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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
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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
