An Interview with Glenn Sternes
Interview conducted by: Jessica Haney and Jordan Miles
Around 1905, Glenn Sternes' grandmother immigrated to the United States at the age of 16. After her family joined her in America, they began to make a new life for themselves. In this interview, Dr. Sternes talks about the triumphs and struggles for his family and shares his family's culture.
Interview
This interview was made in collaboration with Department of History in University of Houston and Czech Center Museum Houston. The following text is the verbatim transcription of the oral history project.
October 8, 2019
UH Interviewer: Thank you for meeting with me today Dr. Sternes. This is an oral history, as I’m sure you know, about your family and what pushed them to immigrate over here. Do you know when they came over?
Glenn Sternes: Oh, different times. On my mother’s side, they came in around 1905, when my mother’s mother came over. She was from a small town in southern Bohemia, and her father had gotten into a second marriage and this is the evil stepmother story. My grandmother was the eldest of a whole bunch of children and she wanted my grandmother to take care of the kids. That was not only it, it probably meant stopping schooling, but also I think there was some talk about aligning with the village priest—like you’re gonna marry this certain guy. And my grandmother said “No, I’m not”, so she took off for America. Now, what had happened was on my mother’s side, my grandfather, whose family lived in—are you familiar with the Texan-style house, which came over from Europe? The two portions split by a central dog-run? That’s the kind of house they had. It dated back to 1850. The walls were a foot thick so they were good for the winters over there; the summers didn’t used to be as bad as they are now, not as bad as Texas. But anyway, that was it, the family was specialized in making the clay-tiled roofs called zadnitsu. That’s what they were doing, and their side of the family was in one half of the house they rented—my grandmother’s side owned the house and they lived on the other side. So sometime before 1905, they took off and went to Chicago. So, when my grandmother got this word about “You’re gonna marry…”, “No, I’m not…”, she made contact with the grandfather’s side and she went over, at 16 years of age, to Chicago on her own.
UH Interviewer: Sixteen?
Glenn Sternes: Think about what you were like when you were sixteen and what you knew or didn’t know! So anyway, she got a number of jobs—she was a seamstress at Hart Schaffner and Marx, the men’s suit-makers, and then she was the upstairs maid in the Gold Coast- the Jewish section- of Chicago on the near North side. She made good friends with the lady that was the downstairs maid that handled the cooking and all that kind of stuff. Finally, she married my grandfather and they moved into a grocery store in an all-Irish neighborhood. Well, think about that, you better speak the language if you’re going to be catering to people. So she ended up speaking the language perfectly—not a trace of an accent. Meanwhile, my grandfather became a worker at a crane company and learned about things around here. Charles Crane was very important for the Czech people—he favored them, he had a lot to do with the president at the time, Wilson. So he helped them indirectly—I don’t know, I just heard this kind of stuff. They lived there for roughly 28 years until my grandfather died after a kidney surgery and a couple of years later my grandmother sold the store and moved in with my aunt, her younger daughter—my mother was the older daughter. That’s that story, around 1905. Other people, like my grandfather, continued work during the day.
At first, he went to the packing houses, but he didn’t like it—it was awful. If you’ve read some of the books on how it was rough, gritty and hard work. So he liked working for the crane company better. As it was, he worked during the day and then he came home and got dinner and then he worked in the store. My grandmother worked in the store during the day and when the two girls came home from school, they would help mom prepare the dinner and then grandpa worked at the store until it closed, probably about 9 o’clock at night. They also worked Saturdays and Sundays. It was a lot of work, but they got things done, they got the things they wanted, they joined the various Czech groups up there in Chicago—it was the CSA and they had things to do with the School organization. It was mainly getting insurance so they could be secure—they used to call it burial insurance so you weren’t putting your relatives through any hardships if you happen to keel over; getting any other kind of insurance and then getting money for your retirement, as well as pleasure, a car to drive—there was one car, from 1924, so that was pretty good. The one I remember was a 1936 Oldsmobile and the war kind of took care of things—you didn’t get new cars for a long time until things kind of opened up.
So both my grandmother and grandfather’s side came from southern Bohemia, near a town called Besek, which translates to sand because they have a beautiful bank of white sand. When I was there once, they had a contest just like they do in Galveston—a sand-sculpting contest. But instead of making modernistic things, they went back in their history and were making kings and such, it was all really well-done. The other thing they did was they had the first stone bridge across the river— this was in the year 1100, so there was a lot of history there! I came upon this a bit later but Paseky was the first town they were in, which translates as “the meadows”. You have these beautiful, rolling meadows and about 90 houses or so in this little town. In contrast to America, people had their village together and then you went out to the fields. It’s not like America where “I’ve got my piece of land and I’ve got my house” and he’s two miles down the road and has his house and his land. It’s a much more sociable kind of thing. Then you had the school, he guest house or the pub, these kinds of things were added in, too.
On my father’s side, both my grandmother and my grandfather came from East Bohemia. They came from small cities. My grandfather was an artist and a china painter; he would paint designs and pictures. He developed a photographic process for photographing China, so I have a lot of that stuff. I grew up all around that. Imagine living in a little house but every wall has a big design—as big as the wall is—of gardens and flowers. It was amazing. He had studied in Dresden, Germany, and then came back and was an artisan. Artists are wonderful but they’re also starving. I think there were some rough times where he was trying to sell some knick-knacks to bring in some money, because you’re not going to get it from relatives for drawing designs. Anyway, he married my grandmother. She was the second wife, because the first wife—a lot of wives—died in childbirth.
