwhelmingly white, bland, Dutch Protestant culture. The Mexican kids taught us forbidden Spanish swear words, and even put on Dutch costumes to march in the Tulip Time parade with the rest of us. I maintain to this day that most of the Dutch and most of the Mexicans got along fine. I remember no incidents, but then I was just a kid. Even in high school, things seemed to be fine.

Beginning in the 1990s, according to Holland Police chief John Kruithof, things changed. He told state officials the city has had 35 gangs since then, although he believes only about half a dozen are active now. Some are Mexican, but I've also heard of Laotian gangs, an ethnic group that didn't exist in Holland when I lived there. They have names like the Latin Kings, Tiny Rascal Gangsters, and the Vice Lords. They aren't just social clubs, either. There have been shootings, and this past week someone threw a firebomb at a house on 22nd Street a few blocks down from my old school.

That area was always a tough, depressing area of tiny houses and unkempt yards. There was almost nothing attractive about it, so it drew people on the fringes of society as inhabitants. It would be a good area for a redevelopment project, something the city of Holland is normally pretty good at. Gangs can do that to a neighborhood, and only good police work--and economic opportunity--can root them out.

Posted by David at 08:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Unlike in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, where a search for a human body accidentally picked up as trash at a local funeral home and dumped in a landfill was called off quickly, this Downingtown family kept at it until they found their mother's missing jewelry. I guess when you're motivated, anything is possible.

Posted by David at 07:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the most depressing things I read recently was a column in the New York Times (can't link it) by Ben Stein, who basicly said things could get really bad in our future, all because of the continuing gross imbalance in foreign trade between the U.S. and China. Stein may not have been quite that specific about China, but that's what he meant. He predicted the U.S. dollar could fall to one-third the value of a Euro, and that foreign oil producers could then decide to abandon the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. If they picked the Euro, that would mean that our dollars would have to be converted to Euros before they could buy foreign petroleum. It's a bad, bad thing.

What sold in the U.S. isn't made in China these days? Or some other foreign country? Once we made everything, now we make almost nothing. I purchased an Apple laptop last summer, great computer, and it was shipped to me directly from the factory in China. No or very few autos sold here are made in China, but I suspect the days of cheap-China not being in the auto market are numbered. It is simply too cheap to make things in China, and the quality can be as good as U.S.-made. Yes, U.S. consumers benefit in the short term from those cheap China prices, but I suspect U.S. manufacturers who ship jobs to China are the real winners, and don't pass along nearly all the cost savings they achieve.

Yesterday, I took my family to the Holland Aquatics Center, a big indoor pool complex in my home town of Holland, Michigan, where we're spending the week visiting my parents. While warming myself in the hot pool, a man who appeared to be about 44 years-old began telling his economic woes to whomever would listen. Call him the Jeremiah of the hot tub.

He had come to the pool after his shift let out at the furniture factory where he worked, and was clearly mentally handicapped. But his story rang true. He said he had worked for 26 years at an old-line furniture manufacturer in Zeeland and Holland, but had been laid off last year. I asked him why. Because they now make what we made overseas, desks in China and clocks in the Philippines, he said. His new job was a significant pay cut. He didn't say what he made now, but in his old job he made$12.44 per hour. The medical benefits at his new job were bottom-of-the barrel, but cost him $25 for single coverage every two weeks. He had to pay the first $1,000 of doctor visits and that sort of thing himself before the insurance kicked in.

What bothered him most was that he had been laid off four years before qualifying for the desk or clock you received as a gift at 30 years of service. Employee's choice.

Around that time, my wife joined me in the hot tub. He's mentally handiapped, she whispered. She works in the field and knows. We decided to go check on the girls and left. I later saw the same man bending the ear of a woman in the hot tub, telling her of China and clocks and cabinets and the plight of the American working man.

What would it mean for the economy if we announced one day that we weren't going to import anything that we can make or mine here? We'll be happy to export to you, but those are our terms. Would it just mean paying a few dollars more, or would it be worse than that? People may be asking themselves this question in not too much longer.

