Virgil's Story

By Virgil D. Mochel

The first part of the story explains how Virgils ancestors from Europe all arrived at that small region called Woodland, Indiana. Emphasis is on what was going on in that part of each ones world to cause them to migrate to this country and eventually to that spot in Indiana. Wars, religious intolerance, and decisions by the various kings or queens were the driving forces that caused so many to leave their homelands and look for better conditions. Life on a farm during the Great Depression and World War II is described in some detail. The emotional devastation upon learning of the deaths of two brothers in that war took a heavy toll on the Mochel Family.

The second part deals with the many varied experiences of Virgil and Marian as they traveled their life-journey together, up to the present time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493103881

Book preview

VIRGIL’S

STORY

VIRGIL D. MOCHEL

Copyright © 2013 by Virgil D. Mochel.

ISBN:   Ebook   978-1-4931-0388-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 09/23/2013

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CONTENTS

Foreword: The Early Years

Chapter 1:   Amelia

Chapter 2:   Clem

Chapter 3:   Woodland

Chapter 4:   Clem and Amelia are Wed

Chapter 5:   Lift That Bale!

Chapter 6:   The Harvest

Chapter 7:   Hatch, Kill, Boil, and Burn!

Chapter 8:   Fun Times

Chapter 9:   Madison Panthers

Chapter 10:   Local Color

Chapter 11:   We Go To War!

Part 2—After Leaving Woodland

Chapter 12:   Hail! Purdue

Chapter 13:   Ring Them Bells

Chapter 14:   More Hail! Purdue

Chapter 15:   Over Hill, Over Dale

Chapter 16:   Illinois Loyalty

Chapter 17:   Corning

Chapter 18:   Wadsworth

Chapter 19:   The Farm

Chapter 20:   Firestone

Chapter 21:   Our Vacations

Chapter 22:   The Church

Chapter 23:   The Entertainer

Chapter 24:   Marian

Chapter 25:   My Siblings

Epilogue

In memory of Clem and Amelia who never wavered in their love for each other and for their six children.

In memory of our loving sister, Mary Jane, who left us much too soon.

In memory of my brothers, Evans and Robert, two outstanding, kind-hearted, intelligent boys who were cut down in a cruel war without getting a real chance at life.

In honor of Rich, my kind, generous, good-humored brother.

In honor of Lester and Harriet who have been like a brother and a sister to me.

A special dedication to our wonderful children, Steve, Jane, and Carol who have brought so much love and joy into our lives.

Also, a special dedication to each of our eight grandchildren and our great grandson, all of whom provided so much joy, love, and laughter.

I thank my Brother-in-law, Dr. Al Schutz, for wading through my writing to correct errors in punctuation, etc. etc.

Finally, I am completely indebted to Marian, my partner for 62 years (and counting). Her love, support, and patience are beyond compare!

FOREWORD

The Early Years

The gigantic, mean-looking, 2000-pound Holstein bull was running straight toward the two of us, seemingly with murder in his eyes. We were standing on the wooden cover of a large clay tile housing the water valve for the livestock water tank. We were frozen with fear as he came charging around the barn and bore down upon us. Our mother, who just happened to look out of the kitchen window and saw this potential disaster unfolding, came flying out of the house, sprinted the approximately 150 feet, whisked her two little boys into a nearby corncrib, and kept us there until Dad and the hired man corralled the bull back into his pen. That was the first of many direct, exciting encounters I have had with bulls during my life. I had never seen Mom run before this incident, nor did I ever see her run at any time after that. At the time I was too scared to be impressed by how she covered that distance in such a short time, but in recalling it, I marvel at her quick reaction. She was normally afraid of cows, but seeing her sons in danger gave her the needed adrenaline surge.

Life on that Indiana farm with four active sons and a daughter afforded our mother with many heart-pounding incidents. But even after having gone through the agonies of the deaths of a nine-month old baby and of two of her sons killed in WWII, she lived to be 102 ½. (Yes, you get to count the half years after you reach 100!) She came from sturdy stock and had the philosophy of accepting and of making the most of whatever life handed you. She was an amazing person, although greatly under-appreciated by her youngest son until much later in life. She handled the cooking, the cleaning, the washing, and the ironing for a family of eight with seeming (to us) ease. All we had to do was say, Mom, I need a shirt ironed. The ironing board would come out, and "voila," an ironed shirt would appear. We loved our mother, but we expected this valet service from her when we deemed it was needed. When I went off to college, it was quite a shock to learn that ironed shirts didn’t magically appear at the mere mention of that need. Virgil had to do it himself. Needless to say, that need came much less frequently at school than at home.

Since I was born on October 29, 1930, exactly one year after the stock market crash, my memories are all biased upon the realities of The Great Depression and the most terrible war, WWII. I wasn’t really aware that we were living in a depression, or even what that meant. To me it was just how life was. We were poor, but so was practically everyone else we knew. We worked hard and played hard. Being on a farm, we always had plenty of good food. I honestly didn’t know we were deprived of anything. World War II, however, did affect our lives directly in dramatic and somber ways. We all had brothers, cousins, or acquaintances who were in the military. We were all very much aware we were involved in a global struggle, the outcome of which was not certain.

Like Mom, Dad was also a pillar of strength. He struggled to make payments on the farm mortgage and developed an ulcer in the process. I learned of the mortgage only after it had been paid off in 1945! He shielded his family from the worries he must have carried. He always seemed to be cheerful and in good spirits. He sang (off-key), whistled, and laughed a lot. He expected his children to work hard, but he never browbeat us nor kept us from participating in our extracurricular school activities. Both he and Mom supported us in these endeavors.

