Parade marshal is Dutch to the core

By Cynthia Woolbright

Staff intern

If it wasn’t for a certain blue suede-shoed, hip swiveling rock and roller, there would be more people playing the accordion nowadays.

“After Elvis everyone wanted to play the guitar,” said 2002 Holland Happening parade Grand Marshal Jan Ellis.

Or at least, that’s how Ellis, a 25-year Oak Harbor resident, views things about her not-so-Dutch love of the accordion.

Born Janeatte van Slageren, to parents Antje and Marten, who immigrated from the Netherlands province of Friesland in 1931, this accordion-toting gal has always lived and loved her Dutch heritage.

She just also happens to love the accordion, which she has played since the age of 6 and at every Holland Happening at one venue or another since the festival’s creation in 1970.

Jan is a longtime member of the All-Island Community Band, the Hugo Helmer Accordion Band, the SeaNotes Big Band and also plays with a combo group that performs for ethic events throughout the year. She has also been involved, every year, with the Holland-American hymn sing that ends the Holland Happening festival weekend.

Always active with the Dutch community in Oak Harbor, Ellis has chaired or co-chaired the festival for 23 of the first 24 years of the festival, and helped place the bronze statue of the Dutch street sweeper in City Beach Park in 1994.

If it wasn’t for her uncle Dave visiting from the Netherlands, Jan may have been walking in the parade with a fiddle. When she was six years old, a traveling salesman came to her home selling instruments. Her parents wanted her to adopt the violin, but her uncle spoke up suggesting the accordion. A year later Jan had mastered the Beer Barrel Polka, which has become her trademark song.

When she began kindergarten in Hynes, now Paramont, Calif., little Janeatte van Slageren couldn’t speak English. The stigma of feeling as if she didn’t know as much as the “American kids” made Jan feel conscientious of her studies throughout her school years. She used her determination to excel, and graduated as the valedictorian of Mount Vernon High School’s class of 1950.

She is a second generation Dutch-American daughter of a woman who encouraged her children to participate in American ways and adopt American customs, but still kept her kids grounded with their Dutch roots.

“We always wondered why all the other kids got french fries and we were always eating meat and boiled potatoes,” Ellis said.

During high school, Jan and her two sisters requested that they receive an allowance, because it was “the American way.” Their parents agreed to open their pocket books, if the older two girls, Janeatte and Suzi (Joan is 12 years younger) helped out running the milking machines on the family’s dairy farm.

“Because my sister Suzi was a cheerleader, she would get Friday and Saturday nights off for football games, but then I’d have her do all the early morning milkings during the week,” Jan said.

Jan Ellis’s mother’s given name was Antje, but she went by Anna, as she believed Dutch names should have an American translation.

“I was almost named Jacoba, which was my mother’s name, but my mom thought it would have been translated to Jemima,” Ellis said.

So it’ll be Jan, not Jemima, leading the Holland Happening parade on Saturday. One hundred percent Dutch, not counting the accordion.