In March of 2018, Shane went to Amsterdam on a business trip and asked Dad/Lamar if he had any addresses or memories from his mission time there. Here's Dad's answer ...
Hello Shane,
We got your letter from Amsterdam. You asked about the addresses of where I lived, and where our church in Amsterdam was located. I had to look up in my old Missionary Journal for some details.
My mission actually started 20 Aug 1957, and we spent 8 days in the old mission home in Salt Lake City. My companion was Elder Ron Whiting, from Basalt, Idaho, also assigned to go to the Netherlands. We studied some Dutch language and missionary lessons.
Then we traveled via train to Chicago and New York and boarded the SS Maasdam for the trip to The Netherlands, 5-14 September. Newly arriving missionaries in The Netherlands usually went straight to The Hague (Den Haag), where the mission home was located, and where the missionary school was located, where we could get additional language and culture training. However, since we had only the two of us new missionaries, and they were expecting three more missionaries in three weeks, they decided to send us out with a missionary companion to bone us up on that kind of stuff.
I was sent to Amsterdam, where my companion was Elder Robert J. DeBry, now the famous ambulance chaser. Elder DeBry was the District President in Amsterdam, and spoke very good Dutch. He was a good teacher. We lived above the church, which was then at Weteringschans 101. It was just one of the many buildings along the street. The church was on the main level, and there were four of us missionaries living on the upper floors.
The church was near some famous buildings in Amsterdam. One of them was Het Rijks Museum, which had lots of art work by Rembrandt, especially his famous Night Watch. The other building was Het Concert Gebouw, translated to The Concert Building. That is still in operation today. I hear on the BBC about concerts coming from Het Concert Gebouw. We had a missionary choir, and sang in lots of places around the mission, and one of the places we sang was Het Concert Gebouw. I still have the programs for this concert in my missionary journal. (See London Temple Dedication for another choir experience).
After that assignment in Amsterdam, I went to the missionary school in Den Haag to learn more Dutch. That was at the church there, Loosduinsekade 11. That was a regular church building, and is likely still there.
After that, I had assignments in Arnhem, by the German border, and then back to Den Haag, and then to the town of Ijmuiden, which was in the Amsterdam district. It was a town of over 100,000 but hadn’t had missionaries in over 30 years. We organized our own meetings in Ijmuiden, above a bar. We had other meetings in the nearby city of Haarlem.
Then I returned to Den Haag, now as the missionary teacher. After that I served in Zwolle, and then Rotterdam North.
I never did get to serve in the northern provinces of The Netherlands, Friesland and Groningen. My grandfather (Ate Westra) was born in Friesland and my grandmother (Geeske Egberts de Haan) was born in Groningen. They married in Groningen in 1902 and came to Utah in 1907. My father (Joseph Ate Westra) was born in SLC in 1911.
After my mission ended, in May 1960, I spent about three weeks in Friesland, doing some genealogical research. Then we traveled through Europe and took a ship home, the SS United States, four days. Two of the five missionaries traveling together had purchased Volkswagons, so we traveled in those, through Europe, and put them on the ship, and drove them to Utah.
In 1960, near the end of my mission, they were preparing to make the first Stake in The Netherlands. It was actually the first non-English speaking stake in the world. I don’t know for sure if there are now more than one Stake in The Netherlands. You can use your Dutch and ask when you go to church there. There is now one temple in The Netherlands. One of the missionaries serving with me, Elder Springer, went back to the Netherlands to help build the Temple. He is a builder and used to live in our ward in Timmerman’s house. He recently died.
You mentioned you stayed away from the shady areas of Amsterdam. We would sometimes go down to the Red Light District and call the young women working there to repentance. One of my companions actually did talk to one of the girls. Many of them were just teenagers. They would sit in a showroom behind a big window, in their pretty formal dresses. Back then, you could tell the location of the Red Light District, by the big Catholic Church, with a huge red cross on top. I think maybe the popes have since then stopped that display of obvious connection between the Catholic Church and the Red Light District.
I’m glad you know what unsafe areas to stay away from----visitors often don’t know that. Wendy didn’t know on her mission, and was in a bad part and the buses had quit for the night. A policeman stopped and told them they needed to get out of that dangerous area. They called their zone leaders to come get them. When Janika went to Atlanta this past summer to be an EFY counselor, she met some people that had known Wendy on her mission!
The churches in the northern part of Holland were mostly Dutch Reformed, John Calvin, and the churches in the southern provinces of Holland were mostly Catholic.
Let me know more of how your church meetings went,
Dad
From Shane: Thanks for the info, Dad, that is really cool to hear! Weteringschans 101 is very close by where I'm staying, so I'll pass by there to see what is is now. I went to the Van Gogh museum today, it is right in between the Rijks museum and the Concert building, and I walked around part of the Rijks museum afterwards -- its a really cool building. I might go into that museum tomorrow. I looked it up, and the Den Haag Ward is still at that same address. There are currently 3 stakes in the Netherlands; Apeldoorn, Rotterdam, and The Hague (which includes Amsterdam). Very cool to hear about your experiences, and to be where you were 59.5 years ago!
From Mom/Margie: Dad said Amsterdam is probably 4 or more times larger than Salt Lake City, which makes it even more amazing that Shane is staying close enough to walk to where Dad lived 60 years ago, out of the entire huge city.
Check out another one of Shane's trips to Holland a little later in 2018 where he visited the city of Groningen where Dad/Lamar's grandfather lived/married/worked and returned to for a mission after immigrating to the United States. Historic Homes in Holland ~ Shane's Trip. Shane was able to locate a number of residences and church buildings from our family history!
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