The first time I went to Czechoslovakia was in 1958 and we were there for 28 days. That was when it was in the heaviest of its communist times —what they call the Novotney years. It was serious. Instead of renting a car when we went there, it was advantageous for us to have a purchase/repurchase program. This was a Citröen— you know the funny-looking Citröens with the sloping hood and the short deck in the back? It has a four-cylinder, all-aluminum engine. If you had to work on the car, which we had to do at one time, it had to be absolutely stone-cold. They would push it onto the rack and we drove it one or two blocks and they’d say “Nope, can’t do that! You’ll have to do it tomorrow.”. That little car had a suspension—all the people in Czechoslovakia knew about the Citröen; they would push on the fender and listen to it “Tsssss” as it heightened itself automatically to the right height. They had studied all this either through magazines, which may be smuggled into Czechoslovakia, or listening to radios or TV. One time my cousin, who was an electronics man, rigged things so that he could get the Western television because it was forbidden to watch Western television! They had mile after mile of blocking, where they blocked all the signals out. Anyway, we went across the border and the border guards didn’t care. If you gave them trouble, they would just take that much longer—even all day—on your car. They might take the tires off and look at the inner tubes to see if you have any contraband. On the way out, we did smuggle some cigarettes in for relatives. Well, not really smuggled, but my dad did pretend he smoked. This was the stuff we had to do.
All these years, I was not aware of this but we would send personal care packages and things because the people did not have anything over there—if you wanted to get something, you saved up for it. Maybe you bought it with money but more often you bought it with what was called Tuzex coupons—these coupons or bonds were little paper things. You would buy them and then go to this special store and you could buy stuff at maybe high prices, but the regular people just could not get them. And I mean things like canned peaches—there were limits on fish and meat. They would save up, but when we visited they would serve us with meat, but maybe they saved up ration coupons for a month or so. You didn’t know until later what sacrifices they had made. Getting back to the TV guy, he knew about the aeroyal suspension and so he did that.
The only time in the trip when we were not surrounded by a bunch of people staring at us in the car was when we were in Prague, about a block from our hotel. And right next to us—this was 1958— was a 1958 white Cadillac convertible with the spare tire on the back. That just brought them all out! We finally found this guy and he was an American who knew the Vice President and just got a car so he could ride around—just “a car” *laughs*. So he had a special engine put in to run on the crappy gas there—they really had very low octane gas and you would get smoke out of the back but at least it would run—the normal GM engines would not run on that. He went around with a professional translator, a professor from one of the universities, and I’m sure the professor was given some suggestions on what to say because his view on the facts was entirely different from ours. Afterwards, at the end of the trip, since my dad was a medical doctor, the CIA (I guess it was?) went around and told him what the hospitals were like. We knew they weren’t as good as ours because we had a nephew that had a tonsillectomy and he was in the hospital for two weeks. Meanwhile, we put our people out in a few days. We went touring the hospital and that’s what gave him that opinion.
We did all kinds of things; our family was really in the forefront—they were one of the first that had running water! Now think of this: in 1958, you went down to the village pump and pumped water for your family and they were able to drill a well and get the equipment—that’s the thing, you have to get the equipment—and drill their own well in the house. They could pump it in the house, but they wanted to get it where it was automatically force-fed and the parts were coming for that. Later on, when I visited, they put bathtubs inside the house as opposed to hauling out a tin bathtub into the yard—Saturday night was bath-time. They had this stuff here in Texas, too, but not in the 20th century. And you couldn’t haul that much water so the little kid was first in the bath and then finally got to the parents.
They usually had another type of job—some had cherry orchards, some had various grains. This was in an area south of Bohemia that was more of a beer growing area—it wasn’t wine. A lot of the Czechs here are Moravian so they’ll talk about the wine-growing in their areas. This was beer, but they didn’t have any beer. They had barley, wheat, and oats. I’m a city kid, so I had to learn what they look like as you drive past. During those years, they only felt comfortable talking to us when they were inside our car. Otherwise, they would literally have somebody go around the perimeter of the house to make sure nobody was looking. Just think about that and what your rights are as a person. Also, the level of trust was not too high—they had cattle and you, with a bunch of women, would be in charge of the cattle. You would have this cow barn but they wouldn’t trust you to take care of your own barn so you had to go over to this town and another person would have to go to another town because they didn’t trust you.
Every morning, they would have loud speakers on the telephone posts, which was called the Yezeded, the group that handled the rights to the various areas and said “You will work in that field today and he’ll work in that field”. So you go to your assigned field, work, and come back. You have a quota, which they knew, and if you own so many hectares-or acres-of land, you have so much of a quota. That’s good if you make it, but if you don’t make it, the penalties come into play. You would have to pay cash in order to make up your loss. If you don’t have cash, you get thrown in jail and your land—or part of your land— gets divided up. Other people get pieces of it and then they may have an even bigger quota, so there’s a risk of them ending up in jail, too. I saw a map when I was there in 1958 of the surrounding areas and our town was the last little one in all of Czechoslovakia. It was literally a black spot on the country as far as this kind of thing goes. They had their own independent lands. Finally, what happened is everyone capitulated—you were in jail for however long—and the land was collectivized. That’s still not the same as a state farm— on collective, you still kind of own the land, it’s like shareholding. You own stock in it.
At the beginning of the season, you decide how much land to use, what you’ll put in it, and the quota. A state farm means you’re just on the land, I wouldn’t say like a slave, it’s a little bit better. You don’t own the land, you don’t share the profits; you just get paid. That’s how it was. The Communist Party was very much like a union. I don’t know much about unions, but usually when you get a job it pays you to join the union. Like the guys that are on strike with GM, they get $250, which is nothing but better than nothing. They will fight for you and get your benefits. During the Communist years, it was very strange that the Communists were “topsy-turvy”. Those people that were at the top were at the bottom under Communism. Those people that were at the bottom were at the top.
