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birth: Doly W Luzo, Skutea, Bohemia, Austia
father: Joseph Stodola
mother: Anna Cejka
marriage: 21 Feb 1911 Clutier, Tama Co., Iowa
spouse: William B Nechanicky
parents: John Nechanicky, Frances Juska
immigration: 1905
Life in Bohemia and America
Life Story of Mrs. Wm. B. (Marie E. Stodola) Nechanicky
Marie E. Stodola, daughter of Joseph and Anna (Cejka) Stodola, was born July 2, 1887, in the village of Doly near Raboun, Bohemia. She was the fifth of eight children; and when she was quite young, the family moved to the village of Lozice. She and her brothers and sisters attended school in the town of Jenisovice, which went up to the...
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birth: Doly W Luzo, Skutea, Bohemia, Austia
father: Joseph Stodola
mother: Anna Cejka
marriage: 21 Feb 1911 Clutier, Tama Co., Iowa
spouse: William B Nechanicky
parents: John Nechanicky, Frances Juska
immigration: 1905
Life in Bohemia and America
Life Story of Mrs. Wm. B. (Marie E. Stodola) Nechanicky
Marie E. Stodola, daughter of Joseph and Anna (Cejka) Stodola, was born July 2, 1887, in the village of Doly near Raboun, Bohemia. She was the fifth of eight children; and when she was quite young, the family moved to the village of Lozice. She and her brothers and sisters attended school in the town of Jenisovice, which went up to the ninth grade. There was also a Catholic church and cemetery there which served the nearby villages. Only the cities had high schools, and colleges were located in the big cities. The school in Jenisovice had children from six or seven villages in the area; and they all had to walk to school, some for three or four miles. Some of the subjects in which she was graded included behavior, religion, language or speech, reading, arithmetic, history, geography, physical exercises, and handwork (crocheting, knitting, embroidery, etc.). Handwork was often begun in the first and second grades. The grading scale was from 1 to 4, comparable to our A to D.
In old Bohemia only the richer people owned cattle and hogs, which were housed in a shed adjoining their residence. The poorer residents had goats, which the children had to milk. Besides goats, Marie’s parents also had chickens, which provided eggs. They bought their pork or beef, and usually once a week on Sunday they had meat to eat. When the goats had babies (usually 2-4 at a time), one was butchered for eating. Her family also raised geese and ducks, and usually had roast goose for Christmas and Easter dinners. The family spent long winter evenings stripping feathers for the feather ticks and pillows.
Many cottage owners had a small plot of ground on which they raised their vegetables to eat, and they were frugal with the land, using almost every square inch. All the farm land was out in the country away from the villages, and people had to walk from their homes to work the land. Children’s summer vacations were usually spent out in the beet fields on hands and knees thinning the sugar beets and hoeing the weeds. Children worked right along with the older people, and they each carried their own water and hoes on the nearly half hour’s walk from the village to the fields. Other people, mainly young males, were learning trades such as shoemaking by serving as apprentices to the tradesmen.
In the fall a tool was used to pull the beets by hand, and they were then put into piles. Each person sat by a pile and removed the foliage, with which they covered the piles of beets, and left them in the fields until just before frost. Hired hands came around with horses and wagons to gather the beets along with the foliage and haul them to the closest village to be weighed and stored. Each village had a small house for weighing the beets, after which they were unloaded in long heaps outside the weighing house and covered with rye straw and dirt, and later hauled to the factory as they were needed. Here they were shredded and the juice squeezed out. People then took the fodder to feed their cows and pigs, and the dried leaves were also fed to the goats.
Some of Marie's other summer duties were to graze cows for relatives, taking them tied together with a long rope out to the grazing field and back again, which occupied a complete day. The young girls learned the art of dressmaking and made most of their clothing by hand, often with ornate trim such as embroidery, beading, tatting, or crocheted lace. Men’s shirts were also handmade.
On certain days of the week the butchers had available to the public a pigs' head soup, which cost about 2 cents a quart, and wieners and sausages (jaternice) for 2 to 5 cents each. The residents often had a half hour's walk to buy their soup, which they carried home in a big pitcher. Everyone in Bohemia did a great deal of walking, as that was the main type of transportation. To visit her Grandmother Cejka at Rychmburk, Marie and her sisters walked about one and one-half hours, passing by a spooky old castle ruins at Kosumberk along the way. Her grandfather owned a flour mill on the Rychmburk River. He was a Protestant while Grandmother Cejka was a Catholic, and they attended each other’s church together.
When the young men in old Bohemia reached the age of 18, they were required to register for the army, were examined; and if they passed, served three years immediately. After their term of duty they were released and each year thereafter were required to serve six weeks, at which time they were reexamined. Some of the immigrants came to America without the required permission, which they had to obtain if they had served in the army. If they returned to Bohemia and were apprehended, they were sentenced to serve a jail term.
Men of Austria (of which Bohemia was a part until after World War I) in the 1800’s did not come of age until they were 25 years old; until that time their parents could forbid marriage. According to a Czech researcher, in order to avoid wasting the lonely years until they came of age, men often selected a likely girl and conducted research to determine whether or not she was barren. If a child or children resulted, it was with the understanding that marriage would take place when the man came of age. It is for this reason a number of “illegitimate” children are shown in the Czech birth records. Men also could not collect an inheritance before age 25.
