LEVINE:

This is Janet Levine and I'm here today at the Ellis Island studio. I'm here with Luby Wuchina, who came from Yugoslavia at age six in 1927. Today is August 15, 1992. I'm very happy that you were able to make this trip.

WUCHINA:

Thank you so much.

LEVINE:

So I could talk with you today. And I want to start out by asking you where you were born and your birth date.

WUCHINA:

I was born on September 16, 1921 in the village of Sv. Jana, Yugoslavia.

LEVINE:

Could you spell Sv. Jana, please?

WUCHINA:

S-V, period, J-A-N-A. It means St. Anna.

LEVINE:

Okay. And you came here at six years old. Did you live in Sv. Jana the entire time before you left for America?

WUCHINA:

Yes. I was born there, and my father had already left for America. I was born two months after he had left. I lived with my father's mother and father and my mother. That was our new home.

LEVINE:

What was your, well, what was your full name as a child?

WUCHINA:

My name as a child was Ljubica Toncic Wuchina, my married name is Wuchina.

LEVINE:

Could you spell your whole name?

WUCHINA:

L-J-U-B-I-C-A. Toncic is T-O-N-C-I-C.

LEVINE:

Okay. So you stayed with your father's mother?

WUCHINA:

Yes, with his parents. Usually when they marry the bride goes to the groom's home.

LEVINE:

That was typical.

WUCHINA:

It was very typical and that's how she makes her home with her husband's family.

LEVINE:

I see. So even if your father had been there, both your mother and father would have made their home with his family.

WUCHINA:

Yes, yes.

LEVINE:

And what was their name?

WUCHINA:

My father's name was Andrea, or Andrew.

LEVINE:

And your grand . . .

WUCHINA:

My mother's name was Fanika. She's the one with whom I came.

LEVINE:

And how do you spell hers?

WUCHINA:

F-A-N-I-K-A.

LEVINE:

Okay. And how about your father's mother and father's name?

WUCHINA:

My grandmother's name was Sophia Toncic, T-O-N-C-I-C. her husband's name, it was her second husband, actually. My father's step-father. But he's the only one I knew and I loved him. His name was Janko, Janko Simonic. J-A-N-K-O, S-I-M-O-N-I-C.

LEVINE:

And do you, do you remember them? What do you remember about your grandparents?

WUCHINA:

I remember my grandfather so kindly, much more vividly than my grandmother. My grandmother was more reserved and stoic. She was good to me, but he was the, I suppose the father-image that I never had.

LEVINE:

Can you remember any experiences with your grandfather?

WUCHINA:

Oh, I remember how he didn't let me wander and I always wanted to sneak off to my small girlfriends who lived, oh, just maybe a block or so away. But it was very sparsely populated. We lived in a village. In Europe you live in small village complexes, and your lands are away from the villages. So this little girl lived probably farther than a house next door, and I always wanted to sneak out to play with her. And I, he caught me, he caught me. There was a road below our yard and our, uh, household, oh, well, our yard. Below our property there was a road there. It's a public road and it led to her house. Always I would sneak back that way and he never made it, never made it. He always spotted me. I never saw him, but he spotted me.

LEVINE:

Did he ever tell you stories or . . .

WUCHINA:

Well, I had a little dog. His name was Bandush, and that's a first. Over there you don't have too many domestic animals. You have them running loose, but they're actually not pets. But this little dog became my pet. His name was Bandush, and I just loved him. When I was bad, doing something I shouldn't have, he would always threaten to chop off his tail, so he'd get his little hatchet and he'd come to me. And he says, "If you didn't behave I'll chop off his tail." And I, of course I always behaved after that, for a while. ( they laugh )

LEVINE:

How do you spell Bandush?

WUCHINA:

B-A-N-D-U-S-H.

LEVINE:

Okay. And what about your mother? What was your mother like? Is that Sophie?

WUCHINA:

No. Her name is Fanika.

LEVINE:

What was Fanika like?

WUCHINA:

She was no disciplinarian. She let me get away with murder. She's the one that did most of the field work. Usually the grandmothers stayed at home, did more cooking, and she worked in the fields with her, with her hired hands. And she did most of the marketing, that is, taking the stuff that we had grown to the markets. So she was, my caretakers actually were my grandparents, my grandfather especially. My grandmother was a midwife, so she was busy in that way. She wasn't home as often. But she took me with her sometimes on her visits. If somebody was dying she was there to console and to give the last blessings. So I remember her on more solemn occasions. But my grandfather was there constantly.

LEVINE:

Now, a midwife in Sv. Jana was not just delivering babies, I take it?

WUCHINA:

Well, yes. She wasn't a professional, so to speak, in today's language. She also had, she would heal. She would have, she would give massages and she would heal the spirit, so to speak.

LEVINE:

Do you remember any times when you were with her specifically?

WUCHINA:

I remember when one particular cousin, he was an old man, while he was dying. I remember very well. It was a house not too far from us. She, it was her cousin, and we were there on his, it was before the wake because he hadn't died yet, and he was in delirium. And to me he was so funny, the words he was saying, they weren't true. So I was impressed by, in a funny way, what he was saying. But she says that we can't laugh, that it, that his soul is going to leave. And that was, it wasn't frightful at all. And then another time a very near neighbor, a house that was even closer to us, a woman died, and she, I remember my mother and I ran. Well, they came to get my mother and my grandmother. My grandmother wasn't at home, so my mother went down, and we saw her dead, just as she died in her, in bed. She was in a sitting position with her head stooped over. And she was getting cold already while they, the women, the villagers, they took care of their dead. They washed her and they laid her out, they laid them out on the bed. And then they, until the casket was made. The burial was usually the next day, because there was no embalming. But I remember very well seeing this woman, and I was three, because I was born in 1921, and a subsequent visit to Sv. Jana, one of my mother's old friends and neighbors told me the year this woman died. So she died in 1924, so that made me three. And I always wondered whether it was true that I did remember it was I did, and it was. They corroborated.

LEVINE:

You have a very good memory very early.

WUCHINA:

I suppose because life was so different, it was such a drastic change from what, life as I knew it when I was six. So you, and there was a yearning and a longing always after you left. And I suppose that's why the memory becomes more vivid.

LEVINE:

Yes. Well, do you remember what you were told about death as a child?

WUCHINA:

It was very accepted in villages. We always saw our animals die and we, the funerals were just, it was almost, it was a weekly occurrence. Somebody would die, some old person would die. When a young person died, one little boy was sled-riding and he had gotten hurt and he died because of that sled-riding incident. Well, that impressed me because I was never allowed to go sled-riding after that. But the funerals, they carried the casket to our church, which was probably a mile from our village. And always after the casket and the processional, the mourners, passed our house, my grandmother would always get a little pail of water and would throw the water into the road after they passed so that the soul would rest in peace. That I remember very well.

LEVINE:

Were you a religious family?

WUCHINA:

We were born Catholic and observed. And over there that's all they had. That was their, their beliefs and their social, their outlets. The church was their whole outlet. There was nothing else but to work, subsistent, peasant farmers. Life was very hard.

LEVINE:

Is that to say that there were no other religions being practiced in your village?

WUCHINA:

No. This is, there were several Jewish families who were as free and liberal and we never really knew the difference. They didn't attend our church. They were the businessmen. They owned the grocery stores and, oh, I don't know. I think one of them, a schoolteacher, my mother's first schoolteacher was Jewish.

LEVINE:

Was there a feeling of harmony or not between . . .

WUCHINA:

Yes. They're never, never anything discussed about religion except there were, in the neighboring, maybe ten miles away from Sv. Jana there was a neighboring village who were Greek Catholics. They celebrated their Christmas as the Orthodox do now. They weren't the Orthodox, but they were Greek Catholics. The difference was the head of their church wasn't the pope. Otherwise they, our church accepted them and they accepted us. So they, that was the only difference. We called them Vlas. They were probably a different tribe and they didn't accept the Julian calendar when it was changed centuries ago. So we were the Roman Catholic. They were the Greek Catholics. That's the only difference. We were very homogeneous. Most of us were Croatian.

LEVINE:

Now, you say you were peasant farmers?

WUCHINA:

Yes, we were.

LEVINE:

What did that mean as far, how was that set up?

WUCHINA:

That means it was subsistent farming, mainly. They did have a money crop which was vineyards. They sold grapes for wine making. And that was actually their only source of money unless someone had family who had immigrated to the United States, and they sent money home. That was mostly the reason why people left there, because it was so hard. If you had a large family the oldest son got the home, the homestead. And the youngest would have to either marry well into a girl's family who had no male heirs or it's just, they never, they just lived. So the cash crop was usually the vineyards. They did market garden products or fruit if they had it, in season. Those were short-lived summer money makers, fall, when the harvest was, in the fall. Eggs, my grandmothers went to the city to sell eggs. And they made, they all, everybody had a cow or cows, and they had pigs. So they, she also made cheeses, and they made their own jams from plum, mostly from plum. Everybody was permitted, there were no alcohol, there were alcoholic drinks, but nothing was restricted. Everybody made their own wine. They made their own plum brandy. It's called slivovitza. They make it today. I still remember them making it in this big wooden casks. And we had the huge wine barrels. We didn't so much make wine for sale, but we did sell grapes, and they would have jobbers from the city and from various areas where they would use our grapes and mix them with different territories. And they were supposed to be very, Sv. Jana had the reputation of having very good grapes because of the topography of the country. It had hilly and had sun, constant sun all day long.