How do I know? Well, we had a relative of a relative in Merania—she was the sister of my great aunt. My great aunt came here and married my uncle and they did okay. Her sister had little to no education, but under Communism. If she walked into the room everybody stood up and sort of bowed down to her. If you have a grade school education, you’re going to make grade school decisions, so this was not exactly like the intelligent people leading the way; it was more like the blind leading the blind. Now her kids—I think she had a daughter, who became a medical doctor. And she also married a medical doctor and they had a little boy. The parents were told that the little boy could not become a doctor. He could not become self-employed. He could be a farmer or a miner and that’s it. What they wanted to do was prevent elitism—they saw that Capitalists were elite and that would split them up. So they’re wondering, what does that do to this kid? They have to tell him he can’t go to school or be a scientist or a doctor; he has to be a farmer or a miner. These are some of the things they were fighting then.
I’ve been there about 7 or 8 times and this was in the 1950’s at first, then the middle 70’s and 80’s and again in the 1990 right after the Velvet Revolution. I was here when all that stuff happened. Before that, there was Dubček, who was Slovak, running the country. But they didn’t like him—the people liked him, that was when they had the Prague Spring, they were turning to the West. But the Communists did not like that and had Russia come to intercept that. The second time around, they did not have Russia come in; they had other countries come in to put the Czechs back into the Socialist realm. Dubček had to get some kind of job because you were not allowed to be unemployed in Czechoslovakia. So he worked in the forests or so. You’ve heard of Václav Havel—well, he was a playwright and he couldn’t do that kind of stuff so he had to work in a brewery. Of course, it was cold and damp and it messed up his lungs, in addition to his smoking, so that’s what eventually killed him. My grandfather and grandmother got together in East Bohemia and moved—my grandfather was finishing his studies in Dresden. In 1904 is when my aunt was born—his first child with her, I found out later there was another child with his first wife. I still correspond with her and we’ve done some fun things together. Her husband is a pilot and so I went up in a plane and he likes to help people learn parachuting and paragliding and all that. The Czechs make some of the best gliders in the world, so that’s exciting. But back to my grandfather—he then came to Prague and in 1906 my uncle was born. Then my grandfather went over to America, to Chicago, and met up with some of his art friends and they were lifelong friends. I knew them from whenever I knew anybody. Mr. Drabek, I have some of his paintings in addition to my grandfather’s paintings.
UH Interviewer: Do you mind if I ask why your grandfather came over?
Glenn Sternes: Why did he come over? For the opportunity. The people that came here from Moravia were for the land. In Europe, you could not own land or forests—you couldn’t even cut a tree in the forest, that was the nobility’s property. You could pick up a dead limb. That’s why they always talk about the forests in Europe being prime, first generation forests. That’s why you have all of the mushrooms—you’ve heard about the Czech mushrooms—that’s because it’s cleared and the mushrooms will grow there. I didn’t get any this time, but the time before, I got a big stack of mushrooms. They are strong and good, the ones they have in the stores here are no good. Anyway, you’re talking about artisans and professional people. They didn’t come because of the land, they came because of the opportunity. I don’t think they thought the streets were paved with gold, but as far as the opportunity went, yes, it was there. People would move into an area and be with their buddies and they would have someone who has been there longer and is a bit more fluent in the language who would teach them various things. Then they would move out. My grandfather—he was older, he was 65 I think when I was born. He was born in 1869. He did what he could, he also did photography using glass plates as negatives—if you know about photography, that’s one of the earliest things. But they had all other things, like an icebox, literally, and then a refrigerator. My grandmother was always a housewife.
My dad was born in Chicago and was the last of the three kids. Maybe he was smarter, I don’t know, but he put himself through medical school and played piano on the side. I grew up around pianos—my mother was a concert pianist so we had three pianos in our house: two grand pianos and a Spinet piano. We went to a town on the periphery of Chicago, on the near west side, it was literally the largest town in America using the town form of government. We had 69,000 there and then there was an adjacent community, Berwyn, to the west of that, which was like 51,000, but that was a city. The Czechs tended to move there, they were in the Western part of Chicago and then they spilled into Cicero and Berwyn. Now, it’s all Hispanic.
I used to go bring friends Hispanic foods and things like that but I don’t have to do that now—they have everything they need over there! The Czechs, well, it’s one of these generational things, they’ve kind of assimilated into Chicago. They’re moving further out, now maybe Grandma or Grandpa dies and so they come back in, but maybe they sell the house—some of the neighborhoods are getting a bit rough. They sell it, make their money, and have the new group come in. You get the Czechs, Poles, some Dutch, and Mexicans more than anybody else. I don’t think you get any Puerto Ricans that I know of. That was like our high school: J Sterling Morton High School and Junior College. It was a four-story, solid city block and we had 6500 students in it plus a 1300 junior college. Later on, the junior college moved on out so that gave us extra room. The school split into what was called Morton East, which was the original plan, and Morton West about two miles west. They shared the same music department and the same academic things, but they had two different sports leagues they participated in, which was kind of weird. Most of the people there had an arrangement with Western Electric. Western Electric, at the time, was the largest and only maker of bell telephones in the whole United States. Every telephone was made there. This was a job that grandfathers passed on to sons and grandsons. You just stayed there. They had a lot of things; they had baseball, bowling leagues; I don’t think they had a pool but maybe some swimming and card groups, that kind of stuff. They were interested in their people.
I’m a psychologist and so what was interesting to me was that some of the early studies on motivation and performance of workers were done at this Hawthorne section of Cicero. The Hawthorne studies were where they would have a worker working at a table and a guy would come up and say “How are doing? Are you liking your work? What do you do here?”. They may do something else, too. They may put in a light fixture so it’s brighter for you. They would measure the performance. They might have some hours of radio come on, various things like that. And then, interestingly enough, they would reverse stuff. So you might get less light than you started with or cut out the radio. They noticed, strangely enough, that the performance was going up no matter what they did. They said “What’s going on? This guy’s practically working in the dark, why is he so motivated?”. It was the fact that he had somebody interested in him rather than just doing your job and going home at 4 o’clock. It was that somebody was interested in you. That, in itself, was also a couple of blocks: 5 stories tall and with a bell tower because in those days not everybody had a wrist watch so they would have to sound the start and finish times.