A look at the ancestral roots of these two wonderful people will help to reveal whence came their strengths. I shall attempt to show not only where their forbearers came from, but also what was happening in their parts of the world that caused them to immigrate to the United States and, ultimately, to that small farm community in Indiana. The fact that all of my families migrated to Indiana within a couple of years of each other is extremely important for the appearance of Little Virgil. Had there been a ten-year difference in their arrivals, the farms probably would not have been available, and so my parents would not have been close enough to have met!

The Edict of Nance, The Thirty Years’ War, King Louis XIV, Prince Karl of Hesse-Kassel, Queen Elizabeth I, all played important roles in our ancestor’s movements. Although it is tempting, I am not conceited enough to think that all of these historical events happened and the royalty did what they did just so Virgil could make his grand entrance. However, it is certain that if these things had not happened, I would not be here! I dare say that most people who lived in America before World War II were here because of the same, or similar, circumstances in their ancestral past. The war and faster means of transportation changed attitudes from localized to more global.

In the next two chapters I will bring my parents’ ancestors to the little community of Madison Township in St. Joseph County in Northern Indiana. I will not deal much with the genealogy but more with the circumstances that caused them to migrate as they did. More detail is given in a previous book entitled Clem and ’Meelie published in 2006 by me.

Most of the information about our early ancestors came from writings of direct descendants (all relatives of mine) of the families described. Of special note is the work done by Cousin Willis Schalliol in his book entitled Schalliol is Our Family Name, published by Belle Publications in 1985. He did a masterful and thorough job of tracing the Schalliol family history back to 1323 in the French High Alps. We are deeply indebted to him for his diligence and tenacity in digging out the records in Europe!

Next I attempt to describe what life was like on that farm and in that wonderful community of Madison Township during the Great Depression and World War II.

In the remaining chapters the highlights of my life after leaving Woodland are related. They include college at Purdue, marriage to my beautiful wife, the U.S. Army, The University of Illinois, employment at Corning, employment at Firestone, our little farm at Wadsworth, our children, and our grandchildren.

This is my version of our life together. It is a story of joy, accomplishments, disappointments, and hardships, but always, love.

CHAPTER 1

Amelia

From his perch over the water Victor caught a glimpse of her dress floating by. He instinctively snatched it and pulled her out of the rain-swollen ditch. If he had not been lying on that tree branch hanging over the water at that precise time, none of us descendants of Amelia would be here. We owe our very existence to Uncle Vic being at the right place at the right time and to his quick reflex! Grandma, their blind mother, did not see it that way at all! She came out of the house when she heard the ruckus. When she learned what happened, she spanked every one of them including older brother, Walter, who had innocently come out of the barn after he heard the commotion. Amelia, who was crying anyway didn’t think she should have been spanked because she nearly drowned. Victor thought he should have been spared because he had saved Amelia’s life. Grandma, of course, reasoned that if they had stayed away from the deep, fast-flowing ditch as they had been told, none of this would have happened. Walter complained slightly because he hadn’t even been there. But a valuable lesson was learned, and the tanning of their rear ends drove the message home. They all remembered it throughout their lives and often laughed about it. This incident probably explains why Amelia, for the rest of her 102 years, was never comfortable on the water, either in a boat or swimming.

Amelia Elizabeth, or ‘Meelie, as everyone called her, was the sixth child born to Augustus and Dorothea Sophia Wilhelmena Bollenbacher Schalliol (I love to say her name.). Dorothea was a remarkable woman. At the birth of her first child, Ida, she temporarily lost her eyesight. When her fourth child, Nora, was born, she lost it again but never regained it. She never really saw her last seven children, including Amelia. Mom said Grandma could see shapes and light and dark but could not see features on anyone’s face. The doctor said she had too much albumin in her blood which paralyzed her optic nerves thus causing her blindness. What a burden that woman had to bear!

Before Amelia’s story continues, a look at her ancestors will show the sturdy stock from which she sprang. I stand in awe of those brave people who immigrated to this country. It had to have taken a lot of courage and guts to give up your home to sail across the Atlantic for three months in a small sailing vessel, having no assurance that the boat would make it or that a better life would result. With my propensity to get motion sickness, the prospect of spending three months on the bounding main, spending most of my time heaving at the rail and wishing I were dead, would have discouraged me from ever thinking seriously about attempting such a non-reversible venture. There was no welfare, no social security, and no guarantee that you would be able to provide for your family after you arrived—if you arrived! And yet these brave people pushed on and weathered whatever storms came their way. They were true pioneers with strong character traits with a willingness to work hard and to forge a new life out of the wilderness.

The Schalliols

I will extract and condense some of the interesting history of the Schalliols from Willis Schalliol’s wonderful book.

In the archives of Haute-Alpes (High Alps) in France, Willis found a 1323 report of a Francois de Chaillol. He apparently lived in a village by the name of Chaillol in the parish of St. Michael de Chaillol. It was common to take the name of the town in which you lived, hence the name de Chaillol which means of/from Chaillol. There is a mountain nearby with the same name. Today the mountain is a ski resort area. My wife, Marian, and I visited both the village and the mountain in 1985. They lie about 25 miles north of the town of Gap where some of our cousins still live.

Members of Francois’s family settled in or near the Village of LeRoux in the upper Queyras Valley about a one and a half hour drive from there in the eastern Hautes-Alps, about one mile from the border with Italy. This is in the parish of Abries. One branch of the family dropped the de portion of the name and the spelling evolved into Challiol.

LeRoux is still an extremely small village that sits on the side of the mountain with the most beautiful setting you can imagine. There is only one road into it and two leading out. One of these roads dead-ends in an abandoned village by the name of Valpreveyre, which is now used by campers and sheepherders. The other, a dirt path, winds its way up to a pass that takes you into Italy. Our last cousin, Victor Challiol, who lived in the village, has died, but his four children have made apartments out of the old Challiol Hotel he owned and spend their summers and Christmas Holidays there. Marian and I met Victor there. He was hoeing in his garden. He showed us the inside of his hotel.

