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Anna Maria Everdina Trip, known to her family as Marie, was born into a large family in the year 1897. Here is a picture taken at the 50th wedding anniversary of her grandparents, Hendrik Jongbloed (15) and Antje Houwink (9). Marie is the young girl (3) in the upper-left of the photo. Her mother (5) and father (7) are just to the right of her. More information about the Jongbloed family.

1899 - 50th Anniversary of Hendrik Jongbloed and Antje Houwink

Hendrik Jan Trip

Her father, Hendrik Jan Trip (7), grew up in Meppel, on the Southern border of the province of Drente, in the northeastern part of Holland. He taught geography and history, first in Haarlem, where his two daughters Marie (3) and Anneke (10) were born, and later in Almelo, which is located in the far eastern part of the midsection of Holland, where his son Scato was born in 1906. Almelo was then a small rural town in a wooded area. Life was less sophisticated there than in the larger cities.

Jacoba Jongbloed

Her mother, Jacoba Francisca (Coos) Jongbloed (5) had grown up in Sneek, in the province of Friesland, in a large family. In those days in Holland, it was unusual for a girl to learn a trade, but the three daughters Sine (2), Bartha (21) and Jacoba (5) were rather emancipated and they were interested in science. All three became pharmacy assistants. Sine, who never married, later became one of the first women in Holland to go to the University and she became a pharmacist. I spoke with someone who knew her, who told me that Jacoba was a "femme savante," who had no interest in the usual female obligations of a homemaker. The household was attended to by Gonda, a live-in housekeeper. Gonda was strongly attached to the family. She later emigrated to America and with her husband owned and operated a bakery. When the war ended in 1945, she sent relief packages to us. I was then eighteen years old, and had not had any new clothes since age thirteen or fourteen, in spite of having grown quite a bit during that time. I was very happy with the new clothes that Gonda sent.

1899 - Hendrik Jan Trip and Jacoba Francisca Trip with Marie and Anneke (Tankie)

Marie Trip

Marie was born in Haarlem in 1897. Marie was an intelligent girl, but very reserved and shy. She had difficulty expressing her feelings and getting to know people. Anneke was much more outgoing and spontaneous, and made friends more easily. But Marie and Anneke got along very well. Marie went to Utrecht at age seventeen to study medicine. She had a good brain and looked nice, but she was inexperienced and naive. According to a fellow student, she was very quiet and rarely laughed, and always kept a straight face. When she was twenty-two Ferdinand took a liking to her. He was twenty-nine and, after seven years in the Army, was an experienced man. He had been engaged for several years, but his fiancee argued with him enough to lead to them breaking their engagement. Marie was taken in by him, looked up to him and was less inclined to argue. People around her said that she should be happy to be able to get such an able man. Thus they were married in 1923.

Marie and Anneke Trip in 1904

Anneke Trip

Anneke was born in Haarlem in 1899. She studied English in Amsterdam and later taught at the HBS in Groningen. She loved children and she frequently came to visit us. We started calling her Tankie, which was a contraction of tante-Ankie. Tankie thus became her name amongst the family. In 1933 she announced that she was going to marry Hans Hoffmann, a German, who also was a teacher at the HBS in Groningen.

When Hans was in his early twenties, he learned to speak Dutch, and earned a diploma to teach German in Dutch schools. In 1924 he got a job at a technical school in Friesland. Later he became a teacher at the HBS in Groningen, where Anneke taught English. Around the year 1933, the worldwide depression increased the unemployment rate in Holland, and quite a few teachers were losing their jobs. Hans understood that, being German, his prospects were not too promising. In the Dutch East Indies there was a shortage of schoolteachers, and salaries were higher than those in Holland. Hans accepted a position as a teacher at the HBS in Batavia (now Jakarta). They left in 1934 and would get their first leave after six years, in 1940.

The Dutch government did not want to take care of the German families, and had made an agreement to send the wives and children to Germany, via Japan and Russia. While they were in Japan, Germany invade Russia, so they were stuck in Japan. In 1947 they were repatriated to Germany by the Americans, who had occupied Japan after the war. Being Germans, they were not allowed into Holland any more. In 1950 Tankie received special permission to visit her Dutch relatives. She came to stay with us, with her three children, and later she came to visit regularly, usually without the children, either Den Haag or Hengelo, where oom Scato, her brother, lived.

Anneke and Marie Trip in 1907

Scato Trip

Her brother Scato or Scaat, as we used to call him, was the most enterprising of the family. He had polio when he was a child, and did not have the use of his right arm. He was nevertheless well-coordinated and participated in a number of sports, including tennis and field hockey. Perhaps his biggest achievement in sports was his finishing of the eleven city skating race, a grueling all-day event held yearly in the North of Holland. He also was a very decent bridge player, in addition to being hard to beat at many of the other games, including chess, that we used to play with him. He and my father had somewhat of a love-hate relationship, since Scaat liked to argue with my father who was fifteen years older than he was and having been in the Army for five years followed by medical school and specialization, considered himself somewhat of an authority on many things. After finishing secondary school, he then studied to become a notary (a notary in Holland is a combination of lawyer and civil servant). He remained in Almelo for years and then moved to Hengelo (a few miles east) to become notary, a lifetime position. Since he was so much younger than my parents, we loved to have him visit and play with him.

We also got along well with his girlfriend - fiancee - wife Mies, who was perhaps ten years younger than Scaat. She was always fun and she complimented Scaat rather well and never took my father too seriously. She also did a great job in raising her six children: Siepko, born in 1939, just before the war, Hanke and Marian, the twins born about 1942, Miesje born right after the war and Hendrik Jan and Coosje following her in that order. Miesje spent about nine months in Berkeley with us, to help with Ernest and Amy in 1962.

