Interview with Marion Kuklewicz
Date of Interview: 16 March 1994
Interviewer: David Nixon
Transcriber: Brenda Light
Begin Tape: 2 Side: 1
Nixon:
Good morning to you.
Kuklewicz:
Good morning, David, and, ah, it’s good to see you today. Yesterday, being March 15, was an important day in my family. If my dad had been alive, it would have been his 102nd birthday.
Nixon:
Yeah.
Yeah, 102nd birthday, so I think that was kind of noteworthy. It would be, let’s see, February 2nd, in 1917 was the year that my parents were married.
Kuklewicz:
So you see, he was quite a young man.
Nixon: Mmm hmm.
Kuklewicz:
My mother, whom we didn’t get a chance to talk very much about last time we were here, was just a young girl of seventeen years old at that time.
Nixon:
Mmm hmm. So she was married when she was…
Kuklewicz:
She was married when she was seventeen; very, very, young. actually. Quite a tiny little, pretty little lady, She was not born in the Ukraine, ah, she was born to Ukrainian immigrant parents, who had come to America back in, actually, in the 1800s and I
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Kuklewicz: don’t know the exact year. Her father came over and
when he got off the ship at Ellis Island, was taken to Pennsylvania to work in the coal mines. But he didn’t like working in the coal mines very much. So he and some friends had decided to start a barroom or taproom, or a tavern, I guess they probably called it back in those days. He did that for awhile, but then made his way to Sunderland, where… I believe it’s where he met my grandmother and they lived right on the line between Sunderland and Hadley.۰۰
Nixon: Uh huh,
Kuklewicz:
off route 47. That’s where my mother was born and lived there for awhile. Then they purchased another piece of property which was on the Amherst Road, Route 116, in just about, oh about, two and a half miles south of the center of Sunderland. That’s where my mom grew up and met my father, who he was working with, like I told you last week, in the fields, down in the lower, ah, along the Connecticut River, down along the main street in Sunderland.
They were married and very shortly, within the next year, my oldest brother was born and that started their whole family unity.
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Kuklewicz Interview March 16, 1994
Nixon:
Mmmm.
Kuklewicz: My mother was very young and had had a lot of
responsibilities from the time she was a young girl, She only went to school in Sunderland, the grammar school, until the third grade. Then she was ill and was home, due to a very serious illness, for about a year, at which time her mother’s family was growing, you know brothers and sisters, and her mother became quite ill. So she stayed at home and from the time she was in the third grade, so that would probably make her about nine years old, maybe.
Umm.
Kuklewicz:
She was responsible for helping to take care of her brothers and sisters and help her mother with household chores. So even though she was very young, she was well versed in housekeeping, child care, and so forth. Not only did she become a mother, but she also was “the right hand man to my father” because she had to help him with the farm and so she not only took care of the children, but she had to go out and work in the barns, take care of the dairy animals, you know, perhaps some pigs and chickens and things like that. That was her responsibility, while he did
Nixon:
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Kuklewicz Interview March 16, 1994
Kuklewicz: the heavier work, and then there were other children that came along. During the course of their marriage, there were ten children.
Nixon:
Umm, humm.
Kuklewicz:
There were five boys and five girls, and of course sons were much wanted. If you were a farmer, sons were much wanted. So the first four children were boys.
Nixon:
Kuklewicz:
Why was that?
Well, because they grew up and helped on the farm; that way you didn’t have to hire help when it was time to harvest crops and things like that. Also, they could help take over part of the chores that were necessary to family life in those days; not that daughters weren’t welcomed, but it was quite nice to have those sons first. So there were four sons and my mother used to always tell us that she was in dispair; she thought that she would never have a little girl, and she very much wanted to have a daughter. But her fifth child was a girl and then she had two more girls.
Nixon:
Umm, humm
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Kuklewicz Interview March 16, 1994
Kuklewicz: Then she had another boy, to make up the five, and then there were two more. I am the ninth of the ten children that she had.
Nixon:
Umm humm.
