is actually i think out of all the coffee klatches we've only the last one we had sort of bad weather but we've been doing pretty good through the winter especially in holland so i welcome hopefully to get a chance to play our guessing game in the back you can't play after we start because i'll give you the answers so my name is matt helmets and i'm the development director here at will island are the coffee klatches are these series we've been doing they've been kind of fun they're topics and a thing from dutch topics from the netherlands to local topics to things tha my own gardens it's been a pretty fun series it's very fun for me i'm kind of a history dork for those of you who don't know me and so when i see things they interest me and so today's story is actually the story behind a safe  three four months ago and we were working in one of the back closets and they saw this and they said why do you guys have this in a closet why isn't this out as a piece and i said well it's a safe and i said well yeah well why don't you bring it out so people can see it though i said well we have money in it and they were made that we still use this but they really said where did that thing come from what's and i said you know as a history person i'm sad to say i've never thought about that because this is a safe  could you if you didn't come up before him and come up afterwards to check it out it's just absolutely it's the statue is not so huge but it's massive when they moved in this into storage it took four guys it took me and one of the i t guys  probably forty minutes to get it up here because it makes a right one hundred eighty pounds and i can barely get this thing to move and it's on wheels so it's it weighs hundreds about the money we took out so what is not in the right now but i could do to check it out and i to want to tell you a little bit about the story today and again these are very informal events if you've been before you know you can interrupt me raise your hand or anything you'd like to do within reason beforehand so the story of the safe we're going to talk first about the safe itself and where it was from and then we'll talk the most interesting part about the safe is actually the owner so this safe is from the detroit safe company most was no where detroit is it's a company that hundred sixty five on east fourth street so it's actually if you're familiar with the troy comerica park and ford field up here the river down here with the rents and it was founded right here number fourteen was actually the safe company so it's a very old company well relatively i guess civil war and spent its hundred fifty years old it employed up to two hundred fifty people some of the stats i found is listed in all these atlas is a registries back in one thousand nine hundred one they employed two hundred fifty people had sales of five hundred thousand dollars which today's dollars that would be twelve point six million dollars but they were known for these safes they had about one hundred different varieties a safe and they were really known for being strong they said they were burglar proof and fireproof they also said that they were drill proof the biggest claim i found it was interesting they said you should be able to take this safe to the third story of a building and drop it on its corner and it won't shatter we haven't tested that we might  have the elevator we bring grain up the window i guess we always push over the galley the windmill and see what happens but we probably won't but they were known for being very very good safes they were actually sold all over the united states you see their factory there in the middle on the right is actually year they sold two hundred forty two safes by eighty two they were selling over three thousand safes a year if you wanted to buy one back then they cost anywhere from sixty to forty thousand dollars which is a lot but again i'm going to translate that in today's dollars that's anywhere from fifteen hundred dollars to one million dollars for a safe but if you look on the right there that is actually a fairly recent picture from bay city they have really a safe room it's written on the door detroit safe company they actually used to make like rooms as well as just standard safes so they're very good safe well known they were in business until one thousand nine hundred they were bought out by diebold safe company they made another ten years until one nine hundred twenty nine hit quick like it was just kind of an advertisement for today's event but it's kind of cool they had opening and closing but the biggest thing for those of you who fill out the question you see there the patent here can you read what you the patent was on the right hundred seventy three and that's that's actually written this is the name of the company here detroit's a company right in the inside of the door so this deal pages patent so i twenty nine eight hundred seventy three so this safe is actually we don't know the information a lot of people saw the date on there and assumed that was like the date their safe was made and the folks explain no that's the date of the patent so we actually looked up what these safes would cost today and for the smaller models if you want to go out and buy one an antique to have in your home or your business to show off they're saying they range from eight hundred to fifteen hundred dollars but they said the hardest thing with these is how do your ship um because if you get into a moving van that you're going to need a crew of about six guys to get him up about three feet i'd imagine but the more interesting parts of the safe itself is very very interesting piece but the more interesting part to me is as we're looking at it you mention the hand painting we have destroyed save company we have the date we have  through what i hear someone said what drug store do you remember the drugstore personally or we've heard about it well might have a person i won't want talk with actually he is he is the drugstore guy so but he as a man that was have you seen those beer commercials about the most interesting man in the world j o duesberg should be on those commercials because he was a very very interesting man we're going to talk a little bit about him this morning mostly the guy was  forty seven so they're very very early settlers so his