Florence Timmer

Florence Timmer, 90, of Fremont, died Tuesday, February 3, 2026, at Corewell Health Gerber Memorial Hospital. For thirty years she ran a steam kettle and a griddle in the cafeteria at the Gerber plant, feeding the people who fed the nation's babies, and she did it the way she did everything — early, hot, and with enough for seconds.

She was born July 14, 1935, on a stump farm outside Fremont, the fifth of Albert and Wilhelmina Prins's seven children, and grew up in a kitchen that never had quite enough and never turned anyone away — which turned out to be the only training she ever needed. She left school at sixteen to help at home, married Cornelius 'Casey' Timmer in 1954, and raised four children in a white house on Stewart Avenue that smelled, depending on the season, of bread, dill, or venison.

In 1961 she hired on at the Gerber plant cafeteria and stayed thirty years. She fed three shifts of the people who made the baby food that fed the country — the line workers, the truckers, the men from the labs — and she knew what every regular took in their coffee and which ones were too proud to admit they'd skipped breakfast, and fed those ones extra without a word. She could scale a recipe for four up to four hundred in her head, never wrote much down, and retired in 1991 only because they made her, leaving behind a chili the cafeteria never did get quite right again.

At home she canned what her garden gave her — dilly beans, tomatoes, a bread-and-butter pickle people angled all year to be given — and she kept the fellowship-hall kitchen at First Christian Reformed running for funerals and weddings alike, holding that a family in grief or in joy should not also have to worry about whether there was coffee. There was always coffee. She buried Casey in 2009 and missed him plainly, and filled the quiet with grandchildren, most of whom learned to bake at her elbow standing on a kitchen chair.

She is remembered for her hands and her portions, for a laugh you could hear across the parish hall, and for a lifetime of the particular love that expresses itself as a full plate set down in front of you before you had quite admitted you were hungry.

She is survived by her children, Nelson (Karen) Timmer of Fremont, Bonnie (Dale) Riemersma of Newaygo, Judith Timmer of Grand Rapids, and Roger (Lynn) Timmer of Hesperia; fourteen grandchildren; twenty-one great-grandchildren; and her sister, Gertrude Prins of Fremont.

She was preceded in death by her husband of fifty-five years, Casey, in 2009; her parents; four brothers; and a daughter-in-law, Sharon, whom she counted as her own.

Memorial contributions may be made to the kitchen fund at First Christian Reformed Church of Fremont, so the coffee is never the thing a grieving family has to think about.