Brooklyn-born Annie Engelbrecht remembers life at Westmar

Brooklyn-born Westmar graduate Annie Engelbrecht (left) met her future husband Mark (right) while attending school. She says she hopes her daughter Maryanne (center) has as rich a college experience at New York's Fordham University as her mom did in Le Mars. [Click to enlarge]

(Editor's note: This is the fifth day of a series taking a look, on the tenth anniversary of Westmar's close, at what has happened to the buildings, how its close has continued to impact Le Mars and how people remember the institution.)

Annie Engelbrecht is suffering from a major case of the "empty nest syndrome."

Her only daughter, Maryanne, has started college in September.

"Maryanne started attending Fordham University in the Bronx this fall," Englebrecht says proudly and perhaps, a bit wistfully. "She's studying history, just like her father."

"And if Maryanne ever gets lonely at school," Engelbrecht explains, "she can always hop on the subway and come home to visit her folks in Brooklyn."

"Not like her old lady," she laughs, "when she was going to school."

You see, even though the former Annie Illiano was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she attended college at Le Mars' Westmar College.

"Don't know how they found me," she says in a distinctive Noo Yawk accent, "but I'm sure glad they did."

An athletic standout at Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay High School, Engelbrecht was the softball team's co-captain in her senior year.

"We took home the city's championship in 1976," she says, recalling the victory. "It was really somethin'!"

Women's athletics during the '70s was just coming into prominence and Engelbrecht thought of herself and her teammates as being pioneers.

"Boys played sports," she recalls with a resigned sigh, "and girls didn't. That was just how things were at the time. So when a group of girls excelled at athletics, people took notice."

Engelbrecht and her team certainly caught the attention of Westmar recruiters.

"Westmar was recruiting very heavily on the East Coast back then," she remembers. "They recruiting 15 or 16 of us right on the spot ... to athletic grants, nonetheless."

"They didn't even call 'em scholarships at the time," Engelbrecht chuckles to herself. "God, I'm old!"

Going to school in the midwest intrigued the impressionable young lady.

"I though it would be a new adventure for me," she smiles. "But my family was against it. Whew, my mom? She was totally against it."

"My mom would say: 'With so many fine schools in New York, why would you even consider going to school in Iowa?'" Engelbrecht recalls. "My mom really put her foot down."

Upon graduation from Sheepshead Bay High School, she took a job at a donut shop while attending King Shore Community College in Brooklyn.

"I got myself a bank account," Engelbrecht explains, "and I was starting to make my own money. My mom knew I still wanted to play sports and that I still was thinking about Westmar. She said if I wanted to go, I could."

"I had her blessing," she says triumphantly.

So, in February, 1977, Engelbrecht started classes at Westmar as a Physical Education major.

The lifelong New Yorker immediately felt like a fish out of water.

"I didn't feel culture shock, per se," she notes. "I was too naive for that. I did feel out of place though."

But Engelbrecht says she was intrigued by her new surroundings.

"Le Mars in the '70s was just like walking inside a TV sitcom," she laughs. "It was like walking into a real-life version of 'Leave It To Beaver.' Y'know, the dads went to work, the moms stayed at home, everybody went to church on Sunday, and drank milk during every meal."

"It was incredible!" Engelbrecht says, shaking her head.

So, how did Le Mars residents feel about the newly transplanted Easterner?

"People in Le Mars see things in black and white," she informs. "They're not used to much gray. So, folks either loved me or hated me."

"Y'gotta remember the times," Engelbrecht explains. "In 1977, when people thought Brooklyn, they thought of only two things: 'Saturday Night Fever' or Son of Sam."

She laughs: "People thought all we did in Brooklyn was dance Disco in the streets and then get shot!"

Although many of her fellow Brooklynites never got used to their new surroundings ("Out of the 15 girls Westmar recruited from New York, only five or six of us made it to graduation"), Engelbrecht was committed to sticking it out.

"I learned to love the people," she admits, "while hating the weather."

Engelbrecht recalls the time she and members of Westmar girls basketball team had to play a tournament in Duluth, Minnesota in January.

"In New York, I though I became accustomed to cold weather," she says ruefully. "The midwest proved that I wasn't. Back home, we'd have ice on the outside of our windows. But in Duluth, there was ice frosting the inside of our windows."

"I thought we were entering into a new Ice Age the entire four years I spent in the midwest," Engelbrech laughs.

In time, she came to appreciate the slower pace of life in a small town.

"You could get in a car and see nothin'," Engelbrecht notes incredulously. "Absolutely nothin' for miles on end."

She remembers another road trip she and her team made to North Dakota.

"We were on the bus," Engelbrecht says. "You'd look to your left and see nothin'. You'd look to your right and see the same thing. No people, no gas station, no nothin'! We'd be driving for hours and seeing nothin' at all."

She continues: "I remember thinking to myself: 'God, I hope the driver knows where he's goin' cuz if he didn't, we're goners!'"

There was another thing keeping Engelbrecht in Le Mars: a boy she met in her sophomore history class.

"I was required to take the class at the Kime Lecture Hall," she mentions. "The lecture hall was circular, just like in a movie theater and everybody sat in alphabetical order."

The class was just a chance for Engelbrecht to gab with her friends.

"I noticed the boy who sat in front of me never said a word and kept to himself," she remembers.

But, apparently, the boy, Mark Engelbrecht, was hanging onto every word the voluble New Yorker was saying.

"By the end of the semester," she says, "he asked me if I wanted to see a movie ("Foul Play" with Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn) with him."

By the end of the year, the two would become an item.

"When Mark and I graduated from Westmar in 1980," Engelbrecht smiles, "I returned to Brooklyn and he came with me."

"People were amazed that I was able to snag a Le Mars boy like Mark and bring 'im home with me to Brooklyn," she informs. "I think he'd even admit to having as hard a time adjusting to big city life as I did to life in Le Mars."

Married in 1982, Mark and Annie just celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary.

She maintains: "You can see he's been adjusting pretty well, after all."

But Engelbrecht has nothing but fond memories of her four years spent in the Ice Cream Capital of the World.

"I remember sending postcards back to my cousins in New York," she laughs. "And then they'd send cards and letters back that I'd get five months late."

"For some reason, they addressed their letters to Le Mars, Ohio or Le Mars, Idaho," Engelbrecht groans. "I'd always tell them: Idaho has potatoes, Ohio has buckeyes, and Iowa had corn."

"They never got it straight," she says, with the head in her hands. "Not once."

As Mark pursued a career as a technician for Verizon Communications, Engelbrecht became a pre-kindergarten -- eighth grade phys ed. teacher.

"It's amazing to see how far women's athletics have come over the past 30 years," she says.

Engelbrecht has also come a long ways over the same period of time.

"Le Mars was where everything started for me," she admits. "It shaped the kind of person I am today."

"The one thing that always surprised me about Le Mars was that people looked you in the eye and said 'hello' to you," Engelbrecht contends. "If you do that in New York, people would think you were crazy. But in Le Mars, it was something everybody did."

"And then, people would open a door for you," she adds. "That didn't happen in New York either."

"Westmar and Le Mars made me broaden my horizons," Engelbrecht continues. "I wouldn't have even considered leaving Brooklyn if it wasn't for an offer to come to this little town in the midwest."

As she looks back at her Westmar memories, Engelbrecht thinks about the experiences her daughter will soon be making.

"The friends I made in college and the experiences I had at Westmar will last a lifetime," she says. "I only hope that Maryanne has the fun and the excitement at Fordham that I had at Westmar."