We had a wonderful high school. I think maybe the roughest thing was English and Humanities, but we had all the sciences and even labs for automotive mechanics, woodworking, metalworking, and printing press. It was because this was a working class community: they had Sico steel that made steel plants and HotPoint that did all your electric appliances and Sunbeam did your mixers and your heating elements. Sears’ national headquarters was in Chicago but the railroad coming in, all the lines were on the tracks so that’s where the yards were. They had Goss Printing Press and Danley Printing Press that made every yellow pages’ book in the whole country. So there was plenty of money to go around or be used in the schools. Taxes were low and so it was a pretty good place to live in. We had people teaching us; we had a 150-piece concert band and a 100-piece orchestra; we had people from the Chicago symphony teaching us. Our director—he’s alive and living in Houston now, I helped him celebrate his 100th birthday here last weekend—he played the french horn and was accepted into the Chicago symphony. And then Uncle Sam said “Come on” because Pearl Harbor got bombed and everyone got pressed into service. So he went to the army.
UH Interviewer: Was your family drafted as well?
Glenn Sternes: Not drafted, but my dad, as an officer, was enlisted. He was in the navy. But my director was in the army and then he got out and did some other things, including being director of the band and orchestra at Morton. And then West Point said “We want you again”, so he became the band director. So while he was there, he wrote the West Point Symphony. I looked that up and thought “I want to hear this”, and they’re going to have the premier at the University of Houston and I thought that it was kind of late, kind of bizarre, but then I found out the story. They had played it before a Japanese group and they stole the score! That’s like James Bond, that kind of thing! I don’t know who did it but somebody from our side—the good guys—went and stole it back! That’s why, about 17 years ago, they had the premier here. He was here because his son was a gymnastics professor at HPU. He did not compete with his dad; he didn’t want to get into music. But he took the music he had learned from his dad and worked it into his gymnastics routine. So maybe someone like Simone Biles is not just having music on but doing her movements according to the music. I think there might have been something else going on but, had there not been, he might have been as well-known as the Romanian guy, I can’t remember his name. Music is a big thing; I learned to play piano and then later on violin and trumpet. I took a summer of organ lessons on a pipe organ and then I got down here and didn’t have anything. As a graduate student, I graduated with a PhD from University of Houston, and knew I had to have something. I was going to get a melodica but it was too expensive so I ended up with a ukulele. But it was fun! Now I’ve got my piano; I’m going to have my violin fixed. The trumpet lessons I had were at Morton—the guy was a member of the Paris Opera. My violin teacher was a student of the number one technique guy in Europe. We had all of these people! I accompanied a girl once and she’s now a music major; she got Outstanding in a state contest. Her dad was so pleased he made me a mouthpiece for my trumpet. So I’ve kept with the music. At our house, we would sometimes get together, my dad on the organ and my mother and I on the two pianos.
UH Interviewer: Was any of that inspired by the Czech tradition? Was the Czech music popular?
Glenn Sternes: *speaking in Czech*: He who is a Czech is a musician. That’s true! I looked at my great uncle, he played the trumpet. There was a picture of him in his World War 1 uniform holding a trumpet. They love music, they love playing, they love singing. My cousin was half-Czech and half-Moravian and he had his own band of 16 or 20 pieces and they would play at the Moravia Day, like at Navy Pier, which is a big thing. They had much the same tradition as here, where they would have different halls. Here they have the SPJST, in the rest of the country they have the CSA or the Falkan. They have different fraternal organizations, somehow Texas got a set of different ones.
UH Interviewer: I was wondering how Czech culture has influenced your life, and if you know the language, any like cultural aspects, or traditions, or even like food you keep up?
Glenn Sternes: Well, here I am, I mean I’m at the Czech center and I think about it. It's just something you grow up with, but in its absence, like I lived in New York, I lived in New Mexico, they didn't have any. New York, you have to find them, they have a Czech community but New Mexico, I don’t think there are very many Czechs. There were other things that I did but, if it was more than a year or two, I’m sure I would’ve missed it, and there’s something about this, here again, being an immigrant here, people hold on to certain traditions. If they don't speak their language, it gets kinda stilted and outdated. You may not remember but President Jimmy Carter is going around. He didn’t speak Polish but he was going to Poland, so he had a guy come over, translate for him from Canada. Well this guy could speak pretty fluently, but he was outdated, he wasn’t updated on things. I think he made a couple of faux pas and said “well you're talking about having relations with your mother”, or something like that, instead of what you were really supposed to say, and so that can happen.
I was given language lessons starting about age five. We would go on long trips, and my grandma or mother, whoever wasn’t driving would probably grill me on some stuff, on various language words, or little poems or little sayings like that. Then afterwards they said it was about time to go to bohemian school, and that was okay. But it was kind of an old model, and my buddy and I soon figured out that if we finished the assignment, they just gave you another assignment. And if you messed up, then you had to write the word ten times, like on the blackboard. Well, this is not the most thrilling thing, so we made little soldiers and tanks and airplanes and that kind of stuff. And finally, it got taken away and handed to my dad. And we had the come to Jesus meeting like “are you doing this?” and I knew enough to say - not say, well that was my buddy’s and his dad was giving me a look to better shut up about it. So they said this is not working, let us try him at another school. Same thing kinda happened, the teacher let us get away with that.
