Another Day in the Country
A history lesson
© Another Day in the Country
My great-grandparents came to America from Germany. It was before World War I.
Great-Grandpa was a thinker, an educated man, a kind man. The year was 1883.
Uncle Hank said to me once, “I wish so much, Pat, that you could have known my Grandpa Gustav. He was such a great guy.”
I’ve only known him by his faded pictures and his progeny.
Uncle Hank also was a great guy, and he told great stories. In fact, the Schuberts have been a great bunch of people for a long time.
My great-grandfather was Gustav Schubert. His oldest son, Albert, was my granddad, born this month in 1875.
People called him A.G. — those were two of his initials. He had four. Gustaf Hans Albert Schubert.
He was 7 years old when he came to America with his family from Germany. They were sponsored by a relative in Illinois. So my grandpa grew up in Illinois.
Then life, in this free, new country called the United States of America, went on. You know this country’s history, I hope.
Our family history includes Grandpa coming to Marion County to visit his sister, who’d married a Lutheran preacher. (I’ve told you some of these stories before in this column, but I don’t know for sure if you were listening.)
While here, 27-year-old Albert saw 17-year-old Auguste Bentz and decided he’d like to have a chance to marry her someday.
About a year later, he loaded everything he owned into a boxcar on a train and came to Ramona, where he bought land, built a house, married Auguste, and began to raise a family.
Grandpa was a self-educated man. He hadn’t had all that much formal schooling — it wasn’t readily available.
But he could read. And he could talk, argue, debate. And he could think. And he could work — although as far as my mother was concerned she remembered her father mostly overseeing work that other people were doing.
At this point, any cousins who are reading this story will have a certain look on their face, probably grinning, because we all knew A.G. Schubert.
We love telling stories about him. He was a character. He was short, good looking, outspoken, and dominant. As a little girl, I was afraid of him.
My own father, who also was a little afraid of him, would sometimes say to me, “You sound just like A.G.”
I was usually doing what he called “talking back,” which meant I didn’t agree with what Dad was saying and I said so.
Among all his attributes, A.G. was a thinker and a plan-ahead-er and a starter of things.
He helped start the co-op in Ramona. He helped start the bank. He helped get together one of the first combine cooperatives; we have pictures and documents to prove it — really old pictures and pieces of real paper.
He came here to Ramona to live the American dream in Kansas, and he did.
He owned his own land, never made a lot of money (but enough), started a family, and picked an extremely good (almost saintly) woman as a mate, which was a very smart move on his part.
They created and educated nine good people. And he lived here, in Ramona, until he was 92. He’s buried out here at Lewis Cemetery.
It is because of a couple of those beautiful girls that Albert and Auguste created — my mother (who birthed me) and her sister, Erna, who gave us a gift, that my sister and I are here, in Ramona, bought a little house in 1990, fixed it up with Erna’s bequest, and still are thriving, alive, and doing our bit, mowing the lawn, teaching, and voting in Kansas.
When A.G. started hearing about what was happening in Germany after World War I, he was sad for his homeland and pretty grateful, I think, to be in America.
News from Germany usually came from relatives who had managed to get out or were still living there and articles in the newspaper.
Grandpa heard about this popular new guy named Adolph, who was doing some good things in Germany.
“Maybe he’ll be good for the country,” he said.
Germany had just lost the war and was in a depression. Food was too high and hard to get. The country needed someone with a new vision.
Auguste was too busy sending care packages to relatives in Germany, taking care of kids and miscellaneous relatives, to argue with him.
Once A.G. saw what really was happening in Germany under Nazi rule, “Grandpa changed his tune,” as my mother used to say.
She was always very musical, as were a lot of the Schuberts, and always very careful about what she said, as in “don’t print that, Pat.”
“And when he changed his mind, he was embarrassed and very quiet about it,” my father would add with a satisfied chuckle.
Dad really needed to prove that A.G. Schubert wrong about a few things, including Grandpa’s notion that my mother was crazy to have chosen to marry my dad and leave the Lutheran church.
A choice, at its simplest level, is often something we make for ourselves — like hash browns instead of mashed potatoes.
The minute you make a choice that impacts someone else, however, you have to be smarter, more loving, and kinder and to think clearer and be more careful.
Surely you’ve learned this, on another day in the country!