September 1999 Volume 3 Issue 6
September 1999 Volume 3 Issue 6
Birthdays & Wedding Anniversaries
Dies und Das
Four New Kids make 57
A Silent Summer by Jim Schwenk
Bridge Celebration by Earl W. Schwenk
A Word from Uncle Don
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1. Carla Schwenk Long of Astoria, OR turns 34.
Want to see how these and other Kids are related to you? Click here for those who descended from John Schwenk and his immigrant siblings. Click here for all others. Want to see pictures of most of these 57 Kids? (207 KB).
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Editors' note: The underlined names are Konrad's Kids.
Christine Schwenk Moore and husband Richard of Boise, ID visited
Amsterdam, Holland during the last week in August...JoAnn Schwenk Carlson
of White Bear Lake, MN has a new computer and email address...Maurla
Haehlen White of Herndon, VA reports she visited Dettingen/Erms near
Stuttgart in July where her immigrant gg-grandmother Maria Agnes Schwenk
Baumeister was born in 1830, the sister of John Schwenk, immigrant. She
stayed at the Löwen Inn while there. She and her fellow travelers
also visited Mundingen and ate lunch at the Hirsch Inn which was once owned
by Conrad Schwenk and wife Felicitas Breymayer, the grandparents of Maria
and John. Just a few miles south of there on the Danube River, they visited
tiny Neuberg where Maria and her siblings grew up in the 1840s and 1850s.
The Hirsch Inn was filled to capacity, and so Maula lodged that night in
Bad Buchau, south of Mundingen. Maurla's attempt to locate living Baumeister
kin in Buchay on the south side of the Danube, reportedly the birthplace
of her gg-grandfather Pankratius Baumeister, proved unsuccessful...Nikki
Schwenk Cartney and children of Pittsburgh, PA returned home safely
after a 45 day automobile journey to the Western States...Irene Rehse
of Laichingen, Germany has been serving as an email distribution
center for Don Schwenk in that she has recently printed
and delivered numerous email and photographs to Heinrich Schwenk, the father
of Michael Schwenk. If we could just get Heinrich online! She also
reports that she and husband Dieter vacationed in Nauders, Austria
just a few kilometers from the Italian border. On the 11th of August, Dieter
hired a mountain climbing guide to accompany him and a friend to the top
of Bergkastelspitze, a peak some 9300 ft. in elevation. Just as they reached
the top, the expected total eclipse of the sun occurred. Irene said this
was a very moving experience for Dieter. Meanwhile, she walked through
the village of Nauders and observed the people and animals reacting to
this rare celestial event...Charlene Laur Soos near Niagara Falls
now has in her Family Tree Program the entire Schwenk Family Tree file
(8900 + individuals) which was successfully transmitted via email attachment
(3.3 MB) by Don Schwenk in August. She then merged that file with her Laur
Tree file, bringing the total number of related kin to more than 10,000.
She is a family historian par excellence! As an aside, she is a half 5th
cousin, once removed, to Gerd Schwenk of Laichingen...Anyone desiring
a list of the email addresses of all 57 Kids please contact your
editors...Rodney Schwenk and wife Jacki of Boise, ID played host
to his father Don and distant cousin Ursula "Uschi" Gorzelany on
August 29th where they lodged for the night before Uschi boarded a plane
the following day for the return trip home to her hamlet of Kochstetten
near Mundingen. The hosts served a wonderful homemade dinner of spagetti.
Rodney's brothers Gordon and Marvin joined in and helped entertain
their distant cousin Uschi (4th, 3x removed)...t-online.de
email
subscribers in Germany can "read" backgrounds and formatting, but cannot
send these...Last month, we asked you, Have you marked your calendar
for the Schwenk Reunion to be held in the Black Hills of South Dakota on
June 27-28, 2002? WRONG! Please change
the year to 2001. Sorry about that!...Douglas
Lauer (a new Kid) of Duluth, GA is President of Link Information Systems,
part of Allied Holdings, Link Information Systems in Decatur, GA.
His employer has a Website where you can see a picture of Doug and learn
a little about his work: http://www.alliedholdings.com/Subsidiaries/Default.htm
...
Four New Kids make 57
| As of the end of August, the number of known online descendants
of Konrad Schwenk, 1601-86, now stands at 57. These four new kin were not
discovered, but rather were online and this fact simply came to our attention.
You
can check out your kinship connection to them by taking the links provided
in the Birthday column above.
Heidi Carlson was born in 1968, is single and lives in the St.
Paul, MN area.
