March 2008 Archives

The World-Herald had an eyeful picture today of a skyful of cranes, almost wingtip to wingtip, hundreds.  Jane Goodall of chimpanzee fame came through two weeks ago to see our Platte River sandhill cranes and their ancient migratory stopovers, Nebraska fossils placing them here over nine million years ago.  If gas hadn't been so expensive, I'd have gone out to see them again, for they are magical, unlike anything else in their numbers, sounds, dancing.  I've seen flocks of hundreds to thousands of snow, Canada, and other geese, mainly at nearby DeSoto Bend N.W.R. across the Missouri at Blair on the Iowa side and down at Squaw Creek N.W.R. where the corner of Missouri abuts the southeastern tip of Nebraska, i.e., along the Missouri River migratory route.  But they have no comparison to these strangely hoarse flutes of wing spans wider than I am tall (6'), who make the grassy earth a trampoline with their eccentrically ecstatic dancing, bouncing on their stilt legs, flapping their wings, bowing, tossing sticks or cobs into the air the way my dogs used to entice me to play.

These are not photos from the Grand Island-Kearney stretch that brings international tourists for these stately birds but were taken at Wildlife Safari halfway between Omaha and Lincoln, those crippled cranes no longer so lucky, needing safe haven.  (Cranes are considered good luck globally, especially in Asia, which is why they often figure in Oriental art, on screens, ceramics.)  But it makes me happy to see them again and reminds me how much I enjoyed what birding I did and how I meant to write of "my" birds after finally finishing the excellent anthology, Graeme Gibson's The Bedside Book of Birds:  An Avian Miscellany (N.Y.:  Doubleday, 2005) about a month ago.  (I take life leisurely, since I have no more hurrying to do.)

Gibson's book is a handsome collection of myths, tribal tales, short short stories, drawings, prints, scientific excerpts, poems, play passages, a bird mosaic any bird lover would cherish.  It makes clear the western European/white man's bleakly fearful superstitions as opposed to, say, our Southwest and Northwest Indian/Native American tribes.  The former are evident in Poe's ominous poem, "The Raven" ("Nevermore"), du Maurier's 1952 short story become a scary radio play I remember vividly become Hitchcock's horror film, The Birds, several Ingmar Bergman films in which crows and ravens are evil omens of rape and death, all opposed to the Pacific Northwest and Inuit (ex-Eskimos) tribal tales how the trickster Raven created the world and the first men and, like Prometheus in Greek myth, stole the sun and gave man its fire, being burnt black for the effort.  (Of course, to be fair, the Swedish Bergman forgot/ignored the chief Norse god, Odin, having two ravens, Hugin [Thought] and Munin [Memory], he sent around the world daily to keep him posted.  And one of my very favorite naturalists, Bernd Heinrich, biology professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, has written THE book about ravens, Mind of the Raven:  Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds about the most intelligent of birds.)  Actually, while there are some anecdotes like the one of an Australian who scared off some black cockatoos tearing at his shingles, only to lose his whole roof to a flock of black cockatoos, the only rare real-life bird terrorism in Gibson's book I recall is an actual account of a boat sent out to retrieve a carpenter who fell overboard, he and his rescuers then attacked by albatrosses who pecked at their heads and eyes so that the men drowned.

Given our murderous history against birds, these airy creatures would be within their rights to take revenge.  But there are hundreds of people who, instead, venerate them, dutifully compiling life lists of birds they have seen, deliberately traveling to glimpse rarities or wonders like our crane migrations.  And here the thoughtful Gibson has captured the matter for me and all these thousands of others:

"A great many birdwatchers--from those who simply maintain feeders in their gardens to those, more obsessed, who wander the world in search of new and better birds--have stumbled onto a seductive truth:  paying attention to birds, being mindful of them, is being mindful of Life itself.  We seldom think of it this clearly, but sometimes, unexpectedly, we are overtaken by a sense of wonder and gratitude.  Surely it is the encounter with a force much larger than ourselves that moves us."  (P. 304.) 

I never kept a life list.  I did have bird feeders by my south windows until the grackles and starlings became too problematic and the women below complained of bird droppings.  Mainly, I kept my eyes open so that I spotted the bald eagle tearing a fish up in a roadside gully down at Squaw Creek N.W.R. and stopped the car abruptly on a gravel road west of Pinedale, Wyoming, up to Square Top Mountain and the Green River lakes, when I saw my first osprey hovering like a helicopter, then plunging straight down into the stream for a trout.  I duly noted the Montana power companies' flat nesting squares above their power poles for osprey nests and even went out of my way to see refuges all over the West.  One of the main reasons I went to one of our finest outdoor museums, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum near Tucson, was to see its screened rooms of buzzing, darting hummingbirds and other aviaries.  Because the largest of wrens, the desert wren, perched on a post there to pose for me, a tile with its likeness is on my kitchen table.

