Baking a life together

Last Saturday the Hooimeyer family gathered for a special service as Martin and Jennie celebrated their 50th anniversary. You can be sure there was lots of bread and a special cake –all from Grandin Bakery – the business that Martin purchased in 1976.

"Our actual anniversary is July 10, and we were married in 1963 in Smithers B.C.," said Jennie last week as the couple met with the Gazette to reminisce about their lives as immigrant Canadians, their long marriage, their business and about their strong Christian faith, which has been the mainstay of their lives.

Though officially semi-retired, Martin still goes into the bakery at 4:45 a.m. three mornings per week to help his sons Bruce and Marcel, who have owned the store since 2004.

"Sometimes I make bread, sometimes cookies, whatever they need. For me, 4:45 a.m. isn't hard. For me that's a day job with bankers' hours," Martin said.

The couple still celebrates the day they met, January 13, 1962, when they sang at a choir practice at the Canadian Reformed Church in Edmonton.

"He kept getting my name wrong," said Jennie laughing together with Martin at their old, very personal favourite joke.

Both Dutch immigrants, Martin was born in 1939 and Jennie in 1941 in Holland during the Second World War but they came to Canada separately.

"I got my first chocolate bar from a Canadian soldier," said Jennie, as she recalled the day when she was a little girl and the Canadian soldiers came in big tanks as part of the liberation of Holland.

Jennie immigrated to Canada in 1954 and her family settled in Smithers. Martin came on his own in 1960.

"We are both from Holland but we had to come here to meet each other," Martin said.

He had learned his trade in Holland from his father, who also owned a bakery.

"I had to wait until I was 21 to leave because my father didn't want me to go," Martin recalled, adding that afterwards his father sold his bakery and went on to another successful career making chocolate.

"I had to leave for him to do so well. I was a baker, but there was no future in Holland," he said, adding that one week after he arrived in Canada he found employment in a bakery in Jasper Place.

Later Martin ran the bakery in the Westmount Woodwards store before purchasing Grandin Bakery from Peter Zuidema in 1976. The Hooimeyers purchased a house and moved to St. Albert in 1977.

It was a gutsy move because he had good employment with Woodwards, but Martin was ambitious and he knew there would be a market for the special Dutch-style of baking, which was his area of expertise.

"I learned at Woodwards to Canadianize my bakery. There was no way what I learned in Holland could be the same here, but still, I used real cream and real butter and made Dutch pastry," he said.

Competition

Martin referred to his first four years in Grandin Park Plaza as "the glory years."

"There were only two independent bakeries in St. Albert then and there were no bakeries in the large grocery stores. Now there are probably 10 or 12 bakeries in town so the competition has increased," he said.

Safeway left Grandin mall in 1980 and moved to St. Albert Centre and it added its own bakery.

Martin stuck it out at Grandin mall until 1990 when he finally moved his store to Inglewood Town Centre. In 1991, Grandin Bakery was named St. Albert Business of the Year.

Watching other bakeries move into town was only part of the challenge for Martin, who steadfastly refused to open his store on Sunday.

"Once the grocery stores started opening on Sunday, that changed the whole climate of business. But I go to church on Sunday and my children go to church on Sunday and my grandchildren do too," he said, adding that his family's faith is important to him.

"We stayed in the church where Jennie and I met in the choir. And my family has too. I'm thankful for that," he said.

While Jennie helped occasionally in the bakery, she was busy at home too. The Hooimeyers have four sons and one daughter and 19 grandchildren.

"Our two boys are fifth generation bakers," Jennie said, adding that her other two sons live at Neerlandia, Alta., where one is a farmer and the other sells insulation. Their daughter is a nurse in Edmonton.

For 18 years Jennie volunteered as a librarian at Immanuel Christian School, which her children attended. And she still volunteers to visit with lonely seniors in their homes.

"I like visiting older people. I love hearing their history and what they went through. I get so much out of it," she said.

Martin agreed, adding, "You go to give comfort and come away comforted."

The Hooimeyers have always believed in supporting the city where they make their home and where they own a business.

"I cannot even begin to tell you how many donations of bread they have made in the past and at Christmas – even on Christmas Eve – they supplied bread and pastries for our hampers. They have incredible generosity and they are great community supporters," said Suzan Krescy, director of the St. Albert Food Bank.

Yet Martin seemed surprised when he was asked about it.

"We are a bakery. We have bread," he said simply.

Martin likes getting up early to go to work, because it means he has more time to go golfing or to help Jennie with the beautiful flowers she grows in their yard.

"Next year, when I'm 75. That's when I will retire," he said. "But we won't travel because we travelled enough when we were younger and went back to Holland to visit. We are happy here."