LEVINE:

Did your father, was your father a peasant farmer before he . . .

WUCHINA:

No. My father was, when he first immigrated to America, probably in 19, early 1900's. Because he became a citizen in 1914, and he married briefly in 1918. He married in the United States. And his wife died during the flu epidemic. It was just a short, he was a newlywed, practically, when his wife died. And then in 1920 he was getting, he was lonely, and he was getting, longing to go back home. His parents were still living. He has two sisters there. He wanted to go back home. He thought maybe he would resettle in the United States, in Yugoslavia. So while he was here he worked in clay pipes making sewer pipes. And he worked in the iron and steel mill. He was a laborer here, but he decided to go and resettle in Yugoslavia with his parents when he was, he came back in July, 1920. He met my mother that summer, and they courted for, until January of 1921. They got married. He was already beginning to feel that he had to come back. He took in, he took to the farming as soon as he came home. There was always work to do. And his parents were aged, so he was beginning to see and beginning to get restless that it wasn't as easy as he had thought it would be to resettle. So he, after they were married in 1921 she got married, uh, she got pregnant immediately with me, my mother did. So we, they were planning to leave. He finally decided in the spring to leave for the United States again, to maybe make some more money, and then make more land. Because if you didn't have enough land you simply couldn't grow enough to sell, or to raise your standard of living. So they decided that they would go back to the United States. He knew he could easily get a job again. But my mother was pregnant. It was a difficult pregnancy with me. The doctor warned her that if she would travel with him she might lose her baby. So he left in July of 1921 without her. I was born in September of 1921. So I had never seen him until I came here.

LEVINE:

Well, before we, the start about your trip here. Is there anything else about the town that you would mention? About the house you lived in?

WUCHINA:

Well, the house I lived in was the house my father was born in and his father was born in before him. I don't know how old it could have been. It was, I remember very distinctly what it looked like.

LEVINE:

You do?

WUCHINA:

It had a main hall. And we were one of the few people who had a latrine, but it was attached to the house. It was, one end was the latrine and the other end was where my mother's, my grandmother's pantry was, where she kept all the peckmis, which was plum jelly, and her cheeses. They made hard, it was a cottage cheese base and they hardened it. It was hard as rocks. They were cheeses for home consumption, plus they sold some cheese. Then there was a central hall where they kept their water buckets because they had to, there was no water in the house. It had a public water fountain. I would say about a block away from where we lived. There was running water coming from the hill that was, that had a little grotto with the Blessed Virgin Mary in the wall. And the water ran from a pipe underneath this statue of the Blessed Mother. And it ran into a font where people would get their water that also had a watering trough for the cattle, for the cows. The people would bring the cattle to drink there. This water was constantly running, and that's where we washed our clothes. At home they boiled the clothes and made their own homemade soap, plus wood ash. They used wood ash in big, in big, wooden tubs. And underneath they would put the boiling water and the white clothes. On top they had a burlap sack that covered the clothes underneath. On top they would put the wood ashes. And then they would pour the boiling water that they had heated separately over this wood ash and it would slowly seep over the clean clothes and it would boil there. Just sparkling white. Then they rinsed, they wrung the clothes out, usually sheets and their peasant clothes were almost all white. They did all whites together. It would come sparkling white. They would wring those out by hand. There was no material, no mechanical help to washing clothes. So they would put the wet clothes, wrung-out clothes in wooden tubs, and my mother would carry it on her head down to the public watering fountain. And in this trough where the animals drank but the water was always clean because it was running, she had a big wooden scooped-out. It looked like a bowl. It was large. She had a small one for me. It was called a kurito.

LEVINE:

Could you spell that?

WUCHINA:

I guess it would be K-U-R-I-T-O. And on it the women would slap the clothes. It was sort of, I suppose, like a scrubbing board, but it had no ridges. It was just smooth. And they would rinse the clothes out and they'd dip it into the running water and bring it back into the kurito until it was all rinsed out. And then they wrung it out again and put it in the kurito that was part of the carrying, on the head. The clothes also, it was used as a tub to carry the wrung-out clothes back home. Then they laid the clothes over the hedges and whatever, everything was clean. It really wasn't that dirty. But nothing was paved, but it was very, it was a different type of cleanliness than as we know it. There was no industrial dirt, I suppose I would call it now. So that's how they dried the clothes, over the hedges and fences.

LEVINE:

Was the watering, the place where the water came down, was that a social meeting place?

WUCHINA:

Yes, it was. The women who met to fill their tubs and who washed together, it was. It was lots of comraderie. It was interesting. I loved it. I loved to go wash in my kurito and got all soaking wet, but it didn't matter. Even in the wintertime, unless it was frozen, they brought the clothes down to rinse. At home it was washed, down here it was rinsed.

LEVINE:

And then how would you get the water to the home?

WUCHINA:

They carried it in tubs, in buckets, wooden buckets on, either two together or there were some women who had very good posture. They were able to carry a tub on their heads, and carry two with their hands. So you had to, you always conserved water at home because the more you wasted or used the more often you had to go down to the font. And it usually was the job of the younger women who were stronger to carry the water home.

LEVINE:

Well, now, is there anything else about social life in the village?

WUCHINA:

They had, their big, their holidays. They really revered them. It was a day of rest, plus it was devotion. Like Christmas was happy, as it is here. They, there is no presents, but I remember having a little Christmas tree and we hung apples and walnuts. And my mother made, had shiny colored paper. She would make stars and moons, cut them out, and that was hung around the Christmas tree. Then under the table, usually on Christmas Eve, they had straw under the table to simulate the manger, and usually the kids would like to get under the table in the straw after Christmas was over because before that they respected that that was Jesus' bed. And I have, we would go to, we would visit neighbors and they would visit us on Christmas. And their food, always they're baking for the holidays. Baking nut breads and the strudels.

LEVINE:

Can you think of any dishes that you particularly enjoyed or that your mother made?

WUCHINA:

Oh, I was always a good eater. My grandmother did most of the cooking, but she was very frugal. So I was very happy when my grandmother for some reason wasn't home and my mother could make us our meal. She always used more lard and more butter and more sour cream. We always had those things because we had a cow and we had chickens for eggs. But my grandmother, like I said, she was very frugal and she wanted to take them to market. So when she was gone we had a feast.

LEVINE:

Can you remember anything that your mother made that you particularly liked?

WUCHINA:

Oh, my mother was a very good strudel maker. They both made bread, usually my grandmother. But my mother's mother taught her always to add a little bit of lard to the bread. It would make it lighter and more tasty. We had, oh, there was lots of cornmeal mush because the basic flour was cornmeal. The white flour you usually bought. They also raised their own wheat, so they would thrash wheat. They had wheat flour, too. But that was for company and for holidays, the white flour. Basically every day was cornbread. So they had lots of cornmeal mush with milk, and even coffee. And she was, my mother made very good strudel even when she came here. She was a very good cheese and apple strudel baker. The, they used all manner of garden things for hearty soups like corn, I mean carrots and potatoes. And sour, they made, they had lots of cabbage so they made sauerkraut. And that was a winter staple, the sauerkraut. They made it in big crocks or tubs and they weighed it down with huge rocks, these, and that's how the sauerkraut fermented. And every so often they would lift the cloth that covered the sauerkraut underneath the rock. They'd lift the rock out and then the cloth and re-wash the cloth and wring it out. And clean off the top of the, because it was would get all kinds of crud as it was fermenting. They would clean that all off and do the pressing again so that the sauerkraut became clean and rich and good for the winters. They made wine in the fall, and that was interesting, too, with their presses. And their wines, they had all the grapes in big tubs. And usually a young man who had healthy feet, he'd wash them real carefully and he would stomp the grapes to get most of the juice out before they put the rest of the grape residue under presses. And they would press it until all the juice came out of the grapes and the clean running grapes was called the first pressing was called most, which would be M-O-S-T. And that was so sweet. That was very sweet before the wine had turned into alcohol. It had no alcohol at this point. I used to drink a lot of that. And then after it aged, I don't think they added sugar. They prided themselves on never having to add sugar to their grapes because their grapes were so good. They were full of sunshine. So the wine that came from their grapes was always pure and clean. So that was their selling point, I guess. ( she laughs )

LEVINE:

Okay. Well, I think we'll pause here while we turn the tape over.

WUCHINA:

Okay. All right. END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE BEGINNING OF SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE

LEVINE:

We're resuming now. I'm with Luby Wuchina and we're talking about the town of Sv. Jana. Let's see. Is there anything else before we talk about coming to America? How about your little friend? What did you play together?

WUCHINA:

We played, I had a little friend who was about two years younger than I was. She was my, she was the closest neighbor and I would say she was my closest friend. We played baby dolls together and we had, on Halloween they would dress us up. But we celebrated Halloween on March before Easter. It wasn't really, it was called Fashneck. But we did what people do here on Halloween. We dressed up and she and I went house to house wishing everybody, we had a little poem that they taught us, and it was a naughty little poem. And so every house got a big laugh when we got through with our poem.

LEVINE:

Can you say it?

