My maternal great-grandmother, Hilje Mulder Folkers, and I had a special relationship when I was a very young, and this relationship still affects me emotionally some 65 years later. Opoo had lost her husband before I was born, and she was living with my grandparents, Hermannus Thiessens and Henrietta Folkers. When I was born, we lived at 326 Bryan Avenue in Salt Lake City Utah. Also living in the family were my mother Ruth, and my aunt Grace. Mom was seventeen years old when I was born in 1944 and dad was serving in the Euorpean Theatre with the United States Army - Air Force.
Since grandma Thiessens worked and grandpa was unable to because of disability and Hodgkins Disease and my mother also worked, I was taken care of much of the time by Opoo Folkers. She had been born in Aduard, Groningen, Netherlands on 6 May 1858 to Hendrik Mulder and Fokje Kloosterman. In her aging years, she made sure that my diapers were changed and that I was well taken care of.
I remember going with my grandmother Thiessens to the Salt Lake County General Hospital to visit her when I was about three years of age. We stopped outside the hospital and purchased fruit or flowers from a street vendor. I can also remember that I had the opportunity to visit her for a brief time.
The room where she was located in the hospital was a ward with several beds. I remember that several women were making noise of various sorts, and one in particular was repeating "shut up!", "shut up!", "shut up!" over and over again. This did not seem like a hospitable place to me. I remember very little of Opoo, except that she was very short and very loving. She was extremely fussy in the way that I was taken care of, and demanded things be "just right" when it came to my care.
On 5 March 1948, she was said to have fallen from the window ledge where she was sitting with the window open, much like I saw some of the women who were in the hospital ward do. But the family has the idea that she probably jumped, as she was not in her best mental state of mind while in the hospital--like I remember of others in the ward. At any rate, she met her death just short of 90 years of age.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I still remember her and the close relationship we had. I was blessed to have the association because she never did learn to speak English. When I later served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I was told that the dialect I spoke when I learned the Dutch language was from Groningen, the city of my grandparents and great-grandparents. Many Amsterdamers said that they could not believe I was from United States, because I spoke Dutch with the accent of the northern province of Groningen, and I attribute much of that to my Opoo!