- Date Of Birth: March 19, 1938
- Date Of Death: March 22, 2022
- State: Iowa
Janice Lee (Beyer) Vander Voort was born March 19, 1938, in Prairie City, Iowa, the first-born child of Clarence Beyer and Clara Margaret (Jensma) Beyer.
Sunday evening, May 9, 1954, a group of boys from Otley, Iowa, drove to Prairie City to see what they might see. In that car, was Daniel Vander Voort, along with his brother William and friend Lawrence Klyn.
Janice excelled in her studies at Iowa Lutheran School of Nursing in Des Moines and graduated with an R.N. degree that same year.
As newlyweds, the couple made their home in Pella. Daniel worked as a mechanic at Ulrich Motors and Janice worked as a nurse at Pella Community Hospital. For most of her career, she worked at the Veteran’s Hospital in Knoxville, on the night shift. Janice was known, by both colleagues and patients, as a competent, compassionate caregiver.
As a young couple with no children, they enjoyed driving nice cars, boating in the summer and hunting together in the fall and winter. Daniel presented Janice with a single-shot Winchester .410 and was proud that his pretty, young bride harvested not just squirrels and rabbits but even a rooster pheasant on the wing with her little shotgun.
Their marriage was blessed with two children, Laurie Rene and Jeffrey Daniel. As a young family they enjoyed camping and riding dirt bikes, Yamahas exclusively. Colorado was always a favorite destination for Janice. She was captivated by the mountains and later when she and Daniel had the chance to travel to Europe, she loved the mountains of Austria.
What she’d learned on the farm as a child served her the rest of her life, helping with the care of cows and calves, gardening, canning, cooking and sewing. An excellent cook, she prepared anything and everything Daniel and Jeffrey brought home from their hunting forays. Her cheesecake and sour cream raisin pies received recognition at the Iowa State Fair and her birthday cakes and French silk pies won the hearts and minds of her grandchildren. Each of her grandchildren, and even some of their friends, received quilts from “Grandma Jan” fashioned from the numerous t-shirts they’d collected from their years in sports.
In retirement, they wintered in South Texas several years, but largely, their entertainment revolved around the activities of their six grandchildren.
Janice loved life in the country. She cultivated iris beds started from bulbs she’d received from her grandmother Maude Jensma and planted many rose bushes. The changing of the seasons, the cows and calves, especially the Brown Swiss, dogs, cats and kittens, wild birds at her feeder, deer…she loved these things. A couple things she didn’t care for, were possums and raccoons. She and Daniel had that in common and even in her eighties, Janice was quick to head for a shotgun and a handful of shells when a coon was spotted. Oh, and she loved to have her nails done.
The beauty of the natural world spoke to her. It spoke of a Creator, her Creator and Janice longed for more. The Bible calls us to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” Janice chose, rightly so, to interpret that passage literally, in opening her home to and caring for, her mother and father-in-law in their latter years, and later, her mother as well. She volunteered as a nurse at the free clinic; went on mission trips to Honduras and the Rosebud Indian Reservation; made meals and sent notes of encouragement to neighbors, old friends, new friends, anyone she felt was in need. If you were the recipient of her homemade buns and maybe home-grown tomatoes, surely you were tempted to postpone your recovery in hopes Janice would come back with another round. To her family, and everyone who knew her, she modeled hard work, conscientiousness and compassion for those in need.
She was preceded in death by her parents, Clarence and Clara Beyer of Prairie City, Iowa, her parents-in-law, William and Wilmina (Dieleman) Vander Voort of Otley, Iowa, three sisters-in-law: Ann (Sabin) Vander Voort of Houston, Texas, Gerdena (Vander Voort) Woodson of Burlington, Iowa, and Christina (Vander Voort) Broyles of Dallas, Texas; four brothers-in-law: Joseph Broyles of Dallas, Texas, Wayne Woodson of Burlington, Iowa, Alvin Keuning of Monroe, Iowa, and William Vander Voort of Houston, Texas.