If anyone desires a list of the email addresses of all 57 Konrad's Kids, please contact your editors. |
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A Silent Summer by Jim Schwenk
It was my last week of school in May of 1954. I was 13 and continually growing up on a small farm on the outskirts of Hudson, Wisconsin (just 20 miles east of St. Paul, Minnesota). After the last day of school, Mom told me some very exiting news. My cousin Wayne from St.Paul would be spending a lot of time with us this summer. This was great news, for I had become almost an only child, since my brother, Dick and sister, JoAnn had graduated from high school last year and were not apt to be around much. Wayne was 12 years old, and the thought of a younger brother to play with was like a dream come true!
Wayne was the son of my mom's twin brother Vernon, who lived in St. Paul. Vernon and my Mom (Vivian) were the closest brother and sister I was ever to see in all my life. It was said that as twins, they even had their own special language that none of their family could understand. They continued speaking with their own foreign tongue until they went off to the 1st grade. That, I remember thinking, was really neat! Forestalling the use of real English complicated Uncle Vern's early years in school, but mom was around to help him out. I didn't know much about my cousin Wayne, for he had never been to a family reunion or any kind of family get-together.
Finally, the day of Wayne's first over-night! Vern was a truck driver and owned a Mack diesel that had an impressive plaque inside the cab that told of the truck having a million miles on the engine. Needless to say, he was gone a lot! Mom waited until the moment that Vern and Wayne drove up in 8-wheeler to tell me that I might be surprised that my cousin had this problem of talking very little to children, and not at all to adults. He was shy, and I should be patient with him and give him some time to get used to new people and surroundings.
Mom and Vern talked by the big Mack truck as it idled and Wayne and
I went off to explore the yard and the farm. No, he didn't talk much.
He didn't even try to talk when I asked him a question. I showed
him the kittens, cows, my white horse Lady, and let him swing on the big
rope in the haymow. He had a big grin and often laughed at most anything.
This laugh, at least, let me know that he was happy with what he saw around
him and it produced a comforting feeling in me; yet I asked myself what
he could be nervously laughing about.
So this was Wayne's first night with us. And as we watched Uncle Vern's rig raise dust on Carmichael Road, Mom told me to keeps howing Wayne around and she was going to get supper ready. My Dad drove in with his milk delivery truck and hopped out to meet Wayne. My Dad (Lloyd) had his usual good-natured teasing comments to make and tried to help our guest relax, but found little response other than shy grins and giggles. At supper time everyone dug in hungrily to the great big hot dish that mom put before us. There was plenty of milk and bread to go with it and tapioca pudding for dessert. Wayne could not find one thing to eat on the table. I could see that Mom was a bit surprised and frustrated. I was always told to try a little bit of something if I wasn't sure I liked it. Mom withheld this suggestion to Wayne and quietly offered other alternatives from the fridge and the cupboard. As I remember, Wayne went to bed with me that night with two folded bread slices and butter in his stomach.
The next day Uncle Vern arrived for Wayne in the forenoon. His run had been short and he was pleased that all had went well during the overnight. We would see Wayne again for all of next week. After they had left Mom was in the kitchen looking through her St.Croix County Homemakers Cook Book. She was muttering something to herself as she sat at the table with the book she, herself, had helped edit. "There must be something that kid will eat! ". She looked up and told me that it was about time for me to clean my room again, so that it was at least presentable for company. I asked, "All of it?" Her very silence told me, Yes !
She was right, the room was a mess! Well if I had to clean it, so what? I kept telling myself I had to find something that would keep Wayne busy when he was so quiet. Isn't funny that when you meet someone who is quiet, you suddenly think you should keep him entertained. This was the early '50's and television was around, but we were not blessed with one yet. So without a tool like that, I was on my own and it was probably just as well. I had to depend on the things I had in my room that might catch his fancy, for I had no idea of what he liked to do. I looked at the scattered parts of my 12 th plastic model car on my worktable and suddenly found myself automatically rubbing my fingers together to see if there was still any glue on them. Was he into this stuff?
In the corner was a three foot stack of Boys Life which my older Brother Dick had accumulated through all of his years in Boy Scouts. I knew there must be activities in these that would really get him going. Even handier than these magazines was my stack of "Straight Arrow" cards on my night table. Insights into the crafts of Indians for centuries past. I had saved every card that Nabisco Shredded Wheat had ever slipped inside a box of cereal and I had forced fed myself to eat enough of those little bales of straw to fill our hay loft! Surely he could see the value of these!
