How I Got Here

---Patricia Meyer Diepenhorst, Feb. 2010

My name is Patricia Meyer Diepenhorst. My mother and twin sister and I moved here in 1948 when I was 9.

First of all, all my relatives lived in Chicago. Coming from England and Sweden they migrated to Kansas, during the dust bowl they migrated back to Chicago. My Grandfather & brothers would either go to Wisconsin or Michigan on vacations to go hunting and fishing. In Chicago during the depression my grandfather lost three homes he built to the banks, so saving what he could, they bought about 60 acres of land just north of Saugatuck for a farm (Gibson). Their three daughters were already raised and gone from home, but every summer they would drive to the farm and take fruit and vegetables back to the city.

My Grandfather having another trade as a brick layer, brick veneered the First Congregational Church, Woman's Club, water fountain in the park, etc. Also at one time they owned the Twin Gables and the Log Cabin which you may know as the "East of the Sun" store. Selling the farm in Gibson, he bought about 8 acres of land on Maple Street raising chickens, had a couple of cows and some ducks. The farm on Maple Street was grandfathered in as the last farm in Saugatuck Village until their death in the late 60s. My grandfather Percy Griffin gave my mother a small piece of land to build a house on so we could move here from Chicago in 1948. Not long after that we watched the old school burn in 1950 from across the creek and the Big Pavilion in 1960.

I remember meeting May Heath in my grandmother's living room during a Woman's Club meeting. My sister worked her High School years for Ruth and Vern Wright at the Soda Lounge. I worked in a dress shop "The June fe". We both married local boys. I stayed and my twin sister's family moved to California in about 1959 where she still lives to this day, and I still live on Maple Street. My brother is the postmaster, Darryl.

Saugatuck was a safe and wonderful placed to be raised. We went roller skating at the Big Pavilion, the movie theater, square dancing on the tennis courts, had to take dancing lessons from George & Joann Gallas & art classes from Cora Bliss Taylor, ice skating on the Turtle Pond & tobogganing down any street end that we could find, we even have the Kalamazoo River to ourselves in the middle of the summer. Halloween parties and basketball games were community events

I always felt fortunate to be raised in a small town rather than a large city. I became a single parent and worked in the local bank for 36 years and became a care giver to two mothers.