Kuklewicz:
Not only did she work outdoors and take care of us as children, but she did a lot of things that today we don’t even think we have time for, and I marvel at how she was able to get everything done. Her days started very, very early in the morning; she would be up at three-thirty or four in the morning.
Nixon: Wow!
Kuklewicz:
Yeah. Farm women always got up very early, but before she would go out to do chores she would start making bread and she would get the bread all mixed and kneaded and set to rise. Then she would go out. and do chores and when the oldest children were very small, it meant that she’d have to bundle them up and take them out with her, because she couldn’t leave them in the house unattended. So she’d have to bundle up the boys and take them out to the barn, hope that they wouldn’t get into too much mischief while she was helping my dad with the chores and all.
Then, like in a lot of big families, as the number of
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Kuklewicz Interview March 16, 1994
Kuklewicz:
children increased and the older ones got older, then each one was responsible for taking care of the younger ones…
Nixon:
Umm humm.
Kuklewicz:
….until they were old enough to go out and work. Once the boys got older and could go outside, she didn’t have to go out quite so early in the morning. The other thing that I always remember my mother doing; my mother was a very, very soft, very gentle person, very soft spoken, very shy, rather retired person. She always had many, many good things to give in our house.
Nixon:
Umm humm,
Kuklewicz: One of the things, you never came into our house and there wasn’t a pot a soup on the stove.
Nixon:
Umm humm
Kuklewicz:
I probably told you before, about when I was a little girl, about the stone soup.
No.
Nixon:
Kuklewicz:
No? I didn’t tell you about the stone soup? Well, when you have ten children you always have to think of little games and ways to keep them busy; to help you without them even knowing it sometimes. One of
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Kuklewicz:
the things she use to do was, she would go to start soup and we would kind of be under foot, getting in the way and she didn’t want to tell us to get out so she would find little ways to keep us busy. One thing she’d say, we’d say, “What’ll you make up your soup today,” and she’d say, “I’m going to make stone soup, so you have to go out into the yard and find me a pretty stone. A nice good-looking stone that I can bring in the house and we’ll put it in the soup pot.” Of course, we’d always say, “Ah, that’s dirty,” or something like that and she’d say, “Well you have to bring it in the house,” and then she’d set us to work at the kitchen sink wash room getting it all cleaned and polished. She’d tell us she was going to put it in the pot, but she really didn’t. But we were too stupid to know that, so we thought she did. Then she’d say, “This is pretty good, but I need, ah, maybe some carrots, and beets, and string beans.”
She’d send us each out to a certain part of the garden to go back and bring the things in. Or if it was in the winter time, she’d send us down to the cellar, to the root cellar, to get the potatoes, and the carrots, and turnips, and whatever was down
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Kuklewicz:
there; beets to put in the soup. So, actually, she was making vegetable soup, but she told us it was stone soup and we thought that was really funny. So we’d, you know, run to do all those little chores for her and that freed her up to stay in the kitchen to be doing things that were more important, and then she wouldn’t have to make all those tiny trips.
Nixon:
Umm, humm.
Kuklewicz:
You know, she probably would have done it in one trip, but she’d send us off on all these errands. That was her way of keeping us busy, umm, keeping us out of her hair, so to speak, so she could get the work done. But there was always, always, a pot of soup on the stove. Of course, we lived in an old farm house and it was heated, basically heated by wood, so she had a wood burning cook stove. If you can imagine baking and cooking, you know, doing it all in a wood stove. Not only wood she make home-made bread, but able to have cookies and pastries. She used to make all of her own pastries and, umm, everything else that we ate. She used to start from scratch–didn’t go to the store and buy anything.
Nixon:
Umm, humm,
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Kuklewicz Interview March 16, 1994
Kuklewicz: Umm,
I can think of so many pleasant things we had; food was very important to our household, because we all worked so hard that we needed to have three fairly substantial meals to keep us going. We were not considered wealthy, we were rather, you know, we were struggling like so many people in the early 1900s. My earliest recollections, of course, are in the thirties, which was during the Depression.
Nixon:
Umm humm.