WUCHINA:

I never knew what that poem was and that it was naughty until we revisited my village in 1980, my husband and I. And my mother's old friend, the mother of my little girlfriend, she's the one that told me about that little poem that we recited. But I don't know it. I'll have to . . .

LEVINE:

Can you say it in, in . . .

WUCHINA:

No. I don't. I don't remember it all. I just knew how surprised I was to know that it was not, no wonder we got so many laughs.

LEVINE:

Well, so you went around in costume.

WUCHINA:

Yes. They dressed us up as not really costumes, but they would put maybe a scarf over our heads and a, something over our bodies. But it wasn't so much the dress. It was Shrove Tuesday, really. It was religious. And we called it, before Lent began is how it is celebrated now in Louisiana, for instance. It's the last Tuesday before Lent begins. And that's, to me it's just like Halloween is here, which is a feast of All Saints here.

LEVINE:

Were you given candies, or were you given . . .

WUCHINA:

You know, I don't remember. I think so. They must have given us some kind of a treat. Or maybe the laugh and being allowed to go out in the village ourselves was enough of a pleasure.

LEVINE:

Do you remember any little songs or stories that you learned as a child?

WUCHINA:

I've forgotten them. My mother was the type that did teach me lots of little rhymes for every occasion. I had an aunt who had come from America, and she was married in 1926. And when they came home for the dinner at my father's house and my mother had me all dressed up with a ribbon like Miss America from across my chest. It was a flag, the color of the Yugoslav flag, red, white and blue stripe. And I recited, I did a little poem, something about "I was as quiet as a mouse." And that's just about all I can remember, but I was lying on this, prone on a little bench. And when they arrived I was supposed to very dramatically get up and give them a greeting to come home with this little poem. When we were there in 1980 I saw that little bench is still there and I, it was a very eerie feeling.

LEVINE:

Well, let's see. How was it decided that you and your mother would then come to America?

WUCHINA:

My father had been sent, after he got here my mother was reluctant to leave because her parents were getting old and his parents were getting old. And she was really the head of the household now in his home. She hated to leave. She thought maybe they could make it together if he, if they purchased more land. And he did. He sent money home, quite a bit of money. They purchased much more land, and they probably would have done better if he had come back. But the longer he stayed away, the less he wanted to come back. He would rather work in the clay mills or in the steel mill, which he now did, than go back and face the difficult subsistence of just farming and probably no income from America any more. If he had gone back, it would have been permanent. So they were discussing that she should come and join him rather than his coming back. Now, his parents didn't want her to leave. They were old, and they thought, it was the son, the oldest son's, Judy and his wife to take care of them until their old age. But they were, had to think about themselves. And my mother was getting very uncomfortable being without him for six years. So they decided that he had enough money saved that he could pay for her passage and start a home together here.

LEVINE:

Do you remember what you had heard or what you thought about America before you left your village?

WUCHINA:

Well, I'd, it's so abstract, what a child thinks about a different country. I didn't so much think about the country. Mostly I thought about this man who was my father, and I really didn't even know what a father was. So I used to sing little stories about how I would, on this same bench in this vestibule of our house I would sit there by myself and sing, make up little stories and sing them about how I would travel to see my father. And about the ship, that I would go on a ship. And I had no idea what an ocean was or the ship. So my idea of a ship and the ocean first, that it was a wide stream. And the ship was, I conjured up sort of a little raft, and I thought that we would be in the middle of this raft, and either side we could reach shore. So when I saw the ocean and I saw the ship it was unbelievable. It was all different from my imagination.

LEVINE:

Did you go to school at all?

WUCHINA:

No. I was six years old in September, and I would have started school that September. But since we were leaving in October my mother felt it wasn't, there wasn't any use to send me to school. I regret it now. When we came back in 1980 one former, he would have. He was a playmate, too. He would have been, we would have been, started to school together. His birthday was in August and mine was in September. He brought this picture of their first grade picture, and he said, "This is our class, and you would have been in it if you had stayed here." So that, too, was the most eerie feeling to see but for destiny you would have been here instead of where I was. So I never started to school. I didn't know how to read. I knew how to count up to five. I thought it was great. My grandchildren count when they're two.

LEVINE:

Okay. Do you remember taking leave of your grandparents and the village?

WUCHINA:

Yes. That was very exciting. As time was approaching I knew we were leaving. I had no idea, no inkling what it really was, that we would go and never come back again. But they had a party the night before, and I was a precocious kid. And I picture myself as I was then.

LEVINE:

Describe how you were then. That would be . . .

WUCHINA:

Oh, I ran from cousin to cousin, and both grandmothers were together. It wasn't a bit sad. It was a gay time until the next morning. Then a friend came with his horse and buggy to, for my mother and me, and they began putting our suitcases on this wagon. So I, then it was really the last goodbye. It's the first time I realize that this was going to be sad, too. It was the last goodbye and nobody could find my grandfather so that I could kiss him and say goodbye to him. And we looked for him, and I wanted so much to say goodbye to him. And here he was in our barn, and sitting on a little stool in the corner of the barn. He didn't want to have that last goodbye. But I went to him and I kissed him. In 1980 when I came back I went to that corner of that barn and I swore he was sitting on that stool in that corner. So it was very sad, especially when I had to hug and kiss him goodbye. Then we went to a small town in Yaska, which is seven miles away, walking distance. And I walked it many times with my mother. This time we went on the wagon. And we went on a train to a town called Karlovac where, it was about twenty miles away where my aunt lived. Karlovac is K-A-R-L-O-V-A-C. There we stayed with my aunt for a couple of days because she had to take us shopping to Zagreb, a department store in Zagreb. And there we got all new clothes, American clothes, so that my father could, so that we could fit in and my father would be proud of us when we came. We discarded our peasant clothes.

LEVINE:

Could you spell the name of the town where you bought the clothes?

WUCHINA:

K, uh, Zagreb. Z-A-G-R-E-B. That's the Croatian capital. It was always our big city.

LEVINE:

Could you say the difference between the clothes that you were accustomed to wearing and the American clothes?

WUCHINA:

Oh, now, it was a drastic difference for my mother because the, every, the peasant outfit, all of the women wear the same kind. It's always the same, basically a big, white dress. But it's embroidered and fancified by the lace that they put on it. It's always white. Even outside of the work aprons, the dress dress, the dress clothing for Sunday, always white aprons with different kind of laces, machine lace that they usually made themselves, or a seamstress who, if there was a good seamstress in the village. And the, it was collarless, but it had small lace up at the top and a bodice was stitched and full, puffed sleeves. The sleeves were usually ruffled and lace edgings. And they had slips. Skirts were also full. One basic white dress took nine yards of material. But these dresses lasted for twenty years. That's how strong they were. So they, most of the women, lots of women were beginning to wear what they'd call colored clothes, which would be Westernized clothes. But they were, it was, because a dress lasted for twenty years it was more economical to stick with their peasant clothes. And in 1927 yet there weren't too many, too much influence from the city. So basically the peasant dress was for all women. So for my mother it was absolutely a big change. Now, little girls, I used to get some clothes, I think, from my, my father used to send things. So once in a while I would have a little dress that wasn't, so-to-speak, the peasant uniform. And my mother did lots of sewing for me.

LEVINE:

Were these made out of cotton?

WUCHINA:

Yes. It was a very heavy linen-like cotton.

LEVINE:

And were they ironed?

WUCHINA:

Well, it was interesting the way they ironed it, too. There's no electricity, so my mother had an iron with the hot coals. But most of the clothes, the material was so heavy that they could iron it just with weight. For instance, the, they would have, with the exception of a dress that was the Sunday best, she would have to use an iron on the sleeve, for instance, and on maybe the bodice. But they would use, they had a rolling pin, a large rolling pin. Then this kurito that they used for washing clothes? They would put two heavy rocks in that kurito. And so all the linens, bed coverings, pillowcases and sheets and the tablecloths, they would be folded and they would go over this rolling pin with this weighted kurito and back and forth, something like a mangle, an iron mangle. Maybe you're too young to know what a mangle was. So that's, and the cotton was so heavy that it pressed beautifully. But to iron the finer things she had a little iron with hot coals. And sometimes in place of that, most of the time, I guess, after I came, in place of those two heavy rocks they would put me in this kurito. So my mother and my grandmother together, they would roll me in this kurito on top of our linens. So I got a ride every week or so when they washed clothes. They didn't wash weekly. They washed probably every two weeks. They would roll me as the weight to press down the linens. So I got. And when they folded sheets, in order to make them taut, there would be two women, one on each side. And also they would put me into a sheet so it would stretch the, and swing me in the sheet. Those were my homemade excursions to a playground. But when we went to, from Zagreb we went and bought these clothes. My father, I still remember the one dress, the particular dress that my mother got. And she's, that's the one she, you wore when we embarked in New York. It was a brown, and it was 1927. The waistlines were getting real low. And she had a big satin bow at the top. The dress was brown. The bottom of the dress below this low waistline, it was striped brown and white, or maybe brown and beige. And it was short, almost below the knees, which was so very unusual. You never saw the women's legs. And now I got new clothes too, but most of all I got a baby doll. I had to, I had a little cellophane baby doll, and they never lasted. So I had lots of those, but they always conked in, and you got a new one. They weren't that expensive, so little girls played with cellophane baby dolls. And, or they burned. My friend Slavitza had, we were playing with her baby doll, her cellophane baby doll, and her little brother got it too close to the open fire and its head burned off. ( she laughs ) So, but one of the, one request that I had from my mother whenever she went to market and didn't take me to please bring me a baby doll home. She never brought me a baby doll home. She brought me a roll of figs. Figs, they sold figs on a rope, and that's in place of my baby doll. And I didn't mind very much. I love figs to this day. But when we were in Zagreb shopping before our departure, I also got this baby doll. We were in an department store, and I can still see the table full of dolls, all kinds. A little girl's dream. I simply couldn't make up my mind what doll to pick. So they chose one for me, my Aunt Rosa, with whom we stayed. She was in America before, so she knew what was what, and she was our mentor and advisor. So she and my mother picked out this small little girl doll. And it was beautiful, even in my eyes now. But I was so disappointed. I never told them I wanted one of these big baby dolls that I could rock. This was a little girl doll, and I really never appreciated her until now. But they chose her because she would fit into this small straw suitcase that I was supposed to carry, that I had all my belongings in, and this little dolly fit right in so they chose her.