father bought land from from rock to an eight hundred fifty two shortly after they get here and then he became the director of the local school system so he was a he was a well known guy he was one of the first trustees of holland high school in eight hundred sixty when it was founded he really believed in public schools which if you know your doctorate form folks there are some who really pushed christian school some who were pushed public schools or monist was a public school man but he also said i want all the education to be in dutch so that set him off from some of the immigrants who had a lot of immigrants i should say a lot but yet some immigrants who wanted english they said were in america english well are modest really pushed dutch  he also if you notice here the most impressive thing i don't think would impress my wife look at the years his kids were born he had six kids in seven years so i feel for cornell cornelius scott schieffer pushed kids out me and six seven years is his wife was also an amazing lady so she flew through him jacob married mary person at which honestly i found his the name of who we married there's never much information about or even in his obituary they got into schooling father schoolmaster they also got into publishing and this is where it gets interesting dr bob swing actually gave a paper on her modest duesberg and i will be some information i have this morning is is from right from his paper that he gave so modest duesberg came over and there was a printing industry in holland there's actually a growing colony so a couple guys from el again saw money to be made came up to holland and started the first paper in holland they called it the hollander basic what it was going to be is a paper that was going to be half english and half dutch so they said to read and been rocked the at the time they said we'll write the english articles and if you supply us with a dutch articles you can have full royalty as i mentioned was in charge of coming up with a lot of articles and editing and being it he had full control he could veto articles well her modest duesberg wasn't in really on that agreement so he was was not fulfilling his part of the bargain he was a very busy man when he first came to holland and he he started most of the things in this community or had a hand in them so he was you know a little slack on writing articles or getting a man and her monis started taking up his pen as well one thing then royalty did that disappoint some of settlers is he would actually he said this is the hollander should be the voice of the community so he actually at class as a class meeting so a church meeting got all the other ministers of the outlying areas like over iceland's wrentham friesland he said you know what you should do is take money from your congregants collect money from your congregants because every person who moves over should get a copy of this newspaper well there all she owns a chunk of it that's a little  and then you're then you're saying this about the church but at that time we know almost no there wasn't such a division of church and state and early holland it was an altar was the religious leader and that kind of by command of that he was also the secular leader so he had this hand in the paper some of the especially the outlying folks didn't really appreciate that didn't appreciate them royalty or their minister asking them for money when they are don't even have a house yet don't even have farmland yet and they're saying you know give me a buck fifty a week for a newspaper or whatever it is so an article pops up in this newspaper the hollander then royalties newspaper that he owns half of it was called the pope and his cardinals and it was about and as you can imagine revenue for altie had not edited or proved that issue and he looked at her modest duesberg and said where did this article come from and his response was well it was a guy from zealand wrote it who must not like  so that was the blame when they discovered them as zealander it was it was a kind of an anonymous article but they said us was the wonder well then royalty rightfully so kind of lost it duesberg and said this is ridiculous i own half this paper i'm supposed to have editorial control and it's you know ripping on me ripping on our colony he threatened to leave and again this is only five years into the colony he said if this is the way it's going to happen i'm going to be out of here because he had i mean if you think he was completely vested in this colony he owned all the land if this thing went south his fortunes were gone as well so he threatens to leave so who steps in the church consistory they both went to the same church again we're talking very early hollin there's not many people and it was it was awkward consistory kind of said to his bird don't publish stuff like that let him publish calm down well the northeast wasn't very happy with that so he actually went to the next class this meeting and he said you know consistory would do anything but i want classes to take action so classes actually said you're right that duesberg should have to make public confession he should have to write a written retraction and if he doesn't we're going to restrict him from communion and at that point if you're a member of the foreign church and you know that's only church you know that's a big deal i mean that's that's is not a secular matter anymore you're talking about people's souls so it got ugly and reverend vander meer and was actually  zealand colony they were the only ones who were at that classis and again if if you know your early history of holland holland was the main colony you know a lot of us who live in holland think of holland holland holland well there are those outlying colonies you know even zealand is not so retracting this this article about the pope so in his mind everything was solved in the consistory mind everything was solved so the following sunday he shows up to church on communion sunday walks up to the front to get communion and one of the elders hadn't got the message and actually stopped him and said you're not allowed to take communion in the middle of a church service in front of his whole community news berg flew off the handle thankfully the pastor another elder stepped in said no no that would solve the problem sorry we