OUR LADY OF GOOD COUNSEL

Based on a story that Betty told, the Jondles were not practicing Catholics. One particularly hard winter when Ed was a boy they missed mass on several Sundays due to heavy snow. After they returned to church one Sunday the priest took the Jondle boys out back and whipped them for skipping mass.  They did not go back to church after that.  Pauline told me that Christina returned to the Catholic Church before she died, but Michael did not, although he had a funeral mass at Corpus Christi Church in Fort Dodge.

Helen Jondle also was apparently not a devout Catholic.

Before Betty married Steve she took lessons in the Catholic Church in Moorland. Father Hunt was her instructor. Here Betty talks about Father Hunt, nationalities, and hair color.

Bob: So, you got married in the church in Moorland?

Betty: Yeah, Father Hunt.  He looked at your father, he says, “There’s some Scandinavian in you, by the looks of you.”  Which is possible.  You know they used to come down and run over Europe.

Bob: There were Scandinavian’s in Czechoslovakia.   They had invaded at one point.

Betty: Yeah. He said, “There’s some Scandinavian in you.”  So, whatever there is, there is.

Well, maybe there’s Scandinavian.  Sometimes I think there’s some German in us because when you go to Minnesota, you go to the polka dances there’s Polish, and Bohemian, and Germans, and whatever, but you go up there, you let your hair down and they are, it is fun.  You go to Nebraska, you go to Omaha or Lincoln (where there are more Czechs at the polka dances), they’re more formal and more reserved.  You know what I’m trying to tell you?  They’re more reserved.  My dad was for having fun.  His hair was sandy, my grandmother’s hair was red, my aunt Julia was that dark, dark red.  I kind of think there might be a little bit of German back in there.

Bob: So, your grandmother, your grandpa Mike’s wife - what was her maiden name, do you know?

Betty: I have no idea Bobby--I don’t know what her maiden name is.  I know she came from across and that’s all I know, but her hair was red and dad’s hair was sandy.  Aunt Julia, I don’t know if she’s still alive or if she’s died, dead by now.  I don’t know, but hers was dark, dark red, that real red, red.  And she married, she was deaf, she had polio and they gave her strong medicine that destroyed her eardrums and she married a deaf man.

He used to have a furniture repair shop in Fort Dodge and she worked at the glove factory.  I think the glove factory is still around.  And then she divorced him, I don’t know why, and she married a guy from up north.  It was a Hefley that she married and they met because he had a deaf child or something.  I don’t know what happened to them.  She had one boy. (end of quote)

By the way Christina Jondle’s maiden name was Vanek.  (I had earlier written that it was Blaha - that was actually the maiden name of Mary Jondle, who came to Iowa with here husband Albert in 1869.)  Christina was born in Bohemia in 1873 and came to America in the late 1880s.

Here is a picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Moorland, Iowa, where Betty took instructions in Catholicism before marrying Steve.