So the third time around, they just said, we’re getting a tutor for you so it was one on one. Well, this guy was really good. He was working for the Czech newspaper. They had two newspapers, at that time. Just imagine daily newspapers for Czech. And was very polished, so he taught me in Czech, then afterwards we got into a little bit of Russian, and a little bit of French. So, I mean, these people know their languages, then that kinda stopped, I took Russian in college, at Northwestern, which had a very good Russian department. They had Czech, I think, but you had to be a junior to take that. And I thought, what does that have to do with it. Czech is always sort of the step-child. I don’t know what happened when I came here, and they had a vibrant department at the University of Houston. But I found out my teacher spoke about eight languages. Czech, Slovak, Polish, German, French, we were here so he learned Spanish, Latin. Because he was an ex-priest, and I think he got into a little bit of Portuguese and Russian probably. He knew enough languages, but he could see that there was no future here because the powers put Czech, and Hebrew under the auspices of Spanish departments. So, they weren’t going to go anywhere and he took off to California, where he was at the Defense Language Institute. The army used to have their military study that and I heard on TV, that voice sounds familiar, that’s Theo! He’s translating some Russian stuff and I thought, “How neat.”
Since then, I’ve lost contact with him, but you know these are the things that you really had to be smart to make it. For instance, during the pre-communist, during the pre-Hitler era, you had the Austro-Hungarian Empire, running the show. The Absbergs would say, “We gotta have the Czech language,” Oh, we don’t need the Czech language, the kids speak German, and watch, they’ll go to a classroom”, “Okay, how many of you speak German?” So, one would raise your hand, another would raise your hand, the professor would say, “See, they all understand German,” that’s enough. And, so that was the way it was, they wouldn’t teach it. Didn’t they have public talk about your national anthem, or songs that you grew up with. And finally, they just had to take it over themselves, and so that built up, and at the end of world war one, was with Woodrow Wilson, they got all these little beanicy countries on their own, all the Yugoslavs countries and Czech, Czech paired with the Slovaks, cause they had done that for a long time, and they were even closer to the Moravian’s, so that's why. It was in 1989, when they had the velvet revolution, where the Czechs and the Moravians stayed together because they were used to it and their language’s close mutually understood. It's almost like, if you had a Yankee and a Southerner, it's closer than that, so you can understand one another. The Slovaks were a little bit different because they were far outer, more towards the east, and they were in hilly and mountainous country they were, Some people made fun of them because they were the rubes, on the other hand they had added a lot to the country, and so they were appreciated for what they were, some of the big leaders like, Dubczech and WOSAC were Slovak. The people wanted it to stay together, but the politicians wanted to separate because then they could wield their power.
UH Interviewer: I was actually wondering what happened to your family during the Velvet revolution? Like did that impact them very much?
Glenn Sternes: Well, my family has stuck through things. They did not do this thing of getting the communist’s card. And, we had people who were suffering before. One was a bookbinder and he was really good at doing quality work on bookbinding, but he couldn’t do that because you had to be a communist. I think if you were in certain factories, you had to have a communist card. That’s why I say it was like a union card, and they just said “nope, I’m not interested, I’ll tough it out, but I’m not gonna be a communist and put up with all this” So when the Velvet Revolution happened, I don’t know the exact stages, but everybody celebrated, and then the problem was getting everything sorted out because, under communism, you don’t own your building you live in, even if you have your business there, which it doesn’t make any sense. On the corners, we have gas stations and quick stores, your in-and-out, your 7-11’s, all that kind stuff. They might have it in the middle of the block but it didn’t make any difference. The communists were paying the rent on this, you couldn’t fix up your building or the stucco. It was the communists, so you let it be. Why spending your money on the communist building, things fell into disarray. Then the big thing was getting your title to your building. I guess you somehow have to prove that your grandparents owned that building or that plot of land, which is kind of tough. Especially if you were Jewish, and they were killed. How are you gonna prove this stuff? Especially, if there were fires over the years, but somebody would have those records. This is like in genealogy, who would prove who you are today? Well, now you had the Latter-Day Saints’ people coming over, worldwide and doing this stuff. Otherwise, it was mainly the Catholic priests that would keep records on his parish. If you wanted to, you would go through days before xerox, pay money to have a handwritten copy made of who lives in what house, and how many generations they go back. Then the next thing was getting the materials. If there’s only so much paint and so many ladders. Their fiddling with the scaffolding, and all that kind of stuff takes time, but that way it has to be worked out. You got 30-year-old people that have grown up knowing nothing about communism there. They’ll tell them intellectually, but it’s like they haven’t lived it. They wouldn’t get what it is like. You weren’t allowed to leave the country, you weren’t allowed to come back if you leave, you weren’t allowed to see relatives. Then you had certain safe places, yeah you could go to Czechoslovakia, to Poland, which might even be more severe, or Hungary, or Romania.
UH Interviewer: Wow, what a variety.
Glenn Sternes: Yeah.Now they’re going. they’re going to Croatia, or Spain, or maybe Africa. The kids are studying abroad. There was some stuff like when we talk about the first revolution. A friend of mine from Mortin had gone to Northwestern with me, and then she stayed there and got her Ph.D. in Biology. She got money to set up a biology lab in Czechoslovakia. So she goes out there, and she was setting it up, getting all the equipment, ordering all this stuff. One night, there was a tap on the door saying, “excuse us miss, we’re very sorry but the communists have invaded our country. We think you better leave.” They were very polite, but it's like “really you gotta leave for your safety”, and she did leave all the stuff. They benefited from this stuff, but that’s the way it was. The Russians started using them as the bully boys, they would have all the other people, you know Hungarians, to be on the front lines so that the Russians weren’t “blamed” for being the bullies.
UH Interviewer: Do you still keep in touch with your family that’s over there?
