Czeching Back THEN When my family moved to Caldwell in 1944, they often felt like they had moved to a new world even though they had been born and raised in Oklahoma - which was just across the Red River. With Dad’s Cherokee/Irish heritage and Mother’s Irish/ German lineage, neither was prepared for the process required in becoming acclimated to the spellings and pronunciations of Czech names. This account is about prounciation of German and Czech names. The German names, for the most part, were more familiar and therefore not so difficult to pronounce. Names such as Englemann, Brinkman, Mahlmann, Poehl, and Deutsch were well known in Caldwell. However, the problem was that you could never be sure which you were dealing with at any given time – a Czech or a German - because through the years there had been a lot of intermarriages between the two groups. It was not uncommon to find someone with a German name who was actually more Czech than German and vice versa. As a practical tool, sometimes the easiest way to determine anyone’s heritage was to simply ask, “Does your family belong to the Sons of Hermann (German) or the S.P.J.S.T. (Czech).” The pronunciation of many Czech names can be very difficult when seeing them written for the first time. A few keys are that the “a” is almost always pronounced as being a “short a” as in “Ahh”. The “c” is often spoken as “ch.” And certain letters (often vowels) are pronounced that do not appear in the written form for the names (e.g. Drgac (Der-gach). Some easier names to read and pronounce are: Urbanosky, Vavra, Hovorak, Blaha, Zavodny, Valigura, Siptak and Chaloupka. (remember the “a” as in Ahh). Some of the harder ones are: Vychopen (Vick-o-pin), Budnik (Bood-nick), Jancik (Yan-sick), Pivonka (Pee-won-kee), Pargac (Par-gach), Loehr (Lair), Matejka (Ma-tay-ka), Hlavaty (Ha-lava-tee), Matejowsky (Ma-tee-yah-ski), Hejl (Hale), Crynkolvic (Crink-o-vich), Hajovsly (High-yah-ski), and Manas (Mineyus). And some are even harder: Suehs (Zeese), Rychlik (Rick-lick), Svrcek (Swer-check), and Giesenschlag (Gee-zen-slaw), And the most difficult of all: Zgabay (Sky-bye) In a few cases, some just gave up and had their names changed to match the mispronunciation. Our local football hero, Charlie Krueger (Kreg-ger), an All-American at A & M and All-Pro for the San Francisco 49’ers, finally became to be known as Charlie Kruger. Dicky Moegle (May-gul), from our District rival Taylor High School, was a star running back at Rice University. Years later while living in Houston, he had his name officially changed to Dick Magle.
And speaking of football, for a great laugh in the 1950’s, a good source we could always rely on came from the public address announcers at football games when we played in towns other than Caldwell. Before the start of the game, we would await the call of each player’s name over the loudspeakers with eager anticipation of hearing the local announcer’s pronunciation of the Czech names. I can tell you that it is very hard to sprint down the field on the opening kick-off when your sides are still hurting and you are out of breath from laughing. Of course, some of these differences between the written form versus the way it was pronounced became a source for boyhood humor, such as it might have been. The Pivonka family, mentioned earlier as being pronounced as Pee-won-key, believe it or not, actually owned a donkey which they kept in their back yard. So quite naturally, it became known as the Peedonkeys’s Wonkey. And one of my favorite memories comes from our first day of class in 8th grade English. Our brand new, first year teacher, Lou Ida Marsh, fresh from the Cajun Country near Beaumont and Lake Charles, Louisiana, was really struggling and was practically shell shocked during her attempts to get through all of the Czech names on the class roll. Then she finally came upon a French name that she knew that she could pronounce properly – Paul DeMottier. When she asked Mr. “Dee-mo’-tee-yea” to raise his hand, the class, previously snickering somewhat silently over her stabs at the previous names, literally erupted into howls of laughter. I have to give her proper credit since French and Italian are supposed to be closely related, and she was laughing along with us when informed how it actually was to be pronounced as (Dee’-mo-teer). And she went on to become, in my opinion, one of the best teachers of all time to grace the halls of Caldwell High School. Now I am not just referring to spellings and pronunciations here, but sometimes certain words would be placed in slightly different positions in a sentence. For example, there was this one really, good looking Czech girl that I took to the movies one night and heard her comment during the posse chase that was taking place on the silver screen, “Gosh, they run so fast already”. Being the beauty that she was, I found this to be endearing. One of the things that you sometimes noticed was the letters “V” and “W” being switched out - one for the other. During a conversation, the term “Vanilla Wafers” might come out as “Wanilla Vafers”. And, there must not be a “th” sound in the Czech language. When Milady would be working the meat counter at Valigura’s Super Market nearly every Saturday, it was always “Honey, do you vant dat meat cut “tick or tin?” That’s the way it was back then. Happy Trails to you, ‘til we meet again, Les Callison Class of ‘59