Surviving members of an entire family who was lost to HIV/AIDS gave a sobering presentation on their family history in honor of World AIDS Day.

The Goedken family was the first family in America to come forward and say that five brothers, one daughter-in-law and one grandson – all hemophiliacs who had contracted AIDS in the late ’70s and early ’80s through contaminated blood transfusions – had died. Sisters Sara Lehman, Connie Boelman and Susan Freese, whose father, John Goedken, was the second to last in the family to die from complications of HIV, presented in 1220 Hoover Hall on Thursday night.

“Growing up, the funerals always didn’t seem like funerals when we got together,” Susan said. “It got the whole family together.”

Five of the six male children of the seven-child Goedken family were born with hemophilia, a hereditary blood disorder that can only occur in males. Boelman said growing up with this disease in the Depression era, during which the boys were born, they had to travel to Iowa City to get blood transfusions regularly. But, in the days, before safe blood transfusion practices, Boelman said, Mary Goedken had to bring a family friend with them to give whole blood or find someone else.

“Sometimes she would just have to get people off of the street,” Boelman said.

Growing up as hemophiliacs, the boys had to be protected by their mother, Susan Freese said, and that was especially hard for young John Goedken, who was classified as a Factor VIII severe hemophiliac. The 1970s brought new breakthroughs in blood transfusion technologies, allowing for the isolation and transference of a specific factor of blood that is missing from hemophiliacs’ blood. However, blood banks took all blood collected and combined it, allowing for the then-unknown HIV virus to be spread to 90 percent of all hemophiliacs in the United States, Freese said.

It wasn’t until the mid-’80s that the Goedken boys – Ernie, Clayton (his son), Carl, Denny, Denny’s wife, Jan and John had started to get sick, Boelman said. Ernie was the first to die, followed by Carl, Denny, John in 1991 and finally the youngest, Loras, in 1997.

The main portion of the sisters’ presentation was made up of fond remembrances of the their father’s last years. The sisters said that in the ’80s, there was an overwhelming deal of stigma connected with the disease, so even though five of six Goedken brothers knew they had each tested positive for HIV in the early ’80s, they still could not talk about it with their children or the town at large, Freese said.

“Both the parents and each of the brothers were really in denial,” Connie Boelman said. “And my father knew, but he couldn’t say anything.”

The sisters recounted their father’s last days in the hospital. Even though he was sick, Boelman said their father still attended the Jones County Fair about a week before he died, simply because “Dad was not going to let this AIDS thing take over family tradition.”

John Goedken died Aug. 1, 1991, the same day as his wife’s birthday.

“When I think about all of the things that we’ve lost [because of HIV],” Freese said, “he [John] never got to know his grandchildren.”

Raymond Rodriguez, health program coordinator for the Thielen Student Health Center, gave closing remarks about the AIDS Walk and why HIV/AIDS awareness is important.

“It’s not the virus that discriminates, it’s the people with it who discriminate and it’s the people around them that discriminate,” he said. “This is now your fight. This is now your issue.”