Kuklewicz:
I can remember her cooking things for us for breakfast, like cornmeal mush was one of the things that she used to cook for us for breakfast. It was substantial, it was relatively inexpensive. It was good whole milk, it really was a good breakfast to start our day off. But I didn’t particularly like cornmeal mush; that was not my favorite. But she would cook a great big pot of it, and after breakfast there would be leftovers. And she used to pour it into, like a loaf pan that you’d bake bread in, put into the refrigerator and let it get hard, The next day is when I really liked it, ’cause she’d take it out of the pan, and she’d slice it, and she’d brown it, ah, butter it, and skillet…
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Nixon:
Um hmm.
Kuklewicz:
and have it with maple syrup, That was my treat! That was my treat.
Nixon:
That’s what the southerners call “sloosh”.
Kuklewicz:
I know. I didn’t know that until about a year or so ago, I was with a group of people in Amherst and they were talking about their southern, umm, roots; these happened to be black ladies and they were calling it grits.
Nixon:
Umm humm.
Kuklewicz:
When I said how my mother used to make it, they were amazed that somebody of our, ah, culture would know to make grits, and they got the biggest kick out of it. But they didn’t know to eat it with maple syrup.
Nixon:
‘Cause down south they probably didn’t have the abundance of syrup that we had, umm…
Umm humm,
Kuklewicz:
here in our area, So that was one of the favorite things. Other stand-bys that she used to feed us, because we were so many, and again money was, you know, fairly scarce. She used to make, ah, for dessert she used to make great big bowls of bread pudding. And at that time, umm, I had an Uncle who
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Kuklewicz:
was not able to find work and so, umm, not like the food stamps that people have today, they used to receive certain foods, One of the things they used to get are large quantities of raisins, Well, he was married to a girl who didn’t know how to cook, and if she did know how to cook she wouldn’t take the time to do it anyway. So, he would get the raisins, he would bring them to my mother and he’d say, “What can you do with these.” She’d say, “Well, I can put them in bread or other things, So she used to use quite a generous amount or raisins in the bread pudding.
Nixon:
And we had our own farm, so we had lots of eggs and lots of nice cold milk.
Umm, humm.
Kuklewicz:
So that was a good way to use up dry, crusted bread. Like so many people did back then, and I know it’s available today, but we used to have the little neighborhood bakeries that baked bread, Now, we didn’t buy that bread to eat, particularly for our main bread source, but my father would go to the bakery and buy the day old, ah, bread.
Nixon:
Umm, humm
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Kuklewicz Interview March 16, 1994
Kuklewicz:
It would be a little on the hard side, because of course it wasn’t made the same as our homemade bread.
My mother would use that, cut that up, and put it into bread pudding. If we had french toast that’s what she’d use that for. And we would have bread pudding as one of our desserts; that was a tradition for dessert in our house. The other thing that was very inexpensive and relatively easy to come by was rice.
Nixon:
Umm humm.
Kuklewicz:
And so, she used to make a lot of rice pudding for us. And again we’d have the fresh eggs, we’d have the fresh milk, she’d have these raisins that were given to her so we could have a nice bowl of rice pudding. And we’d always have cream, fresh from the farm, to go on top of it. Whether it was just cream poured on or whipped cream, either way. So that probably explains why I look like I do today, you know, all those little fat cells just soaked up all those good things.
Nixon:
Huh huh huh.
