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Ralph Heiden - How many of the 13 kids
were around the house at the same time during those early years?
  Norma "Jeanie" Heiden - When I was born, I already had nephews.
Walter (left) and
Lavern Berns (right) were born before I was.
Helma (Heiden) Nickel - She was an Aunt when she was born.
Norma "Jeanie" Heiden -
Bob was born in May after I was born in
April.
Lila and Ma were pregnant at the same time.
Helma (Heiden) Nickel -
Hilda,
Mildred and
Leo all got married in
1928. Jeanie was born in 1927.
Mildred - That’s
the way with Gail. She really never considered Harold as a
brother because he was married and out of the house long before
she was born. |
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 Helma (Heiden) Nickel - I have the 100th Anniversary Book for
Bridge School if you
would like to see it sometime, Ralph.
Ralph Heiden - When you reached the end of the eighth grade, then what?
Norma "Jeanie" Heiden - People back then always thought that 8th grade was enough
schooling for anyone.
Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - You didn’t have to go on to high school in those days. I was
the first one in our family to go.
Harrison Dentel came to the house when I finished the 8th grade. He
said, “She’s only twelve years old. What is she going to do here at
home? She should go on to high school.”
Pa didn’t like the idea at all.
Mildred (Roggerman) Heiden - Art wanted to go on to high school so bad too. But when he
was in 8th grade, they wouldn’t even let him go to Ida to take the
entrance exam.
Norma "Jeanie" Heiden - They thought going to high school was foolishness. But
finally, Harrison Dental talked and talked to them about Wilma and
they gave in.
Then, when my time came several years later, I had to beg and beg.
Pa said, “All Wilma learned up there was foolishness. Going to
parties and such foolishness.” But, they finally gave in and I got
to go.
 Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - I was in the class play my junior and senior years.
Elizabeth Johnson lived across the river and she would come to pick
me up to take me to practice. When it was time for the play, they
asked if my mother and dad were coming. I had to say, “No.” I
wouldn’t have thought about asking them. Pa would have thought that
it was really a lot of nonsense.
Helma (Heiden) Nickel - Back when I would have gone, you would have had to pay
tuition to go to high school. The pastor’s kids were going to go and
I could have gone with them but I would have had to walk to the
parsonage to catch the ride every day.
Helma (Heiden) Nickel - Our road was mud at that time and we often had to walk to
the corner to get a ride somewhere. You could usually get down to
where Henry and Edna lived. When I started working at River Raisin Paper, I rode with John
Beaudrie and I had to meet him down at the corner at 6:30 every
morning. Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - I remember one Christmas Eve, everybody who came over for
the party got stuck on the road. They had to get the tractor out and
pull everybody out of the mud.
Ralph Heiden - Did you get snowed in very often back then?
Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - Oh, I can remember walking down the ditches that were
full of snow.
Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - We would still walk to the
Bridge School no matter how deep
the snow was then. It used to get a crust on top and it would be up
as high as the fence posts. We would walk across that and have a lot
of fun. There were always a bunch of us on the way to and from school each
day. There would be
Walter
(left) and
Lavern Berns,
(right) Lloyd Rath, Junior
Barnaby and Harry Karney. There would be a whole gang of us. I
remember hitting Junior Barnaby over the head with my lunch
bucket. He fell down and I thought I really hurt him but he was
O.K. |
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Dianne (Heiden) Houpt - Did you get my reply to your E-mail?
Ralph Heiden - Yes. Isn’t that amazing.
Dianne (Heiden) Houpt - Ralph says on his
email to me, “This is a long way from
the farm, isn’t it? From the farm to email.”
 Ralph Heiden - Myrna (Drake) Bishop’s husband, Jim,
(left) is a professor at Notre Dame so
we have been emailing things back and forth for a while now. It is
a local call so it doesn’t cost anything.
(Note: This was in "ancient" times when internet connections
went through a modem and a telephone line. I had a second phone
line installed because while you were on the internet, you
couldn't get regular phone calls to your land line which is
another ancient technology.)
Helen (Henning) Heiden - Who is that now?
Ralph Heiden - That is Bertha (Heiden) Drake’s son-in-law. He is married to
Myrna.
Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - Where is
Walter Berns’ daughter? She’s a professor too.
 Ralph Heiden - Margie
(right) is a professor of linguistics at Purdue University.
She has her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois.
Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - She got married recently didn’t she?
Ralph Heiden - Yes. I think they are both professors at Purdue. There are also several medical doctors in the family now.
Linda’s daughter,
Erin, is a doctor. And so is
Connie Sedelbauer
and she is married to a doctor. She has a pretty responsible
position at the University of Michigan Hospital.
Dianne (Heiden) Houpt - That’s where I work and I see her all the time there. She’s
partly in our department now. She is so pretty.
Mary Lou (Heiden) Opfermann - Where is Linda’s daughter a physician at then?
Ralph Heiden - I think she is at the Indiana University Hospital in
Indianapolis.
Helen (Henning) Heiden - I think both of Linda’s daughters are moving back to
Michigan now. Linda mentioned that at the reunion.
Ralph Heiden - It’s also amazing to look at where all the kids have gone to
college. Some of
Carol’s (Toburen) children went to Millersville
University in Pennsylvania.
Janice’s (Clark) went to Louisiana Tech
and Northeast Louisiana.
Dianne (Heiden) Houpt - That’s interesting because before I came over here today, I
went back and looked through all that stuff to see where all my
nieces and nephews went to college.
William Frank Heiden - Millersburg. Isn’t that where Mike (Toburen) was taking a
class and it turned out the guy teaching wasn’t even a professor.
They arrested him and found out he did the same thing somewhere else
too.
Helen (Henning) Heiden - Mike said the kids knew more than he did!
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 Ralph Heiden - That is the only five generation picture taken with Grandpa
Heiden.
Helen (Henning) Heiden - Who is that then?
Ralph Heiden - There’s
Edna, Walter, Lauren, Grandpa and Lauren’s first
son, Sean. Walter made me this nice print since he still had the
negative.
Marie (Heiden) Tommelein -
Denny
got us an old newspaper for 1945, the year we were
married. It was fun to look through but sometimes you’d look at a
price and say, “God, it couldn’t have been that cheap back then!”
 I remember the first year after we were married, bread was still
rationed after the war. We had a neighbor who used to go and stand
in line to get a loaf of bread. She would take her 16 year old
daughter along with our ration stamp and get us a loaf too. I was at
home with the baby and couldn’t go.
You had to wait in line at the Kroger store to get a loaf of bread.
Helen (Henning) Heiden - We only had one car in those days too so you couldn’t just
go when you wanted to either.
Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - No. You were lucky if you had one car!
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Listed
below are excerpts from transcriptions of audio tapes of
two meetings with different combinations of the people
shown here. They occurred on May 28 and September 25,
1995. For the entire script,