Scato and Anneke Trip

Ferdinand Beernink

At the beginning of World War I, Ferdinand Beernink joined the Army as a lieutenant in the infantry, to remain on active duty for almost five years. He served most of this time as lieutenant of the guard at the border between Holland and Belgium, the latter country having been invaded by Germany in 1914. The Dutch received the fleeing Belgian troops and my father was given a trumpet by one of them with which he had signalled the retreat from the city of Liege.

After the war was over he finished medical school at the Army's expense by signing up to become a regular Army medical officer. They also allowed him to specialize in ophthalmology following graduation. Sometime during the last part of his medical school he met my mother, Marie Trip, and in order to get their specialty training at the same University they had to move to Groningen, in the very northern part of Holland. They were married in 1923 and moved to the Hague about that time. He was assigned to the military hospital in the Hague and they both opened a private practice at home, as was customary in those days.

My mother was a pediatrician. Just as they were getting a little worried about their fertility, mother got pregnant and delivered a daughter, Jacoba Francisca, on January 6, 1927, at home of course. She did actually have a female obstetrician who attended the birth. Only 18 months later she delivered again at home, having seen patients only a few hours earlier. This time it was two boys, apparently not to her own surprise, but to that of her obstetrician, who just missed the birth, which was rapid, with fifteen minutes in between babies. I was named after my father's favorite brother and my father named his second son after himself. My mother always maintained that she felt so much fetal movement that she was herself fairly sure that she was going to have twins, but characteristically didn't make much of an issue out of it.

30 September 1928
"Ferdinand Jan, Jacoba, Heinrich Evert" with Ferdinand and Marie Trip Beernink.
The twins are two months old.

Memories

My mother was proud of her family name, which goes back several centuries in Dutch history and to the golden age of Holland. There is, in Amsterdam, the Trippenhuis dating back to the time that one of her forebears was mayor of Amsterdam. See "The Trip Family Tree" for more details.

We had a few nannies, since both our parents were full time workers, but mother (who was always called Mama), of course, did nurse all of us full time. No doubt this early experience has influenced my own strong advocacy of nursing in my practice. The nanny that I sort of remember (especially when looking in the old photo album of course) was appropriately named Nan or Nannetje. The word nanny does not have a real good equivalent in Dutch as far as I can remember.

Because of my father's dominance and my mother's shyness, it seems a lot more difficult to do justice to her achievements. With her inhibitions, it must have been a tremendous achievement for her, in those days early in the century when women in Holland were almost exclusively housewives, to break all the barriers that were present and get herself into medical school and finish succesfully. I am not sure why she chose the University of Utrecht other than the fact that it was the closest medical school to her home in Almelo. For that matter, I am not sure why my father went there either - he may have been stationed there in the military.

We lived in a large boxy house on a corner lot, directly across from the railroad station in Den Haag. My parents both did their private practice at home, and we were trained to be quiet during those hours that patients were coming and going. My father always had to get up very early to go to the military hospital and he returned in the late noon hour. He then customarily took a nap before starting to see his private patients. My mother saw her private patients in the morning and both of them went to several clinics in the afternoon. We went to school on scooters and later bicycles and frequently found no parent home in the later years. We did have one or two maids until the early forties.

In the early thirties a chicken-run had been built in our rather large backyard, where we had initially at least, five White Leghorns and five Rhode Island Reds. Since my mother was from a rural environment, I presume that these chickens were more her idea then my father's, since he didn't care much for animals. He apparently was bitten by a dog when he was a child, and in spite of many promises over the years never did allow us to have a dog. We did have a cat who produced many litters over the years, but we didn't get her until after we moved.

In 1939 we left the home of our birth to move to a larger house only a few blocks away. My father had bought it at an auction at a very good price. This house had a full basement, with an additional three stories above the ground. The yard may have been a little smaller than that of the old house. We children had a large playroom in the basement, where we had a ping-pong table permanently set up, which not infrequently kept my brother and me from doing our homework. The routine was, that my mother would hear the noise of the ping-pong ball and after a few warnings we would reluctantly quit and quickly do our homework.

My mother did not age very well. She was grey at a rather young age and started complaining of pain in her left hip during the later part of the war, around 1944, at which time she was blaming it on a draft in her car door. It turned out, however, that it was the beginning of a severe arthritic process in her left hip, which eventually led to a complete stiffening of her left hipjoint (ankylosis), which gave her a severe limp by the time she was in her late fifties. Today she would, of course, have had a hip replacement done and been able to walk almost normally. Worst of all, she started to suffer from memory loss in her early-mid sixties and developed what everybody now calls Alzheimer's disease. For the last several years before her death in 1971, she barely knew what was going on around her and during the last weeks or months of her life, my father sat at her bedside and fed her what little she would take. When she finally died, he was physically and emotionally worn out - he was eighty.

Coos, Heinrich, and Ferdinand with their parents
Ferdinand Beernink and Marie Trip-Beernink

Credits

This account of the life of Marie Beernink was extracted from two separate "Histories". The first was written by her daughter, Jacoba (Coos), in 1993. The second was written by her son Heinrich, about five years later. I have taken some liberties in intermingling the two accounts, and you will notice that sometimes the speaker sounds like a daughter, and other times sounds like a twin. In some places I was able to smooth this out, but in others I felt the personal tone was more important than making the narrative entirely consistent.