by David DeKok
Nevertheless, the speech turned into a leftist pep rally that left Penn State students even more radicalized and eager to take on the university administration and the state police. Kunstler gave an interesting and moving account of the Chicago Seven trial and of his verbal jousting with Judge Julius Hoffman. “I don’t want to see us bathed in blood,” Kunstler thundered. “Only a madman would say that. But change has to come by any means necessary, or we are a doomed and lost people in a doomed and lost world.” Davis, shouting to be heard over the students, who were chanting “All power to the people,” told them that their demands of the Penn State administration “make all the sense in the world if you have the power to see them through.” They were appealing to the best instincts of a generation, to youthful idealism and disgust over the Vietnam War and racial discrimination. And in those tense days it was like throwing gasoline on a fire, provoking a descent from idealism into Lord of the Flies nihilism.12
On the morning of April 20, President Walker announced that there would be no amnesty for the twenty-nine students arrested at the Old Main sit-in five days earlier. That angered many leftist students, but Walker was unyielding when he met with them. That evening, they took over the HUB and made it their “strike” headquarters. Some decided to vent their frustrations against the Penn State president, who at that time lived in a mansion in the heart of the campus. SDS president Jeffrey Berger remembers hearing one of the more militant students say, “We’re going over to the president’s house.” A mob of students appeared outside the mansion at 10:50 p.m. and began smashing windows. Finally, they used an uprooted stop sign as a battering ram to break open the front door, but then lost their nerve and took off running.13
“He had different thoughts and a different approach to the SDS after that happened,” Keibler said of Walker. “Because he saw that he could have been hurt. He could have been killed.”14
Many windows were smashed, but the scariest thing was the setting of fires. Through the wee hours of the morning, small fires were touched off at five girls’ dormitories among the East Halls, forcing their evacuation, but were brought under control. False alarms forced the evacuation of two boys’ dormitories. Dumpsters outside McAllister, the Human Development Building, and Oak Cottage were set afire but quickly extinguished. A Molotov cocktail was thrown through a window at Tyson Building, starting a fire that destroyed a high-protein corn research project that a graduate student had worked on for three years as part of his doctoral dissertation. He was shattered by the loss, Keibler said. The last fire was reported at 6:15 a.m., nearly an hour after sunrise, in Stone Hall, a girls’ dorm. In all, fires were set in ten to twelve buildings before the long night was over.15
The next day, April 21, a contingent of 280 more state police arrived in State College and established a headquarters at the Holiday Inn. The campus settled down, as if spent. President Nixon’s announcement on April 30 that he was mounting an invasion of Cambodia touched off an estimated twenty student strikes per day around the nation, but not at Penn State. Even student anguish over the killings of four students by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University on May 4 did not bring a resumption of the violence, although there were peaceful marches and the suspension of classes for one day. The students who were arrested for mischief during the April riots by and large won their cases when they appeared before the justice of the peace. Wells Keddie, the labor studies professor who joined the students on the barricades, and who accused the police of brutality in their response to the protests, was denied tenure by Penn State a year later. He sued on First Amendment grounds, claiming he was the victim of retaliation for his political activities. But a federal judge in Harrisburg in 1976 ruled that the tenure committee had sufficient grounds apart from politics to deny him a permanent place on the faculty.16
Even through the turmoil around them, Betsy Aardsma’s friends in the English Department did not forget her. The graduate students created the Betsy Aardsma Fund, from which any graduate English student could borrow money without interest. It was funded through book sales, and one of Betsy’s friends, Betty Bechtel, worked to publicize the annual event. Linda Marsa bought a first-edition copy of The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, at the first auction. She inscribed the book and sent it to Dick and Esther Aardsma.17
