Family of Healdsburg soldier killed in World War II meets caretakers of his grave

Healdsburg’s history museum is typically closed the first two days of the workweek, but on Monday curator Holly Hoods could scarcely wait to open the doors for this:

The kin of a Healdsburg police officer who went to war in 1943 and a year later died in the liberation of Europe gathered at the museum to draw into their family four remarkable first-time visitors from the Netherlands.

Stan and Kim Derkx and their children trekked from Holland to Healdsburg to meet the relatives and the town of late policeman-and-soldier Arthur Beeman. The Derkxes several years ago initiated a special, trans-Atlantic relationship with the Beemans.

The Dutch family in 2011 formally “adopted” Art Beeman’s grave at one of Europe’s vast fields of World War II graves and white crosses. Several times a year, Stan Derkx drives alone or with his wife and kids - Ticho, 11, and Lena, 7 - to the Henri-Chapelle war cemetery and to plot G, row 11, grave 57.

There, Derkx (pronounced DARE-icks) places fresh flowers on Pvt. Beeman’s tomb and reflects on his gratitude to the soldier and the other American and Allied troops who sacrificed profoundly to displace the German forces that occupied and terrorized the Netherlands from May of 1940 until the country was freed, bit by bit, more than four years later.

“The Americans liberated my village on Sept. 14, 1944,” said Derkx, 49, a hale and clearly passionate industrial parts manager and veteran of the Royal Netherlands Army.

To adopt the grave of an American GI in Europe is seen as such an honor that there is a waiting list. When the opportunity arose for him to adopt Beeman’s grave in neighboring Belgium, Derkx went online to learn all he could about the GI who perished in Germany in October of 1944.

Derkx’s investigation led him to the Healdsburg Museum and Historical Society and to director-?curator Hoods. Familiar with the life of Art Beeman, who was born in 1912 in Pueblo, Colo., and came to Alexander Valley as a boy, Woods in turn reached out to the fallen soldier’s daughter, Carol Lee Davy of Carson City.

Kindness from afar

It touched Davy’s heart to learn that the Derkxes had adopted and were regularly watching over her dad’s grave. She and they have corresponded the past four years but prior to Monday hadn’t met.

Tears came to the daughter of Art Beeman there in the museum as she and Stan Derkx embraced.

“I’m so proud,” the muscular Dutchman told her and the 18 or so people present, among them three of Art Beeman’s nieces, a nephew, two grand-nieces, three grandchildren and Anna Cadd, the widow of the soldier’s nephew, Vietnam veteran David Arthur Cadd.

Davy responded, “I’m so proud!”

She reflected that none of the American people who stayed home throughout World War II had to endure the savagery that Derkx’s family suffered at the hands of Adolf Hitler. She was lost at how to express her appreciation to the Dutch visitors for what they and other of their countrymen do to honor her father and the other U.S. servicemen who didn’t come home.

“There just isn’t enough words to say, ‘Thank you,’” she said.

Bearing gifts

On display at the Matheson Street museum, housed within the town’s former Carnegie Library, were several artifacts and photographs from Beeman’s life:

His Class of 1932 graduation certificate from Healdsburg High School. A photo of him as a tall, young Healdsburg police officer. The Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Clusters he was awarded after he sustained a shrapnel wound to a leg when his unit of the 116th Infantry Regiment was overrun by German Tiger tanks in July of ’44, only three months before his death.

The Derkx family presented the museum a gift: the framed adoption certificate they received upon pledging to visit and honor Beeman’s grave.

“It makes me happy,” the museum’s Hoods told the gathering. “It makes me sad. It makes me proud.”

The Derkxes came to Sonoma County from their home in Berg en Terblijt, in the south of the Netherlands. They said it’s a drive of only about a half-hour to the American military cemetery just outside of Henri-Chapelle in Belgium.

‘This is our family, too’

Buried there are 7,992 American soldiers, most of whom died in the march on Germany that began with the D-Day invasion of Europe and encompassed Hitler’s counteroffensive, the enormously deadly Battle of the Bulge.

Stan Derkx scatters his annual visits to Beeman’s grave among several dates: the day the former Alexander Valley ranch boy was born, July 12, or that he died, Oct. 13; Christmas Day, the Netherlands’ Remembrance Day, May 4, or Liberation Day, May 5.

In the United States on holiday, the Derkxes pedaled bicycles across the Golden Gate Bridge on Sunday. They aspire also to see Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Palm Springs and Los Angeles

From the museum Monday, they and the several generations of Beeman’s relatives walked to Healdsburg’s town plaza. Stan and Kim Derkx and their kids examined the memorial sculpture that bears Beeman’s name and those of the other 34 Healdsburg service members known to have lost their lives in World War II.

Lunch was nigh when the daughter of police officer and army Pvt. Beeman gestured toward the visitors from the Netherlands and told her kin something they already knew, but that was nice to hear even so.

“This is our family, too.”

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 521-5211 orchris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.