I tugged at the drawer of the night table and managed to get it open enough to survey all of my mail-order decoder rings, decoder cards, and instructions that I had sent for through the years, from the Green Hornet, Sky King, Seargent Preston of the Yukon, Jack Armstrong; you name it! These in themselves were small icons representing much of my patience and fortitude in dealing with the world of ordering by mail. It totally amazed me that it took at least 5 weeks for the order to be received and processed and get back to my house.. Five stinkin' weeks to get from General Mills in St. Paul. 20 miles away! To this day, I cannot shake the disappointment that I felt returningf rom the mailbox each day and finding nothing that resembled a package. After so long a time of waiting, I wasn't sure what I was getting when I did open it! Perhaps this was some sort of surprise feature that only General Mills knew about. For me it was Christmas all over again! In the stillness of my room, with Mom still grumbling and mumbling downstairs, I felt myself prepared with this kind of reserve of activities. I was ready for my cousin Wayne's return.
When Wayne did arrive next Monday to stay not one week, but for the whole summer, I was set to try my tactics of "what are you interested in", but Mom had other plans. Plans that involved gruelling work for all three of us in the one-acre sweet corn patch. The young plants were just coming up and we had to follow Mom and make sure that they were cultivated so we didn't have to fight the quack grass for the rest of the summer. I imagined Wayne thinking he had been banished to some sort of prison camp until school started again in the fall. After two hours in the hot afternoon sun, Mom and I were both happy to find out that Wayne's favorite cool drink was lemonade! It just happened that Mom took another chance and offered us grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for lunch. Wayne ate every bite and took seconds on the grilled cheese. I can still see the big smile on Mom's face when she placed it on his plate.
As for the rest of the summer when we weren't helping out around the farm, I found that I hardly had to resort to anything in my room to keep Wayne happy. It worked out that he and I were inherently very pretentious cousins. I don't mean pretentious in the way that some folks think . . . ."putting on airs". No, I'm talking about two cousins who got a big kick out of pretending. In the summer of 1954 we fought several battles of the American Civil War, "The Battle of Little Big Horn" 'til we were blue in the face, and rescued, I don't know how many folks, from a melting glacier in July. You see, we had both spent our early years in front of a radio on Saturday mornings listening to broadcasts of "Let's Pretend". I usually made up the story line and gave Wayne the words that he had to say while he handed out the weapons to be used. He was a fast learner and played his part very well!
Yes, Wayne talked to me, but continued to be shy with adults. Before each noon meal, Mom would take me aside and whisper in my ear. "Find out what he wants to eat!" I would then return to the living room and checked with Wayne whether grilled cheese and tomato soup was the only thing that he wanted, or did he want something else. I was always the interpreter when it came to negotiations with adults. We ate (or watched him eat) a lot of grilled cheese and tomato soup that summer!
But all was not lost for Wayne and his communication. He had to learn to talk on his own. I couldn't keep putting words in his mouth and it was usually nerve-wracking for me to have to cover for him with other people. I was totally thrown into the world of empathy and I sometimes wonder if I ever really left it after that summer with him. However, as the long summer progressed I found myself not having to tell him everything to say. Necessity can be a very strong force. Besides being the "mother of invention", necessity alone, can cause someone to have to speak for himself.
When you harness or put a saddle on a horse you must tell the horse that you are there. If you don't, you risk being thought of as a fly and get a 500 lbs. kick in the leg or find the same amount of weight pressing down on your right foot should the horse casually put it there. At the risk of totally being maimed, you say, "Whoa Lady." "I'm here Lady." "That's OK Lady." Some reassurance to the horse and to announce that you are there. This Wayne did!
When the sweet corn grew high enough and had beautiful ears Wayne and I hitched Lady to the buckboard wagon and drove it to town and sold dozens door to door. We made a game of it. How fast could we empty that buckboard and how much money could we make that day? When I was busy, Wayne had to get himself to a house and ask the lady how many dozen she wanted, deliver it, and make change by telling her the exact amount of change she had coming back to her. Just like Mom told us to do so we didn't screw up. This, Wayne could do! (Incidentally, the best part of the late July corn season was that Wayne decided that it went very well with grilled cheese and tomato soup. Mom and I were really happy now! )
The day that my Dad came storming out of the house to look with us helplessly at the tractor radiator spew and drip anti-freeze, was also a moment of necessity! We had been "plinking" with Dick's 22 rifle at tomato soup cans lined up on the water pipe going from our windmill to the cistern. In our blind, excited stupidity we didn't realize that the small, innocent Allis-Chalmer tractor was the backstop for all of this shooting. Knowing full well that we were as stupid as everyone said we were, Wayne looked at the tears flowing from my eyes through his own tearful eyes and admitted vocally that yes, it sure was stupid and chorused with me with many "Were sorry!" "We didn't know that could happen . . . . . . . " Our most traumatic day of the summer and unfortunately never to be forgotten by ourselves or anyone else.