Kuklewicz:
Hah hah hah. Another favorite that she used to make in the winter time was, we had, of course, we had the
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Kuklewicz:
farm, we had a big garden. She used to can; we didn’t have freezers then, so she used to can everything. And one of the things that she used to can was tomatoes. And we would can probably about two hundred quarts of tomatoes to use during the wintertime; for soups and stews and so forth. But she had a breakfast food that she used to make with tomatoes that looked like cream of tomato soup. But not like you buy in a can today; it was real chunky, real chunks of whole tomatoes. And then she would thicken it with, um, usually the top, the milk that she’d skim off the top. So it was really like a heavy cream, And she would spice it and I have tried, and tried, and tried, and I can’t make it taste like hers. It was sort of sweet and spicy, and again we’d have it over [pieutzahl, the day old bread, and that was a good hot meal to have in the morning. You had your bread, you had your milk, and you had your tomatoes, So, um, it was really good. After you’ve been out in the barn and done a couple of hours worth of a chores, you were hungry enough to want a substantial breakfast. favorites in the wintertime. So that was one of the And the spices just
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Kuklewicz Interview March 16, 1994
Kuklewicz:
really, really warmed you right up. Your toes right up to your finger tips; it was really great. And I can’t… She never had written down the recipe, so I don’t have it. But it was the things that I remember, I couldn’t wait to have tomato soup in the morning. Which sounds like a strange thing to have for breakfast, but it really was a hot bubbly delight. I guess no different than having a glass of tomato juice.
Nixon:
Umm humm.
Kuklewicz:
So it was perfectly acceptable. Then there was another thing that my father used to like it wasn’t the best thing for him to eat ’cause he wasn’t really well. She used to make a noodle or dumpling type of, um, breakfast food. And again you have to remember we didn’t have english muffins, and bagels, and all these nice things that you can go to the store and buy. So she had to improvise and do all her own cooking. She used to make a potato noodle, which she called (klusky) and it was done…
Nixon:
Wait a minute, how do you spell that?
Kuklewicz:
I don’t know how you spell it. I can look it up in a minute for you. I don’t have it. And I am not sure
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Kuklewicz Interview March 16, 1994
Kuklewicz:
if that is a Polish word or Ukrainian word, But she called it Klusky.
Nixon:
Klusky?
Kuklewicz: Dumplings.
I think it is K-L-U-S-K-Y, but I am not She would make those–they were made–with sure. warm mashed potatoes, and egg, and flour, and a little salt and pepper. And she would mix it all together to make a sticky dough. Then she would take a spoon, and sort of like you dump dumplings into stew, she would dump them into boiling water and cook them. And then she would serve them with the top melt, the cream…
Nixon:
Umm humm.
Kuklewicz:
a little salt and pepper and that would be another substantial breakfast food. Can you imagine how heavy that would settle in your stomach; like rock. But they were so good! I mean, I think about it now and I can’t believe we ate all these heavy things. That’s probably why I never grew to be six feet tall; I probably stunted my growth from all this heavy food. But she was a marvelous cook, she was a really marvelous cook. Umm, most of the things she cooked were, umm, not necessarily from a cook book;
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Kuklewicz Interview March 16, 1994
Kuklewicz:
they were probably things that she learned from her mother; things she learned from other people that she talked with might have… Sundays were usually a leisure day, especially for the women. My father didn’t take many days off at all. He generally worked every day, seven days a week. I think I told you last time, he’s pretty much a workaholic. Ah, but my mother would take Sundays as her leisure day. So after church, it was the custom for the women to sort of chat for awhile after the services. And they might talk about different foods that they cooked, ways to stretch the things that they had, and share recipes as women still do today. As she got older, I’m sure she was always using a cookbook. Basically, she cooked by instinct. And like when she made bread, I’d say to her, “Mom how do you do it?” She’d say, “Oh, I put some eggs and some milk in the bowl, and then I put my yeast in, then I add enough flour, and when it feels good then it’s ready.”
Nixon:
Umm humm.
Kuklewicz:
You know. So, umm, I couldn’t rely on some of those recipes. I don’t have the touch, I guess, a pinch of salt, you know….
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Kuklewicz Interview March 16, 1994
Nixon:
Umm, humm.
Kuklewicz:
and a hand full of flour like, she does. So after a lot a recipes… But, um, basically she was rather an experimental cook I would guess, you’d have to say, But they just seemed to have so much instinct for being able to put things together and come up with something really, really great.
Nixon:
Umm, humm
Kuklewicz:
As children, as we grew older, then we began to start looking for recipes. Very often our source of recipes would come, umm, from word of mouth. They were passed down word of mouth from the older generations, you know, even generations before my mother. Ah, things would be passed down and we got them to reduplicate them. And if it came out good, then we’d try to write down the recipe. I can remember my mother having one of those composition books with the plastic white cover, you know, stitched-in pages. She would have little notes scribbled in there of things that she’d done that came out good, so she’d record that as a recipe.