Glenn Sternes: Oh, yeah. I went over this summer. This is the second time I went to Charles University, who has a program not formally through here but a couple of us, one of my students went. I teach Czech at the Heritage Society and they’re going to be moving here, so I’ll be teaching here on Monday nights and we went for three weeks, seems to be a long time at first, and then all of a sudden it shortens up. And I had one night where sixteen of my relatives came into Prague, and we had dinner together. That was all the time I had. I had a long time like a 28-day thing, that was a dream. Other times I would have maybe a week, or so, but I kept up with them, all those years.
UH Interviewer: That’s wonderful.
Glenn Sternes: The hard times, the easy times. Yeah.
UH Interviewer: You just mentioned you teach that class like I guess cultural activities?
Glenn Sternes: Yeah. I’m trying to think of things that I do, I mean photography is one of my big things. So sometimes you’ll find me walking around here with a camera around my neck and I enjoy that. Last night, I was at the Galla that they had here, which was not Czech related, but I had events on my cell phone, so that’s kinda fun.
UH Interviewer: That’s nice.
Glenn Sternes: And, I feel like I really missed this kind of stuff. My daughter does not have the full access because my wife is not Czech. They went with me on that trip this summer, but they did not complete the lessons, which they found a little bit hard. I think that the teacher there was trying to go on an academic level, and what they really needed was the very plain things, like table, chair, wall, food, the important things.
UH Interviewer: Conversational?
Glenn Sternes: Conversational stuff, yeah. So then I was the translator for the two of them.
UH Interviewer: If you were to talk with someone who was looking to explore Czech history or communism stuff. What would you tell them to keep in mind?
Glenn Sternes: Just keep studying anything. As you start learning things, then you start piecing it all together. It's like learning that there is a table, then there’s a stool, and stool means table, and from Czech to English, so it's like you gotta learn all of the names. If you’re talking about an animal, or if you’re talking about history and that. That’s quite something.
UH Interviewer: Do you still hold any Czech culinary traditions? like with food or anything?
Glenn Sternes: Oh. Well. You know if you talk about cuisine, it very much like German food, but there are certain commonalities.The palate Czech is, maybe more solid food I think what you get, is you get the upper classes, they would tend to gravitate more towards the French cuisine or maybe even Chinese cuisine, I don't particularly like the Chinese restaurants. In Czech Republic. I think it was more the Cantonese that they had rather than the Jecheon Honna and the spicy stuff. On the other hand, they’re getting a little bit of that way too. I was commenting on how they have Lay’s potato chips, but they have the Red Pepper style that we don’t have, which I think is just wonderful. The paprika, and that's more what you’ll find in Hungary, or in Slovakia. Slovakia and Hungary, they’re very close together and Slovakia, and Vienna. They’re just 36 kilometers apart, and you used to be able to take a streetcar from one city to the other before the Germans and communists did their number. I don’t know if you can do it now, the Czechs are in the. European Union, but they usually use their own money, which probably is the best of both deals.
UH Interviewer: Yeah.
Glenn Sternes: So, that way you don’t have problems with the European currency, and you don’t. . have the borders being set up. It used to be something to just go every border, we’re going through a border, well as a kid, it was kinda fun, you can get your passport stamped, but you’re losing a couple of hours where you just kinda breeze past. The cuisine has its own differences, Germans more into potatoes, whereas Czech are more into dumplings, and there are different kinds of dumplings. There bread dumplings,yeast dumplings, and they’re even fruit dumplings, which are kinda like having a piece of fruit inside and covered by sweet dough, and then you put that in butter, sugar, and cinnamon, and . I think we’ve got one thing that Czechs don’t have, we have your cookies. The not graham cookies, but the other ones.that, that just adds some real taste to it. And that’s a wonderful dessert, or you can have it as a whole meal. But, otherwise, the people will like and again you have to remember what are you allowed in the communist days, you weren’t allowed very much meat at all. but now they are getting into beef, and they are getting into pork, which is much more of a staple . . then beef. You’re getting into some fish, although it's a landlocked country. You have rivers flowing through, and they’ll have carp and trout.
UH Interviewer: Would they use the mushrooms you talked about?
Glenn Sternes: Yes. Not enough but that one thing, the cuisine at the University. Well, we were getting pub cuisine, and it was mainly kind of just gimmicky stuff. My wife was saying “Vegetables, where are the vegetables.” I was, you know I was beginning to notice it too. Not as many salads, not as many greens, that way and then they’ll have dessert. those are the things I noticed. But, you have favorites that you make. We have this one dish that’s Sikhian, flackier, or noodles, so you take some wide noodles and you put them in a casserole. You know maybe it's milk and other kinds of things, but we’ll put little pieces of ham or in some cases, it may even be smoked ham. And then you put it in the oven, and if you get a nice crust on top, that’s a plus. And you just plop it on your plate and go to town.
UH Interviewer: That’s making me hungry.
Glenn Sternes: Yeah. Yeah. And other things like potato pancakes. yours, Vener, Sour-rotten, or veneer. Schnitzel, those were staples. Sometimes, a pork cutlet, breaded, is the just or more popular, duck, goose. They will eat more of those than Americans do. Americans don’t even know how good it is, here. I have to go to the Asian markets to get a good duck. They’ll cook it up real nice. We have one restaurant in Dallas, and I went up there. I met the cook and I talked with her in Czech and she was from the southern part of Bohemia. Now, the. I don’t think Dallas has one either. We have a Polish place here but, you know, to get somebody really have Czech food, you really have to maybe go to Chicago, or to Iowa, I was in Iowa, this, this a this, last summer, cause they had the national muse there they kinda tripped up their name but they do represent the nation maybe we missed out on that, we have a pretty good one here, but there's much bigger, they had the floods, in Cedar Rapids the, show where things were they were helped by the country of Czech Republic. They moved the entire building, now imagine a building this size or bigger, it was by the riverbanks. They lifted it up 9 feet and moved it in so the river would not flood it again. Then they built a basement, they have snow there, wonderful invention. And they have parking for their workers, in the parking garage there.
