CORRECTION

On June 12 I posted that I had thought that Betty had said that her brother Charlie had trouble in school because he did not know enough English. That was incorrect. I have since found a video recording of Betty when she talked about her school days at the Moorland Consolidated School. She had said that it was a neighbor boy, Lawrence Bundy, who had trouble in school.  Both Betty and Charlie had English-speaking playmates, so they both knew enough to get by in school. Here is how Betty put it:

Betty: John Flarrity, he was a leading athlete.  I read in his obituary that he was a coach at St. Edmonds for a while. Thinking back, he was the only Irishman on the school bus out in that territory.  There were the Plainers, Staneks, Fiallas, Kaplans [all Czech names]. I remember John. He was always the life of the party.

Bob: So on the bus did the kids talk English or Czech?

Betty: English. They [the other parents] were not as strict as my folks… Oh, Lawrence Bundy.  Not too many years ago at the Bohemian Hall a bunch of us were talking and Lawrence said he was in my grade, but he started a year before I did. He said, “Well, I started to school a year earlier but I did not know a word of English so they sent me home and told me not to come back until I learned English.”

Bob: Did you say your brother Charlie had trouble in school because he did not speak English?

Betty:  We both knew enough to get by because my folks every Saturday they visited Kriblehobys in Fort Dodge and they talked both [Czech and English]. Their kids knew how to talk English because they did not want their kids to struggle in school so they knew how…There was Blanche, she was a year younger than me and there was Betty after that and there was another little one. I think it was Chris.

Charlie, well he and I used to go across the road to Kaplan’s to play.  And there was Clark.  He was a little older than Charlie.  So he knew plenty, he understood.   We both had enough where we got through it.  But we did not learn it at home.  And my brother and I did not talk Bohemian with each other.  After he started to school we both talked English with each other.  So I think my mother caught onto a lot of it but she would not admit it. (End of quote.)

Here is a picture of Uncle Charlie after a successful pheasant hunt on the Miklo farm north of Clare.  I think that this was taken shorty after Steve and Betty moved to the farm in 1948.