Note to readers: This exploration of my family history is primarily for my kids and kinfolk. I’m posting it in my blog because I’m too cheap to set up a separate website. If you are not among my relatives you probably won’t be interested in this stuff, and that’s fine with me.
My grandfather spent a night in jail once.
Grandpa in 1903
Joseph Gasperik was a butcher, sausage maker and businessman on Chicago’s South Side. He also had a quick temper and got into business disputes. One business disagreement wound up in court, and when the judge ruled against him Grandpa lost his temper and called the judge a “grafter” among other things. The judge promptly clapped him in jail for contempt of court.
My grandmother initially wanted to bail him out. But another relative said: “Leave him in jail to teach him a lesson.” My grandmother quickly agreed. Whether the experience made Grandpa a kinder, gentler person is debatable.
I just heard another story that my grandfather took his sister-in-law, Mary Nemeth, to court and accused her of going after him with a knife. The judge dismissed the case when he noted that my grandfather was very large and Great-Aunt Mary was less than five feet tall. No one ever suggested that she had not threatened him with a knife (and he probably had it coming).
One of his principal rivals in the Burnside neighborhood was a better-connected businessman named DeHaan. Years later, when I was a freshman at Northwestern University, one of the guys in my dorm was named DeHaan and turned out to be a scion of the same family. We got along just fine.
Grandpa was loyal to the old country and blamed President Woodrow Wilson for the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. Whenever he was reminded of this, he would pound his fist on the table, shout “Voodrow Veelson” and curse in a couple of languages.
He was a man of property and would-be tycoon. In his old age, when my parents would drive him around the city, Grandpa would point out a substantial commercial building and say: “I could have bought that property in 1925.” When asked why he didn’t buy it, he would say that it was too expensive, or didn’t think it was a good investment. When he passed away the only property he owned was a few acres of vacant land in the suburb of New Lenox, which is developed today but was practically off the grid in the 1950s.
In his old age Grandpa would drop by our apartment on the West Side, often bringing us some sort of toy (which he had found in some alley, my mother said). He lived alone in the old neighborhood, in an eccentric basement apartment with a ladder through a trap door to his bedroom.
Grandma in the 1960s
My grandfather’s funeral in 1954 was at the Hungarian funeral home in Burnside. It featured dirge-like Hungarian hymns in a minor key. There also were professional mourners, women who would show up and cry whether or not they knew the deceased. Those Burnside Hungarians did grief up right.
My grandmother, Julia Nemeth Gasperik Kristof, grew up in Hungary but her parents settled on a farm just outside Chicago near 127th St. and Cicero Ave. Today the Tri-State Tollway occupies most of that site. My mother used to talk about spending time at her grandmother’s farm.
I did not know my grandmother well because she lived with my uncle and aunt in California when I was growing up and I did not see her often. She and my mother apparently got along better when they were in different time zones. Whenever they were together they mostly argued. My grandmother was hard of hearing, and often turned her hearing aid off because she enjoyed talking more than listening.
She wore her long, auburn hair in braids on top of her head. “Our family doesn’t get grey hair,” I was told. When someone asked if she had her own teeth, Grandma assured them she did. “Of course they’re mine,” she remarked later. “I paid for them.”
My grandmother was the source of much of the culinary heritage that my mother passed along. According to my mother, the only way to make strudel properly was to get three generations of women stretching dough paper-thin across a large dining table. When Grandma came to visit my mother made a special effort to capture the family recipes that had never been written down. She would watch my grandmother preparing something, and would grab her hand to measure the pinch, dab or smidgen of each ingredient.
Grandma came back to Chicago to live with my folks a year or two before she passed away in 1973. By that time the old funeral home in Burnside was closed and the professional mourners were long gone. We held a quiet funeral in Oak Park… not very Hungarian.
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