LEVINE:

What did your mother pack?

WUCHINA:

My mother had her American clothes. She had a trunk that she could carry. It was big enough. It was like, at that time they called it a portmanteau. It was one of those folded, like an accordion folded trunk. And . . .

LEVINE:

Say it again. A portman?

WUCHINA:

A portmanteau. I think that's the pronunciation. But it was sort of an accordion folded, and the sides came out and fit lots of clothes in it. She had her American clothes, some of mine. And she had, she was carrying two bottles of slivovitza, that's plum brandy, to my father, which wasn't permitted. But she hid them among her clothes. She carried some hard cheese. They were hard as rocks and very easily packed in among her clothes. And that was in the trunk, all her change of clothes. And I didn't, I couldn't carry that much in my little straw suitcase. But she also carried a huge goose down pillow, a feather pillow. Out of that she was able to make four pillows when she came here. In fact, when I got married my two wedding pillows were that goose down that we had brought in 1927 from Europe. So she was loaded down with this pillow, this trunk, holding my hand. And she had a load to carry. But on, we went to the consulate. This was just a few days before we were supposed to depart. We went to the American consulate. My father was a citizen already, so it wasn't difficult for us to find passage. And he had sent us an American passport, so we were handled fast. We didn't have any problems. And there at the American consulate we met a newlywed couple. Their name was John and Maria, M-A-R-I-A Bianda, B-I-A-N-D-A. And very fortuitously they were traveling in almost the same direction that we were. In fact, Ambridge, Pennsylvania and Midland, Pennsylvania were only about thirty miles apart. So my mother was elated because here we would have somebody to travel with. She just knew Croatian. But before, we were so happy, and yet before we left the consulate they were booked on a different train to France than we were, so we were alone again. The next day we came, we had our tickets for the train. We came to the, we were going to the train station, the kolodvor it's called. My aunts and my uncle, my Uncle Martin Vidich and his wife, my Aunt Rosa, they took us to the kolodvor, which is . . .

LEVINE:

Could you spell that?

WUCHINA:

K-O-L-O-D-V-O-R, which is a train station. And there my uncle bought me a little round wafer-like vanilla ice cream sandwich. That was my first sandwich of, taste of ice cream. And I never have forgotten that taste. In all my years here tasting tons of ice cream, only sometimes, and that's only the first few licks, this flavor comes back to me. I've never been able to replace it. And so we got on the train, and on the train we met an Austrian who was also going, an Austrian fellow who was also going, he was leaving from a visit, by now our train was in Austria. Yugoslavia borders Austria. So this Austrian met us. We shared the same compartment and, very fortunately, he spoke Croatian. So my mother had somebody else who would help her. And we got very well-acquainted. He was leaving from a visit to his mother. He was living already in the United States in Indiana. So he, he would always tell me to go out into the corridor to explore the train while he and my mother conversed. He thought I would be bored. And this I did. I went from car to car by myself. The European trains have compartments with closed doors, and then they have a corridor. That's the passageway. And I would, they were windows, but they were above my head, so they were little round pull-down seats that I could pull down and sit on and watch the countryside. And once the seat snapped back on my fingers, and I had sore fingers for several days. So we had one, from this train we were heading for France where our port was, and there was one stop where our train stopped and we had to change. I don't know where it was, but I know it was very desolate, lonely, and it seemed like hours that we waited for our oncoming train. And we finally heard that mournful whistle, and I hear it in my ears to this day. Every time you hear, there's nothing like those old-fashioned steam trains for the whistle sound it makes. And we saw that blazing light, and we boarded the train to Paris. But on this route we passed through the Alps, and that surprised me, the huge hills, the tunnels that we went through, snow-capped. It was fall, late fall, so everything on the mountains was all snow-covered, and I can still picture the waterfalls cascading down the side of the mountain, and the tunnels. If I was in the corridor I would rush through the compartment, because I was afraid of the dark. Well, finally on the second train we came to Paris. It was a train station of Paris. My mother would not have known where to go or what to do if it weren't for this Austrian. He became a sinister character to me. So we, he took us to a hotel, because we wouldn't embark until the next day. It was already close to evening. It was drizzly outside. So he took us to a small hotel. My mother and I had a room together, and he had an adjoining room, and I would not let him visit our room. I just had that innate feeling. So to my mother's embarrassment I told her he mustn't come to our room, and she was relieved, too, so he didn't. But the next day he took us to the port of embarkation. I didn't say that when we were in Zagreb getting our passport we were to board a ship called the Paris, or the Paris. But it had had a fire on board. It was in dock for repairs. So we were booked on another one. It was called Ile de France. So my mother was worried about this transfer in the first place. Here when we got to our port of embarkation from Paris after the night in the hotel, we discovered that we were again reboarded because that train, that ship was overbooked. That's where I saw our first ship. We were booked on a small vessel. It was a mail freighter. It was called the De Grase. D-E, Capital G-R-A-S-E is the spelling of this final ship. And that's, the sight of the ship and the water, the wharf. I had seen rivers in Yugoslavia but I had never realized this endless water, even though we were still on shore. And it turned out to be, this was a wonderful little ship. Well, going, I remember surging onto, there was a gangway that led from the shore to the ship.

LEVINE:

You went from Paris to Le Havre.

WUCHINA:

From Paris to Le Havre. That was our port of embarkation, and that's where we were assigned our final ship.

LEVINE:

And was the Austrian still with you?

WUCHINA:

The Austrian was with us. He was with us. He helped her carry her trunk while she carried the pillow and held on to my hand. We were going up the gangway. I had a little pocketbook purse that I was carrying. It dropped. And I stooped suddenly to pick it up and he, in his momentum he couldn't stop. He stepped on my sore fingers from the train yet. Well, that was the end of it. From then he was ever even more suspect. We got on the ship. We were assigned to a C cabin. He was assigned to, he was on A deck. He had a cabin to himself. And we had, my mother and I were I guess in the lesser deck in the C cabin. So he was very good. When we came on board he showed us where to go. And I wanted an apple so badly. Well, he bought me the apple, but I didn't appreciate it. He took us all around, all aboard the ship, showed us the whole ship, invited us to his room. I would not go to his room. And it was very happily, we never did get to see his room, because miraculously we met the newlyweds whom we had met in Zagreb. They, too, were re-routed the same way we were. They finally got on this freighter. And we were there together. It was a small, slow ship. So we were on board water nine days. Well, after this, John, I let him buy me the apples every day. I let him, I walked the decks with him, really pointedly snubbed the Austrian. We didn't see much of him after that. I began to call him "the sinister stranger." He was dressed all in white, reminded me of Zoro. If you're old enough to know who Zoro was, that's the picture I have of him now. He was Zoro.

LEVINE:

Was there any basis, did you ever discuss this with your mother?

WUCHINA:

Well, very, I'm embarrassed to discuss it with my mother. She was young. She was only twenty-nine years old, so she probably attracted people. Not flirtatiously, really. In her anxiety she took help. And he, I knew instantly when he wanted me to walk that corridor on the train I didn't like it, and then when he stepped on my fingers, and then on board he wanted us to visit his room. There was something about him that I did not accept. I instantly didn't like him when we first met him. I don't know what it is. Whereas this couple, I instantly liked them.

LEVINE:

Okay. Let's pause here while we change the tape. END OF SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE BEGINNING OF SIDE ONE, TAPE TWO

LEVINE:

Okay. We are resuming now with Tape Two. I'm here with Luby Wuchina, who is talking about the voyage now from Le Havre, having come to Le Havre from Yugoslavia, and this is in 1927. And you were saying how you did not trust the Austrian but had immediately trusted the newlywed couple.