In 1598 King Henry IV of France issued the Edict of Nantes, which granted political equality to the Huguenots, the Protestants in France. Before that, Protestants were tolerated, but they were definitely second-class citizens and were subject to a fair amount of harassment. Protestantism flourished in the Queyras valley during the next century until nearly everyone of that region had been converted from Catholicism.

In 1685 King Louis XIV (The unwashed one who took only two baths in his entire adult life) revoked the Edict of Nantes and unleashed a cruel witch-hunt. He decreed that Reformed pastors faced the gallows if they did not leave France immediately. Emigration of ordinary French citizens and property were prohibited, with penalties of the galleys for men and seizure for women. All gatherings for Protestant services were forbidden under penalty of seizure. So in the eighteenth century there were great galleys manned by men whose only crime was to have been a Protestant. In essence they lost all of the rights that they had enjoyed for the last seventy-seven years, and they were forced either to return to Catholicism or to lose their property and their heads! If they renounced their Protestantism, they were allowed to keep their property (and heads).

It has been estimated that nearly 2 million persons emigrated from France for religious reasons over a period of 300 years ending with the French Revolution. Some came to this country or to the Caribbean islands and started plantations. Some went to South Africa, or wherever a ship would take them. Immediately after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, nearly 50,000 Huguenots fled, mostly to Protestant areas of Europe. This purge was very effective. Even today France is 80% Catholic and less than 2% Protestant.

Willis has a document in his book listing the names of fourteen members of the Challiol family who renounced their faith on September 14, 1685. Our cousins now living there are descendants of those who renounced their Protestantism and remained in LeRoux. Jeannet Challiol, our direct ancestor, was the only member of his family not on the list because he was probably on his way to Geneva. He was about 43 at the time, and he was one of five Challiols who left France temporarily, they thought, until Protestants would have their rights restored. Of course, it never happened until much later. They secretly transferred their goods and properties to their relatives and neighbors and escaped at night during the winter over the 9000-ft.-high Col des Thures Pass into Italy.

It would have been much more difficult for them to escape had they not lived so close to the Italian border. For three hundred years the Challiol families had tended sheep on this mountain, so they knew the route very well. It would have been strenuous enough in summertime, but in winter it must have been exhausting. They had to carry what they could on their backs and probably had to use snowshoes because of the deep snow. In 1985 my sister, Mary Jane, husband Lester, and quite a few of the Indiana Schalliols returned to LeRoux for a worldwide reunion of the Challiols, and some of them hiked that same route that Jeannet took 300 years before.

Jeannet left his wife, Isabeau, and their three children behind until he found a suitable place to live. They all, of course, had to renounce their faith to be allowed to stay and to keep their heads on their necks. He did return secretly after about 15 months and was able to sneak them out of the country. When he and his companions, if any, crossed safely into Italy, they walked to Geneva, Switzerland, where they received some money and provisions for the rest of their journey. The city-state of Geneva had organized to offer help to religious refugees. They were given food, shelter, travel certificates, and a little money to speed them on their way. Its services were similar to those of the underground railroads for slaves during our Civil War.

Finally, on January 29, 1686, four and one-half months after leaving France, Jeannet and Chaffre Challiol reported in to the authorities in Schaffhausen, Switzerland—their jumping-off place to head north into Germany. Switzerland was a favorite sanctuary for refugees from France, Italy, and Germany. They were welcomed, but they were also made aware that sanctuary was only temporary.

Germany was not united into a single country as it is now. It was a patchwork of princedoms called Landgraviates, some of which were Catholic and the rest Protestant. If the prince was Catholic, everyone living in that princedom was expected to be Catholic. If the prince was Protestant, you had better be Protestant if you wanted to live there. The problem with the French Huguenots looking for a place in Germany to live was that the Protestant princedoms were all in the northern part, so they had to run the gauntlet through Catholic areas to reach the Protestant ones.

The Thirty-Years’ War was fought mainly in northern Germany during the years 1618 to 1648 between the northern Protestant princes and the southern Roman Catholic league. It started as a religious conflict but became a political one involving Sweden and France. Tremendous destruction resulted. If the Protestants destroyed a Catholic village, the Catholic league would retaliate by destroying a Protestant village. In 1631 the commander of the Catholic forces headed into northern Germany to attack the combined armies of Sweden and the northern German princes who were then supported by France. While the Protestants were trying to get organized, the Catholic forces sacked the city of Magdeburg and murdered 20,000 persons. The war reduced the entire rural area and small towns of Northern Germany to abject poverty.

Karl, the prince of the Hesse-Kassel Landgraviate offered asylum to the French Huguenots by his decree of April 18, 1685, six months before King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. The French were to be settled at or near Kassel, the capital of Hesse-Kassel, and at other places within his domain. He wished to attract people with middle-class skills, so he promised empty houses in the devastated areas, six year’s exemption from taxes, and free entry into the guilds. The land he offered was strictly for the French immigrants. German citizens were not allowed to own it. So these villages became like small French colonies. Other Protestant princes followed Karl’s lead. Of the 50,000 Huguenots who left France after the revocation in 1685, roughly 20,000 emigrated to Brandenburg and about 3,800 to Hesse-Kassel. All five of the French Challiols eventually settled in Hesse-Kassel. This was a journey of about 600 miles on foot.

On March 28, 1686 Jeannet received ½ peck of peas, 1/6 peck of barley, 1/6 peck of salt, and ¼ pint of oil in Hofgeismar and was instructed to go to Hombressen, where there were still several houses uninhabited since the Thirty Years’ War. He apparently was satisfied with what he saw, because he headed back to LeRoux and returned with his family through Frankfurt on December 20, 1686. In May of 1687 his family of five was registered in Hombressen, 15 months after he had escaped over the mountain. In that same year his property was appropriated in Abries. The door was closed!