Buzz Triebold, one of Pelton’s top aides in the Department of Security, believed nothing was really accomplished during the investigation. Not ever. “So there was really nothing that was fruitful that we found in the weeks or months after this happened,” he said. “We kept working on and trying to find out what happened from people—who was seen, and who might have been in there—and the direction in which she was stabbed, where the person was, whether he was behind her or in front of her, whether she startled him.” Lieutenant Richwine, with his gift for pithy quotes, said simply, “It was a damn shame, but we worked hard.”18
The Aardsma investigation petered out to almost nothing during the year that followed the riots. By the summer of 1971, no more leads were coming in. The investigation became mostly Keibler, a single detective trying to unravel what had led someone to murder Betsy Aardsma. He had three theories about Betsy’s murder. The first was that the slayer was not concerned about being identified by Betsy, because he fled without waiting to see if the single stab wound was fatal. The second was that she might have been murdered to silence her after she had stumbled upon someone doing something illegal or improper in the library. And the third was that her killer had determined that for some reason, Betsy had to die, and he was only waiting for the right time to do it. He actually had a fourth theory, too—that the owner of the expensive Dutch porn books found near the crime scene was the killer, the one who had abandoned them in haste when he fled. “The reader of those books either saw the killing, or he was the killer,” Keibler said. “And in all probability, he was the killer.”19
Betsy Aardsma remained a puzzle, unlike nearly every other murder victim Keibler had encountered or would ever encounter in his long career. He and his investigators had turned her past upside down more than once, looking for evidence of character flaws that would lead them to a motive, and then to the man who killed her. But this time it didn’t work. As Keibler told one reporter, “We’ve examined in detail all the letters we’ve been able to obtain that Miss Aardsma wrote, both to her parents and to friends, and from everything we’ve learned, she led a singularly blameless and uncomplicated life.”20
The first was true, but the second depended on how you looked at it. In some ways, Betsy Aardsma had made her life very complicated with her dreams and ambitions, her desire to leave home and fly toward the sun, to become smart and educated and to save a little bit of the world. Who could criticize that? At the same time, while not a Pollyanna, she was friendly and trusted people. Had she been less ambitious, or more cynical, she might not have ended up dead on the floor of Pattee Library. Those were the complications, but they were also what made her life and death so compelling and utterly tragic.
Part III: The Good Girl and the World Outside
Two Hollanders a church, three Hollanders a heresy.
—Traditional saying 1
Chapter 14
Betsy Who Dreamed
One of the earliest mentions of Betsy Aardsma in the pages of the Holland Evening Sentinel is on March 14, 1956, when she was just eight years old. In a roundup of news from the various Camp Fire Girl and Blue Bird groups in Holland, Michigan, the Sentinel reported that when the Happy Blue Birds of Longfellow Elementary School held a meeting on March 5, Betsy Aardsma led the group in singing “The Blue Bird Wish,” verses of nearly unbearable sweetness, optimism, and innocence.1 Betsy and her friends sang of their intention to have fun, to learn to make beautiful things, to finish what they began, to keep their temper in check “most of the time,” to go to interesting places, to know about trees, flowers, and birds, and to make friends. It is unbearable bec
ause we know how it all ends for the girl leading the song.2
Betsy’s birth came on July 11, 1947, nine months after her father, Dick Aardsma, was discharged from the army. She was of the Baby Boom, one of 3.8 million American babies to begin life that year in the golden glow of postwar optimism. Among her fellow 1947s in the Midwest were Mitt Romney, born in March, and Hillary Clinton, born in October. In his 2009 book, Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up, Victor D. Brooks wrote that the postwar optimism was short-lived but real. Children existed, he wrote, “in a world of stable and seemingly happy marriages where divorce seemed to be a feature primarily of the Hollywood acting community, and where fatalities from work accidents, disease, and childbirth were substantially reduced.” Murder rates, too, were low and getting lower, not that murder had ever been a big problem in Holland. It was almost nonexistent, really, and the few that occurred, often many years apart, most often involved outsiders killing outsiders.