UH Interviewer: That’s neat.
UH Interviewer: Yeah.
Glenn Sternes: Different experiences, but again that’s a different group of people that, maybe more farmers I think what you’ll find is that you had a selective factor, my father’s side was more you know industrial, and that. My other side of the family were farmers.
UH Interviewer: I really enjoyed getting to hear your personal aspect of history.
UH Interviewer: Yeah me too. That was, that was really enjoyable just hearing it from someone's from a first-person point of view rather than a third person one.
Glenn Sternes: Yeah. And you start, well learning about and is this my experience and then they start putting it in textbooks, and you say “Is that so, do first-generation there like this?”, and second-generation are like this and third generation are like this” and then they again, it like “What generation am I?” because, my grandparents came over here. parents were born here, and I’m you know in, so I guess I’m second or third generation. How do we count this? And am I like those people, like, I guess I am in some ways it’s dying out.when I came here, and this is 1967, Czech was the third language in Texas, after English and Spanish.
UH Interviewer: Wow
UH Interviewer: I never knew that.
Glenn Sternes: German, no. French, no. Vietnamese, no. It was Czech. And they had Czech radio stations. And then [laughs], the owners of the Czech radio stations said, “Well, I can get more money if I change my format to Spanish and have people call in, I can sell more ads that way.” So, hey no dummies, and that’s what happened.they also intend to stay in their little areas, you’ll find the Czechs around here, on the more north side of town. Like if you go where the SPJST is, that’s on about 38th Street. I was recently at the Knights of Columbus, now I’m not Catholic, most of the people here are Catholic and they almost assume that you’ll be Catholic, and, and. So in that way, when the people came over they hung with the Germans because the Germans were also Catholic. The people from Southern Germany, the Northern Germans were more Lutheran, so you had the differential there. And they wanted to find the same kinds of things. You’ll hear about the painted churches, are you familiar with them? Well that’s what they had home, was they would paint up their churches, and so they did the same thing when they made a church over here. And they’re just beautiful, I really appreciate that. And, but it, not just “oompah” music, you got some higher culture going in, but the percentage-wise, it's gonna be average people, doing average things, they present the music and the Mexican people were no dummies, they heard that music and they said: “that's kinda fun”. And so the Mexicans adopted the polka, if you listen to polka, what is a polka? A polka is, in Czech, means a Polish girl. And so, this is where their dancing this way, and so I like it when I go walking in the neighborhood, you have buildings sites, the guys are running the radio, that’s what they do, they get there to work, “turn on the radio”, then they can hammer. But it's all happy music, it’s like, it’s not hip-hop, it’s not downer-kind of music. “My girl, has done me wrong” Hahaha, and so it, that’s, that’s the kind of things that I like about what is going on, and maybe they hold on to certain things.
They would have, some of the Czechs will have a yearly soup tasting. Well, our family was not big on soup. My teacher, my tutor, he’s, you gotta have soup every day, and when I was a Gastarbeiter, which means a guest worker, that’s in Germany. When I was 18, and so I learned to drink beer. When I came here, I was cut off, I came back to America and I couldn’t drink for 3 years, that was okay, didn’t mind me. But I had learned all over to drink thin beer, that it was cold, whereas the beer, they’d give you a “Here have a free”. I ain’t a beer. “Okay” [Laughing]. And so I’d had fun with that but you always had to have soup. We would get to work at 7:15 in the morning. I was making universal joints, for cars, trucks, and whatever. They called them Krodsis, because they were in the shape of an “X” and they would have the caps with the roller bearings on them, and that’s in the back of your car, what allows you to turn around a corner, this wheel on the inside is only going a little bit and this wheel has to go all the way around, otherwise your car is going to JOLT, around. And if that ever goes wrong, you’ll, you’ll know it. You’ll feel it. I had that happen one time, but anyway I was in the packing department, and around 9:00 we would have a breakfast break. Well, I thought, this is okay, cause I would eat at home, I would just take a big knife and cut up a slice of rye bread, and put some honey on it, and that was my breakfast, with some milk, or hot coffee. I really wasn’t a coffee taker then, but then after the breakfast break, then we would have a half an hour lunch break, and that was when you had your soup. You would have some, they would bring it around, and you just, I want lunch, you’d get it. And that was fun, and then we got out at 4:30, and if you wanted to, you could work till 6, and get extra pay. I didn’t particularly want that and so sometimes you could really work four days a week instead of 5.my roommate did that, he came in. He was sick for a couple of weeks, I didn’t even see him, and then he got back in, and so he worked 4 days, and I worked 5. And we made it. but it was different, it was fun to travel on the weekends. It was kinda being like a college kid, I was in college, but it was a different kind of college. And so, I appreciated that. The breads, if you wanted to talk about the breads, mostly rye with caraway seed, sometimes they might have dark breads, but usually there were light breads, with a crust, a real crust on’em. And that was good. This stuff that we have, bread here, this white bread, ya know, twisted [laughing]. That’s, that's not bread. [laughing].
UH Interviewer: I never actually ah like I came in, not really knowing anything about Czech culture okay, or even like, what communism was like to actually live in, but I feel like so much educated. I like to be cultured, to do more research on it. I wanna try the food.
Glenn Sternes: I'll tell you a quick way to that, go see the movies. Now, they have one movie per month for a while there, they were doing a lot of stuff on the Nazis. And the reason being that the communists would let you make a film about the bad things of Nazism, but they wouldn’t make you see a film about the bad things of communism, cause “hey, that’s us”. [laughing]. And so, now that the velvet revolution is over, they can show some of these, and laugh at’em. They would have to kinda sneak it in. You know like how they used to say, The Russians, “you can say anything you want about the Czar, once. “ So the Russians have freedom of speech, you can say anything you want about the Czar, once. [laughing] And with the implication being the second time, you're gone. [laughing]. And now, that was it. I went to Russia, I've been there twice. I looked over Ivan Crosty, Ivan the Terrible, he’s sitting in the chair, and I could imagine, this is the most powerful man in the world. And I got a better deal than he did. [laughing] I flew over to see him, he didn’t fly to see me.
