Friends

Lumie's best friends were Ted and Ed Reinero while we girls played mostly with the Hoffknecht girls who were about our ages – Lillian, the oldest, then Audrey, and Midge was youngest, a year or so younger than Babe. They lived about a mile away and close to the Snelling highway. Mrs. Hoffknecht was a piano teacher, so in exchange for my piano lessons, Mom took care of her girls while she was teaching. Since Mrs. Hoffknecht relied on pupils in town, she arranged to use the piano in the basement of the Methodist church for her teaching. My lessons weren't very regular, and even after several years of practice, I wasn't very good. If we ever wanted to spend a night at the Hoffknechts, Pop wouldn't let us; he just said we had good beds at home and didn't need to sleep elsewhere. If we happened to be playing at Reineros at dinnertime, Pop would take out his trumpet and a few notes on that could be heard a good distance away. That brought us home running.

Sometimes in the summer Harry Babka from San Francisco would come and spend a couple of weeks with us. He and Lumie were very good friends.

Lifelong friends were the Babkas, Dvořáks, and Julišes from San Francisco. The Babkas' older girls, Emily and Marie, stayed at home while the folks along with Harry, Blanche and Bede would journey to see us a few times. I think the Dvořáks came down almost every summer. Olga was a year older than I, and Charlie about Babe's age. "Old" Charlie, the father, loved to hunt, so when they visited, the men and boys always had to shoot either jackrabbits or doves. By the time Lumie and Harry were in their teens, it was traditional for the men to come to the farm for the Labor Day weekend, the beginning of dove season. They would hunt for two or three days, and after the days’ shootings, would gather in the yard and clean the feathers off the birds as well as clean out the insides. All returned to the city with a share of the shoot.

Olga and I have remained friends all these years. She married Harry Babka but after 26 years of marriage, when he became an alcoholic, she divorced him and went to work to support herself. By this time their two daughters, Sandy and Sharon, were married and had homes of their own.

Mr. Juliš was in the army, and with his wife and daughter, Irene, came to spend a few days with us in the summer. Irene, in age, was between Helen and me. One year the Julišes took me back with them to Angel Island where Mr. Juliš was stationed, and after a week brought me back to Merced. The following summer they did the same with Helen.

Pop didn't bother socializing much with neighbors, but Mom would be involved in the PTA and went to birthday parties with us so she could visit with the other women. However, Pop would seek out any Bohemian families in the area. Closest, and who later became good friends, were the Fialas. Their daughter, Annie, was a couple of years older than I, and their son, Emil, was about Helen's age. Visits usually were on Sunday with dinner together. I remember one time when our family stayed over night at the Fiala's so Mom and Pop could help with slaughtering a hog and making sausage. Having to eat scrambled eggs with brains for breakfast almost made us youngsters sick, but the folks enjoyed it. The trip to visit Strmyskas in Stockton was an overnight one. We children played outdoors while the older folks enjoyed the visit, conversing in Czech. If a family didn't return a visit, Pop no longer considered them as friends and forgot about them.

The Plants, Gene and Marie, also lived just out of town and had two boys, Steve and Joe, by Mrs. Plant's first marriage. Gene was French, and even though he didn't speak Czech, he got along well with everyone. Steve developed meningitis and died in his early teens.

After the folks moved to Midpines, their visits with the Plants and Fialas took place just a couple of times a year.

FRIENDS