One day in late July my Uncle Milt Schwenk (Dad's younger brother) stopped
to pay us a visit on his way back from the Detroit Lions' training camp.
He was an "All American" football star at Washington State who had
been drafted that year to play with the Lions. Needless to say, Wayne and
I were totally awestruck when he tossed the football around with us.
We were truly amazed at the size of this guy! His neck was the size of
our 97 lbs. waists! A real friendly sort of guy and a hero that we got
to know real fast! The second night that Milt was there, the whole family
went off to our favorite place to swim. Perch Lake. A clear little lake
north of our farm and known as "bottomless". It was dusk and not
really enough light. The lake did not have a gradual kind of beach,
but had its drop-offs. We were all in the water having a great old
time. I was swimming along and suddenly I heard a terrible, thrashing sound
like a huge fish coming out of the water behind me. It wasn't a fish
at all, but Wayne thrashing the water and Uncle Milt fighting with him,
pulling him straight out of the water, and reassuring him that he wasn't
drowning. No one had told Wayne about the drop offs! He would
surely have drowned if Milt hadn't been the one to see him and pull him
out. A close call to say the least! Was Wayne able to tell
you about it afterward? YOU BETTCHA! Just ask him; even to
this day. If you were a kid or even an adult, he could tell you how he
felt in the throes of drowning and how thankful he was for being rescued.
I'm not sure you will find a speech therapist in the world that will recommend
to a parent that he throw his child into a lake to cure a speech problem.
In Wayne's case, maybe it just happened to be the time when all things
began to come together and he wanted to tell everybody about it.
Bridge Celebration by Earl W. Schwenk
Editors note: In 1979, my father put to paper many short, short stories. These were memories of his youth. He called these Some of my Yesterdays. He passed away in 1991 at the age of 80. In 1995 and in memory of him, I self-published this collection of stories. Below is one of those. He was then age 14 and living in Chamberlain, South Dakota. Don Schwenk.
BRIDGE CELEBRATION
As I have stated before in some of my recordings,
we were living at Chamberlain, which is located on the Missouri River.
Prior to 1925 there were no bridges crossing the Missouri River in the
whole state. The bridge at Chamberlain was completed in the summer of 1925
and a big gala celebration was planned dedicating the bridge to be held
in about August of 1925. A great program was planned. Lots
of people attended this from the East and from the West, and they came
by the droves in their old model T's, teams, or what have you.The town
was overflowing with people..and Indians.
Some of the highlights of this bridge celebration,
as I remember it, was the parade that they had. Incidentally, the
celebration lasted three days as I recall. They had the bands and
the Indians and they had cowboys and school bands and ..you name it!
One thing that stood out in my mind particularly, that I remember very
vividly, was a team of buffalo that was hitched to a two -wheeled cart,
built just like a chariot, like they drove in the Roman days. This
team was trained when they were young, and they were driven just like a
team of oxen, with a yoke; they were owned by Clyde Jones who was from
the western part of the state, out in the Black Hills area.. from Rapid
City.. and he had been a former rodeo bronc buster and was very good at
this sort of thing. He had lots of patience, apparently, for training
a team of buffalo to drive. And they were in the parade. This
stands out in my memory very vividly.
Well, one of the highlights of the celebration was
a big rodeo which was held over on what they called American Island which
was in the middle of the Missouri River. It was quite a good sized
island. There was a rodeo grounds over there and one of the events
that impressed me, besides the bronc riding, was the event of cowboys trying
to ride buffalo. Now this was the day when they didn't have Brahma
bulls that were crossed with Brahma and Black Angus, that were very vicious
and are noted for their bucking ability. They had brought in some
buffalo from Fort Pierre where they raised buffalo on a buffalo ranch.
Some of these cowpunchers were attempting to ride buffalo. There
was not one single cowpuncher that could stay with 'em and qualify.
They were wicked. You don't see this done anymore, but in those days
they were attempting to ride buffalo.
And another thing that stands out in my recollection ...
one of the highlights of the celebration--was a re-enactment of Custer's
Battlefield, Custer's Last Stand, it was called. There west of the
Missouri River, they had mapped out an area for a battlefield. They
had employed a lot of local people to represent the cavalry, and they were
all dressed in uniforms of the cavalry of this particular period back in
1876..or whenever it was if you remember ... or do you remember?