UH Interviewer: That’s great.
UH Interviewer: Yeah, it makes me kinda like wanna go here and see this place for myself. [Yeah] Ya’ know how to experience it.
Glenn Sternes: Yeah. Well, ya know we have one of the fellas here, is kinda the manager for things, happens to be black. He went, to Poland, to Czechoslovakia, you can do that, all it takes is money, on the other hand, one of the study programs, you could do pretty darn cheap. What we did pay your airfare, and then pretty much, you didn’t have to pay too much else, because you're living in a college dorm, it’s not it’s not comfortable, it is not luxurious. No TV sets, You could watch a TV, if they put a TV in the pub. [laughing] It was you know pretty big one, we watched a lot of soccer, The meals were sorta plain, but then what you would do was, in the morning, you would get up, eat, go to class from 9 till 12, 9 to 12:30 or so, have lunch, and then you would do your touring. And we would go see places like Hradčany, which is Prague Castle. And you would go march around it. Now, this is both the Capitol and the White House, combined in one deal. This is where the premier lives, and this is where the Senate and the House are. And all these kinds of things there doing it all, and you go to Vladislav Hall, and this is a big thing. Like horses could ride up there, with knights and shining armor. The stairs are made so that the horses can negotiate into this prime hall. And then you got right on the river, it was so pretty you could take a cruise, you get to see older ruins of the castle that were before the present one, and it's very handy. It's in a very beautiful area, one of the things you’ll see, if you ever study, the national anthem of Czechoslovakia. It doesn’t have any dr beating, “we saw by the rockets red glare” you know, “we saw that we annihilated those guys I laid those skies and their flags still flying there”. And start talking about the beautiful mountains, and how wonderful it is to live there, and it’s very touching, to, to hear this kinda stuff, coming as a national anthem.
UH Interviewer: That’s beautiful.
UH Interviewer: Yeah.
Glenn Sternes: It was fun, I got inspired one time. We went to Greece, we were at one of the you know. “You got this natural, stone descent into where the auditorium is, and I just felt like singing, so I sang the Czech national anthem there. Beautiful echoes and somebody yells to us Czech, and they “oh okay”. [laughing] So it was, was fun. But its, you know, not many people, it's not like Spain if you study about Spain and the new world. The leaders went to the Pope, he said, “Well, we’re going to divide this new world, anything west of this they’re going to speak, Spanish, everything east of this, speak Portuguese.” And that’s why in Brazil, they speak Portuguese, and the rest of South America they speak Spanish. And so, you got hundreds of millions of people, that’s great. [laughing]. Unfortunately, I come from a country that used to be 25 million and now it's about 10 million. So that’s kinda small, but anyway We do some things like I told you about some of the best gliders in the world.sometimes, they had, if you wanna train your police dog, you teach them the commands in Czech so that nobody else can mess with your dog. [laughing] It's kinda fun. They have a muse of technology in Prague, and my cousin took me there. And now he and his wife live in the Barrandov region of Prague, and if you start watching films, you’ll see the big film area is Barrandov. That’s like Hollywood, and so he is from that area, and this muse is somewhere near there, and when someone else is driving I don’t pay attention, but they have streetcars, and motorcycles, and automobiles, and guns, course the Czechs are big on guns, and they also make Semtex, which is one of the biggest explosives, so I’ll not wild about that. And we have words that have grown into the vocabulary, like “robot”. Do you know what a robot is, well that’s a Czech word. That, so that got into the, you know international language so, they’re making themselves known, they were known as an area of silver, silver mining. And, they would get Germans, now we’re talking about the 1300s or so. That they would come down to this one area, called Kutná Hora, and they would, I don’t know, I’ve got to do my research or maybe you can turn this in and let me know what it means to be a miner there. Was it to be a slave or a serf? Because you're working, I went in this mine, it’s dark, it’s clammy, it’s miserable, and you don’t, you were there all day. You gotta bring your own water and that, you can’t use any because it is associated with sliver. You have arsenic and antimony. Those are poisonous, and you are there. Yes, they let you bring your wife so that at the end of the day, you chip away this stuff, and you hand it to her, and she congeals into silver pieces, that can make coins. The Joachimsthaler, was the very first coin that was standardized, because in the old days, if you had coins, “well how do I know that your coin is, you might have ripped off some tailings there or something.” So that's why the coins had the milled edges on there, and you have a picture, and it's a certain weight and it's a certain value. The Germans called it thaler, T-H-A-L-E-R, it comes from the Czech “tolar”, T-O-L-A-R. And that’s where we get our word “dollar”.
UH Interviewer: Wow!
Glenn Sternes: So that was it. See how the Germans took credit for everything. [laughing] They did. They did. So I saved up some of these, but that was interesting, they had okay this, this doesn’t count. We also went to Austria afterwards, and we went to a salt mine, in Salzburg. The Germans named it “Salzburg” so the city of salts. Way up on this hill, they had the entrance to the mine and then you did some of the same things as your digging in this area and I have a little salt shaker from Salzburg salt, so they still use it today. But those were some of the things that they needed, they needed salt, they needed money, how are you gonna get this stuff. I’m thinking what else, what was, but you know all my relatives would have a cherry orchard or so, something on the side beside your 9 - 5 job. You just had to do that, and it would help you when times got rough.
UH Interviewer: Thank you so much for speaking with us today. It was a pleasure getting to know you.
Glenn Sternes: Thank you It was nice talking to you all.