It is July 5, 2008, and I am interviewing Mr. Ed Gritters of Redlands, California.
MHH: Mr. Gritters, where and when were you born?
EG: I was born February 20, 1929 on a farm just north of Hull, Iowa, and I was baptized by Rev. C. (Cornelius) Hanko in 1929.
MHH: Who were your parents?
EG: Ben and Ann Gritters.
MHH: What can you tell me about them and what can you tell me about your childhood? What was the occupation of your father, where did you live, what type of lifestyle did you have?
EG: It was during the depression, so our lifestyle was by today’s standard very low, as it was for most people during the depression. We were rental farmers, so about every two or three years, the landlord’s son would grow up, and he needed the farm, and my folks would be on the road, moving again to another farm if they could find one to rent. By about 1941 they could no longer find farms to rent in Sioux County, Iowa. So then we bought a small farm north of Edgerton, Minnesota in 1942.
MHH: When you moved to Edgerton, I assume that your membership was transferred there as well?
EG: Yes, because I was only 12 years old when we moved to Edgerton.
MHH: And how long did you live in Edgerton?
EG: Until I finished Junior College in Orange City, Iowa in 1948. That’s when I went to Redlands. So I living in the Edgerton area only about five or six years, because I went back to Western Christian in Hull for my senior year of high school. Then I went two years to Orange City—Northwestern Junior College, because there was no Dordt College in those days. Right after that I went directly to California because we had just gotten a new minister in Edgerton who said that it was June and Redlands had neither teacher, either the principal and teacher for grades 5–9, or the teacher for the lower room. So they only had three months to go. Rev. DeBoer, who came from Redlands to Edgerton, persuaded me to contact the Redlands’ school board and offer to take the job there if they wanted—which I did.
MHH: Now, when you went to Junior College, you were trained as a teacher then?
EG: Basically it was for teaching, yes, although it was largely pre-seminary type courses, too. I had Greek and History and things of that nature.
MHH: In a Junior College?
EG: Yes.
MHH: So you had a two-year degree, then.
EG: Yes.
MHH: And did that qualify you to become a teacher in California then?
EG: The restrictions in California for teaching in a private school were very lax. You only had to sign one thing, which was that you were not on drugs (laughter). No requirements about graduation, degrees, anything like that.
MHH: So you went to Redlands when you were 19 or 20 years old?
EG: Nineteen.
MHH: And you began to teach there. At what grade level?
EG: I had grades 5-9 and being principal at the same time.
MHH: A fair amount of work for a young man and a brand new teacher to take on.
EG: For a greenhorn, it was….
MHH: I didn’t want use that word! (Laughter)
EG: I worked till midnight almost every night. You had to study five lessons for each class for each day. So there was a lot of reading and studying to do ahead of time.
MHH: Now, what can you tell me about the school—about its origin and its development and its size—anything, any information that you can give me.
EG: I think the school started in about 1933. My wife could give you the exact date. But I think it was about 1933. And Rev. Vos was instrumental in getting it started there. In fact, I saw some old records there once in the school, of the early years of the school, and Rev. G. Vos was the secretary of the school society. The minister was heavily involved in the beginning of the school there.
The school met for those first seven or eight years in a basement of our church, with one teacher with eight grades. My wife was one of the children who went through those entire eight grades with old Pete R. Zuidema. Later I saw Mr. Zuidema’s picture in some consistory picture in Grand Rapids, so he must have gone back to Grand Rapids after teaching in Redlands.
MHH: So if it was started in ’33, you came in what year to Redlands?
EG: In ’48.
MHH: So the school had been in existence for 15 years. Approximately how large was the school when you were there?
EG: When I came there, there were about 25 children in my room and about 22 in the lower room. But it kept growing. When Rev. Vermeer came the same day I did, they were pretty eager about his preaching, pretty happy about his preaching. Some people who left a couple of years previous with another problem in Redlands started coming back—at least a few of them did: the VanUffelens, the VanMeeterens—a couple like that came back to our church at that time in 1948. So we grew to almost close to 80 families at that time in Redlands.
MHH: A good-sized congregation.
EG: Yes.
MHH: You mentioned that there had been some type of previous trouble and that some had left. That was prior to when you arrived?
EG: That was prior to my coming. It was about in 1945 or 1946, I believe. They had a principal there by the name of Mr. A.C. Boerkoel. For some reason, some of the people did not like him, and some people stood up for him. But as a result, the school board did not extend his contract, so he had to leave. That was sitting bad with some of the people, so there was a split in the church there, nd a lot of people left in 1945–46.
MHH: And many of them returned when Vermeer became pastor….
EG: In 1948.
MHH: The same time you began to teach.
EG: The same day. He came there the same day I did. He had a seventeen-year-old daughter who just graduated from high school in Pella, and she taught the lower room.