didn't tell you that it was ugly there was there was some some bad blood and again this is the time if you think about it just just after this time is when the christian reform church started breaking for the reform church so there was schism already in some areas of the colony there was the public versus christian schools english versus dutch language on colonies like zeal in the free soil and we're starting to be a little jealous of the holland area so there is all these kind of colony had some fun they had a big article saying see the reform people want to rip on those catholics and the catholics came out with an article just scathing the holland county saying well look at what goes on over there look at that they can decide who can take communion or not they're no better than us catholics so that's that's why they put the newspaper that the swearing actually writes that this this incident threatened to destroy the community and drive the royalty to leave only the intervention of clerical colleagues and heavy handed consistory of discipline of the editor resorted or stu's me restore a measure of calm so it was it's one of those things we can joke about now but if you manage a living in a colony then even as a purse and who just moved over here all the sudden your leader is going to take off the guy who writes a newspaper who also has a lot of polls there are going back and forth you know people are taking sides it was a it was a big deal and that is again i say it was her modest duesberg who owned the paper but his son was actually the one will keep talking but this wasn't the last time i was in the for all these went head to head so the holiday lasted until just about the civil war it was always known as a democratic newspaper and when i say democratic i mean that in the way we don't want to talk about today brothers also owned the holland city news a little earlier which is kind of a predecessor to the holland sentinel of today so they were there were publishers and again this is a time when people don't always have one job throughout their life so that even if you look at her mo duesberg his father and he is a publisher he's a school board member schoolmaster so is doing a lot of things when x will come up and see what else they did there we go so the civil war we're talking about again early holland colony the civil war crops up how many of you have heard about the story of the holland boys in the civil war or have been to one of the presentations of the muster ok just some we're not going to cover all that today obviously it's a huge story but obviously you have a bunch of dutchman here in america and very early on the colony the civil war strikes lincoln calls for soldiers and a lot of the dutch boys go off to war you know a lot of barely speak any english one of those is jacob goes bird on the safe also one of his younger brothers they sign up with the well known company out of holland company idea of the twenty fifth michigan infantry here's where a story gets funny g by this time eighteen thirty eight and sixty two she's about twenty four he's one he's an older enlistee a lot of more eighteen twenty twenty one so he gets selected as the second lieutenant in this group along with a lot of other they say everyone who is in this infantry company is  dutch blood so they go off together and fight well what's happening back on the home front they go off and fight who reports what's going on the newspaper well who owns the newspaper home reporting their story and saying why are we in this war there are so many people being killed we need to pull out of this war why are we as a dutch colony giving soldiers to this effort so you have basically undermining the war effort back home and how in colony it was actually it was not problems really hit on a personal level when jacob duesberg takes a leave and goes home due to what he describes as injuries but they were not injury it's not like he got shot he was saying he was injured and came home well when royalties sons his two sons who served in the infantry did not agree and thought he was basically a coward this is in the book that came out two thousand and one dutch leader an american patriot duesberg left us he himself says it's due to ill health but i say it's because of him being homesick and for fear of the bullets so this again he he basically here depending on how you look at it he either abandons his his post here in the infantry he comes home due to illness bend and roll to the other end all the son puts an even stronger i'm going to read the portion of his letter to you this is i'm going to dutch don't worry it's translated dear father yesterday evening i received your letter the twentieth the calling up of five hundred thousand suits me fine that's the troops one can call i have no sympathy for those at home who are being drafted in holland they appear to be very scared duisburg is putting the fear of death into the hearts of the ignorant masses they should burn his printing office he speaks as if everyone who signs up is going to die it's enough to put death it the fear of death in anyone who has never seen a war i'm not surprised the young people running away he's no better than a rebel his writings are shameful for holland people i saw an article in the paper that he was making an estimate of the number of soldiers lincoln had in the service and how many survivors there would be it was such a large figure how many survivors there were it was such a large figure i dearly mention it there to mention it lincoln in his stupidity from the article do all these men to eternity however he overlooked the thousands of those who have died of illness also those who have bought their way out of their positions i can name a few for him his own sons want to desert her an fighting in the duesberg that are there saying well these guys are cowards and leaving us so we get very heated and again you see early colony but the interesting thing to me is that when i when i read this i thought duesberg does kind of sound like a coward well he was the second lieutenant and he left but there are some stories i say in one thousand and seven they had a reunion in holland for all the men of the twenty fifth the company i thirty nine survivors came to that it's not they didn't have a list of who came but interesting enough in the obituary