In 1904 when Marie was 17 years old, she and an older brother, Frank, immigrated to America. An older sister, Mrs. Joseph (Anna) Pulkrabek, Sr., living with her husband on a farm south of Traer, had paid for Marie's ship passage. For several days before their departure, relatives and friends came to bring them gifts and to wish them tearful good-byes. It was difficult for the parents to face the fact that two more of their children were leaving for America probably never again to be seen by them. Out of a family of eight children, two girls remained in Bohemia to marry and raise families, the three sons also immigrating.
Frank and Marie were taken from their village of Lozice on November 2 by horse and buggy to the town of Pardubice where they boarded a train to Prague, then to Leipzig, Germany, where inspectors quickly searched their luggage. On they went by train to the huge railroad station in Berlin and finally to Hamburg, where they were vaccinated and their eyes examined before they boarded the steamship, “Pretoria” on November 4.
Fifteen days were spent on board ship in the steerage section crossing the Atlantic during which time the only entertainment was visiting with other passengers and enjoying the ship's band, which played for dances three nights a week. During the voyage, a young man from the "first class” section presented Marie with a banana, the first she had ever seen. They experienced some rough seas during the voyage and several days of seasickness.
The ship docked in the port of New York on November 19, and the immigrants spent a night on Ellis Island, where they tasted their first hamburgers and also were served potatoes and strong tea for supper. They were bedded in a huge room with the men on one side and the women on the other side of a large curtain hung between the two sections, with a restroom on each side. Next day they were sorted according to their destinations by a Czech speaking attendant, taken by boat to the mainland, then to their train by a horse-drawn coach with the curtains drawn so they could not see out. During the train ride across the countryside, they were amazed to see the large herds of pigs and cattle roaming through the fields. The train took them to Chicago where they boarded another train for Clutier, Iowa, the total trip taking two days and nights. Joe Hushak met and drove them by horse and buggy to the Pulkrabek farm, where they arrived just in time for the Thanksgiving feast, a new experience. They were positive they had truly come to the “Land of Plenty."
After spending the winter with her sister's family, Marie lived for three months with the priest's housekeeper in the small house beside the St. Wenceslaus Church in rural Clutier. Then she took a job as a housekeeper for Mr. and Mrs. Henry Sieh. About a year later she worked for the Arthur Wood family and then for the William West family while Mrs. West had a baby. From these employers she learned to speak English, sometimes incorrectly because one family with whom she lived mispronounced words at times. Her favorite employer was her next one, Dr. and Mrs. James A. Pinkerton, who treated her almost as one of the family, and where she spent about three happy years. Then she was employed by the T. F. Clark family for about a year before her marriage.
William B. Nechanicky was born on his parents' farm in Sect. 20, Carroll Twp., Tama Co., Iowa, on September 3, 1883, the son of John and Frances (Yuska) Nechanicky, one of 11 children born to the couple. He attended a rural school in the area and assisted with the farming duties; and at age 19 moved with his parents to the farm in Section 17 of Geneseo Twp., continuing to assist his father. Four years later his mother died here. On February 21, 1911, he was married to Marie E. Stodola at St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church in rural Clutier by the Rev. Father Joseph Gregor. They acquired and began housekeeping on his parents' former farm in Geneseo Twp., his father and remaining children moving to a farm in Perry Twp., the old “Bunker” farm two miles southeast of Traer.
William and Marie had lived five years in the big old farmhouse with rambling porches on their Geneseo farm when it was completely destroyed by fire on December 10, 1916, when their second child, William, was only five days old. "Grandma" Marie Kubik was there assisting the new mother, who was still confined to her bed; and she helped the mother, baby and two-year old son evacuate the home while the men were occupied with fighting the fire. The family stayed with relatives until they could convert a small farm building into suitable living quarters, which they occupied while the new house was being built, from April to nearly the end of that year. Marie cooked meals for six carpenters and six masons, sometimes all together, while the new home was being built. The workmen slept on cots and beds in the corncrib and the tractor shed on the farm.
Throughout her lifetime Marie prepared and served many meals for annual threshing rings, silo fillers, and other harvest helpers; and she was renowned for her culinary ability. Kolaches, poppy seed rolls, and houska were usually available for holiday feasts and often other times of the year. Until her later years, she baked all the bread, both white and rye, and many rolls, doughnuts, listy (she called them platsitchky [sp.?]), cookies, cakes, pies, etc. Her soup creations were endless and delicious. Everything was made without a recipe -- just by taste, feel, and appearance.
In addition to Marcel and William, three other children were born on this farm -- Mildred, Celia, and Robert -- and all attended Geneseo Consolidated School, several miles east, riding school buses every day and packing sack lunches. A few times when the snowdrifts were deep, a bobsled hauled the children to and from school.
In the spring of 1943 William and Marie purchased and moved to a large home in Traer, and their son, Marcel, and his family moved onto the farm. William who had suffered for years from asthma, died suddenly of a heart attack at age 63 on July 4, 1947; and Marie continued to occupy the home until she was paralyzed by a stroke in 1975. She entered the Sunrise Hill Care Center in Traer where she died of cardiopulmonary arrest due to pneumonia three years later at the age of 90. She and William are buried in St. Wenceslaus Cemetery in rural Clutier, Carroll Twp., Tama County, Iowa.
by Cecilia Scott
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