WUCHINA:

Yes. Well we, then, he bought me the apples and he toured us on the decks. We used to sit on the, walked every day on the ship, sit on deck chairs. And they had a little room on the third deck which was the entertainment center. There was a swimming pool there, and mostly there was like a salon. It would be probably described as a huge living room. In it they had a piano, and I had never seen a piano before. It must have been a player piano because it played a little tune, and someone had a play terrier dog who they'd wind up and he would dance and walk around the room, and that was fascinating to me. Then, it was just interesting to walk the deck and watch the birds. I called them water birds, seagulls and whatever. And he would, John became an expert apple peeler. So he would peel my apple, and he never broke the peel. It was one long string until the whole apple was peeled, and I watched it dangle over the rail and then fall down into the water, which was deep and far below, if it got there. Sometimes the seagull would snatch it before it fell. And the ship, there was a passing ship. Nothing but water, and it's impossible to imagine for a child that there is a world with nothing but you and water and sky. One day, it was sunny day. The weather was good during our voyage, only one threatening day, and that's when my mother said how they had to tie down the deck chairs but nothing came of it. It was just threatening. So the rest of the weather was nice except that it was cool. I had to wear my sweater. And I was getting it dirty. And my mother, every day she would very gently but forcefully reprimand me for not keeping my sweater clean for my father to see. So I blamed it on the ship because it would belch this black smoke. So I was anxious for, life was so pleasant but I was anxious to land, to see land again. And what fascinated us about the ship, the bathrooms. My mother and I were very seasick, she longer than I. I recovered probably the first day. Then she would let me go to the dining room, which was beautifully appointed with white tablecloths and on each table was a brown bottle filled with rum. I love the taste of rum to this day. And the meals were fabulous. They were good. It was different. We ate a lot of fish that I had never eaten. We didn't eat much fish, maybe dried fish, stock fish. There was a fish they dried and it looked like old, dry wood. We used to have that for Lent, for fasting. Otherwise never ate fresh fish. So on this ship we had all the fresh fish we wanted, and it was delicious. Then this was the first time I ate spaghetti, and that was most interesting. Those long, we always had noodles. But these were long, fat noodles with a hole in them. And with the baths, the bathroom, my mother let me go alone. And one day I locked myself in this bathroom, and I was getting panicky. There was no way I could get out. I couldn't open the door. And then a beautiful lady, to me she was a pretty lady, she opened the door for me. She smiled. She was of another nationality. She didn't know my language. I didn't know hers. And here, I saw her later. She had the same cabin in the same floor, deck, that we had, in C Deck, several cabin doors away from us. She, I still see a dress hanging on a hanger in her doorway. And to me this is what chiffon is today. It was a print with orange and brown and it was filmy and chiffony. And she had the bob. I wasn't used to women with bobbed hair. My mother still wore her hair in a bun, and most peasant women did. But she had her bob, and I wonder to this day where is she, who was she. But she was kind, and she gave me, I used to go to her door and stare, as I see children stare now, and I love them for it, because it's so apprapo. I used to stare, and she'd give me chocolate bon bons. Then we didn't see much of the Austraian. I snubbed him during the whole trip until the very last day when the time came to embark. We, they told us that we would be sure to get to the one side of the ship the next morning about six o'clock we would pass, something that we, was a curiosity, and for all of us we should see upon entering the United States, or America. Well, the day came and we dressed and packed, final packing. My mother exchanged quick addresses with my Sinister Austrian. We were never to see him again. He had wanted her to write to him. She tells me later she had asked my father, he would not let her write to him, so that string was broken. Well, when we got, we all got to one side of the ship. It was overcrowded, the decks, on the one side, and I was worried that the ship would tip over. I couldn't see over the rail because the rail hit me where my eyes were. The vision was blocked. So somebody picked me up. I still didn't see anything, but just a blob rising out of the water. I didn't know what we were supposed to see in the first place, and I didn't see anything. Years later when I went to school I realized what that was was the Statue of Liberty. So, and I also realized in school that I was very nearsighted, so those were plausible reasons why I didn't, I couldn't make her out, and I'm sorry that I didn't see that grand and glorious lady that first time. But we landed on, I remember after this vision, I don't know how much time elapsed, but the boat was moving, and it was moving not by itself, but small, tiny little tugboats were pushing us to a place that our big boat had to fit in, probably somewhere here, I don't know. Then I remember the people were ready to embark. The shore, we saw land. And I remember the gangway, how they, it seemed to me I don't know whether we went down or whether we went up, but my next memory is of going up steps, and then we entered this huge building with these windows, these enormous windows. I was glad to see that these enormous windows are true. Then we followed the crowed. It was surging, it was pushing. We followed the crowd, and we had to put our baggage on a moving floor. Now, I don't know where that is. Maybe we went to another room. I don't know. It must have been a baggage belt. Well, we had to put our baggage there. Somebody was directing us. And I was so afraid we would never see that again. I wanted to follow it. My mother pulled me back. Well, in a little while, being directed by whoever was directing us, I guess the employees here, I saw my mother's trunk on a table. And a man was shuffling through it. He didn't do a very thorough job because he never found her cheese, nor did he find that slivovitza for my father. He never looked in my suitcase. I had nothing, but I was impressed that he left the treasures she was carrying for my father, that he didn't see them. We had not too many problems here in the, because we were American citizens through my father's citizenship, and the American passport. We didn't have any waiting to do. We did have to, we were still with the young couple, the Biandas. And we, they wanted us to wait. They had an uncle living in Staten Island. And since they were so close, John knew where this was. He, they urged my mother to stay with them since the last part of our journey would be together. And she hesitated. She didn't know what to do. If she went, left without them, we would be all alone again. And if we stayed my father wouldn't know what happened to us. We would delay our dates when we were supposed to meet him. She decided to stay. So the next memory is of us, we sat on the benches down here. It seems to be like those could be their benches. The room is beautiful and empty now, but then it was full of people. I remember sitting on the benches, and John went to get us tickets. The next memory is I don't know whether we got the ferry here or not, but we were on the ferry to Staten Island, and to the, to visit the uncle, the young couple's uncle.

LEVINE:

How long were you here at Ellis Island?

WUCHINA:

It was only a day, the day when we embarked or the day we got off and came on shore. And that same day we went to Ellis Island, to Staten Island on this ferry, visited with the uncle, stayed overnight with the uncle. He had a small confectionery store, and in back he had living quarters. Well, we had a meal there. It was night time. The plans were to catch our train the next day for Pennsylvania.

LEVINE:

Just a second. On Ellis Island, I'm wondering why you went to Ellis Island, since you were not traveling steerage class.

WUCHINA:

I don't know. I think it was still probably the embarkation. Unless it was another building, but this, I don't know.

LEVINE:

Were there steerage passengers on your ship? Do you remember that?

WUCHINA:

No, I don't think so. See, we got on this freighter. It was a freighter. It was a (?) freighter. We got on it because of the problems with our two ships we were assigned to. I don't know whether they would have come here, or I don't know. But . . .

LEVINE:

Did you have any food at Ellis Island?

WUCHINA:

I don't remember. I don't remember. I don't remember whether we ate here or not. I don't think so. I don't think so. It wasn't long that we were here. Just while he made the accommodations to get this ferry to Staten Island. That was in a day.

LEVINE:

Do you remember anything that struck you as odd or different or new here at Ellis Island?

WUCHINA:

Just the huge windows, the big, the room packed with people, surging with people. And the fear that we were finally on land that didn't move. And it, just flashes of memory, sitting and worrying, my mother worrying what should she do? Should she go with them? Should she stay here? The Austrian was gone, and she would be alone again. And yet there was no way to, telephones weren't used like they are now. She had no idea how to use a telephone.

LEVINE:

No one was going to meet you. You were going to travel by yourself.

WUCHINA:

We were traveling directly from here to Pennsylvania where my father would meet us, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

LEVINE:

And I guess no one had to meet you because you were . . .

WUCHINA:

Nobody had to. Somebody, yeah. Somebody had already directed us. Our passage was already paid for, and they seemed to know where we were to go. But she was on her own once she was here, with the exception that we were with this couple who knew how to get there. He had been in America too, and he went back to Europe to get married, so now he was a newlywed. So he knew where he was going too, and he knew where Midland was, how close. And he urged us to stay with them, and we did. We went to the uncle's house, and the young couple stepped upstairs. We were given a small bedroom in the back, and lo and behold to my consternation we got a visitor through the night. The uncle came to pay us a visit. ( she laughs ) And my mother, my mother said to him, she thanked him for his hospitality. But if he didn't leave she would call his niece and nephew and we would leave immediately. So he left peaceably. And that, by then I was getting very tired of taking care of my mother. I couldn't wait until we would see my father. I didn't tell you about my experience about getting dirty on the ship. I had a sweater that I wore every day, and my mother nagged me to keep it clean so it would be clean for my father. Well, I blamed it on the ship belching all this black smoke. So she tried to wash the, we had a sink in our cabin. She tried to wash it in the sink and it stretched. It stretched so long that it became a coat rather than a sweater and my father would never like it. It wasn't pretty any more. So I had a coat and a little hat. It was a very chilly, foggy day when we landed. So that's the reason why we couldn't see the Statue and the fact that it appeared like something dark rising out of the water. Then we got to, we left the next day, got the train to Pennsylvania, came to Pittsburgh. That's where we parted from our friends who were traveling to Ambridge. He told us not to worry. He caught another plane, uh, train for Rochester. And on this train we met a real kind American man. We were sitting on, he was sitting across from us, and he bought me a Dixie Cup of chocolate ice cream. Slado let. I had my second slado let. The first was the last one that my uncle had gotten me in Yugoslavia, and now my first American slado let, or ice cream. That is the only Croatian word my children ever learned. They still to this day know slado let.

