Hugh Lowing in His Own Words: Jenison, Cedar Crest Dairy and the War Years (2005 Interview)

In February 2005, Trevor Lowing sat down with his grandfather Hugh C. Lowing (born 1918, Georgetown Township) for two hours of recorded conversation about Jenison, the muck farms, World War II, Cedar Crest Dairy and a life of hard work, with Nancy Lowing joining at the end. Listen to the recordings and read the story in Hugh's own words.

Editor's note: This story is edited from a two-hour interview Trevor Lowing recorded with his grandfather on February 21, 2005. The transcript was made by machine and edited for readability: filler words and false starts are removed, and some answers are shortened. Hugh's own words appear in quotation marks. Names, places and dates marked with a small dagger (†) were hard to hear or haven't been checked against records yet. A few passages about private family matters and some offensive period language are left out of this edited version. The full, unedited recording is linked below.

Who Hugh Lowing was

Hugh C. Lowing was born on March 20, 1918, in Georgetown Township, Ottawa County, Michigan, the area most people call Jenison. His parents were Roy Holden Lowing (1887–1968) and Mary Elizabeth Sheridan (1888–1971), who married at Allendale in 1913. Hugh was the second of five children. His brothers were Otis, Wayne and Boyd, and his sister was Mary Joyce. On October 19, 1939, he married Nancy Brown Jarvis, who was born in Grand Rapids in 1919. They raised six children. (Source: the Lowing family tree on this site.)

In February 2005 Hugh and Nancy were visiting their son Thomas Hugh Lowing in Port Charlotte, Florida. Trevor, Thomas's son, set up a video camera and asked his grandfather about his life. Nancy joined for the last twenty minutes. Hugh was 86.

Listen to the interview

Transcripts: Part 1 transcript · Part 2 transcript. These earlier transcripts cover roughly the first half of each recording. A complete, time-stamped transcript is being prepared.

Born on Bauer Road

Hugh grew up at 2361 Bauer Road ^†, but he was actually born about a mile and a half down the road, at the home of the local midwife.

"Them days they had midwife, no doctors, you know. So Dad took Mother in March. It was bad weather down Bauer Road. The frost was coming out, and the buggy went right up to the axle, Dad said."

The midwife was Maggie Bosworth ^†. Hugh didn't know her maiden name, only that she had married a Bosworth. The country doctor, Doc Wedgewood ^†, had no car. He made his rounds by horse and buggy in summer and by cutter in winter. A cutter, Hugh explained, is "just like a buggy, only it's got runners on it." When a baby was coming, "you don't wait for him to go off fifty miles in the buggy."

Jenison, the muck and the Lowing farms

Hugh pointed out that Jenison was never a separate town: "It's Georgetown Charter Township, and everybody calls it Jenison." The low ground along the old river bottom was rich muck where farmers grew onions and celery. Hugh's sons topped onions by hand there as boys to earn a little money. By 2005, he said, the muck had largely blown out, and much of it was sod farms.

When Trevor asked what a young Hugh would have seen from his front yard, he named neighbors across the road and the farm next door. Then he described how much of the township had once been Lowing land. Where Rosewood is now was called the Pinery, "where all the pine trees" were, and pine stumps lined the fences. "There was Lowings all over there," he said. He remembered Uncle Charlie and Uncle Harry, who had big farms down by the river, and Uncle Albert Lowing ^†, who owned "quite a chunk" along Clay Hill. Every year the family went to the Old Settlers' picnic at Jamestown Park, which drew people from Hudsonville, Jenison and Jamestown.

Brothers, the woodshed and the 1933 World's Fair

"I had three brothers and one sister," Hugh said: Ogie (Otis) ^†, Wayne, Boyd and Joyce. Discipline came from a razor strop hanging in the woodshed. He laughed about the day he and Ogie took a four- or five-pound sledgehammer to the maple trees their father had planted, "to see who could take the most bark off with one hit." "We caught hell for that," he said, but added: "If kids don't get in trouble somewhere, they never amount to anything."