In 1689 he learned that some land was available in Carlsdorf (Carlsdorf was named after the Prince Karl, or Carl, their benefactor), which was only one mile west of Hombressen. They moved there, and by the year 1700 Jeannet and his three sons, Abel, David, and Jacques, each owned a portion of the land in Carlsdorf. Each portion consisted of about six acres of cropland, three acres of meadow, and ½ acre of garden—all within walking distance of Carlsdorf. As of 1985 a descendant, Wilhelmine Marie Challiol, still owned the portion originally owned by Jeannet.

All three of his sons married and had children. Abel and Jacques each had three sons, in addition to some daughters, but all of the sons died in infancy. David had two sons and three daughters. His son Samuel is the ancestor of the Challiols who came to America. Of the five French Challiol families that emigrated to Germany, only the family of Jeannet provided a lineage of heirs bearing the family name which at present exists as Challiol in Germany (only two) and Schalliol in the United States (about 50).

The transplanted Challiols lived in the Hesse-Kassel area for about 160 years. During our Revolutionary War in 1776 the British hired mercenary Hessian troops who came from that area. The stories told by the returning troops of the land and the people probably sparked some interest in emigrating. Also, around 1820 all Hessian males of age 21 were subject to serve two to three years in the military. Willis wrote, It is no surprise then that the German tide to America swelled in this period. It flowed steadily from 1820 to 1893 with the peak in about 1882.

The first Challiol to arrive in America was Peter. He might have spent some time in England, but there is a record of him being a baker in Philadelphia in 1821. By 1831 he had moved his family into a new two-story stone house about a mile west of Winesburg, Ohio in Holmes County, and he purchased two hundred acres of land. There is a plaque in front of the United Church of Christ Church in Winesburg commemorating the first settlers. It says the first settlement was made in 1827, and it lists Peter Schallioll Sr. as one of the first eleven to come there. Somehow the spelling of his name got changed to Schallioll.

Back in Udenhausen, Hesse-Kassel, Daniel Challiol married his second wife, Christine Hauptreif, in 1818 after his first wife died in childbirth. This marriage produced four sons, Johann Carl (1818), George (1820), Gerhard (1821), and David (1825). Daniel had three children from his first marriage. According to the custom in Germany, the oldest son, Jean Pierre, inherited the family farm, so the others had to look elsewhere for their livelihood.

Peter had only one healthy son; he became the postmaster of Winesburg and was a partner in a general store. Therefore Peter needed help farming his land, so he brought Gerhard over to live with him in 1848. Peter was apparently Gerhard’s and David’s uncle, although the records are not clear on this. Gerhard married, and twelve of his children were born in that stone house.

Back in Udenhausen, Daniel, the father, died in 1831. David, my great-grandfather, married Margaret Elizabeth Hauptreif, a relative of his mother, Christine Hauptreif, in1849. They had a son, Jacob, born in December of 1849. In 1853 David, Margaret, Jacob, and David’s mother, Christine, sailed on a ship that took 49 days to cross the Atlantic. They came to Winesburg to help his brother Gerhard do the farming. Their Mother, Christine, died only two weeks after they arrived. They lived in that stone house too (It must have been crowded!) My grandfather, Augustus George, was born there on March 23, 1857. That stone house was still standing and occupied until it was torn down in about 2010.

Peter bought another large tract of land about 18 miles from Chicago. In 1860 Peter sent David and his family to help his son, William, manage it. David and his son, Jacob, who would have been 11, went by horses and a wagon, and they led a cow behind. They had to ford rivers and streams and follow Indian trails. Margaret and August, who was only three, went by train. They stayed in a hotel but found conditions to be very disagreeable. They had to contend with frequent visits by Indians, rattlesnakes, and prairie wolves. They didn’t stay long, but returned to Winesburg. Later, David learned of good, cheap land in Indiana from neighbors near Winesburg, who had already pulled up stakes and moved to Madison Township in St. Joseph County, so in 1861 David moved his family there also. In that same year, Julius Gerhard, Willis’s Grandfather, was born. They bought an 89-acre farm in 1862 one-half mile east of Beech Road on New Road. He paid $1400 for it. A daughter, Louise Christine, was born in 1863, but she died in 1888. Strangely, the Indiana Schalliolls dropped the last "l and became Schalliol. The Ohio relatives kept the double l".

The Bollenbachers

We have brought the Schalliols from France through Germany through Ohio to Madison Township in Indiana spanning about seven centuries. With my mother’s writing we will now have her mother’s family, the Bollenbachers, join them.

Amelia’s grandfather, Philip Peter Bollenbacher, Sr., married Sophie Hesterman in Petershagen, Prussia, Germany on December 26, 1841. After having five children, Sophie died. On December 25, 1852 Philip married Sophia Wilhelmina Auman, and they had four children, Diedrich, Louise, Louis and Dorothea, Amelia’s mother. She was born December 18, 1858 and was named Dorothea Sophia Wilhelmina. In June of 1861 when she was 2 1/2 years old, they sailed to America. During the crossing on the high seas another daughter was born. She was named Clara for the name of their ship, and her middle name was Johanna after the ship’s captain, Johann. She was given free passage to cross the ocean at any time during her life, but she never went back.

The family came to Madison Township because some friends had come earlier and apparently recommended it. They bought a farm on the east side of Cedar Road one-half mile south of New Road—not far from the Schalliol farm! Philip, Jr., John, Emma, and Minnie were born there. Minnie died at the age of three when her clothes caught on fire from a trash fire.