Unfortunately, I don’t have those just now; they were lost. She had given them to one of my sisters, who
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Kuklewicz: had really a flair for cooking.
And a few years back They lost everything my sister’s house had a fire. in the kitchen. So a lot of those handwritten recipes that we had that would have been really nice things to pass down to the generations were destroyed in the kitchen fire. Most of the house was destroyed, and the kitchen particularly. What happened was the fire started in the barn, it was in the winter time, and the wind was blowing and so it blew, you know, the flames into the house and that whole ell was totally destroyed.
Nixon:
Yeah.
Kuklewicz: So a lot of the, ah… That was after my mother had broken up the home. So a lot of her dishes, things that were family heirlooms, not necessarily priceless…
Nixon:
Umm humm.
Kuklewicz:
but family heirlooms, nonetheless, were destroyed, Umm, we lost a lot of things then. Um,
Nixon:
what other…
What was your mothers name?
Kuklewicz: Oh, I didn’t tell you that, did I?
Nixon:
No.
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Kuklewicz Interview March 16, 1994
Kuklewicz: My mother’s name was Julia.
Nixon:
Julia.
Kuklewicz: Lilian. And in parenthesis you might write “Lean,” because some places it’s Julia Lilian and some places it’s Julia Lean. My mother preferred Julia Lilian.
Nixon:
Ah huh.
Kuklewicz:
Her maiden name was Biscoe, and they spelled it B-I-S-C-O-E.
Nixon:
B-I-S-C-O-E.
Kuklewicz:
Which is the way it was interpreted when my grandfather landed at Ellis Island.
Nixon:
Umm humm.
Kuklewicz:
In Ukranian it comes out to the equivalent of B-I-S-H-K-0. Some members of the family who were better able to communicate the spelling, retained the name B-I-S-H-K-O. We have other family members who live in Pennsylvania, still in the coal mine region of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, still spell it
B-I-S-C-0. So it’s just a matter of when the people arrived, ah, what the interpretation was, when they landed at Ellis Island.
Nixon:
Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, is that where your grandfather…
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Kuklewicz:
That’s were my grandfather was when he arrived. He worked in the coal mines in Shenandoah, and I have many, many relatives in Shenandoah who still live in the town. Most of them are older now, so they’re not active as miners anymore. But they spent their whole life, um… This has nothing to do with my family, but just, just, kind of FYI. Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s parents were Irish immigrants, who worked in the coal mines in Pennsylvania too. When they were young boys they and some of my, I call them uncles but they were actually cousins, some of my uncles and the girls who brought us back together formed a band in Pennsylvania. We used to play music at different events there, And Tommy and Jimmy decided that they certainly weren’t going to spend their lives, ah, underground working in the coal mines. So as soon as they were old enough they left.
Nixon:
Umm humm.
Kuklewicz:
But that’s the origins that… that was their origin too. And it was interesting to note that the people on my mother’s side of the family, my grandfather, many of his uncles, brothers, cousins were very musically inclined. The people who lived in the coal
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Kuklewicz:
mines, I think, because they were underground so much, that when they were above ground, they were very sociable and they had a lot of partying. A lot of, ah, events where music was played. There was a lot more drinking on that side of the family, alcoholic beverages and so forth. It seemed to be their way of release from this horrible existence that they had to deal with in the coal mines. And of course it was very dangerous; there were a lot of accidents and so forth. And I guess that was their way of coping, was to have, ah, more, more, ah, music, laughter, dancing. Part of me on what was my father’s side of the family, you know, not to say that… that was a bad thing, it just seemed that was their way of relieving stress. The music was very, very important, um, you know, for all… for all of the time during the year. Not just on special occasions, but all year long was very important, very important. Ah, things like dance, music, that’s all, you know, ah, celebrated a lot in that branch of the family.
Nixon:
What was your grandfather’s name?