But Gibson's birding passage about being "overtaken by a sense of wonder and gratitude" made me think of four particular instances.  One occurred when I was still a fit runner, jogging around the northeast corner of Lake Cunningham one evening as a fog began moving in at dusk, no one else about, silent.  Suddenly this large bird flared almost into me, like a plane coming straight at me and pulling up at the very last minute.  I had heard nothing and simply registered, shocked, the blue-grey wings and body at near kissing distance.  As far as I can identify it, noted for its face disk like an owl's for better hearing and virtually silent flying, a male northern harrier had been flying low swiftly through the open sidewalk corridor between the trees near the lake.  A close encounter of the feathered kind.

I had another similar incident hiking in Neale Woods on the river bluffs north of the city.  Out of my peripheral vision, because I certainly heard nothing, I suddenly had reason to look up; and gliding straight at me from its tree perch, passing not more than a few feet overhead, was a Great Gray Owl with its five-foot wingspread.  I have since seen documentaries explaining the wonder of owl wings evolved for silence, and I can attest to that, for it never made a sound, just this huge bird swooping just above me, its yellow eyes boldly staring disdainfully.

When exploring Wupatki National Monument, northwest of Flagstaff, Arizona, I had been at Wukoki and Wupatki with other tourists; but I alone investigated Citadel Ruin and Naiskihu Ruin, then got too spooked for more than a glimpse of Lomaki.  I have been familiar since birth with crows and iridescent grackles, not to mention their cousins, blue jays, of the famous brainiac Corvidae family, but I had never seen the largest, the Raven.  My initial encounter was here among ancient Southwest ruins, and I was startled--again--on two accounts.  It seemed huge, much much larger than the raucous crows I had always known, and it was very black and very bold.  It clearly took an interest in me and kept coming closer and closer until it landed less than a yard away on a boulder and tried to carry on a conversation.  But I have already said I was spooked, especially when I tried shooing it off, with an opposite effect.  Too big, too black, too bold for me.  Every superstition about ravens I had in my myth-mad mind unnerved me.  This was the bird of the Haida and Inuit Creation-Fire myths, oh yes.

Related to the raven incident was an encounter with another of its cousins that same day I saw the osprey.  Later that day I was hiking solo up a trail heading off north from scenic Square Top Mountain.  I acquired two fellow travelers, the very gregarious, downright snoopy Gray Jay a/k/a the Camp Robber.  I had read about it (I even think Mark Twain mentioned the bird) and so wasn't alarmed but amused, for they took very friendly interest in me and the shiny silver camera slung around my neck, enough to try to light on my shoulder.  I had to ford a frothing mountain stream full of boulders and tried via some fallen trees.  I fell in, which led to some curious photos later, though they did come out; but the birds found it wonderfully funny and kept chattering and wanting my camera.

Such make up my wonder and gratitude for the marvel of birds.

Velma Faleria Koftan Luckert, born 25 March 1915; died 25 March 1991.  This seems to be the earliest photo of her.

This one is marked, "Velma Koftan 9 months."

These are the two I remember best from boyhood, the one leaning on the newel post the same as the large oval portrait of her on the stair landing of the Bloomfield farm I absolutely loved, always awed that it was Mama, in that way children can't quite grasp their parents were ever as little as they are.  Fern's writing, as usual.  On the back of the straightforward frontal pose was written my caption.

Fern, Big Sister Velma, Audree, Larry in the wagon, at the Old Brick House, of course.

And, finally, a photo from her high school junior year.

Apparently some sort of family reunion took place at Mary's Cafe on Main Street in Center about 1950 or 1951, judging from the size of Lindsay Craig.  As usual, I identify people left to right.  Here are the Ellingson siblings, Charley, Ole, Mabel Ellingson Stevenson, Oliver, and Everett.  Charley and his wife, Mabel (two in the family was confusing), ran a small tavern with a single gas pump at the south end of town and lived in the house catty-cornered from it, south of the courthouse, where my sister and her family have now lived for decades.  Ole and his wife had a large general store on the southeast corner of the main intersection, where the post office is now, and lived in the house directly east of it.  Charley Stevenson ran the small abstract office next to the old post office, later run by his son, Charles, from whom I borrowed old National Geographics.  (Kay Valverde and her daughter, Laura Hintz, run it now.)  I think Oliver and Everett were farmers, but my four cousins, for whom Ole was a grandfather, would have to agree with or correct me, just as they would have to identify Oliver's and Everett's wives.

