By Victoria Mullen, WKTV

Things were different back when Donna Troost was a kid in the 1930s. She walked two miles to school everyday (yes, really), and in the 1940s, her dad had to get permission from the government to allow Donna to carry her sister, Mary to school on a bicycle. Sounds strange until you realize that there was a rubber shortage during World War II.

Troost was born at home in Wyoming, Michigan, and from little on always wanted to live on a farm. As a young girl, she relished spending a couple of weeks each summer at her grandparents’ farm in Irving Township, between Hastings and Middleville.

“When I first went there in the summer to visit, there was a hotel and a grocery store in the town of Irving, but they were all boarded up,” she recalled. “The only things left were the church and a gas station. When Middleville took over, Irving became a ghost town.”

It was a simpler time. Troost walked everywhere she needed to go with friends, or her sister, or cousins. She met her future husband at a roller rink one evening; their first date was a hayride on a farm on Kalamazoo Ave. and 60th Street.

“He gave me an engagement ring, and his father gave me two calves to raise on our farm,” said Troost. “We bought a farm on Patterson and 36th in 1949.”

They got married on a Thursday night and honeymooned in Niagara Falls that weekend but had to be back by Monday because they had to “hay”. Troost and her husband lived on that farm until 1962, when the airport bought the land around it. They then moved to a farm in Allegan County.

“Moving everything was just awful because it had to be done in one day,” Troost said. “We milked the cows in the morning, then loaded them up with all the equipment. And we milked them again that night at the new farm.”

Listen to Troost’s VOICES conversation here.

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