As teenagers they camped at Holland Beach with friends. In 1933, when Hugh was 15, he, Ogie and their cousin Bob Lowing drove to the Chicago World's Fair in Bob's car. "That was a big deal," Hugh said.

Courting Nancy

Hugh and Nancy met at Grandville High School ^†. She was a class behind him, and Hugh said she took summer school so she could graduate a year early, with his class ^†. Hugh was one of only two students with a car. Nancy remembered waiting in the school vestibule as he drove up. "I thought they had money," she said, and both of them laughed.

Hugh's favorite story from those years starts with a double date with his cousin Max. They blew two tires on the way to Holland Beach, so Bert Little, who ran a filling station on M-21 in Grandville ^†, lent them his own car: "a little convertible, black and white, had them big donut tires on." At the beach they found the gate chained shut for the night. "There's a bunch of guys around there. We lifted that damn car right over that chain. Eight or ten guys, you can do about anything."

They married on a Thursday night at the First Christian Church in Grand Rapids ^† and held the reception at her parents' home. Friends planned to shivaree them, an old custom of banging and clanging outside the newlyweds until they paid up. But Max, the best man, slipped them out to Hugh's car, hidden at the Avenue Terrace on South Division. They spent the night in a downtown hotel in South Bend ^†. Hugh woke to "a clippity-clop" of a horse in the street below. The next night they stayed at the Stevens Hotel in Chicago for about three dollars. "I got the bills home yet," he said. "We got them in our wedding book." Hugh had to be back at work on Monday.

Max was killed at Anzio in World War II ^†. Trevor had come across his name, and his decorations, in the family history.

World War II at home

"I remember Pearl Harbor real well."

Ogie and Wayne were in the National Guard's 126th Infantry and left right away, to Camp Beauregard and Camp McCoy. Wayne went on to the war against Japan. Ogie broke his leg in training and didn't go overseas. Boyd "was only sixteen years old. He lied about his age and went to the Navy."

Hugh signed up too. "It was an honor in them days. It was an honor to serve." But his father sat on the draft board in Grand Haven as township supervisor, and he pulled Hugh's name: "I got three in. You got to stay home and work on the farm." Hugh never stopped feeling it. "In my high school class, every kid went to service but me."

The farm took in conscientious objectors as workers. Hugh remembered one young man, Bob Raider ^†, as a nice kid and a good worker. He also remembered him complaining that "it never gets done, they get one job right after another here." Because it was a farm, it got all the "C" gas-ration cards it needed.

Eventually Hugh quit working for his father and went into war work. He worked first at Kelvinator in Grandville, then at Lear Siegler ^† in Grand Rapids, where he moved up in tool-and-die work. Then he went to Campbell, Wyant & Cannon (CWC) in Muskegon, which he called the "biggest white metal factory in the world." CWC cast aluminum engine blocks for Hercules engines and the big drive sprockets for tank treads. Hugh worked nights in machine repair for about $2.41 an hour, "big money in them days." To get there he bought a nine-passenger straight-eight Buick with 5,000 miles on it for $300 from the widow of a retired Grandville plaster-company manager. He drove a carload of men to Muskegon every night. When the tires wore thin, CWC gave him a slip for new Corduroy tires, which were made in Grand Rapids and rationed.

Cedar Crest Dairy

Roy Lowing had worked at the old Grand Rapids Creamery ^†. He and Mary bought the family farm from Roy's mother for $12,000 after his father died, and "there was years that they just worked enough to pay the interest." In 1928, when Hugh was ten, Roy started a small dairy. Hugh explained the name:

"Crest is top, ain't it? And cedar is a cedar swamp where we live. Every year for Christmas we'd go down there with an axe and get our tree."

It began with a few neighbors in Grandville asking for milk. Milk was cooled over a slanted aerator fed with cold well water. Mary washed and filled the glass bottles by hand in the basement. The family delivered door to door, and the children milked cows before school.