This was obviously to include their spouses.  It's Mabel and Charley Ellingson; Mabel Ellingson Stevenson; Ole separated from his second wife, Loova (far to the right); Oliver and his wife; Everett's wife; Mary Ellingson, whose husband Joe, a onetime barber, was dead by this time; Loova, Ole's second wife; and Everett.  Mary's Cafe was the town's main social center (I have an earlier entry on it), and I called her my second mother because she helped Dad care for me when we lived at the station and Mom was at Wayne for summer school.  She and Mrs. Ernie Sandoz were the only non-children I ever gave May baskets to.  One of those May 1sts Mary chased me across the street around Dad's gas pump, caught me, and kissed me soundly.  When I gashed my knee open on a broken 7-Up bottle behind Dad's garage, she was the one who staved the blood with a wet towel and soothed me while Dad got the car to take me to Dr. Kohtz's in Bloomfield.

The three cousins here are two of Mary and Joe Ellingson's three daughters, Gladys Covolik and Mae Bogner, with one of Charley and Mabel Ellingson Stevenson's twins, Charles, who later took over his dad's abstract business.  He remained a lifelong bachelor and was good friends with another lifelong Center bachelor, Ora J. Ballard.  They drank together down at Charley and Mabel's little tavern, though Ora had other interests like ham radio, the TV line he and Dad rigged up for our first decent reception.  Women found Charles charming, albeit an alcoholic, and pursued him, so he had occasional affairs; but the bitter joke was that he already had a family to support, his twin's family, John a brutally vicious alcoholic.  Luckily, John was usually in the military miles away.  But we always knew when John was in town, when Charles--and sometimes his parents--had a black eye, a split lip, a pained limp. That's Lindsay looking up at the three and, I suspect, a Bogner girl.  Dad's single pump and part of the station are in the background, the original wooden garage at the left (north) of that gone.  I often value old photos for their backgrounds, as with the last photo, of Lindsay Craig, showing the parts hallway and Dad's garage running to the right of his station in the background directly across from Mary's Cafe.

By sheer--uh--coincidence, I found my poor photos of the graves of [Great] Uncle John and [Great] Aunt Nellie in a group of Center pictures.  I was actually at Bassett for my nephews' football game; as you can tell from the long shadows, it was late in the day, and I was in a hurry, already having walked the whole cemetery looking for [Great] Aunt Bess Koftan's, not knowing at that time (years back when Chase and Jared were still in Bloomfield High School) that she, her husband, her daughter were buried at Mills.  What I did manage was a rough sort of locating by the cemetery buildings in the northeast corner of the cemetery, seen to the right rear in the photos.

In the top photo, in the diagonal of three tombstones, the Feddersen is in the center.  I missed any marker for the 1922 "Baby," "Robert."  Uncle John is at the left, Aunt Nellie to the right.

I also realized what a mystery photo was I had mixed in with the same Center pile.  It's of Aunt Nellie, behind her pupils, looking about the same as she does in the photo of the four Naper teachers in the earlier Feddersen entry.  A happy bonus.

[Great] Aunt Nellie was born four years after Glen, 25 June 1888, the middle child of Edward and Mary Peters, at Mariaville, of course.  [Great] John F. Feddersen was born 10 March 1881 at Bryant, Iowa.  She married him at Dustin, Nebraska, 3 July 1907.  I'd never heard of Dustin but discovered it was a village with a Congregational Church in Dustin Township, the township the only Dustin left now, on the Niobrara River on the north edge of Holt County.  It's near Anoka and Naper, Boyd County, where Uncle John was school superintendent.  They had three sons, but I knew only the two who lived, Mervin W. and Donley F.  The third, Robert, comes from the Bassett Cemetery roll with simply the year 1922, "Baby."  The three are the only Feddersens there.  I found this out recently on the Internet, for I've been to the Bassett cemetery and took photos of Aunt Nellie's and Uncle John's graves (which I can't find right now) but do not recall the infant's grave.  Nellie died 1 June 1945 at 57 in the Stuart Hospital, he at 66 on 11 January 1948 in Sioux City, Iowa.  Judging from Uncle John's obituary, included here, they packed a great deal into their lives besides having two very successful sons. 

This is the earliest picture I have of her, which I suspect is around the time of the early one of Aunt Myrtle.  The writing on the photo is Fern's (Grandma's).

