By Ginny Raue
She was born July 4, 1932. It was the time of the Great Depression; between 13 and 15 million Americans were unemployed and half the country’s banks had failed. But Audrey Dhuyvetter has no complaints. While gas and clothing were hard to come by, thanks to her mother’s ingenuity, somehow they never went hungry.
It took a world war, she said, for people to be able to make money again.
“I would rather have stayed the way we were, though, than to see a war.”
Dhuyvetter is a life-long resident of the Apshawa area of West Milford, as was her mother before her. One of four children, she recalled her childhood and the town in those days.
“It was woods. There were only 15 to 20 houses in the Apshawa section. We’d go to Henry’s Pond to swim - along with the snakes. We’d pick blackberries all through High Crest.”
They walked the roads of West Milford; strolls around the lakes and to St. Joseph Church for catechism classes on Saturday and Mass on Sunday. As they got older, if they found a few coins in their pockets, they’d trek to Butler for a movie. Sitting on the porch counting cars was fun as was playing baseball and making mud pies.
Dhuyvetter still passes by the stone wall and saloon on Macopin Road where her father and mother met. Her grandfather called square dances there with a megaphone. She lives in this pocket of family memories to this day.
She told of an old bus that would come by each week, tricked out like a general store, including the requisite pickle barrel.
“It was such fun to go on the bus to shop. You could buy sugar, rice, flour and meats packed on ice. He had fabric and thread, tobacco and notions.”
Dhuyvetter attended the two-room Apshawa School where two teachers taught all grades and the building was warmed by pot belly stoves.
When she was 16, she bought a 1930 Plymouth from her aunt, a big step in those days towards women’s independence. She paid for it by working after classes at Butler High School, paying 50 cents a week towards the $35 sale price. She got her license at 17 and, like all kids then and now, she gained some freedom.
She met her husband, Frank, at a dance in Greenpond. They married in June 1950 at St. Joseph Church. He was 20, she was 18 years old. The bride wore a while lace gown and the reception was at the Apshawa firehouse. A cold buffet was served and the wedding cake was made by her mother-in-law.
Frank was in the Marine Reserves at the time and, as luck would have it, he heard the call to duty on the radio while they were on their honeymoon.
“We didn’t even know where Korea was,” Dhuyvetter said.
Shipped out by September, there was little communication during his tour and, although Audrey wrote him every night, he rarely got her letters.
“A ham radio operator in Wisconsin called my mother-in-law and told us he was alive,” she said.
Frank wound up in a hospital in Japan suffering from frost bite. When he came home he was based at Lakehurst and they saw each other on weekends.
The couple went on to raise their daughter, Debra, in their Apshawa home. While Frank suffered a massive heart attack at age 50, he lived another 30 years.
“I was married for 60 years. We were happily married. We never once called each other names. You’d get mad but it was trivial. We were always prepared for any hardship that came along,” she said.
Dhuyvetter has one granddaughter, Amy, her “pride and joy.” When Amy was planning her own wedding, she picked a date as close as possible to her grandparents’s June wedding date. Sadly, Frank was stricken with cancer and died a few weeks short of the wedding.
Knowing Frank wanted the ceremony to go forward, the day of the wedding came. When the flowers arrived on the day of the wedding, they realized they had not cancelled Frank’s boutonniere. And the bride’s bouquet was missing. As friends scrambled to get her flowers, Amy quietly decided to walk down the aisle carrying her grandfather’s boutonniere.
Dhuyvetter remains in the family home and hopes to live out her life there.
“I feel like my husband is here with me. It was our home and we were happy here. I don’t think I’m ready to leave the memories,” she said.
She passes the days chatting on the phone. Her sister, Marge Waarst, lives behind her, neighbors stop by and her family is at her “beck and call.”
A contented woman, she lives very much in the present but treasures her memories of life, love and family.
She doesn’t cook much now but rather enjoys the luxury of family-prepared meals. “Okay, Audrey, just nuke it,” they tell her. She dug out an old family dessert recipe.