LEVINE:

Can you spell slado let?

WUCHINA:

S-L-A-D-O L-E-T. It's two words. It means sweet ice, or ice cream. And he got me this Dixie Cup with the little spoon. And I was eating it, and it was so marvelous. And he wanted me to give my mother a taste. I knew what he meant, but I pretended I didn't understand. So he took a small, a spoonful and gave her a taste. But she, she says, "No, thank you," in gestures, because he didn't understand Croatian. And I always felt mothers can be as sweet as ice cream, and that was my first taste of ice cream in the United States, in America. Then also on that train across from us two Croatian men were sitting. They were coming, I guess, from Pittsburgh. And they heard us talking, and they had known, this was, we were getting close to home. They had known that my father, Andrea Toncic, was expecting his wife and daughter. So we wouldn't have known where to go. My father didn't know at this point which station we would arrive at because we were two days late. So we were very fortunate that these two Croatian fellows met us, and he, they said to my mother would she come with them, that being they knew my father they would take us to their boarding house, and from there they would call my father on the telephone. And since we were only ten miles from home she decided to go with them, and we did. We took a street, from the train station in Rochester we took a streetcar to this boarding house, and there we met his, their boarding boss and his wife, Mrs. Nissich, Mr. and Mrs. Nissich, very kind and warm. We had our first meal of sauerkraut and kielbasa and mashed potatoes. And they had given me an apple, and this apple had a blemish on it, and I was so worried about almost meeting my father that I dug this hole in this apple that it was half, I eroded it to half and never touched a bit of it. And finally my father arrived with his cousin. And my first impression was this was not my father. He was tall and slim. He wore a brown suit, striped. But the man with him, his cousin Mikkah, he was my father. He was, uh, he was short and bald and jolly. I suppose I had the idea that, of my father, patterned after my grandfather, who was bald and short and jolly, and my father turned out to be, to look something like this sinister Austrian. And so the relationship was bad. I never called him "Father," never really accepted him, for about a year, much to my mother's grief. But after that we had a real loving relationship and I loved him.

LEVINE:

What was it like that first year getting used to being with him?

WUCHINA:

Well, I, oh. I always ask my mother we found a confectionery store around the corner that sold candy. So I always got nickels to buy candy. Never would I ask him for a nickel, never. My mother would urge me. She thought, she knew I wanted candy. If I wanted it badly enough I would ask him. I never would. I'd rather do without the candy than ask my father for the candy. I just didn't accept him, and he was getting cool toward me too, because he thought my mother had somehow influenced me against him. She didn't. It's just I was so used to another image of father. I didn't really know what "father" was. I thought it was my grandfather.

LEVINE:

Do you remember the reunion between your mother and father?

WUCHINA:

Oh, yes, I do. I, they met, we met in this boarding house and they sat together and I resented him sitting so close to her. ( she laughs ) And then when we came to my, his cousin's, with whom we were to live for the next fifteen years we lived with them. My father lived, worked in the steel mill, but he was sickly. After a couple of years he quit and joined partnership and they had a grocery and meat market together, and we lived with these cousins as the first communal family that I can remember. We lived together with him. He had his wife and he, and son Johnny who turned out to be my big brother. And a niece of his mother's. Her name was Francis. She was my big sister. I loved them. We lived together, they were our family for fifteen years until we finally moved out just across the street to a house of our own. But my first impression when we got to the house, a most fascinating first thing that I never saw before is, either it was this, a big cabinet, nice, shiny cabinet that had a lid and had a wheel that turned. You have to wind it and this wheel turned, and it played music. And here it was a victrola. I couldn't get over this victrola. And we got there, all the friends, my father's friends, and friends and neighbors. They were all there to greet us. And they just were looking us over. They looked me over and they said, "Just look, she's still weaving from the ship." And the more they commented how I was weaving from the ship I had long ago gotten my sea legs. ( she laughs ) I weaved. The more they talked the more I weaved. And it, I fit in. I went to school. This was, we arrived in early November and I went to school, and I didn't go to school until January, my first semester. Well, that first semester, of course, I knew, I didn't know the language and neither did my mother. And the first semester was rocky. I got the measles and chicken pox and missed a lot of school, so I had to repeat first grade in the following September.

LEVINE:

Were there other immigrant children in your school?

WUCHINA:

Our, in Midland where we are it was a very ethnic town. But no, not too many immigrant children. They were already there. These were, we were rather late in the immigration picture. I was the only one. And I got all kinds of comments in school from my teachers. They enjoyed my broken English, I guess. Because they would get me and ask me who bought me my dress. I would say, "My madder." Who bought me my shoes? "My fodder." Who did I come to see? "My madder and my fodder." And I can still picture that little broken, they were fascinated, I guess, by the language. And by next September I knew the language completely. Children learn so fast, never have an accent after that. In fact, my girlfriend just the other day says, "You know, we went to school from the first grade on, and I never remember you as having any accent, and you don't." That's how fast children learn to talk.

LEVINE:

Do you remember anything about your experience of learning the language?

WUCHINA:

You just learned it, you learned it in conversation at home. Mostly you pick it up in school. I had to learn that you don't say, "Madder." That, you know, that you say, "Mother." And I was very nearsighted, so I had a difficult time seeing the blackboard. So when they enrolled me for school it wasn't Ljubica any more, because that was L-J-U-B-I-C-A. It was too long. They Anglicized it, and they shortened it, which they called me Luby anyway. It's the Croatian pronunciation of the short, Luby. So I was forever Luby. They just added the Y, L-U-B-Y, from my shortened Ljubica. And when I was learning to write in the first grade, I would see this blackboard. But all I saw was the big L and then a whole lot of U's. And that's the way I thought my name was spelled, L-U-U-U-U for ever more. Until the first, when we, then I realized that that wasn't my, I wasn't spelling my name correctly at all. When she got us close to the, when she got us to the blackboard. Then in the second grade I realized I couldn't, nobody to this time really knew that I was nearsighted. Nobody tested my eyes, and I didn't know what I was supposed to see. And the irony, my mother was nearsighted too, and she never wore glasses. So she too missed the Statue of Liberty. She may have seen a little bit more than I did, but being nearsighted, that was a handicap that we never knew we had. And in the second grade I knew I could never make a K. And by then another cousin of mine had come from Europe. He had had two years of school in, he was my cousin and he came from Sv. Jana with us, from the same area we came, but he came a year later. Well, he had, because he was already, he already knew the alphabet and it was the same alphabet, the Roman alphabet, as ours, it was real easy for him to, he's learned easier than me to pick up the language and he already knew how to write. So he's the one that used to teach me how to make my K's and my H's, because I never saw it on the blackboard, and never knew to tell the teacher how, that I didn't see it. You just, you never knew.

LEVINE:

How was it discovered, then, that you couldn't see?

WUCHINA:

Well, then I was beginning to realize that I couldn't see what other kids were writing. And plus I was looking very close to my work. So in the third grade in school they started, they were testing eyes in school, and that's when they discovered. And I began to wear glasses in the third grade. Now I have contacts. What a miracle! Ooh, what a miracle.

LEVINE:

Okay. Now, did your mother work at all while she was here?

WUCHINA:

No. My mother never worked. My father, by now he was a partner in the grocery store, and my mother was a housekeeper and she was a cook. We all lived together and she did all the work of the house for the family. It was two families that were really one.

LEVINE:

And what were your uncle and aunt's names?

WUCHINA:

They were really my father's, uh, he was my father's first cousin, but my father came to America because of him. They were just a year apart and very close, like brothers, in Europe. So that's how they got to live together, because he came to him the second time when he arrived in 1921 he came to him, and that's how he started, he got the job in the steel mill. And, like I said, he was sickly, so my cousin needed help in the grocery store. And he said, "Why don't you stay and let us be partners?" And that's, they became partners. And they ran the grocery and the meat market. My aunt, she was the butcher. She was the first lady butcher that I knew. And my father was more of the grocery man, and it was all, it was family run, the whole family ran. Ran the business, even we did, my cousin Johnny and I, we always had to do potatoes and do onions and do eggs. That means we had to pack potatoes in a peck bag, and we had to clean the onions to take the excess peels off. And we had to, the eggs, we had to put into cartons very carefully so we wouldn't break them. So everybody worked. It was a family-run thing.

LEVINE:

And what was your father's cousin's name, and his wife?

WUCHINA:

My, his name was Nicola Falica, F-A-L-I-C-A. Hers was Barbara. They lived, that's where we lived. We lived together. I loved her as I loved my own mother. And I was an only child. I couldn't wait. I was lonely. So I accepted this family even better than if, and I left my family, my extended family at home. So this was a new family. So I loved them because they were sort of an extension. And my mother had my first brother and, in 1929. So I didn't even realize she was pregnant. I was eight. I knew she was getting bigger, but she had my brother in 1929, two years after we had arrived. His name is Andy. Then when I was sixteen years old she had my other brother, my baby brother. His name is Ivan.

LEVINE:

Okay. I think maybe we'll pause here and turn the tape. END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE TWO BEGINNING OF SIDE TWO, TAPE TWO

LEVINE:

Okay. We're continuing now on Side B of Tape Two with Luby Wuchina. And you were talking about your mother having your two brothers. And is there anything else that you would say, how long did you stay in school after you were here?

