I have used [Great] Aunt Babe's family memories in previous entries, and so here are some pictures of her. She got her nickname, of course, because she was the baby of the Joseph and Frances Hlinovsky Koftan family, b. 5 July 1908, seen here with her parents.
I don't know when this one was taken, but clearly she's into her teens or later.
Grandpa (L.J.) Koftan's youngest brother was Joseph Albert (b. 12 February 1903-d. 3 July 1967), who apparently stayed with them at the Old Brick House and was good friends with Dad (Jack Luckert), three years younger, when Dad worked as Grampa's hired hand. All [Great] Aunt Babe mentioned was that Joe left Missouri, went to Colorado, came back broke, and went to Nebraska. These photos are from that time. [Great] Uncle Joe looked like Grampa but was taller and thinner and was good-humored, easy-going, as I remember him.
This is another with Mom (Velma) in the middle. They must be going to a dance. Like the classy caps and Mom's cloche.
Times were so bad--I assume this is in the late 1920s-early 1930s--that Dad and Joe went up to North Dakota to work with the wheat harvesting crews. My brother-in-law, Jim Rohrer, said that a group of them went from Nebraska and they also harvested flax. (I'd never seen flax fields until I taught in North Dakota, striking in their dark maroon-burgundy color.) He also mentioned, as I then remembered, that the crew sometimes slept in rail cars. I've found these studded belts and pants in the photo below intriguingly like cowboy chaps. I'd guess they were for dress-up rather than work. I wish I could remember more of what Dad told me, none of it very happy memories, though the trip out to Yellowstone with Joe was better. I've always had a hard time imagining that, jumping in a Model T and taking off when roads were scarce, service stations rare (they had to take most of their repairs with them, like tires, tubes, oil, gas cans, gaskets). And I would think the Twenties roads were equivalent to the old Alcan up to Alaska, rough and hazardous, all the way to Yellowstone and inside the park too. The Old Brick House is prominently in the background.
The upshot was that, as I've told before, Jack (Dad) married Mom (Velma) and Joe married Ella Larson (b. 1 July 1910-d. 3 January 1982) on that day too windy to pick corn, driving over to Yankton 21 October 1933 to the courthouse now gone. Apparently, judging from the set of photos following, Walter Wenke married Mildred Larson, Ella's sister, around the same time.
This would be their formal 1933 wedding portrait, followed by a 1965 Christmas card photo. I have several more recent pictures of them and their three children, Phyllis, Delores, and Merlyn (Bud), but those are for later years.
Having watched Nova's "First Flower" program about the Mother of Gardens, western China, specifically the incredibly biodiverse and scenic Hengduan Mountains--I was as excited as the botanists at the plurality of different flowers everywhere which have been transplanted into our gardens over the centuries--I am even happier with my Lauritzen membership. On my first spring walk yesterday, I came across the flower Grandma Koftan had in the middle of her garden so that I specifically associate it with her. Here is, first, a white version and then one of the patches of this descriptively named bleeding heart.
And, of course, from central Asia into the 16th-century Dutch mania and money-maker for centuries, the tulip, still probably the most profitable bulb in gardening.
Dad's backyard pride was with two of these, the flowering crab. I still remember his planting them with fish around the root ball by his Sioux friend's (Ray Frazier) instruction.
Pink and white magnolias above daffodils and then a magnolia with such large blooms, like huge white butterflies on its leafless branches, that it looked like a theatrical prop.
And, finally, another reminder of Center days, the spicy scented clove currant, a thorny row of which separated us from our neighbors to the east. It also grows wild in the woods around Center. We called it the gooseberry bush for its bitter little green berries, which Mom tried to make a pie out of, lots of sugar required. The yellow-flowered fragrance came in my bedroom window; and, passing it yesterday, I was back in my childhood home. Proust can have his madeleines; I have my own aromatic bundle of memories.
