A Little Piece of History

I’m going to tell you a story.  It may sound like something you’d make up--in fact, if it was made up you probably wouldn’t believe it.  But I promise you it’s true.

First, a little background.  My mother’s father--my grandfather--was named Joseph Nadenicek.  He passed away on January 1, 1929, when my mother was three years old.  She has no memory of him at all.  She was told some things, obviously, but she has no personal memory of him at all.  They had been living in Ohio, where my grandfather was a pastor in the Presbyterian church.  Some years after he passed away, Mom’s family moved to South Dakota, where they had relatives.  Eventually they settled in Yankton, where Mom grew up.

So last week I got an email from my cousin, Jon Nadenicek.  His wife’s cousin lives in Yankton, and recently they had a city-wide clean-up day.  You’ve seen them--it’s a day where everyone can haul all the stuff they don’t want out to the curb and the city will pick it up for them and haul it away at no charge.  So, Jon’s wife’s cousin was driving around Yankton on the city-wide cleanup day and saw an old trunk that was going to be hauled away.  She thought “That would be a good prop for our community theater group”.  So she stopped, picked it up, and took it home.

Later, she got home and opened the trunk.  Inside it was a suit with the date of 1918.  On the label was a name:  “Jos. Nadenicek”.  In the pocket were some business cards, with my grandfather’s name on them, listing him as the pastor of the Slovak Presbyterian Church and giving an address and a telephone number.

Naturally, the wife’s cousin called my cousin Jon and asked if he wanted these items.  Mom is the last of my grandfather’s children to survive, so Jon asked if she would like to have them.  Of course she said yes.  So, soon, we will have that suit and those business cards.

It’s an incredible thing.  I assume my grandmother must have brought the suit with her when they moved from Ohio.  Why would she have done that?  Was there something special about it?  Had he gotten married in it, or gotten ordained in it?  Had she kept it thinking it would fit one of her sons eventually?  And even assuming that’s true, my grandmother Nadenicek passed away over forty years ago.  Where has the suit been all that time?  Did my Uncle Paul keep it?  And even if he did, Uncle Paul passed away over four and a half years ago.  Where has the suit been?

If you wanted to, you could write all kinds of speculative stories.  You could also endlessly speculate about whether there was some sort of divine purpose in bringing that suit back to our family now, all these years later.  If there is, I don’t know what it is, but perhaps that will become clear at some point in the future.  I don’t know.

What I do know is that some little piece of my grandfather, whom I never knew, has been returned to the family.  And that’s pretty cool.