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Text Box: SPARTA TOWNSHIP HISTORICAL COMMISSION Newsletter

Text Box: The Sparta Township Historical Commission encourages and offers help to township residents who might like to prepare family histories, particularly if their families have lived in the township for a long time. Such histories could be in the form of notebooks, booklets, even DVDs, with text, photographs and copies of documents. The STHC would like to build up its collection of family histories, so would like copies of all materials prepared. As a short example of the kind of thing STHC is encouraging, the following is taken from materials written by Ken DeYoung about his parents, Thies and Letty DeYoung: Thies DeYoung was born in Grand Rapids in 1893. He grew up moving from farm to farm, mostly around Allendale. He quit Coopersville High School at 16. He worked on farms in Michigan and Kansas, in lumber camps in the UP (often riding the rails for transportation), and in factories in Grand Rapids, until drafted in 1917. He became a heavyweight boxer in the army. He was in the trenches in France on Armistice Day, ill with pneumonia. He spent more than a year recovering in hospitals in France and the US, and had surgery for thyroid problems. When Thies and Aletta Wyngarden first met, in Walker Station in 1920, he was still in uniform, neck wrapped in a large bandage, on leave from an army hospital. Thies then went to Michigan Agricultural College in East Lansing in a program that allowed him to finish high school and graduate from college in four years. He got all A’s at MAC, and wanted to go into medicine, encouraged by doctors he had met in the hospitals in the army. That did not seem financially possible when he graduated in 1924, so he had a job lined up as a high school science teacher. Letty Wyngarden was born in Firth, Nebraska, in 1897, where her father was a Christian Reformed minister. Reverend Wyngarden was transferred to New Era, where Letty graduated from eighth grade. She attended Hope and Calvin academies, then taught in grade schools in the Berlin (now Marne) area for a few years. She then replaced her drafted brother as principal of Wood Avenue Christian School, in Muskegon. When he returned, she went to Davenport-McLauchlan Business College in Grand Rapids for a year, and became, in 1920, a member of the original faculty of the first Grand Rapids Christian High School. Thies and Letty were married in 1922. In 1924, Thies’ father agreed to loan him $900, and he applied to the new Loyola Medical School in Chicago. He graduated in 1928 at the top of his class. He also achieved the highest score on the Illinois State Board examination that year, the first Loyola graduate to do so.