Calvin Cremer

Calvin John Cremer was born in 1940 in Patterson, New Jersey. He was the middle son of five sons born to parents Dr. John and Madeline Cremer. He had 2 older brothers, Bob and Jerry, and then 2 younger brothers, Jim and Bill.

Cal’s parents were medical missionaries in Ethiopia from 1935 to 1939, when they were kicked out by Mussolini during World War II. They came back to the states in 1940 and Cal was born in Patterson New Jersey. Dr. Cremer accepted a job as administrator at Bethesda Hospital in Denver Colorado, which was a hospital for tuberculosis patients. Cal spent the first eight years of his life in Denver, Colorado. He had a great love for the mountains as they always felt like home. When he was eight and WWII had ended, the whole family moved back to Ethiopia where Dr. Cremer served as a missionary as a Thoracic surgeon and Madeline was a nurse.

The kids were sent to a boarding school, Bingham Academy, in Addis Ababa, where they lived and studied for six years during the school year. They flew from Ethiopia to Addis Ababa in MAF (Mission Aviation Fellowship) Planes during that time and Cal fell in love with flying. The boarding school was extremely strict and the days were tough on him and he greatly missed his parents. When he was 12 he decided to run away to go back home 300 miles away back home with a classmate. They only made it halfway when they were caught and sent back to the boarding school and severely punished. One day, Cal's dad flew to the boarding school to see his kids, and when he arrived he asked where Calvin was. They said he was being punished, and his dad found him locked in a cement room on the outskirts of the grounds. When his dad saw how his son was being treated he decided to remove him from the boarding school entirely. Cal spent the next year on the mission compound and he hung around with the maintenance man, where he learned how to repair cars, trucks, run generators, deal with plumbing, construction, and other maintenance issues.

When Cal was fourteen the family moved to NW Grand Rapids and he attended Grand Rapids Christian High School. He then went to aeronautic school in Oklahoma, and was a helicopter crew chief with the National Guard. He then spent four years at Calvin College and people that knew him were amazed at all he could do. When they had to go somewhere by bus, Cal would take a plane and meet them there. He would also fly other Calvin students home from time to time and one of these students happened to be a young man named Wilbur Van Dokkenburg, back to his home in upstate New Jersey. Wilbur also met his wife at Calvin and later they had 4 kids and one of them was a daughter, Sally, who also went to Calvin College and met Cal's oldest son John and now they are married and have 6 kids. What a small world.

After graduation Cal obtained instrument flight rating (IFR) in Chicago, where he was asked to be a teacher at the school. He worked at Midway Airport in Chicago training pilots for their instrument flight rules (IFR) and also giving proficiency tests every six months to pilots who are already working for United Airlines.

While working in Chicago he attended First Christian Reformed Church of Cicero where he was invited over to the house of Rose and Everett Van Reken, where he met their oldest daughter Marjorie. For their first date Calvin wowed Marjorie by flying her in a private plane to Canada for dinner. After dating 8 months they were engaged and were married December 15, 1967 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This was the same day Marjorie graduated from Calvin College because her dad had said she had to wait to get married until she graduated as Cal was 6 years older.

The young couple moved to Colorado, and were able to purchase a small home in Littleton and also found a small sign business for sale that they bought and worked for a year. During this time they thought it would be nice to be teachers and decided to go back to school to get their masters degrees in education so they sold the business and moved to Alamosa, Colorado, where they both attended Adams State University.

After graduation they both were offered teaching positions in the same school in Del Norte, Colorado. They moved once again and this time wanted some space, so found 320 acres out of town in a picturesque mountain valley that had an abandoned two room cabin. The rancher they bought it from had used the land as a sheep pasture and gave them a good price as long as he could still let his sheep graze there and they agreed.

The cabin had not been lived in for 40 years, had no windows, roof, or flooring. Calvin fixed up one room where they lived in the first year. It had a makeshift kitchen with a Coleman camping stove in one corner, a sleeper couch that served as a bed in another corner, and an organ Cal had purchased in another corner, and a small fireplace. Living the life of pioneers, they had no bathroom or even running water and used a generator for electricity. There was a well outside the cabin that he installed a pump into so they had fresh water. The second year he fixed up the second room. It was a very nice kitchen, with a dining area and a bathroom. Cal even figured out how to hook up the pump to the kitchen and bathroom so they could have running water inside the house finally. Both of them played the organ but Cal really loved it and actually kept the organ his entire life no matter where he moved.