August Schalliol and Dorothea Bollenbacher Wed

We have now brought the Schalliols and the Bollenbachers to Madison Township and have them living within two miles of each other. They had never met before arriving in Madison Township, but they would become acquainted and become linked by the marriage of their son and daughter, August and Dorothea. I am not a big believer in Fate, but it is interesting to think about the forces that led each of the families to leave their native land and eventually to settle so near each other within a year or two. Had they lived ten or more miles apart, Grandpa and Grandma probably would not have known each other well enough to fall in love and marry. Also, the timing was important. If either family had arrived ten years later, the land they bought probably would not have been available. In either case we descendants would not be here.

One of the things they had in common was that both families were Prussian from the Hesse area in Germany. The people from Prussia spoke High German, or Hoch Deutsch, while those from southern Germany from where Dad’s folks originated spoke Platte Deutsch, or Low German. This would be somewhat similar to a comparison of Chicago English versus a Southern accent. The Prussians thought of themselves as the elite and tended to look down their noses at the Platte Deutsch folks. So the two families had essentially the same dialect and could easily understand each other. Dad often kidded Mom about the Schalliols regarding the Mochels as heathen. I doubt that they did, but they might have made fun of the low Deutsch accents.

Young Augustus went to a one-room school until he graduated from the eighth grade. He then attended a Normal School in Wakarusa and received a Teacher’s Certificate, after which he taught in a one-room school for several years. He also taught singing school, where families would come to the school on Sunday evenings to learn how to sing. It was an important social event. They had no radios, telephones, movies, or TVs.

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On April 30, 1882 Augustus George Schalliol and Dorothea Sophia Wilhelmena Bollenbacher were married. The wedding picture of the happy couple is seen below. I wonder who decreed that no one be allowed to smile in the posed pictures of that day?

A little smile surely would have softened their looks! They moved to the back woods community called Oak Grove, where he was teaching. They loaded their furniture and other possessions on a borrowed wagon pulled by a yoke of oxen. The oxen were controlled only by voice commands as he walked beside the wagon. It was a warm spring day and the deer flies were out in force on the cattle. Suddenly they bolted and ran into the underbrush to rub the flies off their backs. As Grandpa described it, I saw all of my worldly possessions vanish into the wilderness. It must have been a sinking feeling for a couple of newlyweds on their way to their new home.

When Schoolmaster August tried to enlighten his charges by telling them the world was round, he got into big trouble. A special meeting of the parents was called, with the result that he was informed he could keep his job only if he would say no more of that foolishness of the world being a round ball. Apparently they hadn’t heard of Christopher Columbus’ belief and voyage or of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world.

During the two years that they lived in that tiny settlement of Oak Grove, they had their first child, Ida, who was born Feb. 6, 1883. Dorothea lost her eyesight but soon regained it. Shortly after that Grandpa gave up teaching and bought the farm on Patterson Road about ¼ miles west of Dogwood Road. The rest of their children, including Amelia, were born on this farm. The picture below shows the family on the farm in 1895. Standing left to right are Father August, Mother Dorothea, Ida (12), Grandmother Margaret Schalliol (August’s mother), Amelia (6), and Nora (8). With wagon: Victor pushing (10), Minnie riding (18 months), and Thaddeus pulling (7). On horses: Walter (11) and Grover (3 ½). Elsie and Mabel were not yet born. Mom said that after the picture was taken, Victor yelled at Thaddeus (Tod) for not acting like he was pulling. Victor was a performer all of his life, so I guess it started at an early age. As mentioned earlier, Grandma went permanently blind when her fourth child (Nora) was born. Apparently she could see well enough to give them all a good spanking at Amelia’s near-drowning, which would have happened to the right of the picture.

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Life in the Schalliol Family

Schlosser Brothers from Bremen had a creamery in Wyatt, so they talked Grandpa into running it as a sideline to his farming. He had to have been extremely busy with the farming, running the creamery and helping to care for the kids. He made most of the girls’ clothes because Dorothea couldn’t see well enough to do it. However, she was able to mend clothes with a special needle that she could thread herself! She also cooked and baked. The older girls were trained to help and to take more responsibilities as they grew older.

Both Grandpa and Grandma were hardworking, industrious, and loving people. Life was hard, but they provided a happy, loving environment. This was evident by the personalities of their children. All of them were rather low-key and very kind. We nephews and nieces always enjoyed being around them. They had a good sense of humor and didn’t seem to let things bother them too much. Modern-day psychologists would be frustrated to find that they were well adjusted, and definitely did not hate their parents!

In 1899 Schlosser Brothers built another creamery at the corner of Beech and Madison Roads, and they asked Grandpa to move there to run it. So on April 9, 1899, after having lived on their farm for sixteen years, they packed up and moved into a little house on the south side of Madison Road, about one-fourth mile west of Beech. Amelia was ten. Just a year earlier (1898) the Alaskan Gold Rush commenced when gold was found in the Klondike River. Thousands of people flocked north to Alaska to seek their fortunes. Since the Schalliols also went north (about three miles.) to seek their fortune, they decided to name their establishment Klondike, with tongue-in-cheek, I’m sure.

About a year later they built a general store on the corner beside the creamery. The store was a tall building that had four bedrooms and two large living rooms upstairs. Their parent’s bedroom and a large kitchen where they ate their meals were on the bottom floor.

What was the purpose of the creamery that Grandpa ran? Quite simply, it was to separate the cream from the skim milk. The cream was used to make butter, and the skim milk was considered to be of no value for human consumption, so it was given back to the farmer to take home to feed it to the hogs! No one would have considered drinking it because they had all the whole milk they could use. They never heard of cholesterol, and I sort of wish we hadn’t. We have been using skim milk for twenty years with no noticeable beneficial effect. Whenever we mistakenly buy a gallon of 1% or 2% milk, we marvel at the great taste!