of jacob duesberg when he dies all of his pall bearers are fellow soldiers from the twenty fifth infantry so they are a lot of them and none of them i've been roti but none of them you know obviously those guys don't think he's a coward i don't imagine they'd they'd carious casket but so you don't know who exactly to believe at that point yes ma'am know that's a good question so that photo is actually the officers of the twenty fifth michigan the whole infantry division or i think to be a division the company the company officers duesberg was the second lieutenant of that company so those are actually just then again this is by one thousand and seven so you're talking both folks who died in the war and folks who died subsequently in the next fifty years so forty years or so so but there was they did they face several battles and again that's a whole broader picture than we have time for this morning but a very interesting story so so so far we have him his family getting in a war and publishing his family getting a war as a soldier well he was also mason this is the third fun story about m sixty four jacob duesberg this is again still during the civil war he was back at home running his printing press he joined the grand haven masons lodge lodge number one thirty nine he became an apprentice a fellow craft and a master mason and i'm not pretending to be a master of masonic names i'm just reading you what he was he then joined the lodge in grand rapids which is kind of the biggest lodge in west michigan where he became a mark master a past master most excellent master and royal time and he also had a drugstore to talk about but he offered his his place for meetings and he was a member so he was a member of the first when it was chartered eight hundred sixty seven he became the most worshipful master of the masons in holland  was on the first members so he was also a member of the odd fellows a sort of different society so he was an odd fellow which i think of course he was an ideal he had to be he joined that eight hundred sixty six interestingly enough you know if you go out i think what mr do is very key i mean he went to war ek my home he joined the masons and he became of master mason he went up several degrees i'm not sure exactly how many degrees but he was a master mason so he's  well up there and he was running a lodge well interestingly enough by eight hundred seventy nine he's implicated helps write a book called freemasonry illustrated which if you know anything about the masons at all there what kind of society secret societies so do you publish a book about what you do on a day to day basis typically not well jake of duesberg didn't want to eighty or so it seems he was in this book it was actually written by a man named blanchard jonathan blanchard who is the president of wheaton college at the time who was a flaming anti mason he ran for president for the anti mason party which back at that time there's a lot more parties which a leave that there so this book is by blanchard it's against masonry isaac fair banks you know the name isaac fairbanks here in holland actually what's that and he was he was a very early known citizen he's sworn testimony to the to do is produce part in this book because what does birth did it's a book that's about six hundred thirty pages five hundred twenty eight pages of that were written by duesberg and basically laid out everything the masons did everything they said everything that happened in our meetings the rituals everything but the interesting thing is it was very factual it wasn't judge mental it wasn't good or bad hundred so pages that absolutely ripped into them and said they're non christians they hate people they're go all going to hell so he was this book is very anti mason but the interesting part is it was all blanchard that was doing the anti masonry and he had duis burke who was just laying out the facts but again if you use a mason he's not one to be laying the facts out there for everyone to read so it's no one no one's ever been able to figure out why he would just open a soul like this when he was a master here's one man's analysis that i found it he's this man is kind of tries to just study the masons he's not positive or negative on them he says it takes years to become master of a lodge and usually that man who has been a master of a user that man is a master freemason for years duesberg does not say anything negative himself about freemasonry in his five hundred twenty eight pages but he apparently exposes for blanchard to analyze and deride their working as utterly weak as he progressed to master and past master what an utterly weak person to progress and lead in an era for so long how can someone be so evil for so long why did he go beyond the apprentice stage let alone anything else how long does it take for a man to discover his own errors what does work does is this he reveals that he was a duped man for decades however that's not possible that's not real exposure no one can write five hundred twenty eight pages and be that stupid and through the many years of duesberg cannot be that stupid or weak something else other than a mid life crisis caused duesberg to turn against something he had enjoyed for years and years there's another reason and that reason has something to do with the failure of freemasonry is good honor and it's compatibility with christianity so he believes that duesberg did kind of fall away from the masons after years and again in my research there's nothing to suggest you know i imagine by the by that time if he would have done that the lodge would have kicked him out so he had drifted away but he was he was sort of anti masonic but if you know a little bit in those years and eight hundred seventy four that's really when the masonic controversy holland first reformed church had a big problem  because a lot of the dutch again said you know you can't be masons well the interesting thing is by that time hope college had started and they had some scholars from out east who were going to hope reform church and i hope church it was not a problem it was more of an eastern church more of a  it was pretty much an end up in the c r c masonry was absolutely rejected in the r c a it was i would say tolerated as long as it didn't interfere with your with your christian walk in a christian life