FAIRMONT - Clara Reitsma was born in Holland on July 16, 1911. As she approaches the 100-year mark, the Fairmont woman is reflecting on what she's seen.
"I don't feel like I'm 100," she admits. "I don't see what's the big deal. It will probably be just another day to me."
Reitsma's family of 14 - eight brothers and three sisters - were part of the large immigrant migration to America in the 1920s. Reitsma was only 8 years old when they took that life-changing trip.
"My father had brothers that were in Hawarden, Iowa," she recalled. "It's Dutch country. They still don't sell gasoline on Sundays. But they have these big, beautiful churches."
Leaving Holland was no small task for this large family. Nor was it done lightly.
"Before we got on the boat, my father said, 'This is just going to be like being buried alive,'" Reitsma recalled. "He never did make it back to Holland."
The family spent 13 days on a boat that took them and numerous other families across the Atlantic to New York.
"It was in January, and it was really stormy," Reitsma remembers. "The ship was like a big city. ... My oldest brother was 21, and my oldest sister was 17 and they were in charge of the younger children while my father made the arrangements."
Like many immigrants, Reitsma did go through a slight name change when she went through immigration.
"My name in Holland was Klazk," she said. "But they changed it to Clara."
It was a three-day train ride from New York to Iowa, where the children attended country school in Hawarden, north of Sioux City, Iowa.
"We didn't speak any English," Reitsma said. "It must've been hard on that teacher to suddenly have all these Dutch kids. ... But she was nice."
When it came to learning English, Reitsma said they "had to learn fast."
"Everyone was so helpful it seemed like," she said. "Children can learn fast when they have to. We would speak English at school, then speak Dutch at home."
They went to a church that was in a town 20 miles away, traveling by horse and buggy.
"The adults went to the morning services, and the horse and buggy would come back and take the kids to the afternoon services," Reitsma said.
When she became an adult, she began working at a cannery in Sioux Falls, S.D. There, she met the man she would marry and relocated with him to Fairmont.
"We were married in 1936," she said. "He was from Holland, too. ... We managed to make it back to Holland eight times. I still have relatives from Holland that call."
Reitsma had two children, a daughter, Donna, and son, Martin. Her first child was born while her husband was fighting in World War II.
"I wrote him a letter every day," she said of when her husband was in the service.
Following the end of the war and her husband's return, Reitsma worked in the school lunch service for 25 years. A 1971 article from the Sentinel shows Reitsma making sandwiches with some of the other lunch ladies.
"I made the Sentinel a few times," she said. "I can't remember for what though."
Outside of work, she baked and was known for her Dutch heritage recipes and pastries.
"I made a lot of things," Reitsma said. "My daughter said I always had a recipe pinned to a kitchen curtain that I would see and want to try."
She also loved going back to Orange City, Iowa, during the tulip festival in spring.
"The clomps of the wooden shoes going down the street, I always loved hearing that," she said.
Now as she approaches the century mark, Reitsma is living at Lutz Wing at Mayo Clinic Health Systems, Fairmont, but she remains sharp.
"Things take longer to do, but I can't complain," she said. "I'm still fairly independent, and that's the way I like to be."