Aunt Nellie was a hearty, authoritative woman, efficiently businesslike, a born organizer, with a gusty laugh, very motherly, easily sociable, affectionate.  She was one of those bosomy women like Mom who grabbed one and hugged him.  I liked her a lot.  She often wore a red crystal necklace that I cherished so much, I ended up with it, after Grandma's and Mom's deaths, though I gave it to my sister Sue because I felt guilty that no one was wearing it.  I think red must have been her favorite color as it is mine, for I remember a red-and-black-figured dress she often wore.   Rather like Sweet-and-Sour/Tart cuisine, she was opposite to Aunt Myrtle in temperament, though certainly just as well-read.  She and her husband spent their lives teaching, after all, and she created the first teachers' magazine, I'm sure, in northeast Nebraska, which Linda Mindemann Bartleson now has in its very old cardboard covers bound by wire, the issues read and re-read by me when I was a boy, used by Mom in her rural school teaching.  The mimeographed pages had project designs, playlets, stories, a creatively varied hodgepodge rural elementary teachers could--and apparently did--find very serviceable.  I kept it in my closet for ready reference when I had the back bedroom in our house, and any penciled lines traced over her designs are mine.

That's Myrtle with Mervin, not Nellie.  I'm curious where they lived that it was so barren, but I love the hobbyhorse and old wagon.  Below are Mervin and his parents, about 1911-1912.

 

This photo is when they were teaching at Naper, where he was school superintendent.  John and Nellie are in the back row.

The following two photos were apparently taken at the same time and are how I remember Uncle John and Aunt Nellie, so sometime in the 1940s.

I'm guessing it was one of their funerals when I and Mike and Denny were dropped at the David Peacocks Up West while the adults went to the funeral, which puts it in the 1940s, when Aunt Nellie and Uncle John died.  The occasion remains memorable for me because we played with the first and only Saint Bernard I saw until I moved to Omaha (after 1975), larger than I was, which also puts it in the 1940s.  But I don't know for sure anymore. At any rate, I find it odd that we have the clippings for Uncle John but not Aunt Nellie.  I'm assuming his obituary is readable and any reader will recognize they moved around in teaching.  You will also note John lived with his older son, Mervin, and Agnes, Mervin's first wife, in Sioux City, Iowa, when he died. 

When I was writing about my ideal weekend, I failed to mention that that very weekend, when I whacked through Vermeer's Hat:  The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, The Girl with the Pearl Earring was on, and so I naturally watched it again.  Despite its re-creation of Vermeer's family and 17th-century Delft, I didn't like it any better than I had the first time, when it first came out, but then I hadn't liked the best seller from which it came either.  Similarly, the fine funny Slings & Arrows series on the Sundance Channel that same weekend concerned Hamlet, when, of course, I was reading Haig's The Dead Fathers Club, besides which I had from Netflix Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, his curious, modern corporate version of Hamlet.  And Joslyn Art Museum opened its "Elegance of the Qing Court:  Reflections of a Dynasty Through Its Art," which concerns the most prestigious, longest Chinese dynasty of the Manchus, who in the Vermeer book were about to charge over the Great Wall into Chinese history as the Qing/Manchu court.  (As Joslyn is at pains to keep telling the public, it's pronounced Ching as in "ka-ching.")  I saw the elegance with the million-dollar screen as centerpiece the following Tuesday, but my point is the show opened that Saturday.  I suppose I could call the coincidences serendipitous, that happy word serendipity standing for unexpected good fortune, but I get a bit nervous about alleged coincidences.  To mention Indra's web of everything being interconnected seems too strange.

Continuing, an old teaching friend of mine, who spent a late January week here with her drama students, is directing Euripides' Medea this April, that play having made Tony winners out of great actresses who had the lead role.  I re-read it, because Viv asked for suggestions; but, even though I have the Judith Anderson LPs of it--she was one of the Tony winners as Medea--I had used when teaching World Lit classes, either the passage of time and/or my court experience led me to pronounce Medea as one psychotic bitch and to strongly urge Viv to make her a voodoo sorceress.  (Medea is one of the most powerful sorceresses in myth, helping Jason steal the Golden Fleece against her own father, killing various people including her brother, so besotted with Jason that, when he gets a new girlfriend and tells Medea to get lost, she sends fatally poisoned robes to the new girlfriend and father-in-law, then slaughters her two young sons by Jason, flying off by dragon power.)  Anyway, History International obligingly showed a documentary on voodoo and its related obeah and santeria history and congregants here now, an estimated million and a half voodoo practitioners alone in the U.S. 

