Obituary
In the care of Solemn OaksLucille Vandermeer, 92, of White Cloud, died at home on Tuesday, August 4, 2026, on the farm where she had kept chickens for seventy years, and where — though she would deny it if you asked, and did, right to the end — she quietly paid for four decades of ribbons at the county 4-H fair out of the money she made selling eggs.
She was born Lucille Prins on January 22, 1934, on a farm outside White Cloud, the fourth of eight children raised through the Depression on what the land and the animals gave them. She married Bert Vandermeer in 1953, and they farmed the next section over for fifty-one years — corn, hay, a milking string, and always, in the yard, Lucille's chickens. The egg money was hers by long tradition. What no one knew for years was where it went.
Every summer at the Newaygo County Fair, a 4-H family whose kid had raised a good steer or sewn a good dress or grown a good tomato would learn that the entry fee, or the auction float, or the price of the fabric had already been taken care of. For forty years the person taking care of it was Lucille, working through the fair office on the strict condition that her name never be spoken. When a reporter finally guessed, in 2011, she told him he was mistaken and offered him a cookie. He printed it anyway. She was furious for a week and quietly proud for the rest of her life.
She was small and unsentimental and tougher than the weather. She could wring out a wet hen and dress a Sunday roast and win an argument with the co-op over a two-cent discrepancy. She outlived her husband by twenty-two years and most of her generation by more, kept her own house and her own flock until the last spring of her life, and gave away, by the reckoning of the people who later tried to add it up, a genuinely startling amount of money, none of which she would admit to.
She is survived by her children, Gail (Ron) Terpstra of White Cloud, Wayne (Deb) Vandermeer of Grant, and Marlene Hoezee of Fremont; eleven grandchildren; twenty-three great-grandchildren; six great-great-grandchildren; and forty years of 4-H kids, grown now, who are only beginning to understand who paid for what.
She was preceded in death by her husband, Bert, in 2004; her parents; and all seven of her brothers and sisters.