Around 1946, Betsy’s parents, Dick and Esther, had moved the family to a house at 144 East 16th Street. It wasn’t far from the home of John and Bessie Van Alsburg, Esther’s parents, at 455 College Avenue on the corner of East 19th Street. John Van Alsburg was a well-known coal dealer in Holland, in business since 1925. Betsy’s first home was not as nicely situated as that of her grandparents, who lived on a leafy block of pleasant older homes across from a city park and ball field, but it would do. What more does a baby need than four good walls and a roof and a loving family?3
Dick Aardsma, who majored in history at Hope College in Holland, worked as a bookkeeper for the H. J. Heinz Co., which made most of its pickles at a large factory on the shoreline of Lake Macatawa, a small lake that opened onto the giant Lake Michigan. A couple of years later, he switched to a similar job for Venhuizen Auto Co., which sold Studebakers (first by far with a postwar car, went one ad in the Holland Evening Sentinel) in Holland. Around 1951, he was hired by the State of Michigan as a sales tax auditor, a steady job he would keep for the rest of his working life. He exercised his mind and a yen for history by reading biographies of historical figures. The family moved that year to 180 East 24th Street, across the street from Baker Furniture Co. and kitty-corner from tree-covered Prospect Park. A couple of years later they moved again, this time to 165 East 26th Street, a solidly middle-class block with no factory in sight. Esther Aardsma, even though she had a Hope College degree in English, followed the custom of most women of her era and did not work outside the home after children began arriving. By 1956, the Aardsmas had four: Carole, Betsy, Richard II, and Kathy.
The Aardsmas were relatively unusual for a Holland family at the time, in that both parents had college degrees. Both Dick and Esther were of Dutch descent, as were so many other people in Holland. Esther had grown up there, and Dick had come from Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood, then a tidy Dutch enclave but much different today. They had met at Hope College, graduating together in 1940. Hope was affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, one of two major Calvinist denominations in Holland, and a Van Alsburg family tradition. Esther’s siblings Donald and Ruth Van Alsburg had graduated from Hope before her. The Van Alsburgs were bound up in the unusual history of Holland, a pioneer family that had prospered in the New World. That Betsy Aardsma had the option to follow her Icarus dreams into the world outside was due in no small part to the choices her ancestors had made.4
It is difficult to understand the currents of Betsy’s short life without understanding the history of Holland. The city, located on the western side of the state’s hand-shaped Lower Peninsula, is 150 miles up the Lake Michigan coast from Chicago, or 90 miles as the crow flies. In 1969, Holland had almost twenty-five thousand people and had not yet undergone the late-century television and chainstore-driven homogenization that ironed out the unique wrinkles of so many American small towns, ethnic or not. The Holland phone directory could be mistaken for that of a smaller Dutch city, and outsiders often commented on the number of blond-haired people they saw on the street. Hollanders were split nearly evenly along religious lines between the Reformed Church in America, whose members in 1969 could fairly be said to be moderates on Calvinist and other theological and social issues, and the Christian Reformed Church, which took a very strict, ultraorthodox view of those same matters. What was left was an oddly schizophrenic community. It was divided by an invisible wall of separation that dated to 1857, and it affected many aspects of life in Holland.
The founder of the town was Reverend Albertus C. Van Raalte, a well-educated and fairly well-to-do dominie, or minister, from Arnhem in the Netherlands. He was an important leader of the conservative opposition to the state church. The state church, headed by the Dutch monarch, was Protestant and Calvinist. So were Van Raalte and his peasant followers, known as Seceders. The difference was that Seceders, who comprised about 2 percent of the Dutch population, followed John Calvin’s teachings with a vengeance. Their rules barred any desecration of the Sabbath, including children playing outside. They banned attendance at community fairs, drinking, gambling, going to the theater, and dancing. They condemned the Dutch king for his tolerance of Catholics, Jews, and Anabaptists, or Mennonites. Even in the 1800s they were out of step with much of the Netherlands; today, when Van Raalte’s Arnhem has sex clubs advertising on the Internet, they seem like the Dutch from another planet.