I am currently watching the Rainer Werner Fassbinder masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), from Netflix, which has 13 episodes and an epilogue, each disc minutes over three hours.  I had seen it back in the Eighties on Bravo, when that was truly a brilliant cultural channel full of live performances and foreign films rather than tired repetition and "reality" show dreck (a good German word for "shoddy and inferior merchandise").  In fact I had to wait for its recent release after re-mastering.  Anyway, my current book is a literary thriller in turn-of-the-century--if you want to be fancy, you say "fin-de-siecle," which is the same in French and refers to 1890-1910--Vienna, Frank Tallis' Vienna Blood:  A Novel (Random House, 2007), about which I had read a recent rave review along with Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves:  A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2008)--jeez, telling us what we're reading again!--and made an immediate trip to Border's for the two.  Fassbinder's TV series takes us through the familiar decadent Twenties and Thirties in very decadent Berlin, as the musical Cabaret also celebrates, whereas Vienna was decadent a bit earlier.  Tallis' novel, about forbidden secret societies and early forensics and psychological profiling, has horrific murders with Jack-the-Ripper sexual mutilations based on Mozart's The Magic Flute, Freud and Mahler as background characters.  (Tallis is a practicing clinical psychologist, as is one of the two leads, the other a detective.) The commonality in both works is the ominous rise of the National Socialists, the Nazis.  OK, the kicker:  last night reading the novel, I came across this line (p. 127 in the paperback):   "Among the small objects attached to the silver chain [of a man's charm bracelet] was an effigy of a man in a kaftan suspended from a gibbet.  It represented a hanging Jew."  Later, watching Disc 3 of the Fassbinder, I had another familial surprise.  The macho oaf, Franz Biberkopf, who is the anti-hero of the Alfred Doblin novel-Fassbinder epic, is again reading the newspaper aloud and announces that the famous conductor Bruno Walter's final concert is April 15th.

Well, that date is not only Tax Day now in the U.S. but also the date of the Titanic's sinking and Abraham Lincoln's death.  But, given my Great Grandparents Kaftan/Koftan marrying on 15 April 1886, does it mean anything that out of 365 days that's my birthday, or that Great Aunt Bozena/Bessie Koftan Chapin and her daughter died on 21 November 1927, my sister's birthday also 21 November?  That's why saying "coincidence" makes me nervous.

LATER NOTE:  Having finished the Tallis book, I can add one or two other "coincidences."  One of the murder victims was a Czech; the time period was of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs (as the book put it), from which the Kaftan and Hlinovsky families fled by steerage to the United States.  The book takes place in 1901 Vienna, but I recognized some of the places from being there in 1969, which added to the pleasure, the way seeing movies set in Rome, Zurich, Athens, other places I passed through, lets me relive that too-brief trip.  Also, the book concerns an always relevant topic, super patriots who hate Jews, blacks, homosexuals, women, etc., etc. One of this strident, dangerous group of seething bigots is a doctor who throws a young English woman out of his medical classes because women don't belong there, are not capable of being doctors.  The next morning I read in the Omaha World-Herald that a federal judge ruled in favor of a Southern Baptist seminary who fired a female professor because "women are biblically forbidden from teaching men," and the school's "ecclesiastical decisions [are] protected under the First Amendment's religion clauses."  The woman had sued.  (21 March 2008, p. 14A.)  In the book the doctor creates a public furor, writing letters to newspapers, and is fired.  Anyone who says religion and politics aren't hopelessly one and the same does not understand history or the way religion has always interfered with government, which is why this story's tale of intolerance is monstrously familiar.   

The fourth Peters child before Fern, the baby, was born 4 February 1891 and died 23 April 1968.  I found out from the Certificate of Delayed Birth Registration that Edward LeRoy Peters and Mary Jane Maher were both born in 1857, Great Grandfather Peters in Wapello, Iowa, and Great Grandmother Peters in Muscatine, Iowa.  I put in the following document because it may be a clue to where all the Peters children went for baptism and church.

I had never thought about St. Nicholas in Valentine, though it still has a parish there selling T-shirts online.  (Of interest to me was the name of one of the sponsors, a familiar Bassett name, for I went to Norfolk Junior College with Harley Gesiriech, and his older sister, Lola, was a bailiff here in Douglas County District Court while I was a court reporter.  And, yes, I think the name on the baptismal certificate is misspelled, as is the corrected maiden name of Great Grandmother Peters.)  I knew the family was Roman Catholic, but I also know only Glen stayed in that church.  Nellie, Myrtle, and Fern were all Methodists.  Forrest is a mystery anyway.  Aunt Myrtle is buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Randolph NE, close to the south edge.

The next oldest item for Myrtle is a truly faded photo of Mariaville school children I mentioned much earlier that I include here only because of its frame shape and the writing on the back I put below it.  I defy any identification from it but recognize she's somewhere in the picture. 