In this day of homogenization, I would guess that most people don’t know that cream is lighter than skim milk, so it rises to the top if non-homogenized milk is allowed to sit in a container. The cream separator works on the principle of a centrifuge separating less—dense cream from the more-dense skim milk. The cream was run into 30-gallon cans and the skim milk was put back in the farmers’ original cans. When all of the farmers had brought their milk in for the day, Grandpa hauled these 30-gallon cans filled with cream to Schlosser Brothers Creamery in Bremen, where they made butter. He had to make that fourteen-mile trip (one way) every day with a team of horses and a covered wagon. Mom said he usually had four or five of those 30-gallon cans. I don’t know how he handled them by himself! Thirty gallons of cream would have weighed about 220 lb. by itself, and the steel can was probably another 80 lb. He must have been one tired puppy when he got home! The round trip must have taken six or seven hours alone, so he had extremely long days.

Why did they build a combination house and general store? Grandpa was a first-class entrepreneur. He knew that the farmers who brought their milk to him would have some time to wait while he was running their milk through the cream separator. What better place to wait than in a general store where they could buy groceries, hardware, dry goods, etc.? So they would do their shopping while Grandpa was working. His older kids tended the store while he was gone. Amelia said she helped.

In 1901 Frank Brown, the owner of the Wakarusa Telephone Company, convinced Grandpa to start a telephone exchange in the country—as if he didn’t have enough to do! Brown and his men helped to get it started. At first they installed a small switchboard in the back of the store, but later it was moved upstairs in the living room. It grew rapidly requiring a larger switchboard and someone to attend it at all times. The first directory was printed in 1902, and it had thirty names on it. We don’t have a copy of that one, but we do have the 1905 directory, which lists 104 customers on 24 lines. This, then, was the start of the Klondike Telephone Exchange that remained in the Schalliol Family until about the early1950s when it was sold. About 1910, the same Frank Brown who talked Grandpa into starting the Klondike Exchange decided he wanted to live in California. He talked Grandpa into buying his interest in the Wakarusa Telephone Company, so now Grandpa owned two of them. He sent Victor to Wakarusa to manage it. After a few years he sold his shares of that one to someone else.

Victor, Tod, and Grover became the linesmen and the troubleshooters. Uncle Vic said he made his first climbers out of buggy tires. Building the lines was no small task. They had to dig the holes for the big telephone poles with a hand posthole digger, then raise up the poles to make them slide into the holes, all by hand. After getting all of the poles set, they climbed the poles to string the wires and attach them to insulators on the crossbeams. They took wire into each household that wanted the service and connected it to the telephones they had mounted on a wall. The wires they strung along the roads all had to terminate on the switchboard in their house, so miles and miles of no. 9 steel wire was used.

All lines were attached to the switchboard. The telephones each had two big dry-cell batteries. When you wanted to make a call, you rang in with the hand crank on your phone. This made a buzzing sound at the switchboard, and a little cover over the female connection on the board would drop down. The operator would plug a male connector into your line and ask you what number you wanted. If you said 442, that meant 4 rings on line 42. (That was our number.) She would plug into line 42 and ring four times. When somebody picked up the phone, the two lines were now connected, so you could talk. There were also half numbers. For example, two and a half on 42 would be one regular ring, one long ring and a short. If you heard a long ring, you knew the next one was going to be a half. When the operator rang on your line, all phones on that line rang, so you had to count the number of rings to make sure it was your number. This was also a very convenient way to listen in on a neighbor’s conversations, if you wanted to be nosy. Certain people were known for this. You merely had to lift the receiver quietly and listen. Sharing dark secrets on a party line was a risky business!

If there was an emergency such as a fire, you merely had to ring in to central and say, Ed Jones’s barn is on fire! She knew which lines were the closest to the Joneses, so she would plug in to all of them and ring twelve times. Everybody knew this was a distress signal, so someone in every house who heard the twelve rings would pick up their receiver and listen. The operator would say, Barn fire at Joneses! All that were able would rush over to the Joneses to help out. This was before there were volunteer firemen in the township, but it was a very effective way to alert people and to provide emergency help. I remember such an occasion when we received a call after dark that McIntyre’s barn was on fire. We went outside and could see it burning a mile away.

Dad almost never bothered to look up a number. He would first shoot the breeze with the operator and finally say, Central, get me the Wyatt Bank, or whomever he was calling. They knew everyone’s number by heart. They also seemed to recognize everyone’s voice, so you didn’t need to tell them who you were. Mom said she heard a lot of things on the phone when she was an operator, but, of course, they were lectured to keep their mouths shut and not spread gossip.

Some of the rules they had in the 1905 directory are interesting:

1)   Ring off when through talking. (Almost no one did.)

2)   Before ringing up, raise receiver hook and if line is in use, quickly replace again.

3)   Listening in on party lines is a crime punishable by law. (A great source for the gossip mill.)

4)   Call by number and not by name. (Dad never did.)

5)   Closed on Sunday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and from 6 p. m. to 9 p. m. (That is when the Schalliols went to church.) Holidays same as Sundays.

All of the first four were violated by lots of people, but the operators took it all in stride. They were always friendly and helpful. Would that we could talk to friendly, helpful people in our present-day phone companies! It is very difficult even to talk to a live person instead of a computer anymore.

When we were kids, Klondike had about 50 lines, with six to ten homes on a line, so they had a very large switchboard and girls were hired around the clock to attend it. Amelia did this for years before she got married. They had a bed in the room for the nighttime central. When she heard it buzz, she had to get up and place the call. The switchboard was in their new home they had built in 1914.

August bought the first Horseless Carriage in Madison Township. It was a Stanley Steamer that could be used only during the summer because of the poor road conditions. The roads were good enough for the horses but not good enough for the new contraptions. Later they had a Studebaker E.M.F. and a Flanders, also a Studebaker.