Posted by David at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm back in my hometown, the Tulip City, the Land of Lawn Care. In other words, Holland, Michigan. We drove out Saturday, our usual route on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the Ohio Turnpike, the Indiana Turnpike, and then up into Turnpike-less Michigan.

Gasoline is expensive here, much more so than where I live in Harrisburg, Pa. I paid $2.97 a gallon when I filled up before we left. It was about $3.08 on the Ohio Turnpike and then $2.98 in Michigan. But that last price was an aberration. We lucked out. Most places were charging $3.18 a gallon for regular. My dad said he paid $3.59 a gallon a couple of weeks ago.

The high prices are starting to hit home, and not just in ways you would expect. We stopped for dinner Saturday night at Win Schuler's Restaurant in Marshall, Michigan, and noticed the menu prices for meat entrees had risen significantly since our last stop a year ago. But I will say that the Lake Superior whitefish, which I ordered, was delicious. Never a bad meal at Schuler's.

WKZO TV 3 ran a story on their newscast last night about how the rising price of gas was affecting volunteers, the folks who do everything from deliver Meals on Wheels to ferrying neighbors to the doctor. I suspect we are at the start, perhaps two-tenths of the way along, of a great energy inflation similar to that after the first Arab oil embargo in 1973. Everything is going to cost more. Inflation robs the working man. Even if you reduce your own use of energy--I just bought a more fuel efficient car--you'll pay for the people who don't when you hand over your cash at the grocery store.

Posted by David at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Judge Jon Van Allsburg in Ottawa County, Michigan, now joins the ranks of those distinguished jurists who manage to ignore the obvious while making certain that well-lawyered corporations don't have to face up to the full consequences of their actions. I've written about this case before, and it just gets worse and worse.

Van Allsburg ruled yesterday that the family of Erwin Jordan can't sue for emotional distress in the outrageous incident in which Jordan's body was left in a box in a garage by Notier-VerLee-Langeland Funeral Home in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, picked up by a trash hauler, Priority Arrowaste,and subsequently dumped in Waste Management, Inc.,'s Auburn Hills landfill in Zeeland Twp., where it remains today. The reason? Because the family didn't "witness" the body being dumped in the landfill and didn't learn of the incident until more than a day later. It wasn't enough that they must go on living knowing that their family member was dumped in the trash.

That the body remains in the landfill is outrageous and shocks the conscience. Neither VanAllsburg nor anyone else with authority over the situation should have allowed Waste Management to leave it there. Costly to look for it? Sure. But that's what insurance and deep corporate pockets are for. That's what a civilized society does.

VanAllsburg has allowed a lawsuit to proceed against Priority Arrowaste on the narrow ground of whether its employees should have known that the box contained human remains. But given how this case has gone so far, and given that the Jordan family is from the Holland area's blue collar fringe and has no position and influence in the community, I'm not holding my breath that they'll ever get justice in this sad and horrific case.

Huh? So the mere fact that a loved one's body has been dumped in a landfill instead of being laid to rest in cemetery or cremated isn't enough? Van Allsburg has already excused Priority Arrowaste from liability on the grounds that Notier-VerLee-Langeland Funeral Home placed the remains in a storage box too close to a refuse container, thus violating some arcane provision of its "contract" with the waste hauler.

Posted by David at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the more bizarre and disturbing stories to come out of my hometown of Holland, Michigan, in recent years had to do with a lost corpse. It is a story with elements of black humor, but which ultimately shocks the conscience.