She wore glasses most of her studiously bookish life, so this must be very early and thoroughly representative of her.  (And I rather think Aunt Audree looked like her, just judging from this photo.)  Most of the family found her formidable--my sisters were certainly intimidated by her--but I always got along well with her, books the strong bond, though she waspishly corrected any errors I made, especially in her favorite subject, history.  I still remember her correcting my pronunciation of Armageddon.  She gave me a birthday present when I was a young boy, a biography of her hero, Alexander Hamilton.  She also willed me her fine H & C Bavaria bone china.  Her handwriting--I have her recipe cards and even, I think, the Hamilton biography--was very clear and spidery.  Like her brother, she loved to argue and marshalled her reading into a battle platform from which to shoot down fools.  Or at least those foolish enough to argue with her.

She was briefly married to Jay Clark Wefso of Stuart, but nowhere in Mom's records are the dates.  It must have been an early divorce at a time divorces were still scandalous (which extends up to my childhood).  It was one of those episodes whispered about; I remember that.  Jay died in 1951 of a stroke and is buried in Stuart.  [Great] Aunt Myrtle was always a spinster, despite her short marriage, looking the thin, waspish stereotype of a schoolmarm, which is exactly what she was.  She lived over a main-street cafe in Randolph for all her teaching years, the final scan in this entry about that teaching, a small apartment kept briskly clean and neat.  Children, including me and later my sisters, sat quietly on chairs during the visits, hoping we didn't stay too long, though she generally served light lunches.  I didn't mind, because she had books, but my sisters dreaded those occasions.

She was also not supposed to live so long, for she had leukemia.  Her brother, Dr. Glen E. Peters, kept her going with some regimen he thought up.  After he died, she moved from Randolph to Center, where Mom gave her the required shots and looked after her, in turn for which she baked us her excellent bread (which recipe I stuck in this blog site long ago, I think) and sometimes other baked goods.  I think she enjoyed Center, living in her own house after years of a tiny apartment, having a garden and flowers, finding the natives friendly.  But she developed a rapidly growing tumor in the midsection, which looked, startlingly enough, as if she had either swallowed or was pregnant with a basketball.  She moved temporarily to a rest home in Pierce and finally died in a Norfolk hospital, years beyond what even her brother expected.

Speculation is a red balloon, subject to lightning zaps, crazy wind currents, territorial birds, and BB (or other) guns.  I was trying to answer Cousin Linda's questions about Grandma Koftan's becoming a teacher right after her eighth-grade graduation.  I could find no Sacred Heart school of any kind closer to the Peters in Rock County than Norfolk.  Stuart had a St. Boniface; O'Neill has always had St. Mary's.  No Peters is among the alumni of the latter, at least those listed online.  Batting around, I happened on Rock County High School, Bassett, which has on its alumni lists "Lawrence Koftan" with a w twice, 1908 and 1911, as well as Roy [LeRoy] Koftan, 1910. 

I had selectively forgotten Velma's (Mom's) high school report card, proof that she took Normal Training courses, which was the name for classes for prospective teachers.  I've already mentioned that Nebraska Normal was the forerunner of Wayne State Teachers, now part of the state university system, where Mom took summer sessions to keep her teaching certificate renewed and I ultimately graduated with both the bachelor's and master's in education.  So whether Grandma Koftan took Normal Training classes at some high school equivalent or merely at some special educational school ends up my hazardous speculation, even if I claim to have known at one time.

I also happened upon a Delayed Birth Record Index, 1879-1905, for Rock County, Nebraska, where the Peters and Koftan families lived.  "Kofton, Fern E. Peters" (sic) with 6/5/1895 is listed, as is "Peters, Nellie Mae" with 6/25/1988, the only two entries for both families.  Gives a whole new twist to the Shakespearean cliche about a tangled web.

The Tyndall (SD) cemetery has Great Great Grandfather Martin Hlinovsky, Frances'/Fannie's father.  (Martin's wife, Rose, is buried at Beranek Cemetery in Pawnee County, Nebraska, which county was where the Hlinovskys went before South Dakota.)   Two Kaftan couples lie there in Tyndall, apparently preceding Grandpa Koftan's cousins, the Emil and Elsie I knew, Emil dying at nearly 103 merely a year or two ago.  Vincent and Elnora Koftan, Great Grandfather Joseph Koftan's brother and sister-in-law, are buried there, the ones Aunt Babe said were responsible for Joseph and Fannie's moving to the Bassett, Nebraska, area.  Also, the three infant/young daughters of Joseph and Fannie, Eva, Edith, and Clara, who died of diphtheria, are buried there.  So are six Zelenkas, including Fannie's sister, Katherine/Kate.  On the Delayed Birth Registrations for Bon Homme County, South Dakota, are just three Koftan names:  Laurence John, 04/27/1891, sits between his cousins, Uncle Vincent's daughters, Belle Violet, 08/30/1895, and Mattie Louise, 05/17/1898.  As long as I'm dealing with cemeteries, Grandpa Koftan's sister, Bessie/Bozena, and her husband Levi/Lee Chapin, with their daughter, Josephine, are in the Olive Branch Cemetery at Mills in Keya Paha County, Nebraska, along with other Chapins.  