Do you recollect, should I say. Anyway, this was filmed, and the Sioux
Indians from the reservation that came in from Rosebud and from Crow Creek
and from Cheyenne and so forth. There were lots of Indians at this
celebration that were camped there. They were the opposing battalion
that annililated all of Custer's men. I guess the only thing left
was a horse. It was really quite an event. Well, we got to
see a little bit of it. After it was filmed they showed this in the
theater after it was finished and, of course, the name of it was Custer's
Last Stand. And since these days of 1925, twice in recent years,
Mabel and I have been privileged to stop at the memorial in Montana and
visit Custer's Battlefield where all those soldiers were killed, and it's
truly quite a sight.
It was shortly after the bridge celebration that
we moved to Rapid City, that fall in October, and many, many things happened
in the coming years while we were out there in the Black Hills Area.
A Word from Uncle Don
Note: The words in blue color and underlined are links to photos or descent trees. Please don't overlook clicking on these.
During the month of August, I was priveleged to play host to Schwenk cousins from the Stuttgart-Ulm region here at my home in South-Central Idaho. I took many photographs of them with my digital camera, and then sent many of those to some of you. In the hope that the rest of you will find these interesting, I want to share some of these with you.
My first guest was 16 yr. old Uschi Gorzelany who arrived here on August 2nd (That link will show her kinship connection to our Konrad). We had met in June, 1996 during my brief visit to Kochstetten and then became penpals which ultimately led to her visit here. This was her first visit to America and the first time she was to be away from her family for more than a couple days at one time. She stayed with me for four weeks and kept this old man very busy playing tour guide. We made excursions in this part of Idaho nearly every day. Some of those destinations were Craters of the Moon, The Sawtooths Mountains in Stanley, paddleboating in Redfish Lake, the lookout station on nearby Bell Mountain, a 4000 cow dairy farm near Jerome, Shoshone Falls by Twin Falls - to mention a few. Toward the end of the month, we took a four day trip to Glacier and Yellowstone (157 K collage) National Parks, a 1550 mile loop.
She is such a remarkable young woman. Very mature for her age. She did not wait to be entertained; She would hike the mountains around my house, ride the bicycle into Hailey and volunteer a day's labor at the local animal shelter, saddle up my mare and ride her to the Wood River 2 miles west of here and then ford the river, forcing Sunny to swim for her life; Other times, she would ride bareback up or down the canyon. One day, she rode the bicycle up to Ketchum, a 19 mile stretch on a paved bike path. She picked pie cherries at the neighbors, Tom and Jan Farr, then baked two cherry pies. One evening, she made homemade Spätzle (Swabia's favorite noodle dish) and served this on the front porch. Such boundless energy!
Most of the time, she spoke to me in German with a considerable amount of Schwabian dialect mixed in. I spoke mostly English to her, switching to my broken German when neccessary. At times, she would begin a sentence in English, then complete it in her native tongue. And I sometimes did the same - in reverse. What this comes down to is a "strain on the brain" when speaking in a foreign language - unless one is accustomed to this. All in all, it was a memorable, wonderful 28 day experience for each of us.
On August 18th, Michael Schwenk (take this link to his descent from our Konrad), his wife Maike, her brother Jens Ulmer, his girl friend Daniela Frank and a mutual friend Steffen Ciborovius, all from Laichingen, arrived here during a 2-3 week tour of the Western States. They all speak English quite well, and so we conversed mostly in English. By this time, I had pretty much run out of bed space - although I have a sofa sleeper in the living room. Three of them opted to camp out on the front porch rather than sleep indoors. Here is a photo taken of all seven of us by the front porch and pond.
Michael and fellow travelers had visited the Southwest and Yellowstone before arriving here, and prefered to simply take it easy and do laundry rather than go see the local sights. On the 19th, most of them drove to Hailey and ate a bite at Shorty's, a 50's-style restaurant owned by Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. Michael stayed home and enlightened me on some of the finer points of zipping (compressing) files. While doing that, we sent my Schwenk Tree FTM file (via attachment) to his work address in Stuttgart along with the Family Tree Maker program. And don't ask me how he did that!
Early on the morning of the 20th, they headed west for Crater Lake, Oregon. Then on the 22nd, they arrived at the home of Kyle and Beth Schwenk in Warrenton, Oregon, next to Astoria where they spent two nights. Here is a photo of them enjoying a fine meal there at the Kyle Schwenk home. They then headed down the Oregon Coast to the Los Angeles area where they had rented the van for these travels. If their travel plans remained unchanged, they would have arrived in Stuttgart today, August 31, the same day Uschi arrived there. And so ends this report of a wonderful visit by some really great cousins from S. Germany.
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