Here's what happened: Erwin Jordan, 66, an average working man, but descended from Holland's original Dutch settlers, dies Dec. 20, 2005. What with the holidays and all, his children can't decide whether to bury or cremate him. The body is at the Notier-Ver Lee-Langeland Funeral Home in Holland. The funeral home, which has been there forever (my grandfather was buried from it), put the corpse in a black body bag inside a white cardboard cremation box to await their decision. Since its refrigeration units are all in use, they put the box in the unheated funeral home garage (Big Mistake #1)

After the holidays, the kids, who seem a bit dysfunctional, still can't decide. One day, Jan. 6, 2006, to be exact, along comes a truck from Priority Arrowaste, the regular trash hauler used by the funeral home. The dim-bulb crew sees the white box, which weighed 70 pounds, and according to testimony in the lawsuit, thinks it contains used rags (Big Mistake #2). A worker picks up the box to put it in the truck. It breaks, and the body bag tumbles out. He picks it up--that must have been easy--and throws it in a dumpster (Big Mistake #3), which is then emptied into the truck.

Off goes the truck to the Auburn Hills Landfill (did it used to be a subdivision?) operated by Waste Management, Inc., in Zeeland Twp. Erwin Jordan's body is dumped in the landfill along with whatever else is in the truck (Big Mistake #4). Seventy other truckloads of garbage are dumped on top of him before the mistake is discovered later that day. The police go to the landfill with cadaver dogs on Jan. 7-8, 2006, but can't find the body.

Now things really get strange. The search never resumes. Police determine that no crime has been committed, so they have no obligation to find the body. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, after initially insisting that the body must be found and removed from the landfill, change their mind. They determine that it is only against the law to dump medical waste in a landfill, i.e., body parts. Since Jordan's body is intact, voila! No law has been violated! The Jordan kids say they don't want the search to continue, either. Only Jordan's brother, Stuart, issues a plaintive plea to find his brother Erwin. The Holland Sentinel publishes an editorial headlined "Find the Body."

Guess what? Erwin Jordan is still in the landfill. This was no Law & Order landfill search, where they keep digging till they find the body (that does happen in real life, by the way, usually when someone offed in New York is suspected to be in a landfill in Pennsylvania). A county judge should have ordered the search to continue, and hang the cost. That's what insurance is for. Inconvenience to business or bureaucrats is not a legitimate excuse. Where were Holland's many pro-life clergy? The whole episode shocks the conscience.

This past Friday, the various parties squared off in a Michigan courtroom for the opening rounds of the litigation. Notier-VerLee-Langeland and Priority Arrowaste, which appears to be the hardliner against settlement, are suing each other. The Jordan family, now united, is suing both. Where is the Pedro Almodovar of America to turn this epic into the absurdist film it cries out to be?

Posted by David at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the suspects arrested last week in the 1979 murder of Janet Chandler in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, was a black man named James C. Nelson. Thanks to some archival sleuthing by the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, we now know that Nelson served a long sentence for the kidnapping and assault of a woman in Ohio that took place four years after the crime for which he now faces murder charges in Michigan. Nelson and several of the accused were Wackenhut security guards brought in from outside to patrol a strike at the Chemtron plant in Holland in January 1979.

The racial and sexual aspects of the Chandler murder--she is alleged to have had a brief affair with him, he was the only black among the six people arrested--are doubtless causing shock waves in still-very-Dutch Holland. When I was growing up there (1953-75), Holland was one of the whitest cities around. That has changed somewhat now, but when I was at Holland High School we had exactly one black kid in the school and a couple of Asians. There were a couple of dozen Mexican-American kids, whose parents had arrived in the 1950s to work at the fruit and vegetable farms outside Holland, found factory jobs and stayed. That may be an over-simplification, but not by much.

I never knew a black person well until I enrolled at Hope College in Holland, which was a world of its own. I always got along well with the Mexicans, as did most in Holland (some may have a different opinion, but this is mine). They brought welcome cultural and religious diversity to our very white and blond and Protestant town, and finally some ethnic food worthy of the name. You have to understand that in Holland then, pizzerias were a recent innovation. Calvinism ruled the palate as well as the soul.

Janet Chandler, who was 23 at the time of her murder, was an adult and perfectly free to date whomever she chose. There was nothing wrong in what she did. But anyone trying to understand the dynamics of this case should know how radical a course she was following given the local culture, which was only just beginning to change. Sympathy for her parents will be tinged with disapproval of her by some. In many ways, murder cases, and especially murder trials, are the morality plays of our day.

