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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 30, 1975)
4- UNLstudentfinds roots, self in South Dakota (Editor's note: Lynn Silhasek, senior in journalism from Omaha, recently spent several days tracing her roots in rural South Dakota, land of her grandparents. This is her report.) By Lynn Silhasek "Vitame Vas" reads one storewindow along the snow-packed main street in Tabor, S.D. The Czech greeting means "we welcome you." The townspeople are Czech, too. A Petrik owns the Pheasant Bar. The name Cimpl is painted on the town's grain elevator. Vyborny owns the machine works and Koupal has the construction company. The names peer at me from the storefronts, like old folks staring at a newcomer in town. They haunt me as I drive through town until I remember the distant cousins that go with them. And they offer their own "we welcome you." For me, it's a welcome back. Back to my own first generation whose story begins in several Southeastern South Dakota communities 20 miles west of Yankton. Back to a time when the names on the shops, the stores and the bars were intertwined with those of Kocer and Base, the names of my mother's parents. Depression uproots My grandparents, uprooted by the Depression, broke ties with these neighbors and relatives and moved to Rochester, Minn., in 1938. They left behind Czech towns their parents built from the ground up. The to ns were in Bon Homme and Charles Mix counties, labor-where both my grandparents grew up where they attended church. Wagner-where they were married, where they ice skated on ponds, that abounded in the area, where they raised nine children. These were times pieced together through family stories. I couldn't share them with my grandparents, because I knew Jacob and Agnes Kocer only at the end. Grandpa, his face burnt brown, his forehead white from wearing a hat in the fields, was confined to a wheelchair. He died when I was 3 years old. Grandma, stooped, slight, chest sunken from asthma, died 10 years later. I had lost out on 50 years of their lives, years spent with people whose nationality 1 claim, whose customs my family practices, whose features I exhibit. People I didn't know. I set out from Omaha, Neb. to find these people in the towns of Tabor and Wagner. The search started at an end-the St. Wenceslaus Cemetery in Tabor. Dark dirt path The road to the graveyard is a dark dirt path through the surrounding black iron fence. Years ago, horses would plod up this drive, pulling the wagon that contained the casket. Now snow on the road is untouched. It's a pure white, deep snow, maybe like the snow that fell the -winter my grandmother rushed her dying first-born from Wagner to the church here to be baptized. It had been cold enough for the water in the baptismal font to freeze, according to the family story. Next to the church was the grave of my great -aunt, Johanna Kocer. She had wanted that church built. In 1872, she sold 160 acres to settlers in the Tabor area who wanted to form a town, on the condition that a Catholic church be built on one of the land tracts. "John and Katerina Kocer?" repeated the groundskeeper when I asked where Johanna's brother and sister-in-law, my great-grandparents, would be buried. "I been mowing grass here for 40 years and I don't remember no . . . wait, down there," he said, pointing "I had lost out on 50 years of their lives, years spent with people whose nationality I claim, whose customs my family practices, whose features I exhibit. People I didn't know." downhill to the older part of the cemetery. Familiar names We both went down among the silver crucifix monuments, dusting off the three inches of snow from each to read the names on the markers. No Kocers or Bases, but Petriks, Hruskas, Jandas, Kostals-the same names that were in town. Stones marked couples, families, children and infants who had died either in the blizzard of 1888 or from black diptheria or smallpox. Someone else had remembered their family. Plastic mums placed on one grave were nearly buried in the snow that drifted from the tombstone to the ground. "Sure I remember-Katarina," he said, "but I don't know. . ." He trailed off, looking down the rows of crucifixes that marked his family, his neighbors. "Sorry." He took his shovel and began to gently scrape the snow away from the graves. No one in Tabor knew where the Kocers had lived, either. Great-great grandfather Vincent Kocer had page 6 5 come from Czechoslovakia and settled in Spijlville, Iowa, but moved to Dakota territory in 1870 to homestead south of what is now Tabor. My grandfather was born in 1884 either on