UPDATE: February 15 is the new target date for the book to be available on Amazon. It is actually almost ready to be put online, but the person who is doing the technical work needs to set my book aside for a while in order to meet other, long-standing commitments. The Gift of Laughter is a … Continue reading
Family
The Gift of Laughter is a family history memoir, the story of my father’s family. My dad was the fifth of the fifteen children born to Jacob C. and Helena Zimmerman Willems. In 1919, the family moved from a Mennonite community in Saskatchewan, Canada to the raisin country southeast of Fresno in California’s great Central … Continue reading Family
Update
Dear Friends, The book is written, edited and in the process of becoming a print-on-demand book. Friends are putting on a pre-publication book launch next Sunday evening at the Reedley First Mennonite Church in Reedley, California, and I will also be presenting the book to a group at Fresno Pacific University, a Mennonite Brethren school, … Continue reading Update
Early Marriage
Sixty-one years ago this week I stepped on a Pan American plane at Los Angeles Internation Airport headed for Tokyo, Japan. There I would marry the boy who would become the father of my two daughters. I was seventeen years old. My groom was nineteen. We had not seen each other in over a year, … Continue reading Early Marriage
Old Photos: Golden Anniversary
Lena & Jacob Willems, 50th Anniversary February 1959 The marriage of my grandparents, Jacob and Lena Willems, lasted until Grandma’s death on August 1, 1963. They lived long enough to see their 50th anniversary celebrated by their children, grandchildren and even a few great-grandchildren. It was a big crowd in the Dinuba Mennonite Brethren church … Continue reading Old Photos: Golden Anniversary
Old Photo: The Family 1947
The photo below was probably taken in January 1947 when the family gathered for the wedding of my father’s sister Martha to Lowell Long, my Uncle Ed’s best buddy from high school days. Lowell and Ed were living with my parents when Pearl Harbor was bombed and the United States entered World War II. Two … Continue reading Old Photo: The Family 1947
Update
There is not much of a post this month. I am closing in on the end of the editing of my book, and my brain is unwilling to really think about anything else. I hate this part of writing, the going over and over the text. I went through this with my MA thesis; I … Continue reading Update
Old Photos: 1930s
The photos in this week's post used to be mounted in a big photo album that sat on my parents' coffee table when I was a growing up. It had a hinged wooden cover held together by a leather shoe string threaded through holes drilled into the narrow strip of wood on the left edge. … Continue reading Old Photos: 1930s
The Canadian Twins
My father left home to make his way in the world sometime in January or early February of 1933. He was eighteen years old and restless. He said he borrowed a dollar from his young uncle, Jack Zimmerman, and caught a freight train going to Los Angeles where his oldest brother, Nick, was working on … Continue reading The Canadian Twins
Old Photo: Willems Family 1930s
During the 1930s Depression, my grandparents, Jacob and Lena Willems, leased three different farms from the California Land Bank. The first was near the town of Reedley; the second was just a half-mile east of Dinuba; the third was near the tiny town of Orosi a few miles east of the farm in Dinuba. The … Continue reading Old Photo: Willems Family 1930s
Heritage 