In the meantime I will finish this particular headachy entry with more interesting data, courtesy of Robert Clayton/Hlinovsky, who explored Martin Hlinovsky as a family connection.  He included the ship log for the SS Leipzig out of Bremen, Germany, that came into Baltimore in 1871 with the Martin Hlinowsky family, Martin, 52, farmer; Rosalie, 42; Maria, 21; Catherina, 18; Josefa, 9; Rosalia, 7; Franzisca, 5.  (Love that ethnic spelling for Frances/Fannie.)  Their homeland was cited as Austria, but I've told him I think that's because Czechoslovakia didn't exist in name or country; Bohemia and Moravia, its two most famous provinces, were part of the Austrian Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs.

LATER NOTE:  I've got to stop adding postscripts.  This is why I usually mull topics over for a few days before I commit myself to print.  First, I'm going to stick with my initial memory as the correct one:  Grandma Koftan taught after completing the eighth grade.  I recall too well being flabbergasted that she was allowed to do that, since I lost Mom to summer institutes and such as she maintained her teaching certification, besides which I was familiar with teaching from [Great] Aunts Nellie and Myrtle.

Secondly, about our Great Great Grandparents Hlinovsky, Martin's dates in the Tyndall SD cemetery records are simply 1819-1891, which seem correct enough, because that makes him 52 as the ship log above says he was.  The Beranek Cemetery in Pawnee County NE has his wife's (Rose's) death date as 29 August 1877 at 47 years, which means she lived only five years in the United States and died when Great Grandma Fannie was 10.  Which further means that Martin was a widower who moved his family to the Tyndall area and apparently did not marry again.  In the meantime, surprised as I was to discover that the Hlinovskys came by steerage through Baltimore instead of the more usual Ellis Island in New York City, I also discovered while fussing with Ancestry.com briefly only that Josef Kaftan also came through Baltimore in 1867.  (I wouldn't commit my credit card to the two-weeks' "free trial.")      

Cousin Linda asked in her comment on "Young Fern" about Grandma Koftan's age when teaching and when she married.  I assume some of those postcard photos with her friends, especially the one referring to what she and Leo planned to do, occurred while she was at O'Neill taking some kind of teaching training rather young.  I will not testify to this, but I recall a Sacred Heart Academy that trained teachers right after their eighth-grade graduations.  So however old Fern was when she finished elementary school is how old she was when she started her education program, as her brother Glen and two sisters, Nellie and Myrtle, did.  The latter two had later advanced training because they became career teachers, but I have no memory of where they went for that further training.  Nebraska Normal College at Wayne was established in 1891.  I do know rural teachers in that age were often barely older than their pupils, which created discipline problems, as might be imagined, especially with farm boys whose education was interrupted by seasonal work so that they didn't finish elementary school until they were 15 or 16 sometimes.  And I do know that Gram started teaching very young.  The age of 14 sticks like an unhappy burr.

As for her marriage age, red-haired Fern was 19 when she married Laurence on his 23rd birthday.  I've scanned some photos of them, including the ones I have with her parents' invitation to a reception, used before.  I've also just re-read [Great] Aunt Margaret/Babe Koftan Langhammer's "Memories" of 1988, and she has an interesting paragraph about the occasion:  "Laurence also married while we were still in Nebraska.  He married Fern Peters.  They were married in the Peters' home.  It rained that night and I had to sit on her lap.  It wasn't very nice on her white satin wedding dress.  They were married in Mariaville.  Mrs. Peters ran a millinery shop in her home.  We went over once for Easter bonnets."

I've always thought these were as close to wedding photos as they had.  She does look 19 and he 23.

While I was slogging through a sluggish weekend and then wrestling the scanner, I had a letter from Mr. Robert Clayton of Ludington, Michigan.  He has since proved a new lode to mine of family data.  Just as starters, I will quote his letter, which I don't think he'll mind, as helpful as it was:  "My father was born a Hlinovsky and later changed the name to Clayton" [because of misspellings and mispronunciations].  "Hlin or hlinov means clay or sandy loam (thus the surname choice, as my grandfather Hlinovsky went by common name of Clay) and more recently means seclusion."  As he later pointed out, Hlinov--Hlinsko (?) in my atlas--is southeast of Prague in Moravia.