WUCHINA:

I finished high school and then I had a year of business college. I graduated in 1940.

LEVINE:

And then where did you work?

WUCHINA:

And I had, I worked for three years as a stenographer in a steel mill, in an office in a steel mill. And I got married in 1945.

LEVINE:

And how did you meet your husband?

WUCHINA:

My husband was a friend of the, he was, his sister and brother lived in my home town. They were customers at our store. And he didn't live in my town. He lived in Liganeer, Pennsylvania, and he came to visit them. And when I was sixteen, he was nineteen, his mother, and he would accompany his mother and she would carry these Croatian cheeses, these hard rock cheeses in a basket and sell them to us in the store for our personal consumption. So he came with her and one Sunday he came and my mother and my aunt, they were napping. It was Sunday, and that's when life was a little bit easier. It was so busy in a small, family-run store. So they were napping and he came with his mother, and his mother introduced me as saying, "This is my baby." And I laughed, I giggled. Because, you know, you're sixteen, you're giggling. And here he is, so much older than I was, three years older than I was. He was nineteen, and he was still her baby. So that's the first time I saw him. And then in 1942 we, or perhaps it was '41. He had gone to the war. By then the World War II had started, and he was a soldier, and he came on a visit again. And we met again at my house, just very briefly. But after that visit his sister and brother-in-law, I always said that his brother-in-law was our matchmaker, because his, we, he was, he told us that he was taking his brother-in-law, who was my husband Tom, to the train station. He was leaving for the, wherever he was assigned to go. He had been on furlough. And I said to him, "Well, John, you tell him I said goodbye." And he told my subsequently, I didn't know and he told Tom, he says, "I know a girl in Midland who said goodbye to you." And Tom wanted to know who she was, but he just knew how to put enough mystery to it so that he kept it dangling. Finally he told him who the girl was. And he had seen me. I used to work in the store, too. And he wanted to write to me. So these were such restrictive days in our lifetimes that his sister came to ask my mother and father if he could write to me. So we started to write, and we did most of our courting by mail. And . . .

LEVINE:

How long did that go on?

WUCHINA:

Well, he left for overseas in 1942. We got, we started to write, correspond, in November. By March he proposed by mail. And I said no, and then I was in my office typing and I thought, "Oh, my, I shouldn't, why did I say no?" But I wasn't sure. We hadn't seen each other that often, just on several furloughs.

LEVINE:

Did you feel you knew him by mail?

WUCHINA:

Well, I did. And yes, it was so surprising. I never knew it would get to this head, to a head so fast. So he, I wrote him a telegram. I said, "Yes. I've changed my mind." I said yes after I had sent him a letter that said no. I changed my mind by telegram and I said yes. And then he came on another furlough that summer, and I suppose, and probably another furlough. Then he was sent overseas in that fall of 1942. And he stayed overseas. He fought during the Normandy Battle, the Battle of The Bulge. He was imprisoned. He was a prisoner of war in Germany. And he came back, was released when the war ended. A couple of days before the war ended he came back, in May of 1945, May 7th. And we were married on May 20th. So it progressed fast.

LEVINE:

And how long have you been married?

WUCHINA:

We've been married forty-seven years. And we had five children.

LEVINE:

And what are their names?

WUCHINA:

Can I tell you their names? They want me to. The oldest one is Andrea. She's here. And the second one is Tom. And the third one, Carolyn, she's the middle one, she's here. And Ellen, who is now in Ecuador. And Margie is our baby. We had five, and we have sixteen grandchildren, and Jessica is the youngest. And we had a wonderful life. My husband was a steel worker. He worked in Crucible Steel Company. During the Eighties, steel mills closed and our town has really suffered greatly when the steel industry went down. It was a once flourishing wealthy little town, very ethnic. But a very nice mix. Got along beautifully with all nationalities. In particular we got along beautifully and still have, our best friends are Serbian. And what is happening to our Serbian and Croatian people in Yugoslavia. It goes to show you what a great country we are to have melted and blended the way we did. So that very few friends any more that live around us are Croatian, in fact.

LEVINE:

The Wuchina family were Croatian?

WUCHINA:

Yes. They too were Croatian, and they were from a neighboring village. They weren't from Sv. Jana, but they were in a neighboring village. His father and mother had immigrated in the early 1900's, his father maybe in 1899. So they were here a long time.

LEVINE:

Did your family, your mother and you and I guess your father's cousins, did they, can you say what they retained about the old country, what kinds of things they maintained and retained?

WUCHINA:

They always loved the land. My father, when we were young he had an old coupe Ford, and it had a rumble seat. That was most marvelous. I tell my children always about that rumble seat. When he, my brother and I rode in that rumble seat. And my mother, and we always took this aunt with whom we lived. And my big sister Francis, we took her with us. So there were all, usually four people in the front, at least three. If it rained, Andy and I and Francis would also jam in in front of this Ford rumble seat. Because we always went for rides in the country to see how the corn grew and just to see. It was always his dream to buy a farm. They retained that love of land. Plus they always bragged about the water. There is no water as fresh and pure and tasteful as the water in Sv. Jana. And we observed, always they were hospitable to anybody that came. We had a link to their family. Little by little their father, their parents died and my beloved grandfather died in 1932. I hardly knew him. I was saddened a little bit. But by then I was used to not having him, although I remembered him. And then my grandmother died in 1942, my father's father, with whom we had lived. 1942 my mother's mother died on the day Queen Elizabeth was coronated. On June 2, 1952. They were already old. My father's mother was eighty-two. Both grandmothers lived to be in their eighties. But we always kept the ties. Now we have no immediate family there. My father has no immediate family. He has lots of nieces. My mother has one niece with whom we stayed when we visited there. She's still in the village where I was born, but several houses away.

LEVINE:

Well, can you comment on the fact of coming here, of immigrating here and spending most of your life here, as compared with what it might have been like had you stayed?

WUCHINA:

Oh, my mother tells me now during this war. She thanks God that my father brought us here. She said what would have happened to us there now if we had lived this long. She probably wouldn't have lived this long. The life was just simply too hard. The things that I could tell you about their daily requirements that you had to do in order to maintain yourself as a peasant. It's . . .

WUCHINA:

What did that mean? Did you feel like in a certain class, like a peasant class within that society?

LEVINE:

My mother never had the desire to go back. I did. I had this longing and this yearning forever. I used to have dreams of going back, but I never found what was there. I never saw my grandmothers in these dreams. It was a repeated dream all through my life really until 1980 when we did go back. Our five children got together and bought us a passage. We were completely surprised. My husband, at that time, was already not feeling well. And they thought, I used to say to them I always wanted to go back. They knew this, too. So whenever they had a big expense they all went to school, on to school. So I would say, they needed something, and I would always say, "There goes my trip to Europe, there goes my trip to Europe." So finally in 1980 they gave us this gift, and they said, "There goes your trip to Europe." And that's how we got back. It was the one and only time we got back. But since then I have no more desires, no more dreams, and no more yearnings. Because I saw it. It was magnificent, getting back to walk in your footpaths. This seemed Ellis Island in a way repeated a sort of experience of going back, a deja vu. You saw something. You're looking for something, and this is what you really saw. It's trying to combine your memory with what you're really seeing now.

LEVINE:

Say a little bit more about the dreams you had before you went back, repeated dreams.

WUCHINA:

I always dreamed that I was looking for my grandmothers. The house was never the same. The house in my dreams was never the same the way it really was. Either the one grandmother, then I would walk from one grandmother's home to the other grandmother's home. It was never the same path, and I either never got to that second grandmother's home, but I never saw either grandmother. Some, they were not there, or there were other people there. And nothing was ever fulfilling about these dreams. The longing was still there to go back. I wanted to see it as it finally, as it really was. I never did until we got there and we came home. I had another dream about my home there. And it was also different, not the same. But it wasn't hurtful any more. It seemed to be so complete, and I didn't care. I never dreamed about it any more.

LEVINE:

When you used to dream the other dream, did you know in the dream that it wasn't . . .

WUCHINA:

Yes, you do. You know in the dream. You say to yourself, "But this isn't like it was. Where is everybody?" And that's, when we first got there it's like a high, it's like a high that I don't' know what else, where else you would get such a high to step down until those, all those memories flash back to you. It's like a kaleidoscope. We were there only one week. And the whole thing was a kaleidoscope. It was all coming together. And to see this ground, my footpaths. These were my foot paths. The sun used to shine on me. I even remembered a huge poplar tree that grew right below our yard, which I had to pass on the road to this little girl. My father, my grandfather always stopped me. This tree was always there. It seemed to be my marker. But when we got there in 1980 I looked for it. It wasn't there. And I thought I guess that tree must not have been there. So I asked my cousin. I says, "Did there used to be this big, tall poplar tree there." He says, "Oh, yes. They cut it down five years ago." So that was complete, too. I finally knew that that tree was there, but wasn't any more. But we were there, I was in this euphoria for about three days, and I began to realize that there was an emptiness, because the people weren't there. Nobody was there that lived that life with me, except it wasn't all a bust because there were four women who were friends with my mother, and who knew me well. And they brought out little stories about me as a child, and the one neighbor brought my little girlfriend Slavitza. She came. She's two years younger than I, but we had one day of a reunion. In fact, they dressed me up in peasant clothes. And she came back to visit her mother. She was no longer in the village, but her mother still was. And we had this wonderful day together. But she looked about three, she looked ten years older than I did. She was very thin, haggard, because of the hard work. All women worked, they all worked just to live. And she lived a little better life than she would have in the village, because you have to keep yourself. You know, you have to earn the money. You have to earn your bread every day, every day. If you didn't, if you don't take care of your cow, if you don't take care of your grounds, you don't eat.