that homestead on or another in that area. Grey stones My grandmother, born three years later, lived on the Kucmick homestead north of town. They were her grandparents, who built their house and farm buildings cut of the greyish stones in their land. Stones the farmers get a crop of every few years when the topsoil wears down. In a cafe across the street from the cemetery, some Tabor farmers try to remember the location of the stone buildings. One remembers a farm about five miles north of town that had a group of these buildings standing several years ago, but he doubts if they are still there. Tyndall, the country seat, should have records on who owned the land, he says. The clerk at the Tyndall Registrar of Deeds office plopped a 1912 plat map onto the counter. Using the farmer's direction, I located land in the Lincoln township. There was the schoolhouse my grandmother attended. There were the neighboring Zolnowskys, whom my mother remembered hearing about. At that time, the Kucmick homestead was on land owned by Anton Fillhaus, according to the map. But a check on the records back to when my grandmother was born showed no Kucmick owning the land. They might have rented. Wagner ancestors Another 27 miles west leads to Wagner, and remnants of the past that still stand. Grandmother's parents, Tom and Agnes Base, moved here after she was born. Leaving her with the Kucmicks for a while, they homesteaded south of Wagner, then moved into town. Base opened a shoemaker-repair shop next door where he practiced the trade he had learned in Czechoslovakia. The 11 -foot square wooden shack is now relocated and belongs to the Charles Mix Historical Society. The organization obtained the shop through the efforts of Base's granddaughter, Theta Honomichael, society treasurer. Base also goes down in Wagner's history for another reason-he was the town's first marshall in 1920, according to a history of the state printed at that time. Jacob and Agnes were married in the house at Wagner. They also went broke in Wagner. Grandfather's farming on 40 acres went bad with the Depression and so did his luck. The bills were finally paid in 1938, as he watched people bid at a public auction on his cultivator, binder, springwagon and the frame house he had built for $1 ,000. Kocers are still in Wagner. My mother's cousin, Frank Kocer, a retired farmer, and his wife Rose live in town. Rose is cleaning fish for supper when I come. She's still wearing her green dress and artificial holly corsage from that afternoon's hospital auxiliary Christmas party. The fish are bass their son Dan caught ice fishing. Both Frank and Rose had been neighbors of my mother when the three were growing up. Rose remembers the player piano in Frank's house that belonged to his mother, and how the families would hold sing-alongs when they visited at wintertime. They would stay at Kocers until late, then bundle up the smaller, sleeping children and leave for home over four miles of snow in their sleigh, a wagon box placed on sleigh runners. Snowbound two months Rose remembers a later winter when Fed, their first child, was a baby, over 39 years ago. They were snowbound on their farm for two months. A neighbor died and wasn't discovered until rescue parties were sent to open the roads and assist people in the country. Rose and Frank have been doing a little of their own family tree searching. They show their slides of Czechoslovakia where they've been, twice, to visit Kocer family relatives. The fact that there were still relatives in Europe wasn't known until letters from Czechoslovakia were found in an old trunk belonging to my great-uncle Joseph Kocer. The letters, dated 1939, were from a Jan Kocer. According to one of the letters, there are five existing Kocer families, all of which originated out of Kritkovicia Okr Budweiser, a district in Czechoslovakia. Jan Kocer had traced the family through three centuries, back to 1620. A painting of Krikovicia hangs on a wall in the South Dakota Kocer home. Frank explained that the cluster of white buildings in the picture house the Kocer family members. The brilliant yellow wheatfieids the Kocers work in surround the house and encompass a silver lake, populated by thousands of ducks. Rose and Frank bring out the demitasse and the cups made of Bohemian glass that were given to them by the relatives. A gold-lettered "Na Pamalku" embellishes each of the gifts"in remembrance." 