When Mom was in her teens (about 1908), they had their own family band. Victor was the leader of the band, so I suspect he learned to play the trumpet pretty much on his own and very likely taught his brothers and sisters. I am sure Grandpa had his hand in the learning process, though, because of his interest and ability to read and to teach music. Victor and Minnie played trumpets, Tod played baritone, Walter played a slide trombone, Grandpa played a valve trombone, Nora and Elsie had alto horns, Grover played a tuba (the same one I still play), and Mom played the drums. J. V. Klein (who later married Ida) sometimes played trumpet with them. They had a good time playing together and played for various functions such as reunions. The photo is a very dark picture of the Schalliol Family band possibly in 1908.

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   Top row: Tod, J. V. Klein, Victor, Walter, Grandpa, Minnie.

   Bot. row: Amelia, Nora, Elsie, Grover.

After several years Victor organized the Klondike Band with boys he had taught to play instruments. That finished the family band, but the Klondike Band grew to twenty-five members complete with green band suits trimmed with gold braid. They played in a small grove of trees just east of the Schalliol house. Large crowds came from miles around to hear them. They sold ice cream, pop, candy, etc., to help pay for the uniforms. I have a photo of the band, which includes Amelia and my tuba that I still play.

The picture below is probably the last family photo of the Schalliol Family while Grandma was still well. In the top row, left to right: Amelia, Grover, Walter, Victor, Tod, and Nora. Bottom row, l to r.: Grandpa, Elsie, Ida (Married), Minnie, and Grandma.

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Ten carpenters arrived on September 1, 1914 to start constructing a new home in front of the store. They lived with the family, going home on Saturday nights and returning on Monday mornings. The carpenters finished the building just in time for the Family to move in on Christmas Eve. That house is still being lived in today.

Mom told a cute story that happened while the carpenters and the painters were eating their last meal with the family. Bill Stauffer, who was their painter and lived right across the road from the Mochels in Woodland, told them that Clem Mochel was having his cousin, George Weber, build a cedar hope chest for his sweetheart, and he was going to give it to her as a surprise for Christmas. In those days receiving a hope chest was like receiving a diamond ring. Bill didn’t know that Amelia and Clem were about four years into their ten-year courtship and that she would be the recipient of this surprise gift. The family about exploded trying to keep from laughing. I don’t know if Mom acted properly surprised on Christmas Eve, or not. I do know that she kept that hope chest all of her life, and her grandson, Steve Mochel, now has it.

By the time the family moved into their new home, Grandma had already had several strokes, so the housewarming was not entirely joyful. As she had more strokes, she first had to go on crutches, then she lost the use of her left side and her speech. Finally she became bedfast for about five months until she died on April 18, 1917 at the age of 58. The family, of course, cared for her at home. She was a remarkable woman and her death was a terrible loss to the family.

That fall there were four weddings in the family: Minnie and Ed Hahn on August 15, 1917, Elsie and Charles Beehler on December 12, 1917, and a double wedding of Nora and Elmer Hunsberger and Grover and Mabel Shearer on December 18, 1917. I wonder if the weddings were on hold while their mother was seriously ill and needed lots of care. These weddings left Amelia as the only unmarried child. She and Nora had to do all of the work, including helping to tend the switchboard.

Tod had bought a farm on State Route 331 at the intersection with Kern Road. After a few years Nora and Elmer bought his farm, so the two couples moved on the same day. Tod moved home to run the telephone company. He and Nancy took care of Grandpa until he died of a heart attack on January 7, 1938. About a year later Victor and Grover bought Klondike, and Grover and Mabel lived in the big house while Vic and Maude lived in the little house to the south. This is the same small house August and Dorothea moved their family of nine children into when they came north to Klondike in 1899. They had moved the house to its present location from its original site on Madison Road. In the late ’40s or early ’50s, they sold Klondike to a young man who operated it for a few years and then sold it to GTE.

The picture below shows the remaining Schalliol Kids in 1949 at a reunion. Aunt Ida had died before this picture was taken. In the back row from left to right are Tod, Grover, Victor, and Walter. In the girl’s row are Nora, Minnie, Elsie, and Amelia (60 yrs.).

Victor

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Victor, the brother whose quick action saved Amelia from drowning in the ditch, was an enterprising young man like his father. When Grandpa bought the Wakarusa Telephone Co. in 1910, he sent Victor to manage it. In this town of about 1000 people there was no electric service, so Victor and a friend saw an opportunity. In 1911 they built a small plant that produced coal gas and ran their generator with that. They had 14 customers and operated from dark until 11:00 p.m. Victor reported that it was an up-hill struggle, because the leading businessmen opposed their venture and preferred gasoline lights. Victor borrowed money from his brothers, especially Tod, who seemed to have a lot of faith in his older brother. After struggling for about eight months, they were given a street lighting contract. In July, 1912, they turned on 40 100-watt bulbs for which they were paid $70 per month.

An interesting incident happened while he was operating the electric plant. One night when his Klondike Band was playing a concert in the town square, all of the lights in town started to dim. He jumped off the bandstand, ran through a dark alley, stumbled over some crates and dived headfirst into a big mud hole. He did reach the faltering engine in time to make a necessary adjustment, so the lights and the concert continued.

In 1920 he pioneered rural electrification long before it was thought of in Washington. He extended his electric lines into the rural areas of St. Joseph County around Mishawaka and South Bend. The farmers in these areas had been trying to get the electric company to extend its lines to them, but the company refused saying that rural lines were not practical and would not pay. But Victor did it and reported that it was a success financially and in every other way. In an article he wrote in 1959, parts of which were quoted in the Jan. 15, 1969 St. Joseph County, Indiana Farm News publication, he stated, Never did I do anything that was so much appreciated as bringing electric service to these farmers. The reward was much more than financial, and those were the happiest days of my life. It was a labor of love—. It is difficult for me to fathom how a one-horse country electric company could have accomplished such a gargantuan task! He must have had some help, but he probably did the lion’s share of the digging, the pole setting, the wire stringing, the pole climbing, the buying, accounting, etc. He must have done his dad proud!

