Frederick M Kooyers

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Man of Company E (Frederick) Frederick M. Kooyers was born on September 29, 1894, while the family was living in Reeman. Fred moved to Muskegon with his family when he was five-years-old and completed eighth grade at Muskegon Public School. He was drafted into the army on June 19, 1918, trained as a machine gunner at Camp Custer near Battle Creek and served in Company E, 339th Infantry. By September 5, 1918, only two months before the armistice was signed to end the war, Corporal Frederick Kooyers landed in Archangel, Russia and as part of the famous “Polar Bear Expedition” found himself, instead of fighting Germans, fighting mostly Bolsheviks in Russia’s civil war. The expedition was under British command, under-supplied, ravaged by Spanish Flu, and for both political and weather related reasons (the shipping channels remained closed due to ice until spring), the American soldiers weren’t extracted until June 2, 1919, nearly eight months after the war was officially over. A digital copy of Fred’s diary may be found at this link as part of the George Albers Papers at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. An interview with a Hope College oral history project can be found here.

After the war, Fred returned to Muskegon and married Blanche Marie Bouchard on October 11, 1919 at St. Jean Baptiste Church. He worked in the drycleaning business for 56 years. After Blanche died in 1975, he moved to the Michigan Veterans’ Facility in northeast Grand Rapids, where he resided until his death on August 13, 1982. He is buried with his wife in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Muskegon, about two miles from where his parents are buried.