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Kuklewicz: My grandfather’s name was Alexander Biscoe. I don’t remember him having a middle name.
Nixon:
He spelled it B-I-S-C-O-E?
Kuklewicz:
In the United States he spelled it B-I-S-C-O-E. And my grandmother’s name was Anna, A-N-N-A. In parenthesis, her maiden name was Gouden, G-O-U-D-E-N.
Nixon:
G-O-U-D-E-N.
Kuklewicz: And her last name was Korpita, K-O-R-P-I-T-A.
Nixon:
K-O…
Kuklewicz: R-P-I-T-A.
Nixon:
Was she Ukrainian too?
Kuklewicz: Ah, I’m not sure if she… The Korpita side of the
family is Ukrainian. The Gouden, I think, might have been Czech or, um, Austrian. I’m not sure. I never new my grandmother and so, consequently, I don’t know as much about her. She had passed away before I was born.
Right.
Nixon:
Kuklewicz: Umm.
Nixon:
Now she’s got her… She was married before she left Alexander?
Kuklewicz: No. Her mother had been married twice.
Nixon:
Oh, I see.
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Kuklewicz Interview March 16, 1994
Kuklewicz: So she had the Gouden and Korpita name.
Nixon:
Okay. Did Anna Korpita come from, ah, from the Ukraine, or was she born here in the United States?
Kuklewicz: No, she was born there and came over to this country.
And I… I would have to assume from what I know, and again, I don’t know the total history… And this is something… This is something, as we get to talk to some of the other people that I want to have you interview, ah, we may find more background out on that. But it’s delving. It’s not something that I really researched that much, but I assume she came, ah, to the United States as a young child…
Umm, humm.
Nixon:
Kuklewicz:
and then her parents settled in the Sunderland area. When we go out to do interviews in that area, I can show you, you know, some of the… I can show you the area where they lived. Umm, but, she came over here and they lived in the south part of Sunderland. It used to be called Hungarian Avenue, where they lived.
Nixon:
Umm, humm
Kuklewicz: And that was because there were a lot of people who were Hungarian. Umm, there were a lot of Lithuanian
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Kuklewicz:
people who settled in that particular part of Sunderland, plus Ukrainian, some Czechs. It’s now renamed, and it’s called North Silver Lane. South Silver Lane. Excuse me, South Silver Lane. But that’s what it was known, it was sort of like… It was like a little section of the town, sort of like a little village and they all sort of congregated there. And I’m sure that when they came, because they didn’t have a lot of money and so forth, they probably lived in what we would consider communal housing now. Simply in order to survive and have a place to stay. So that was sort of like a little section of the town that, um, had gotten, sort of nicknamed Hungarian Avenue. Then when the streets, you know, got really named, the town, the town group, it was then called South Silver Lane.
Nixon:
Kuklewicz:
Why did Alexander move from Pennsylvania to Sunderland?
Well, he didn’t… He decided that coal mining definitely was for him. Wasn’t for him. Umm, as I said, they had the tavern, which he had worked in with a couple of partners. And I’m not sure exactly why he left there, but his background again, was, was
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Kuklewicz: farming. And so he decided, umm, that he wanted to
get back into farming. He came to Massachusetts and started farming in Sunderland. And that was where, I would chance that he met my grandmother. Nixon:
So, you don’t know why he chose..
Kuklewicz:
I don’t know why he chose Sunderland. Um, I… I
think that, as far as I can remember, the men in the Biscoe side of the family were people who like to… They like to travel, for one thing. They like the outdoors, they like hunting, and they like fishing. So, I’m wondering if, um… If maybe they were led to New England because of those aspects. sure. And this is something… I’m not As I say, this is something I haven’t been able to really find out. I’ve asked with my remaining older brother and sister, and they don’t seem to… They don’t seem to know. So, I’m hoping that when we talk to some of the other people, maybe we can find out more…
Umm, humm.
Nixon:
Kuklewicz:
as to why… why this took place. As I had referred to before, he did have a small farm, but he was what my father always called a gentleman farmer. He wasn’t as serious about building a big farm… or