Always trying to improve things, but never the conventional way, Cal built a bridge over the river so they didn’t have to drive through it in their Land Cruiser. He also bought a bulldozer to build an airstrip and then bought a plane. Flying to church was a normal thing for them and the story goes that the church knew when they heard the plane flying over the church it was time to start the organ.

One day while eating at a restaurant called the “Cow Camp Cafe” they talked about how they liked the design of that log home style building and so as he was paying the bill, Cal asked for the owner and offered to buy the restaurant if they ever decided to sell. A year later they called the school where Cal was teaching and said they were ready to sell. Cal went and bought it, closed the restaurant and hired a crew to move the 3 bedroom log cabin 50 miles on a truck to their property where it was connected to the two room cabin. This required having every vehicle get off the road as they came through and even having a crew taking down mailboxes and fence posts and such that were in the way as they went, since the house hung off both sides of the 2 lane roads, and another crew to put them back up after it passed.

Cal redirected the river and built a hydroelectric dam so the whole house now had electricity. They also built a hanger for the cars, bulldozers, and airplane. It was quite the isolated paradise, although there was often a lot of snow and Cal even bought a full size road grader from the County to plow the very long driveway and runway. It was when they were at the ranch they were blessed with two boys. John Everett was born February 1973 and Benjamin James was born in August 1974. Cal also had a retired German Shepherd police dog that would protect the property from coyotes and such.

The family decided to move from Colorado to Florida mostly because they were tired of the cold weather as winters in the mountains were brutal. The family sold the land in Colorado and moved to the exact opposite of the almost 2 mile elevation lifestyle in the mountains, down to warmer sea level Sarasota, Florida. Being unconventional in his approach to things, for the move Cal bought a full size semi to load all their things (including the bulldozer) and he and the dog drove ahead, while Marge drove behind in the Volkswagen Campmobile "minibus" pulling their pop up camper with all of the family photos and cashier's check from the property sale in a briefcase inside. John was 4 and Ben was 3 and although they didn't know it, she was pregnant at the time with baby Deborah.

On the way to Florida the Volkswagen overheated and the rear engine caught on fire. Marge was able to get out with the kids and the whole bus and trailer burned along with most of their personal belongings which is why many of the photos that survived from before that time have burn marks around the edges. Upon arriving in Florida the semi that was likely double the legal maximum weight with a bulldozer in it broke down and Marge and the kids waited in a church while Cal fixed the semi. The church was having choir practice and they decided to take a collection for Marge and the kids to take a greyhound bus to stay with some family until they could get settled.

In Sarasota, Florida they camped in a trailer and had a nice ranch style home built on 5 acres not very far from the ocean. They attended the Tabernacle church where they made many friends, attended Bible studies, the boys attended Sunday school and John went to the church's school through first grade, and Cal served on the board. They were soon blessed with a little girl, Deborah, in July 1978 and she truly completed the family. Cal was so proud of his little girl.

While in Florida Cal started investing in Silver and ended up leveraging to acquire more as it was quickly going up in value. In 1980 when it turns out the Hunt Brothers cornered the silver market artificially pumping up the price, Cal's portfolio of it was worth a great sum, but that didn't last long as it soon crashed and he lost it all. He then decided he wanted to go to learn the Bible more, so the family moved to Michigan so he could go to Calvin Seminary. Calvin loved to read the bible and memorized a lot of Scripture. He also taught the kids to learn many basics on the bible the names of the 12 sons of Jacob, as well as the books of the bible, scripture verses, etc.

Cal found he loved to read, listen to the radio, watch the news on TV and staying informed about national and world news, and contemplated ways to solve all the world's problems to the point where studying became his career for many years.

