Jacob Shutek 1893-1971
I remember when I was a very little girl asking him "What was it like in Slovakia?" I was so curious to know about a land long ago and far away. What was it like? What things did they eat? What things did they wear? Why did he come to America? But the man my cousins and I called "Bubba" just looked at me and when I looked in his eyes, it seemed like I saw deep happiness and sadness mixed together. He smiled gently at me, then turned his head, and began speaking to my father about something entirely different. That was the way it was. The old people never talked about the old country, unless it was a quick conversation in Slovak, then it was over. I will always remember him in my uncle's house, sitting in a chair in the corner of a living room, putting together his gigantic puzzles on a folding table as we played our games and the grownups talked in the kitchen, sharing their weekly news. I remember when he passed away. I can't really say that I ever knew him, but I knew he was known and loved by many, that he and the host of characters that lived in the nearby villages within the city paid respects to him at their funeral. And though he said very little he had made an impact on the place we lived. Hushed voices would whisper to each other "Do you know who that is coming up to his casket? Did you see the tears in his eyes?" I had the feeling that all of them... friends and "frenemies" alike, were mourning the loss of a generation of unsung heroes who would die with the stories of the little villages they founded, leaving an even more mysterious "old country" to lay in a clouded, misty past that seemed impossible to ever find again.
Mary Buchko 1904-1943
This was the grandma I never knew, she died young, when my father was not yet a teen. To look at her now, it is easy to sense adventure in her eyes, but I would not realize how much adventure. Her short life would take this young girl out of a large family barely finishing school in a Chicago Suburb, to a place in Appalachia. A place where no electricity or running water existed and coal fueled the furnaces of the few homes existing on that side of the hill. For over 21 years she would call this place home, friends and neighbors becoming family, till the day she was laid to rest, leaving a grieving husband and two young sons to carry on without her. Not really ever finding pictures of her until I was in my thirties, I would gasp as I looked at what seemed to be a mirror. When I confronted my parents, they said that, yes, your Dad's side always noticed a resemblance between you and his Mother.