40-year reunion Talk includes both past and present relatives. Except lor brief meetings at family funerals, the Kocers haven't seen my mother since stic left South Dakota for Nebraska more than 40 years ago. Then Rose opens the at tic sleeping quarters for me. daily nebraskan "Freddie was born in this bed," she said, sheeting the mattress, fluffing the pillows and piling on another feather tick. The lights were off, but the reflections of the street lamps on the snow outside bathed the old high bed and matching dresser in a milky radiance. And once again I was 10 years old, up in the attic room in my grandmother's home in Rochester, trying to fall asleep under the stares of pictures of relatives then dead and unnamed, lullabyed by the occasional swish of cars as they passed along the highway beyond my uncle's cornfield. "For me, it's a welcome back...Back to a time when the names on the shops, the stores and the bars were intertwined with those of Kocer and Base, the names of my mother's parents." I leave in the morning on a road to other relatives that goes past that town's cemetery. The name Base is in there, a mother and two daughters. But Agnes Base's name isn't even on the vault's marker. Great-aunt Emma's and Christina's names are there. Emma Base Goddard, dead at 18. She worked at a theater in Sioux Falls and married a musician who had affairs with other women. Learning this, Emma took poison. Christina wasn't old enough to know pain. She died from a hole in her spine a month after she was born. Blowing snow reclaims the marker, and I continue to the house of Frank's older sister, Tillie Zacharias. Born in Tabor Like the rest of her brothers and sisters, she was born in Tabor. Now she, her husband Charlie and their only son Joe live on the farm that Charlie's father had homesteaded. But they didn't farm much this year, according to Charlie. "We lived off my accordion," laughs Joe. He's been playing the instrument for 20 years, ever since he was 17, in Tabor, in Wagner, in bars and at dances. While conversation with Tillie and Charlie drifts into the past, Joe straps on an accordion. His fingers trip over the keys in a rendition of "Praha," a song about Prague, Czechoslovakia. A picture of Joe, taken when he was 12 years old, hangs on the wall next to one of Myron Floren, Lawrence Welk's accordionist. Joe is a member of his fan club. Tapestries, pictures Elsewhere on the walls hand blue tapestiies of deer, a watcrcolor of the farm and a magazine picture of an old man visiting his wife's grave that Charlie had liked and saved. Charlie brings out pictures of relatives. Dresden-doll aunts. Cousins in white First Communion dresses. And a story to go with each. A picture of Joe Zacharias, Charlie's soldier brother, who escaped injury in World War 1 only to die of pneumonia on the train home. Albina Kostal, a beautiful woman with milk-white skin, died of diabetes at 22, leaving a 3-month-old son.! Charlie tosses me a picture of him and Tillie taken some 50 years ago. "These folks aren't nothin'," he jokes. Tillie, her hair now drawn back, her forehead now sprinkled with age spots, scolds him for his teasing. Then she frowns because she can't remember Tabor. The Tabor of 88 years ago. Had she lived, my grandmother would have been that old Jan. 1 . In late afternoon, I backtracked to Tabor, to find the Kucmick homestead. I followed the farmer's directions, five miles north of town on dirt roads, until the schoolhouse that had been on the plat map came into view. Stone buildings I walked through the fall-plowed cornfield and the snowdrifts up to the farm, which sat a mile in from the road. The modern farm buildings were vacant. But the few stone buildings held memories of a past brought alive with this South Dakota trek. Buildings of stones smooth with age, they now house only lumber. If these were my grandmother's cold, bleak beginnings, they certainly were an indication of what was to come. She didn't stay north of Tabor long. Her education went only to the second grade in that schoolhouse. In her teens, she began working on farms and waiting tables in Wagner. She married at 16. This was the story of my closest link with my heritage, a tale that echoed through the lives of other relatives I traced in these communities. Their lives revolved around the basics: life, death, sickness, health, a good season or blighted crops. You wonder when they had the time to enjoy Labor Day parades or to crank ice cream for a picnic in some neiglibornood's grove. Yet they did. The relatives who are still alive and making family history arc proof of this. They make music or help in hospitals, not any remarkable accomplishment. Yet, in welcoming a stranger like me into their lives, they keep alive a sense of family, protection against the time when their names are erased by the years. thursday, january 30, 1975