Harassment by state church supporters and ultimately by the Dutch government caused Van Raalte in 1846 to lead a group of his followers to America. They traveled to Michigan, where in the dead of winter at the beginning of 1847 Van Raalte set them to building a Calvinist utopia shielded by the wilderness where they could practice their religion without interference. Other Dutch settlers followed that year, including two great-great-uncles of Betsy Aardsma’s on her mother’s side, John and Henry Van Alsburg, sons of a potato farmer who had probably heard Van Raalte preach. Their brother, Dirk Van Alsburg, Betsy Aardsma’s great-grandfather, followed them to America in 1854.5
But isolation did not stop the Dutch settlers from quarreling among themselves, ostensibly over religious doctrine. Clerical critics of Van Raalte condemned the “awful, poisonous heresies” they saw among his followers, including tolerance of Masonic membership, use of church organs, adding lightning rods to church steeples (displaying lack of faith in God), placing flowers on caskets, and even church picnics. These are hard to understand today. But underlying it all, at least for the conservatives, was fear of assimilation into the American culture, which loomed ever larger as the wilderness was cut down, and loss of their Dutch language and identity. In 1857, the Reformed Church in Holland broke apart, with about a third of the congregations forming the ultraorthodox Christian Reformed Church.
There was no physical barrier between the two communities, just that invisible line. They coexisted but did not engage each other, even when they played their roles in the annual Tulip Festival, a celebration of Holland’s Dutch heritage that included nearly all the children in the elementary schools dressing up in Dutch costumes and parading down 8th Street. It was entirely possible to go through life knowing no one from the other side of the line, or at least not well.
The Reformed Church, which included Betsy Aardsma’s family, moved toward embracing the American culture, the English language, and public schools while holding on to a more moderate interpretation of Calvinism. The Christian Reformed Church, which eventually ministered to just under half of the Holland community, sought to protect its faithful from contamination by the outside world, including members of other faiths. It did this by creating its own schools and institutions, even its own version of the Boy Scouts and, for a time, its own Pinkie/Candy Striper program at Holland Hospital. They struggled to preserve the Dutch language, but by the very early twentieth century, it was increasingly a lost cause.
Their conservative piety and adherence to the old ways survived. When television arrived in Holland in the 1950s, the Christian Reformed elders considered it little different
than moviegoing and added TV watching to their list of banned activities. But not all of the faithful agreed, and the story was that console televisions—the kind where the television was inside a nice cabinet with doors, intended to make the TV set look like another piece of furniture—were especially popular in Christian Reformed households. When the pastor came to call, the doors on the TV were quickly closed. How he could miss seeing the aerial on the roof was unexplained, but it was a good story, one that illustrated the cultural divide in Holland and the strictures under which one side lived.
The rest of Holland, while never liberal, became increasingly moderate after World War II, helped by an influx of executives from national corporations who were not Dutch, and sometimes not even Protestant. In 1951 Parke, Davis & Co., the pharmaceutical manufacturer, opened a plant in Holland to make chloromycetin, one of the early wonder drugs, employing some 350 people. Even more significant was the arrival of a General Electric plant in 1954, to build hermetic motors for refrigeration and air-conditioning units. That factory employed nearly eight hundred people, including some seventy-five executives who comprised the headquarters unit for the motor division. They moved into the community, bringing with them different outlooks, different experiences, and, in many cases, different religions, including Catholicism. Their children enrolled in the Holland public schools.
Also changing Holland after the war was the arrival of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who came as migrant labor to work in the fruit and vegetable farms around the town, staying for the factory jobs. They were curiosities among their fellow students in the public schools, so brown and non-Dutch. The new arrivals, whatever their background, did not change the overall tenor of Holland, but they stirred the mix and intrigued young people like Betsy Aardsma, who yearned to know the world outside of a hometown that was so often blond and bland and hyper-pious. Because her ancestors had cast their lot with the Reformed Church, she had a better chance to do so, but the path was still not easy.6