For Robert Clayton I went to nearby Holy Sepulchre Cemetery to look for the only Hlinovsky in Omaha cemetery records, a Frank Hlinovsky, who died 8 March 1947. The wonderfully helpful groundskeepers had me call a central office and then obtained faxes so we could locate the spot, an unmarked county grave on the very east edge of this very large cemetery, the first row west from the wire fencing. Any family wanting to locate the shallow grave has to find a John J. Butler to the immediate left of the Hlinovsky site, looking west, as demonstrated in the photos below. It's the 14th plot from the north end of that first row. The second photo shows the approximate location in relation to the rest of the cemetery, the bulk of which is over the hill, thousands of graves. A large upright Walsh marker is off to the southwest a ways up the hill.
Afterwards, thinking about the solitary 69-year-old with a family name, I walked around Elmwood Park in the humid 80 degrees that set spring bursting, as demonstrated in the photos below, a variegated wood violet illustrating Mendel's laws between the more usual purple and white ones, the blooming wood violet always our childhood sign it was finally spring in Center. Marilynn Peterson and I would go down to the Coulee Creek almost daily to look for it. While I walked along the edge of Elmwood's spring-fed brook ravine, I discovered new beaver work, a bed of sweet cicely, and a plague of ground ivy (the tiny scalloped leaves in the violet photo), both in pioneer herbals. The next day dropped 40 degrees into chilly rain.
Dad always accused me of loving Mom more, so I certainly have to give him the same birthday memorial I gave her. At three with curls and his two older brothers, Rich(ard) the taller, and Chet (Chester).
At the left rear, he looks teen-aged or not much beyond, here with his dad, George, and, I think, Vern and Clark Stocking in the overalls. Vern was married to Aunt Lizzie (Elizabeth Mae), Dad's sister. Evelyn Stocking Davids (sister of Clark, daughter of Vern) identified the man in the suit as Joe Bruhn, husband to Dad's sister Evelyn, the dog as Jiggs, the place as the Chevalier northwest of Bloomfield.
He was, of course, Grandpa Koftan's hired hand, the Old Brick House behind them, early 1930s.
In Center in 1946.
And my favorite of him, Hollywood handsome, taken by a reporter at Dad's shop to do a story on him.
John and Sarah Ann Twigg Peters' third child was William (b. 7 July 1864), and he had three daughters, but we have only a photo of his first, Sadie Pearl, who married Orlando Ludwig. She has a faint resemblance to her cousin, Fern.
The fifth Peters child and the only other sister was Ida A. (b. 8 March 1870-d. 1944), who married Joseph R. Hammond, whose children were definitely among Grandma Koftan's favorite cousins, for she went to visit Leon at his date ranch in the Southwest and we went to a memorable reunion at Howard's in Des Moines. First is another photo Mildred sent me, of "Aunt Ida and Uncle Joe Hammond." That peculiar hairdo here seems braided into an ornament.
In the family photos we had this one of Ida's daughter, Nellie, who married twice, to Dave Wykert and then Percy Winder. I would guess she's the one at the left above.
That preceded necessarily this four-generation family group. L.-R. are Nellie Peters Wykert, Ida Peters Hammond, and Sarah Ann Twigg Peters, with the baby named as Minnie Pearl Wykert; but we have Nellie's daughters as Elsie and Marian.
Grandma Koftan's Aunt Nell was the oldest child of John and Sarah Ann Twigg Peters, b. 27 May 1856, a little more than a year before Great Grandfather Edward. The Webers had seven children, and Gram must have kept in touch with her aunt and uncle, for we have a photo when Chris and Nell were elderly. Here is, first, the younger married couple and then the much later photo. Please notice her hairdo, for it's going to appear on others. I had the older photo, but this better print is from Mildred Peters Christianson, with her writing.
Their oldest child was Effie (b. 13 May 1876-d. 23 Feb. 1972), who married Will Miller. They looked like this (another photo from Mildred).
Their second child was Anna, who married a McCartney, but we have only this folder photo of her, perhaps a graduation occasion (?).
Their third child was Saidee (b. 30 August 1880-d. 1956), who married Leonard Shipman, seen here with their two daughters, Twyla and Miriam.
At the same time, with Ardell Lawson.
And this was probably from the same time, too, but is a 1961 reprint, the corner taken out by the photo above. You have to bear in mind most of these photos are already on scrapbook pages, as this title says, and I have to block them out with paper but can't do anything about my montage overlapping. While the little photo above is one of those from an instant photo booth and later, the two small ones here definitely seem to be school pictures.