but again this brings right in the middle of this and ends up in this book by the w in college president it's just interesting when you see this guy's name pop up time after time as i'm as i'm looking into him and i just go what else did this guy do but one thing i just talked with is the end his legacy but i am amazed  died in one nine hundred thirteen that here we are hundred and one hundred forty years so talking about this guy that makes me kind of do some crazy stuff so people talk about me and one hundred four years and i'm when i'm dead and gone so so as someone mentioned the main thing he did so he was a newspaper man he was a soldier he was a mason but the way he made his money it was he was a drug store owner he owned do drugs does anybody remember doing drugs  that makes no sense so it's the building the kind of colorful brick building there your fifth third bank is on the left and moynihan gallery and right between those miracles is there today so he ran this drug store i couldn't find when they closed it but he opened  he opened it he ran it for forty years and i was finding ads for the drug store up until nine hundred fifty nine was the latest ad i could find so it was it was here at least through the fifty's if not the early sixty's so the drug store actually came on and on and that's that's what leads me to still the biggest mystery because actually i took a picture on the side of the say very dark i tried to make it as bright as i can as a drugstore little ad for tri tabs x e royds which i have no idea i tried to search what those things were or what they cure and i have no idea and it tells you tells the druggist how to write the prescription for tri tabs x e royds and that's again right on the side if you want checked out afterwards so that that still is the remaining mystery to me again the safe has a story mr duesberg is a very very interesting character the one missing link for me is still how we ended up with this safe and when i asked for the city i said where do we get this thing i know jim or i'm a disguise it helped move it into storage that was several years a and they said well we got it from one yop was here and the op court was here years ago so i called the op and he wasn't sure but at some point it had been at city hall so those folks did know that it was back in city hall in the finance might have been some kind of crazy story well he in a drug store so at that time he was actually the first drug store in holland he ran the first newspaper in holland and the first drug store in holland that's what his obituary leads with but whether he got formal education for that nothing that i could find says he guess no but it would just be a guess so that's kind of a like i said his legacy is this very interesting to me he was a large figure in the community in holland actually the holland fire nine hundred seventy one that destroyed most of the community jacob duesberg was actually on the committee to rebuild the town his drug store was open by that time when out of business and they say it was one of the first businesses to reopen after that time after the fire so he helped out a lot of other people and he was told one thousand nine hundred four he dies in grand rapids he had stomach cancer and died in butterworth hospital and again his obituary is glowing although most of its words are glowing tells about how the first drug store owner first a newspaper man in holland colony mentions that yeah his his paw bears are all members of his company from the civil war so no sign of if you read obituary he sounds like a good upstanding guy no skeletons in the closet well you do a little searching and you find this stuff but again just an interesting guy and i don't i don't mean to be negative that's a good question i didn't i should find that because i found i found the original what the building looked like but i don't know if the company is still the only companies out of existence for the building still there and i'm not sure i'm not sure on that one messes accommodation s it is the number i don't tell you that's why i said we could have said hey guess the combination but then we would have had it's kind of a combination and we'd have one i did look at some of the saves ours is pretty intact and again i encourage you to come up and even this even this door you know if i were to slam my leg in a store i'd be going to hospital like it is a heavy door but that's what it says it's drill proof because so many layers of steel and we do have a box a wood box that we put in here but arse looks like it's some of the best preserved a lot of the don't have this inner door or they've done some new modern work in there so i was actually pretty well preserved and we like it we sleep again we still use it as safe we joke i don't know how you'd get this thing out of here we're going to have a bear of a time to put it back in storage but i think is worth getting out of storage to talk about it a little bit person so i don't know what they do they progress but from a four story window to open it for us indonesia used to be the dutch east indies up until the fifty's and sixty's when the dutch were kind of forced to give them up by the world community our guest is going to be ralph ockers and and if you know mr rockers you know he's a he's a professor or was a professor down in indiana he now lives in holland he is a dutchman by birth his father was in the dutch civil service he was born in belgium while his dad was home on leave and he they lived and he was a civil servant to the dutch east indies before world war two world war two struck his whole family was taken into captivity by the japanese so he has a story he and a sister wrote a book and we're going to go doing a book interview about him of his family's story of both what were the  happen as well as his story of you know surviving through several years of captivity and what's it's not a really well known story but not many dutchman made it out of the dutch east indies after japan took them over they the japanese were pretty harsh and and his sister both made it out wrote a book about their experience so to be on the twenty fifth there is a sign up sheet next door thanks a j peace for coffee that's over there we do have if your friends memberships if you need to sign up to become a friend or we do suggest if you