Cal later moved to Muskegon where he spent his last 30 years and found work as a handyman for a landlord in town, and was always convinced he could fix anything. He still loved to work on cars and to this day his garage is filled with all kinds of tools, from mechanics tools, to large carpenters tools, including a drill press, a band saw, a lathe, and so much so that getting an actual car in the 2 car garage to keep it out of the snow was not even a thought that crossed his mind. All the practice he got fixing things in Africa was fully ingrained in him and he loved tinkering on them, although most of us would agree it was not necessarily always the right ways to fix them. Through it all, he found constant companionship in his love for animals, always keeping a cat and a German Shepherd nearby whether in Colorado, Florida or Michigan.

Cal always loved studying archeology and had a dream of getting to see Ethiopia again, and he actually could still speak the language, Amharic, fluently, even as he aged. When he was about 70, he and his siblings were ordering food at an Ethiopian restaurant in Grand Rapids and everyone just spoke in English but when the waiter got to him, Cal started ordering in Amharic, which was the staff’s native tongue, and the waiter was so shocked he actually dropped his pad and pen. When he was 79 Cal finally realized his dream and went back to Ethiopia and got to see his old house, as well as the hospital his dad worked at and even got to speak for a few minutes during a church service which he was able to do in Amharic and he really enjoyed getting to sing songs in the native language again and talking to the people there. He also got to travel to Israel and see the sites there so that was a great blessing to him.

Never one to stop learning, even his old age he still thought he could do anything. At the age of 80 he fell off a 16 foot ladder while trying to put up a bird feeder on a tree and shattered his leg in multiple places, and thought he only sprained it so how he even got back up the stairs and into the house is amazing. Turns out the day before that, he was on the roof of the 1.5 story house he lived in with an 8/12 pitch roof moving the antenna from one part of the roof to another to get better reception! John got him a wheelchair so he could recover and even though he could walk just fine after about 6 weeks, that wheelchair became his primary mode of transportation once in the house for the next 5 years as he said it was just so comfortable in it.

Cal had 12 grandkids he loved to see on holidays and concerts or graduations or whenever he came over for dinner. John and Sally have David, Rachel, Alissa, Sarah, Jason and Caleb. Ben and Nancy have Jacob, Ellie, Kate, and Maddie. Deb and her late husband Nate Trask had Morgan and Landon, and now Deb is now remarried to Tom Apicella. Cal loved to get together with his siblings and even all the cousins, and they would get together often at his brother Jim's and Jim's wife Grace would make all of their favorite meal in the world called Wat, an Ehiopian meal.

In his final years, Cal loved to watch Little House on the Prairie and after a few hundred episodes in a row he decided he wanted to learn to play the violin so he got music for it and started learning how to play. We think it is because Charles or "Pa" in Little House played the fiddle at night as the kids went to sleep. Cal still had and played the 60 year old organ that he still had from Colorado whenever he could although it was no longer in tune and many of the keys would stick, but that didn't stop him from trying. Like his younger brother Bill who was an organ player most of his life, he couldn't read it, he just played by ear and was really good.

Cal passed peacefully at home unexpectedly but only just after feeding his dog and then his chickens, knowing his son John was almost to his house to pick him up to visit his brother Bill in the hospital in Kalamazoo, so he definitely didn’t feel alone. As he was a devout believer, we greatly look forward to the resurrection and getting to see him again. In the meantime we sure are going to miss him and are thankful for the many years God gave us with him.

Calvin John Cremer, age 85, on February 7, 2026 at his home in Muskegon, went to rest to await the resurrection by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Calvin is preceded in death by his parents, Dr. John A Cremer and Madeline (Vanden Akker) Cremer, as well as his two older brothers, Robert Cremer and Gerald (Mary) Cremer.

He is survived by his sister-in-law Mary; his children: John (Sally) Cremer, Benjamin (Nancy) Cremer, Deborah (Tom) Apicella; 12 grandchildren: David, Rachel, Alissa, Sarah, Jason, Caleb, Jacob, Elizabeth, Katherine, and Madeline Cremer, Morgan and Landon Trask; Gerald's Wife Mary, James (Grace) Cremer and William Cremer; as well as many nieces and nephews.

The service to remember and celebrate Calvin’s life will be held on Friday, February 20, 2026 at 1 PM at Heritage Life Story Funeral Home - Alt & Shawmut Hills Chapel, 2120 Lake Michigan Drive NW in Grand Rapids. Friends are invited to visit with his family beginning at 11 AM. Interment at Washington Park Memorial Gardens.