LEVINE:

So was everyone in the village a so-called peasant or was there a hierarchy, or . . .

WUCHINA:

Well, yes. They had, they had a government. They had, oh, I would say, let me see. This, the Sv. Jana was composed of fourteen different villages. My mother's family lived in one, and we lived, when she got married she moved to my father's, which was, I would say maybe a half mile distant from her. But they, when you marry outside of your village it's like as though you're traveling to America. She left her village for her husband's. This neighbor, this woman, my girlfriend's mother, she used to say how she cried when my mother came to the village. She was in this strange village and it was only a half mile away at the most. And as . . .

LEVINE:

So the hierarchy, you were saying.

WUCHINA:

The hierarchy, they had the teachers, very great awe for the teachers and for the priest. The priest, the church, was all. It was big. It didn't control us, but it was our spirit. And the government was very well-organized. We had, they had, they didn't have police, really didn't have. It wasn't necessary. We were so homogeneous, there wasn't very much crime. There was small theft where one neighbor stole from another, where neighbors would bicker about, uh. Our yard where my mother, our little household, had a, our plot of, our house and our grounds were close together. Our kitchen garden and our wine barn and our chicken coops, it was very close, and it was fenced off. We were in a little enclave all by ourselves. But lower down in the village each family shared a huge, like houses were built around sort of more than a courtyard. It was a huge field that everybody owned together. It was a complex that each house was individual, but they all had the same yard. So my mother said they would get into the biggest battles because their chickens and their ducks would use this common yard. And they would, women would argue about whose chicken was whose and where the eggs were dropped, whose eggs they were. And so there are lots of bickering of that kind, but really no big crime, so they had no police court or police force. But they had, their government was like a municipal building, and a, they had sort of like a council who took care of, everybody had to pitch in for maintaining the road. Everybody maintained the road that was close to their property, in front of their property. The road in front of our house, my mother owned a hill that was really, it was more than pastureland. It was woods. Most people had owned, they owned strip of land, strips of land. They weren't farms like here. They were strips of land that, one strip, your vineyard would be here, and maybe a mile or so away would be your corn field and your wheat field. So there is, the transportation in my day was all walking. You had to walk from field to field. So in, besides working so hard in the fields you had to walk everywhere. And everybody had their plot, a piece of woods where they would be allowed to get their kindling. The fires were for cooking and eating. They were all wood fires. So they would have to furnish their wood, their heating and their cooking from their own plot of forest land. And also my mother had on her forest land there was like a dry creek bed and lots of pebbles and gravel. So they were able to use that to pave the public road in front of their property. Several families in this, in that little village of Kupictol. That was my father's village. That's how they maintained their roads past their homes.

LEVINE:

And did they own this land? Did it belong to them?

WUCHINA:

Oh, yes. Everybody owned their own. Some people were poorer than other people. As peasants we weren't so badly off. My father's family was more badly off, but that's why he immigrated when he was seventeen. His first time, his mother was widowed. Then she married again. But there was no, he had no, because his father had died when he was a very young child he, his mother wasn't able to accumulate more land. So she was never able to do anything except subsist on a kitchen garden. Maybe she had to pay hired hands to have a vineyard. But then there just simply was not enough money. This was a microcosm of what other people did, too, in the same conditions. That's why so many people immigrated. Because you didn't, there was not enough land to make it profitable to raise big families and to be able to educate children like we do now. You didn't get a wage. Whatever you did you had to earn yourself either by selling or working for someone else.

LEVINE:

What if you didn't own any land? What would you do?

WUCHINA:

You became very poor. They are the ones that really did immigrate. You were very poor. There were widows whose husbands died and had lots of children, or they sent their children out into the world. And they, and that's how. And eventually they brought other family members to America, and there, nobody, maybe an older son was left, and then he got all the property. And those who immigrated, they would send money home to buy more.

LEVINE:

Now, did the people who were better off in that town, they either owned more land or . . .

WUCHINA:

Now, my mother's family, her father, they were a very well-established family. But when she was young, when her mother first married, her father died, her mother's father died when he was four, when she was four years old. She has a good memory. She remember when he died. She remembers life, her life is interesting, too. I'm writing it down. And her father was a very wise man, very bright, very intelligent. Now, he did have school. His father, we think that they had immigrated from Slovenia, now because Yugoslavia is in the news you would know where Slovenia is. My mother has a Slovenian name and she thinks that her father's grandparents came to the town of Sv. Jana. And they were coopers, barrel-makers. And they made all kinds of wooden things. And so they were tradesmen, plus being farmers. So they were able to buy lots of land. They had lots of land, plus they had an established trade, and they even had a school for apprentice coopers, barrel makers. See, this was wine country, and they needed barrels for this, to sell wine. Some made wine to sell where others, we in our case, we just sold grapes, made wine, just a little wine for selling, mostly for home consumption. Everybody drank wine and brandy, the slivovitza over there. It was no big thing. You drank it with meals. There was a lot of drunkenness then for those who couldn't tolerate the drinking, but most people could, and they drank in moderation. When they worked out in the fields they drank, and that was their, watered-down wine. That was their, instead of just water it gave them sustenance plus, uh. But those, people would get addicted like they do here, and they would lose everything, and nobody knew why. They were just drunkards. You could not maintain their properties. And you had to. It was handed down from father to son. And with many children, lots of the children had to immigrate, or married.

LEVINE:

And your mother's family it sounds as though it was relatively well-off.

WUCHINA:

Now, my mother's family was well-off, plus her father and her grandfather, they were very well-educated. Plus her grandmother, she knew how to read and write. In those days, this was in the 1800's, where very few women went to school. But her grandmother, my mother's grandmother knew, she read to her, she took her to church and she read her holy stories. My mother remembers the big, thick book of pictures of holy stories. Plus she read her Cinderella and the fairy stories as we know them here. They go by different names, but it's the same story. It amazes me how these fairy tales, they have fairy tales just like us, very similar.

LEVINE:

Well, now, when your mother married your father, did, then she became part of your father's family.

WUCHINA:

Yes. See, my mother's family, at the beginning, was very well, was well-off. Plus her father was educated. He was the head of this town. He was sort of like, he knew legal things. He had all kinds of books, and he got all, subscribed to all kinds of periodicals. And all the people came to him for advice, because most of them weren't even, didn't even know how to read or write. So they needed somebody who knew. And he had, he had been in the army for seven years, plus he traveled, so he knew the rest of the world. He spoke German. He spoke seven languages. My father's, my mother's father. Now, my father's father's family was much poorer because her husband also died. And when women become widowed they can't, they can't maintain the property unless they remarry, and they farm the children out. They send the children out into the world. My mother's family would, at the beginning was very well-off, I guess I would say, well-established and very bright. But her father died when he was thirty-six years old only, and she was four years old. So her mother married again, and she lived in her step-father's household, which was happy, but it wasn't as, her step-father had also been to the United States. In fact, when he married my grandmother she was an eligible widow and all the, many men from Sv. Jana had immigrated already in the Pittsburgh area. There were steel mills here and they needed men for those kinds of hard, unskilled labor, really. And they all were writing home for, they wanted to marry. They wanted to get their, they wanted to get wives. So her stepfather came purposely. He left America purposely to go back to Sv. Jana and to get this widow Putz. My mother's maiden name was Putz. And to marry widow Putz. And he promised her if she would marry him, she had many proposals but nobody wanted her two daughters, one my mother and one her sister. So she would not marry. She was widowed seven years until Ludwig, his name was Ludwig. So he came from America, he said to her if she would marry me, he would take her children, he would go to America for a short time, earn more money so he could come back and endow her oldest daughter, who was ready for marriage. And that's what happened. He went to America, came back, by then she had another little baby. And he, you have to have a dowry over there to marry. That's a whole other story. So he endowed her, my mother's sister. She was only sixteen, and my mother regrets very much that they saw fit to marry her off so early because she had two children in rapid succession. She got TB and she died when she was twenty-one, my mother's sister. She grieves for her forever. But she had a good life in her step-father's home. He was wonderful to her. He made a very good step-father to me, too. But I was closer to my father's side because we lived there.

LEVINE:

Well, our time is running out. Is there anything you'd like to say in closing?

WUCHINA:

Nothing. Except my mother always says, "God Bless America." That's she's here, and she never had the yearning, longing to go back. And I say, "God Bless America," too. It gave me a wonderful life and wonderful children. Over there who knows what I would have been, a little old worn-out lady not able to talk at all, ( she laughs ) instead of as much as I do.

LEVINE:

Okay. Well, thank you very much. This has been a most interesting story. And this is Janet Levine for the National Park Service. I'm here with Luby Wuchina. It's August 15, 1992, and I'm signing off. Thank you very much.

WUCHINA:

Thank you very much.