MHH: Quite a load for her, too.
EG: Yes.
MHH: The formation and continuance of the school in Redlands makes it probably the first school that was established by people from the Protestant Reformed Churches. Is that correct?
EG: It was and is the first school in our denomination, yes.
MHH: And what was the motivation behind the establishment of that school and its continuance?
EG: I wasn’t there, of course. I couldn’t speak about the motivation. But I think it would be the same for every one of our churches: where they were able to establish our own school, they did so. Rev. Vos was heavily behind it. He strongly recommended it. With him being the minister there, they soon decided that they would start their own school.
MHH: And that was separation, then, from the existing local Christian schools.
EG: That’s correct.
MHH: At what point in this sequence of events were you married?
EG: We were married in September 1, 1950. That would have been just before my third year of teaching.
MHH: And, speaking of your third year, how long did you teach in Redlands?
EG: I taught there six years—from 1948, although the congregation had split badly in 1953 already, so I had children of both groups in my room—made it very difficult teaching. So at the end of that year I did not sign my new contract. I was surprised that they gave me another contract because I had basically left the group that was with Vermeer and DeWolf. But they chose to renew my contract, which, of course, I did not dare sign.
MHH: Can you give me some history about the difficulties in Redlands in connection with Vermeer and with the school, with various factions in the church? Walk me through it step-by-step. What was this all about and what happened?
EG: Well, many of those things did start for just something rather minor. We had a family that moved to Redlands from Montana. They insisted that the Montana schools were so much better than our Redlands Christian school that they wanted all of their three daughters stepped up one grade—just automatically. The school board didn’t feel that that was a good enough reason to say that Montana schools were so much better than our Redlands Christian school. Well, nothing was said or done about it at that time. But then, when more and more difficulties arose, then they started bringing that up. They said that we were punishing this poor family from Montana who had three kids and now they’d have to pay tuition a year longer and things of that nature. I really don’t remember what the next step was. I do know that soon people who were wholeheartedly with Rev. Vermeer started agitating, and they were able to get a majority of their people on the school board. That pushed out some of the people that had been on the school board for a long time.
MHH: Back up for just a second. This problem—why were there factions to begin with? Was that connected with the matter of the conditional covenant and doctrinal splits? Back up a little bit and take me through that.
EG: I don’t know that I can tell you why that split occurred at that time, but it split quite a bit along the lines of what happened in 1946 with principal A.C. Boerkoel. You know, sometimes you think those things heal. But after four or five years, those things had not healed. So after getting control of the school board, the next thing they decided to do was pick on the Sunday School. We had one man who was happily teaching the Sunday School. He was the president of Sunday School for several years. One year they did not approve him continuing as Sunday School principal. Then some of the other Sunday School teacher— because this superintendent who was not approved for continuing as president of the Sunday School—also quit. So they had a new batch of Sunday School teachers, basically again that were put forward by Vermeer and those who followed him closely and who were still somewhat against this man who’d been principal of the Sunday School for many years.
MHH: So now we have basically two factions, and the majority one gained control of the board.
EG: The board, yes, and the Sunday School.
MHH: What happened next?
EG: Well the next thing that happened was that there was more and more discussion finally reaching Redlands about the problems with Hoeksema and DeWolf and others in Michigan. A few of the members of the church of Redlands (about 5 of them) were totally in favor of Rev. Hoeksema. Basically, the rest of the congregation, to my mind, did not see that great a need for a split. I don’t think we saw the need for the Declaration of Principles.
So there we have the five families, five men who were strongly in favor of the Declaration and going along with Rev. Hoeksema. Basically, the rest of the church, I think I can say, were not overly joyful over the Declaration. But when Vermeer’s group then voted to join the DeWolf group, that really left the other group out in the open, off by themselves, because they said they really did not feel like starting a new church with these five people there, because they were always 200 percenters, so to speak.
So they called Rev. Hoeksema to come. I know that the five people that were for Hoeksema all the time were not overjoyed about it that now the rest of us were going to jump on their bandwagon once more, although a couple of them did get voted into the first consistory in 1953 or 1954. They were not especially happy about it.
One of those four became Sunday School superintendent in our new church. He had other things that he was always harping on. He did not believe that our sins will be revealed in the resurrection, and he insisted that a Christian Reformed Church is the false church. That many years ago, we were not ready to take that stand. I don’t know if we would say that today, but looking back 60 years, you can read a lot into it.
He was told he could teach Sunday School, but he could not tell the children that your sins would not be revealed in the resurrection and that any other church but ours at that time was a false church.
But he ignored the consistory and he taught those things. So the consistory then told him that since he had reneged on his agreement not to discuss those things in the Sunday School, that he could no longer be the Sunday School superintendent).