Posted by David at 06:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A very old murder in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, was apparently solved this week after 27 years. Not weeks, not months, but years. Five people were arrested, including one who worked as a nursing assistant at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa. Police painted a picture of an almost unbelievably sordid crime. Michigan has never had a death penalty, but if the alleged facts of this case had occurred in a state which did, most or all of the suspects would be facing execution if convicted.

The victim, Janet Chandler, 23, invariably described as "pretty," was a senior at Hope College, a prominent Midwestern liberal arts college in Holland affiliated with the Reformed Church in America. She lived off campus and worked as a night clerk at the Blue Mill Inn, a motel along the highway. On the night of Jan. 31, 1979, she disappeared. Her body was found a day later by a snowplow driver in a rest area along Interstate 196, seven miles below South Haven, Mich. She had been raped and strangled, although I'm not sure if the rape part was disclosed at the time. Despite an extensive investigation by the Holland police, the final arrests were not made in the case until this week. DNA analysis didn't exist in 1979, and the police say that might have helped them if it had.

Janet arrived at Hope College from Muskegon, Mich., in the fall of 1975, a few months after I graduated. By 1979, I was living in Shamokin, Pa., and working at my first newspaper. My parents sent me the clippings about her murder from the Holland Sentinel, but I didn't think much about it again until I read in 2004 how a group of Hope students and their professor had made a documentary about the unsolved crime. Not long afterward, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox created a new "cold case" unit that adopted the Chandler murder as one of its first efforts.

Murders in Holland, a city (then) of 25,000 along Lake Michigan, are rare enough that you remember most of the ones in your lifetime. They have almost always been committed by outsiders, people who were not part of the majority Dutch culture even though they may have lived there. Not being Dutch and Reformed in Holland (I was the former but not the latter) is akin in some ways to not being Mormon in Utah. I always supposed that Janet Chandler's murder was connected to a robbery at the motel, that the killer had eliminated the only witness, dumped her body at the rest stop, then disappeared into the snowy night toward Chicago.

As the Grand Rapids Press reported today, it was very different than that. A group of Wackenhut security guards hired by Chemtron, a Holland company then having a strike, abducted her, raped her repeatedly, tortured her, and finally killed her. The strike ended soon afterward and they crawled back to whatever hole they called home. During their time busting heads at the strike, they had, police said, engaged in heavy alcohol and drug use in their off hours at the hotel. Sexual relationships are said to have developed between the guards and motel employees, possibly including Janet herself. The rape and murder took place at a party at a Chemtron guest house on Howard Avenue in Holland, not far from the Parke-Davis factory where my father worked. More than a dozen people were present, but even those who didn't participate in the crime kept the secret for 27 years.

Some of this came out locally last February, when the cold-case unit arrested Robert Michael Lynch, 66, and got a good confession from him. Many details were withheld at the time. What we know now is that Laurie Swank, 48, the Geisinger nursing assistant from Nescopeck, Pa., was Janet's off-campus roommate at the time and is said by police to have been the instigator of the horrors against her. Jealousy over a man?

I'm sure it will all come out, just as I'm sure that one or all of the defense attorneys will attempt to portray Janet as a willing participant in an orgy that got a little too crazy, went a little too far. That's how they do things in murder trials. Why? To get a lesser sentence for their clients than the life terms awaiting them if convicted of first degree murder. I pity Janet's parents for what they are going to have to endure in the name of justice, but there is no other way short of unlikely confessions. One or two will probably get off because of the difficulty of proving actions, proving intent, after 27 years.

How long did the alleged participants in this crime worry about getting caught? Was it in their thoughts every day, even two months ago, or did there come a time when they all but forgot about it? Some are parents now themselves, and perhaps better understand what they allegedly have done. What is clear is that this is a story the Russian writer Dostoevsky would have found as interesting as the world of murder and guilt he created in "Crime and Punishment."

Posted by David at 06:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)