THE VICTORIOUS VRATILS
Wallace, Ralph
The Victorious Vratils By RALPH WALLACE IWAS VISITING the gang in the newspaper office in my home town in Kansas recently when an item came over the wires saying that Robert Vratil, rawest of...
...More and more the boys did the heavy work on the farm...
...Yes, and 51 pairs of shoes...
...When Vic let me shoot one of his" hand-made guns, I was happy the rest of the day...
...They had 17...
...Leo is in the Coast Guard...
...That did not include the game brought in by the rest of the family...
...But he didn't quit...
...One night army officers strode into the Svatos home and asked Joseph Vratil curt questions about his new weapon...
...He taught silently, both by action and example...
...Each year she put up 3,000 quarts of fruits and tomatoes and pumpkin and cabbage and other vegetables...
...Leo, a second class seaman, patrols the North Atlantic with the Coast Guard...
...In the long farm years, she had learned that a job was a job, to be finished quickly and competently...
...Sergeant Eddie now, last heard of at Buna fighting the Japs...
...Once he killed five ducks, on the wing with a single shot...
...Vic, whose E»glish was better than Mary's, was always reading books on farming and on child care...
...He divided the children into squads...
...And Frank...
...The rest of Victor Vratil's children are farming or helping others farm...
...They're an army by themselves...
...A few weeks ago I sat in Mary's spotless kitchen and watched in amazement as Butch, the only tame badger I have ever heard of, clambered on her lap like a huge, wedge-shaped house-cat...
...After the fish pond a big orchard went in, and then an irrigated vegetable garden...
...Louis and Frank are in the Air Force...
...Helen, one of the prettiest of the daughters, died in 1935...
...At the end of the week the squads changed chores to avoid monotony...
...Pawnee County teachers still say the Vratils were the best-mannered and most intelligent children they ever taught...
...Besides, every child (and Vic and Mary as well) learned to swim there...
...overhead, great cottonwood and Chinese elms interlaced their branches...
...When he thought the lessons had been absorbed, one day he would point to the big gun rack in the dining room...
...children and they had loved and wanted every one...
...Everything, that is, but death...
...Only Mary, of all the farm wives I have ever known, would not have screamed when the boys blithely brought home 12 baby skunks they had dug from a burrow, and installed them in a front yard pen...
...the next nine children from the eighth grade...
...The Vratils came to us from Bohemia when the Kansas country was young...
...we did not see him in town so often...
...We had scarcely stepped from the car when a pet racoon tried to climb on my shoulder...
...Robert is in the Marines...
...As a boy Vic learned the gunmaker's trade and at night helped his father with a secret invention—an air rifle so powerful that its slug would go clear through a bullock from a distance of half a mile...
...Between crops, in 1900, he went to Chicago to visit relatives...
...To make the children love farming we must make the farm fun," Vic said...
...Lester is in Anti-Aircraft...
...That was the year that Vic, always one of our most progressive farmers, had invested $4,800 in combines and tractors to mechanize his place completely...
...At school recess, the Vratil boys would whistle shrilly, and as the other children's eyes bulged, Mike and Ike would come flapping out of the sky to perch on the boys' shoulders...
...The first two girls graduated from high school...
...The boy would select a gun...
...They had faced every problem Kansas could provide—crop failures, blasting storms, ruinous prices, 19 mouths to feed—and emerged victorious...
...Must have had a bad gun," his mother remarked later...
...The state hatchery gave Vic catfish and bass fingerlings...
...for a rare and beautiful example of the fulfilment of the American dream...
...I had gone there with my father...
...Neighboring farmers laughed as they told of approaching the Vratil place and seeing the children hide in the trees, and chatter in Bohemian—too frightened to show themselves...
...Robert—Sergeant Robert it is now—is teaching Marine rookies the Vratil way of shooting...
...A Rare And Beautiful Example It was that same Autumn that Adolf Hitler's arrogant legions marched into what had been Bohemia...
...Vic blandly offered it to everyone, wets and dries, who came to his door...
...The Vratil crows, Mike and Ike, became famous throughout the township...
...After 35 years, the gentle breathing beside her had stopped...
...Our community was no more considerate than any other rough farming town, and at first we referred to the Vratils, somewhat contemptuously, as Boliunks...
...We wondered how he happened to get off the bullseye even once...
...There he dropped into a west side grocery store one day...
...Irene and George are in airplane plants...
...Early pioneers still speak of those next four years—1893-96—with something akin to horror...
...I hadn't heard any news of the huge and happy Vratil family for years...
...Frank is an Air Force lieutenant, herding a Flying Fortress through the skies...
...One Vratil boy, although able to speak English, proved so agonizingly shy he wouldn't recite for his whole first year at country school...
...Maybe it was due to the way the teachers praised the 'smartness of the children...
...And somehow Victor and Mary Vratil had remained as perennially blooming as the land itself...
...additional pork to be traded to the butcher for fresh beef...
...That is like a graph, recording the family's financial ups and downs...
...Vic changed after that...