MHH: You mentioned, Mr. Gritters, that eventually there was a faction in the church, I assume under the leadership of Vermeer, who went with the DeWolf group. Now, why did that happen? Was the conditional covenant being preached by Vermeer? Did he agree doctrinally with DeWolf? What happened?
EG: I believe they did not originally believe with DeWolf or go along with DeWolf. But I know that some of them also were not totally in agreement with going with Hoeksema. So there was a difference of opinions there. When this trouble then spread from the school and then into the Sunday School in the congregation there, then Vermeer, since he saw that we were contacting Hoeksema, and five of these men whose names I haven’t mentioned were with that group also, then they decided they would go with DeWolf. That was contrary to what people thought after discussing it with Vermeer over the last year or two. They had made comments that Hoeksema was getting old and he should quit. I personally overheard Vermeer and another member who became a member of the other group say that. I personally witnessed that when I was teaching school here.
MHH: Would it be fair to say that there were, at least to one degree or another, personalities involved?
EG: I’d say there was probably over half personalities. Some of that reflected back to 1946 when the school split over principal A.C. Boerkoel.
MHH: And the result of all of this was that the school ceased to exist?
EG: It did, when I declined to sign my new contract for 1954–55. They got a Baptist teacher from Yucaipa to take over the lower room and my second cousin from Iowa who had been teaching with me. I believe she was the principal that year. But that was the last year. After that they closed the school down because about a third of the kids went with us to our church, probably a third or fourth of them had already gone back to the Christian Reformed school. And that left them with such a small group that they decided that they could not continue.
MHH: I’ve also heard comments made about some letters in the context of this Rev. Vermeer. I know nothing about that. Can you help me out?
EG: Well, one day my wife and I had picked up the mail, or it came right to our front door, and there was an envelope handwritten in pencil. My wife said (just a joke), “What’s this? Blackmail?” Well, it turned out that it really was, because when we opened it and we read it, it said things like, “We just welcomed our minister back from his much needed vacation and we had a celebration for him. And where were you that night? You were with the enemy.” And those were the types of things that were stated in that letter. It was all handwritten. As to where it came from, I don’t know. I did take it to Rev. Vermeer and discussed it with him. The minute he saw it, he took it from me and he crumpled it up and he said, “Here’s what I do with these things.” And he dumped it in the wastebasket. I said, “No, I would like to keep that letter.”
I’ve always been interested in people’s handwritings. I could identify every kid in our school just from their handwritings. This one said, “Dear Ed:—” Now, you either have friendly letters with a comma, as you know, or a business letter with a semi-colon. But I knew somewhere I’d seen someone who always started his letter: “Dear So-and-so,—” I found a letter written by Vermeer that, in my mind, there was no doubt about it that he had written it. And then I understand that Mrs. VanVoorthuysen also got a very uncomplimentary letter from somewhere, they didn’t know where from. It was traced back to Vermeer’s typewriter. I don’t really know much about that because no one talked about it much because those of us who received those letters were ashamed of them.
MHH: But yet, you had not done anything wrong that you were aware of?
EG: No, and I had never been accused of anything wrong. And, like I said, at the end of all this, I was given a new contract again for the 1954–55 school year. So if they had been terribly against me, they never would have renewed my contract. But I felt, that because of the situation, I could not go on. It was very difficult finishing out that first year. A lot of the children had already gone back into the Christian Reformed school. And I sat there with two groups of students in my class: the kids that were the people from our church who thought that I was favoring the other side, and the other side who figured that I was favoring the children who I went to church with. It made it very difficult working, even though I tried the best to be equal with all of them, discipline-wise. I didn’t do anything different than I did the previous five years.
MHH: So those were difficult times.
EG: Yes. That was a difficult year to finish. And then, like I said, the school continued one more year and then the school ceased also.
MHH: And at that point, the church had divided also?
EG: Yes.
MHH: Approximately how large was the church that remained in Redlands?
EG: When we left, I would say we probably had about 26 families at reorganization, although I was not there since I was still teaching in the school. And I thought it’d be just raising more difficulties if I joined, while I was principal of the school and joined another church. So I stayed to complete that year. What did you ask, how many children?
MHH: Yes, the size of the church, because you had mentioned that originally it got as large as 60 families.
EG: It got as large as 80 families, to my recollection. After the dust had settled, we had maybe just over 30 families in our church—between 25 and 30. A lot of them went back to the Christian Reformed Church, at least a half a dozen families that I can remember. So they were probably left with 50 families— certainly, a bigger majority than we had. That came out also then when we started fighting as to who was going to get the property.
MHH: What happened there?
EG: We went to court with it and the court ruled in their favor, I think because they had a majority of the people, although that didn’t happen in all of our churches. Some churches, they said, this small group, small as they are, are the true continuation of the old Protestant Reformed Church, so they get the building. The judge in San Bernadino did not look at it that way. He ruled in favor of the majority who remained. [To be continued]