In honor of his acquaintance and Ryan's double gift of the scanner and this site, I scanned these photos of Joseph and Fannie Hlinovsky Koftan.  (I'm sure you noted the original spelling on the certificate.)

Sorry I cropped off the J on Great Grandpa Koftan's name just above.  I have some more photos from this visit for later, but these got included because they were on the page with the pair photo.   Below are Laurence and Fern with Audree at his parents.  I assume it's in Missouri, because I don't recognize the house.  I'm assuming it's in the mid Twenties because Audria Margarite was born 27 January 1922, looking about three here, and Gram (Fern) has black stockings on. 

Barely visible in the bottom border below is Gram's writing, "Grandma Koftan in Missouri," above my label.  Great Grandma Koftan died 14 November 1939, Great Grandpa Koftan 3 March 1945.  Both are buried in Clarence, Missouri.

LATER NOTE:  I remembered that the Marriage Certificate came from Bill (William Joseph) Langhammer through Phyllis Koftan Presson Flemming, who made three copies and sent them to me for my sisters and me.  They should receive their proper credit.

[Great] Aunt Margaret/Babe, Bill's mother, wrote down her "Memories" in 1988, which included the information that "Dad stopped sowing oats to get married.  Mom was nineteen and Dad was twenty-four."  "She wore a bonnet with a bird and flower on it," but the description was never finished because the children giggled, annoying her.  Babe says her parents moved from the Tyndall area to a 1360-acre ranch "about eight miles from" Bassett, living there for about ten years, but, with bad times, trading that place for a 320-acre farm near Clarence, Missouri.  Later, after their sons left, the couple bought a 40-acre place near Clarence for retirement.  Fannie had the flu after World War I badly enough to require surgery; much later she developed  breast cancer and died two years later when it had spread into her lungs despite a mastectomy.  Joseph was lonely after she died but refused to stay with any of the children, though he did visit them.  He caught pneumonia while visiting Ella, went to Laurence's, and died in a Norfolk, Nebraska, hospital, the body returned to Clarence for burial next to his wife.    

I overlooked this odd distant view of the first Knox County home of Laurence and Fern, Velma's favorite house, probably because it's taken from such a distance, and I cannot reconcile it with the second, a very battered photo of Velma and puppies.  At first I thought it was taken from the east, looking west, from the Andrew Schainost place, but the trees aren't right, because  I know from my own memory that a lane ran out to the county road between rows of eastern red cedars.  Running north and south, the county road itself had big cottonwoods along the west side (Nebraska's state tree for a reason, most frequently seen in such roadside rows).  The house also had other trees, including a small apple orchard, because one of Mom's favorite anecdotes was about the drunken chickens.  She claimed the chickens ate so many fermented apples, they went staggering around, and she'd go into hilarious drunken clucking and kabawking that always made me laugh.  From those clues I'll let you draw your own conclusions.  Obviously, there is a front and back porch.

Both of these photos of Mom and her sister were taken at the Old Brick House, because Audree's birthplace is Morrillville, not Mariaville, and that's where Mom was a teenager.  Notice how thick the trees are.

I suppose "Grunts" is on the photo because these are bigger than newborn pigs.  We called the tiniest baby pigs unable to compete in feeding runts, and Gramma would coddle them in the kitchen.  They were like pets.  I remember them, wrapped in blankets to keep the undersized babies warm near the stove or under it, fed with a nippled baby bottle.  That was their only chance at survival.  Ella Mae would be George Koftan's wife, L.J.'s sister-in-law, as far as I know.

I've been having some computer problems again lately and so will test the machine and my patience here with another of Laurence J.'s siblings.  The PBS stations recently aired the Sondheim musical, Company, which won the 2007 Tony for the Best Revival of a Musical, notable because the whole cast played instruments, their own score.  Probably the best known song is the sardonic "The Ladies Who Lunch," and I smiled at the family reference in the opening lines:  "Here's to the ladies who lunch/--Everybody laugh--/Lounging in their caftans and planning a brunch/On their own behalf."  Not quite the kind of kaftan Grandpa K. described, a long black robe for mourning, or the dictionary's "cloak with full sleeves and sash, reaching down to the ankles, worn by the men of the Middle East," but still in the vocabulary, fashionably updated.

Bozena/Bess was born 20 September 1894, and brother George was born 24 March 1901.

She married Lee A. Chapin, whose grandson and great granddaughter came through from the Columbia, Missouri, area a couple years ago and introduced themselves and their spouses and great great granddaughter on their way out to Ainsworth to check family records.  Aunt Bess was apparently as happy as her photos.  I told the Chapins Gram and Mom had considered Lee as a bit too conceited about his looks; i.e., a ladies' man.