HOLIDAYS

In this conversation Betty talks about the holidays when she was a girl.  She repeats the story about her parents making their own wine and beer.  She also talks about how she learned English from the Kriblehoby girls and finally how her dad always paid cash.  He never borrowed money, perhaps because of the financial trouble that he saw his father get into.  These points will be important later as the story about Steve and Betty’s relationship with her parents unfolds.

Betty’s mother never learned to speak English.  She said that Czech was such a beautiful language why learn anything else.  Ed and Helen spoke Czech at home, so that was Betty’s first language.  She said that the Kriblehoby girls learned English so she learned it from them. When it was time for her to go to school she knew enough to get by, but there were other Czech kids who did not and they got in trouble at school and were held back.  I think that Betty might have said that her younger brother Charlie had trouble when he first went to school because he did not know enough English.

Bob: Your parents, did they have a Thanksgiving meal?

Betty: I think we just had chicken because that’s all we had although maybe we had duck but they raised that stuff, they had it.  It was a regular.  They had a little potatoes, that she canned a lot, she canned lots of tomatoes and there wasn’t such a thing as pressure cookers, there was that oblong boiler that was on the big cook-stove, put the stuff in there, boil it for so, I don’t know how many hours or what.  Nobody ever got sick.

Bob: So, did you have like a special meal at Christmastime?

Betty: I think so.  I think a lot of the times we went to Kriblehodys. That was their friends in Fort Dodge, because she (Helen Jondle) could talk to them.  But their kids didn’t learn Bohemian.  They didn’t talk Bohemian with the kids and then when I watch Big Joe (Polka Show) and they have, they have some great Bohemian bands down there.  They sing it, and those guys must have been raised the way my mother wanted to, me, to raise you kids - teach you Bohemian first, you can learn English later, because the way they sing their songs, the pronunciation is there, you can tell they were raised with the language.

Bob: So, what was your, the first Christmas you remember?

Betty: I think there was a little Christmas tree and they were real candles and you had to be real careful, they were lit with a match.  It was just a small tree on a table.

Bob: Mm-hmm.

Betty: And the Kriblehodys kind of exchanged gifts.  That’s where I learned enough English to get by, because the girls didn’t learn Bohemian, talked English with them.  So, I learned enough and I just… Once a week, every Saturday, my dad would drop us off (at the Kriblehobys), he went up town.

He went to the saloon, had his beers and they made their own beer and they made their own wine.  I don’t know how they did it but there was that big 20-gallon stone jar behind the cook-stove.  I don’t know how they made the beer, they bought the ale or whatever it was and they put it in a regular bottle, they had a regular bottle they could cap it with.

They made their own wine. In the summertime they would go in some of the people’s timbers where the grapes grew wild.  They were little tiny things. They were sour.  They would pick them, mother would clean them up good, put them in the stone jar, put in the sugar and I don’t know all what she did and I know when they started working, I think they took yeast, she could skim the foam off every morning and after they quit making the foam I think they would bottle in the regular bottles.  Yeah, they made their own wine and their own beer.

Then there was those prohibition days, when I think it was outlawed, whatever, so they made their own beer, but I know dad would drop us off and go uptown.  I suppose he did that like the guys do here, at Willy’s (a bar in Clare in the 1960s), I don’t know.  I don’t know what he did.  But he was honest, as honest as could be, and he would never buy anything if he didn’t have the money in his pocket, they didn’t have checking accounts.  The eggs paid for the groceries and in the wintertime when the hens didn’t lay very many eggs, they always had cream.

He must have had quite a few cows because the separator was in the corner of the kitchen and it wasn’t electric.  It was so many reams per minute you had to turn it, and the best milk I ever drank, when it was still warm with the body heat from the cow.  God that was good milk.  Milk we get these days, they take the stuff out of it, then they put junk back into it and what the hell is part of it?  It’s all screwed up. (end of quote)

Here is a photo of Edward and Helen Jondle, their daughter Betty and son Charles, who was born on June 13, 1928.  The Miklo kids knew him as Uncle Charlie.  I estimate that this photo was taken in 1929 when Charlie was less than a year old and Betty was about seven.