VandeBerg, Gale

(1920-2020)

 

Submitted 2024,

by Jerry VandeBerg

 

Gale LeRoy VandeBerg was born November 10, 1920, in his parents’ (Horace and Fern VandeBerg) farmhouse in the rural area which was then called York Center, about nine miles northeast of Neillsville in the Township of York. He married his Neillsville High School sweetheart, Zona Idell Raine, in 1943, after completing his initial university degree at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. They were married for 67 years until her passing on February 23, 2010. Family was always in the forefront of my parents’ lives, from their individual childhoods and onward throughout their entire lives. Their love and devotion to their three children and their children’s families were always of utmost importance to them. Gale loved to talk and write about his rural experiences and heritage growing up on his parents’ farm, nestled among neighboring farms of close relatives, in the York Center area in the 1920's and 1930's. He enjoyed talking about those experiences along with the values he learned from his parents, the York Center Methodist Church, the eight grades-one-room-country school, Oriole Hill School, and Neillsville High School.

 

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Gale’s family had close ties to the church and the Oriole Hill one-room school from their beginnings, including among others, Gale’s uncle, Burton Lawrence, who was one of the men in charge of building the church in 1880, and Gale’s grandfather, John VandeBerg, who helped neighbors build the school in the 1880's and served as the school board’s treasurer for its first 24 years. Among Gale’s favorite adages, which were concepts instilled in him by his parents and which he instilled in his own three children, were, “A job (or anything) worth doing, is worth doing well” and “Where there is a will, there is a way.” After three university degrees and a forty-year professional career in education, with the last twenty-nine years at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Gale retired in Madison in 1983. During his 37 years of retirement, Gale wrote eight books up into his nineties and of which he self-published seven of them. Although he was legally blind while writing his last several books, he used his “Where there is a will, there is a way” determination to overcome his obstacles to do “A job, well done.” Many of Gale’s books feature substantial chapters about rural life, farming, and family values in the 1920's and 1930's in Clark County including fascinating history of settlement and farming life going back to the 1880's and sometimes earlier. His book Beyond the Horizon, published in 1992 , is chronicled in one of the accompanying articles. Another of his books entitled AND THAT’S THE WAY IT WAS - 55 Stories Of Farming and Rural Living In Wisconsin 1880 - 1943, published in 2001, is devoted entirely to enjoyable and informative short stories of settlement, farming, history, and rural life, along with many rare, fascinating photos about life and farming of that era, in Clark County and Wisconsin. Gale led a loving, optimistic, full, and active life. He passed away in his home in Madison on November 16, 2020, six days past his 100 birthday. With a keen and active mind both th throughout his life and through his final evening of life, he passed away with his two sons, Jerry and John, at his side. With Gale’s fondness for Clark County and for his experiences growing up on his family’s farm in the Township of York in the 1920's and 1930's, Gale would have been greatly appreciative to be included in the history of Clark County by the Clark County, Wisconsin Internet Library Project. On behalf of Gale and our family, we thank you very much. Forward by Jerry VandeBerg Gale and Zona VandeBerg’s youngest of 3 children.

 

 

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