Lois VanderPloeg

Lois VanderPloeg, 88, of Fremont, died Wednesday, June 24, 2026, at the Newaygo County Medical Care Facility in White Cloud, after a long and full life measured out in shifts, hands of euchre, and the particular sound of a canning lid sealing. For thirty-nine years she worked the line at the Gerber plant, raised four children, and put up enough peaches each August to see her family and half her street through to spring.

She was born March 30, 1938, in Fremont, the daughter of Albert and Grace Timmer, and she grew up one of six on a farm where nothing was wasted and everything was canned. She married Gordon VanderPloeg in 1957, a quiet man who drove a milk truck, and the two of them settled in Fremont and did not leave. In 1959 she hired on at Gerber, where she would spend thirty-nine years on the production line, proud of the work, proud of never missing a shift she wasn't genuinely sick for, and proudest of the pension that let her and Gordon retire without having to ask anyone for anything.

Thursday nights were euchre, and had been for fifty years — the same four couples, then the same dwindling number of them, around the same kitchen table, playing for pennies and bragging rights and the right to tell the story again. Lois kept score, kept the coffee coming, and kept a running tally of every euchre her late husband had ever failed to call. Every August she and the peaches went to war: bushels of them, up from the Godfrey orchards, and for two weeks the kitchen ran like a second shift, until the cellar shelves were full of jars that caught the light like amber.

She was a fixture at First Christian Reformed, where she taught Sunday school for decades and ran the funeral luncheons with an efficiency that grieving families never saw and always felt. She sewed the school clothes and the wedding dresses and, when the time came, the christening gowns for grandchildren she adored without a shred of restraint. Her table was the one everyone gathered at — Sundays, holidays, and any Thursday you could wangle an invitation to — and no one left it hungry or unaccounted for.

In her last years, when her own hands could no longer manage the canning, she sat at the kitchen table and directed her daughters through it, jar by jar, so the shelves would be full and the tradition would not skip a summer. It didn't. The peaches from last August are on the shelf still.

She is survived by her children, Debra (Ken) Feyen of Fremont, Randall (Lisa) VanderPloeg of Grand Rapids, Sharon (Tim) Bultema of Fremont, and Mark VanderPloeg of Newaygo; ten grandchildren; sixteen great-grandchildren; her sister, Marian Timmer of Fremont; and a Thursday euchre table that will be one player short from now on.

She was preceded in death by her husband of sixty-one years, Gordon, in 2018; her parents; and her siblings, Harvey, Delwyn, Arlene, and Betty.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the Fremont Area Community Foundation, which Lois supported quietly for years because, as she put it, this town had been good to her and it was only manners to be good back.