When Roy tired of running the business, Hugh bought it from him, and his brother Wayne took over the farm and the herd. Hugh's Cedar Crest bought Wayne's milk and milk from neighboring farms. He ran Divco delivery trucks ^†, "a ton and a half," with Hercules engines and aluminum bodies that "would last forever." He built up a large business supplying school milk in half-pint cartons. Hugh said there were 57 dairies in Grand Rapids when he bought his father out. Many were started by Dutch immigrants, who "knew that trade" from the Netherlands. The only vacations he and Nancy took were the national dairy conventions, held at McCormick Place in Chicago and in Atlantic City.

By the mid-1960s small dairies were closing. In 1966 ^†, Hugh stopped processing his own milk and became a distributor for Farr Dairy ^†, hauling his farmers' bulk milk there and buying it back bottled. "It was good for him and good for us," he said. He was proud of how he dealt with the farmers who supplied him: "I was always fair to my farmers."

Six children and a house on Baldwin

Hugh and Nancy's first child, Bruce, was born in June 1941. Four boys came first, then two girls. The family doctor charged "twenty-five bucks" for prenatal care and delivery. When the doctor moved his practice to a more expensive part of Grand Rapids, he told Hugh, "I charge according to the pocketbook," and kept him as a patient.

In 1955 they built their own house. Percy Roberts ^† framed it in cement block, and the family did much of the work themselves, even pounding the well down by hand. They moved in on July 1, just before their fifth child was born. On Saturday nights Hugh and Nancy went out with a group of friends Hugh called the "Bloody Seven" ^†, and they hosted parties in their finished basement.

Hugh talked at length about Bruce, who died in 1993. Bruce was determined to study electrical engineering at Ferris, even after a counselor told him he would never make it. It took him five years. He went on to a civil-service engineering career connected with Fort Monmouth ^†. Hugh said Bruce was among the youngest ever promoted to GS-15 ^† and briefed generals at the Pentagon during the Vietnam War ^†. Bruce also spent years tracing the Lowing family tree, and that work underlies the genealogy on this site.

A house fire in 1972 destroyed many of the family's photographs. The slides that survived were later put on a DVD, and Trevor scanned many more in the months before this interview.

Nancy joins in

In the last part of the recording Nancy sat down beside Hugh. They had dated since they were sixteen. "I was 21 when I married you," she said. She was matter-of-fact about how they had built their life: "We made it ourself. We didn't need help from somebody else. We earned our stuff."

Nancy remembered that her mother, Grandma Jarvis, collected everything: rocks, bridles and especially buttons. "She wrote a book on buttons" ^†. Hugh remembered the Depression: a beekeeper down Bauer Road named Cowing ^† traded five gallons of honey for milk. "We lived on that one winter." Groceries for a whole week, Nancy said, cost about three dollars.

Trevor asked about a Lowing family Bible mentioned in the family history book. Nancy had her own mother's Bible, but neither of them knew where an older Lowing Bible had gone. If anyone in the family knows, please get in touch.

What Hugh had learned

"We've had a good life. Of course, we've never been educated people. We always worked for a living, but we always made a good living. Our kids never went hungry."

On retirement, he told Trevor not to rush it: "Retirement is great if you got something to do. If you're a fisherman, you can fish so much. You can golf so much."

Trevor's last question was "What's the key to a happy marriage?" The tape ran out before Hugh could answer. "I might get you again next time we visit," Trevor said.

Sources and related pages

• Interview recording: Hugh and Nancy Lowing, interviewed by Trevor Lowing, Port Charlotte, Florida, February 21, 2005 (Parts 1 and 2 above).
• Family tree: Hugh C. Lowing in the Lowing genealogy (members only).
• Hugh's mother's family: From Dublin to Huron to Allendale: The Sheridans' Long Road to Michigan.
• The Lowing family burial ground near the home place: Lowing Private Cemetery, Bauer Road and 28th Avenue.

Family members: if you can correct a name or date marked with a dagger (†), or you have photos of Cedar Crest Dairy, please contact the site.