In 1928 he had an accident while repairing the lines after a severe thunderstorm. While up on a pole with his climbers, he came in contact with a ground wire while working with a 2300 volt hot wire. He fell unconscious from the thirty-foot pole, breaking all of his ribs on his left side. His back apparently hit a fence post on the way down. The doctor told him he was probably dead when he started the fall, but hitting the fence post started his heart again. He lost a finger in that narrow escape, but he was back climbing poles again in less than three months. That sturdy Schalliol character shows itself again! After he demonstrated that rural lines were practical, the South Bend electric company wanted his lines, so he let them have them in 1928 for a song. If he had been greedy, he could have wound up a wealthy man.

He and Uncle Grover continued the operation of The Klondike Telephone Exchange after Grandpa died in 1938 until they sold it in the late ’40s. I remember those two working to restore service after we had a bad ice storm. Most of the lines were down and many poles were broken. Their old steel wires were very rusty and weak. I can still see them working out in the cold, scraping the wires to make better electrical contact and then splicing them together. They both had their climbers on, and Uncle Vic was in his 60s, I believe. Mom had them come in to get warm. They had to have been extremely tired because they had been working for days, but they laughed and joked about it as though they had good sense. We really felt sorry for them, but they took it in stride. To me Uncle Vic had the same strength of character and determination as our ancestor Jeannet when he hiked over that mountain three centuries before! In fact all of August and Dorothea’s kids displayed that solid strength of character, but I see Uncle Vic out in the forefront. Had he lived in 1685 he would have been one of the first to go over that mountain!

Amelia

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Now let’s follow Amelia’s life B. C. (Before Clem). In 1903 she graduated from the Brenneman School 8th grade at the age of 13. This is where most girls and boys stopped with their education in those days, if they even went that long. The next winter she attended Confirmation School at the Zion Church. It was taught by a Reverend Grob in German. She was confirmed on Easter of 1904. Imagine spending almost an entire school year studying the catechism in German! The picture is Amelia’s Confirmation Graduation picture at the age of 15.

The next year she went back to Brenneman School to repeat the eighth grade, just so she would have something to do. She liked school that much! In the fall of 1905 she and Tod started high school together in Wakarusa, and they graduated four years later in 1909. She must have done a good selling job on her father to let her go to high school, because country girls simply did not do that. I believe she was the only girl of her family to complete high school, but I might be wrong. So in 1909 she and Tod were in the ninth class to graduate from Wakarusa, and there were nine in the class.

The following winter she attended Valparaiso College, where she took two terms of a teacher preparatory course, which gave her a certificate to teach elementary school. Tod and Vic were there at the same time.

Armed with her teaching certificate in 1910 she landed a teaching job at the Willow Flat one-room school at the northwest corner of Elm and Madison Roads. A certain Clem Mochel, who later became her husband, had taught at the same school a year earlier. She stayed with her sister, Ida Schalliol Klein, and her family and had to walk ¾ of a mile to school everyday. During the fall and spring that wasn’t too bad, but it was not much fun in heavy snow or rain. There were no snowplows cruising the roads at that time, so if the snow was waist deep, she simply had to wade it. She enjoyed the teaching, but she didn’t like the part of being the janitor. She had to build the fire in the potbelly stove every morning, sweep out the room, carry the ashes, shovel snow, etc.—all for $40 per month! After one school year of that, she decided her time could be better spent helping with the switchboard at home, because the telephone business was booming.

Amelia was now twenty-one and her ten-year courtship with Clem was probably cruising at this time. It is likely that they knew each other through the two churches, St. John’s in Woodland and Zion, both of which were served by the same minister. The photo below, on the left, was taken in 1911 or 1912 after she had quit teaching and was working on the switchboard. She is quite sedate and serious in this picture. The picture on the right was taken when she was probably 29. It is the picture Clem carried with him when he was in the army during World War I in 1918.

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During the time between these two pictures, Amelia was living at home tending the switchboard and taking care of her blind and bedfast mother, Dorothea Sophia Wilhelmena Bollenbacher Schalliol (I love to rattle off that name!). She was dating Clem Mochel, who did indeed give her that hope chest on Christmas Eve, 1914. She learned to enjoy life and to make the best of whatever life handed her.

We will now leave Amelia waiting for Clem to come marching home in 1919, so they can end the ridiculously long (ten and a half year) courtship.

CHAPTER 2

Clem

He wasn’t expected to live. He had a very slim chance of surviving, being a premature blue baby who weighed only two to three pounds. But Mary Elizabeth, his loving mother, would not give life to such unexpressed thoughts. Clem Oscar Mochel was born at home on July 23, 1890 with no incubator or modern equipment that would improve his chances of surviving. His bed for many months was a pillow placed inside a dresser drawer. It was a miracle that he lived and thrived! The loving care his mother gave him deserves full credit.

Martin and Mary did not have another child until six years later, when Raymond was born. He died 2 months after birth. Another nine years passed before they had their third child, Omer George. So Clem never knew what growing up with siblings was like. He really was an only child, since he was a senior in high school before Omer was born. It is strange that both Mary and Martin were from large families, but they were able to have only three children.

As in the story of Amelia, the ancestry of Clem is fascinating, although we do not have records going back nearly as far in time. The circumstances that led Clem’s four ancestral families to come to this part of the world, Madison Township, are all different and interesting. Again, had they all not arrived in the same proximity and within the same time frame, I would not be here to write their stories.

The Kelleys

I wish to start with the Kelleys because they were the first of Clem’s paternal grandparents to arrive. Their name really was