...Nor did Vic neglect to plant a vineyard...
...Vic had left land and machinery and buildings worth between $30,000 and $40,000, plus $4,000 in cash...
...He had not known that the little girl he remembered at Vysoke Myto had come to America, too...
...Even the smallest children were given a peanut and popcorn patch to cultivate, with peanut brittle and marvelous sticky popcorn balls as a reward...
...In our harsh prohibition state, even the worst bluenoses among the neighbors winked at Vic's superb sherries and sweet Bohemian wines...
...two tons of pork smoked or salted down every year...
...Anyone who learns the patience and kindliness to domesticate wild things," Vic once said, "can learn anything else in life...
...The Vratils aren't a family," a neighbor remarked...
...Now the Vratils came to town more frequently, all 19 jammed into the family's two cars...
...Won the Battenfeldt Scholarship to the University of Kansas, as a matter of fact...
...Well, Eddie is in the Infantry...
...in a single Summer, six of them earned $800...
...And another Vratil would have learned to hunt...
...Squad 1—three members—washed dishes and made beds...
...And, the officers added meaningly, unless Joseph Vratil forgot his experiments with new guns, he would be made to forget them—permanently...
...A Gunmaker Flees To America In 1890 Vic's father, Joseph, was a prosperous gunsmith in Vysoke Myto, Bohemia, living with a shoemaker's family named Svatos...
...When the boys got to be eight or nine years old, Vic would take them out after rabbits or quail...
...This was just a different sort of job, that was all...
...toward the road rose a little forest of seedling trees which Vic cultivated and then planted all about the place...
...the next six from high school...
...The neighbor women may have laughed a little too, at first, because Mary Vratil made all of the children's overalls and shirts when the long day's work was over...
...Finally he scraped together enough cash to make a down payment on 160 acres of land...
...for a lesson in pioneer courage...
...With Uncle Charlie's boys, Vic's sons formed an all-Vratil team and won the Tri-County League championship...
...Many of the neighbors believed only hunting and trapping carried the Vratils through some of our steel-hard Winters...
...Thus we knew, without ever quite putting it into words, that in our midst the American dream was being proved...
...It was during this period that the Vratils finally lost any lingering feeling of foreignness...
...For guerilla warfare...
...Very silent, so...
...He became the first farmer in our section to grow peanuts, barrelsful...
...Another Summer a year's crop of stored grain—$4,000 worth—went up in flames...
...It became a legend in our town that Vic expected his boys to bring home at least 23 rabbits for every 25 of his shotgun shells—or else...
...Eddie, I think that was...
...I hope I am not making life for this Bohemian family sound all sweetness and light...
...a tall, dignified,-strikingly handsome man with a brown Vandyke beard and piercing blue eyes...
...It wasn't just the size of Vic's family, however, which made us take note of the Vratils...
...Mary wouldn't for a moment stop the others from going...
...The boys "worked out" to provide additional cash...
...One by one, as Mary sat dry-eyed, the boys came to tell her they had volunteered...
...And some of the boys would stay to work the farm...
...Bohemia was restive under the Austrian yoke...
...Hardships Aplenty I first saw the Vratil farm when I was a small boy...
...Perhaps because to the Vratils wine was a ceremonial thing, to be used in moderation...
...Roy-is studying for a Navy commission as a ship's engineer...
...With what money they had saved, the Vratil family fled to America and on to Kansas, where Joseph bought a farm near our town of Lamed...
...flour and sugar to be purchased by the ton...
...The way his father trained him, he didn't know he was allowed to miss a shot...
...In none of the four years did a single farmer in our part of Kansas harvest a crop...
...Well, 160 acres didn't provide much income—and 12 boys and five girls wore out nearly 70 pairs of overalls a year...
...Vic—now a stropping young man—worked for other farmers...
...They would confiscate and destroy it, nevertheless...
...The first years were not easy, but Vic and Mary showed resourcefulness and brains...
...But" what nut trees will grow in western Kansas—even if I had time to let 'em mature...
...Mary, Mary Svatos...
...It was planned, perhaps, for assassinations...
...was all Vic could say...
...Somewhere he read that nuts were good food for children...
...Very powerful, so...
...Vic mourned...
...Mary even was appointed to the school board and began to speak at local women's clubs—always apologizing for her somewhat broken English, but always, somehow, making the most lucid talk of the day...
...Learning To Hunt Although Vic could be strict enough, never in his life did he lay a hand on a son or a daughter...
...That hurt...
...Even this food could not begin to satisfy the healthy Vratil appetites...
...One Winter Harold...
...The population of the county halved as the beaten settlers deserted their ruined farms...
...By 1930 Vic had accumulated 640 acres...
...The first year he rented an additional 320 acres, the Vratils stood on the porch one Summer night and mutely watched a barrage of hail savagely beat 400 acres of their ripe wheat into the ground...
...But the Vratils, starving but stubborn, stuck...
...Carefully, Vic and Mary figured out their needs: 10 cows and 300 chickens to provide eggs and milk...
...Only a bank loan that Winter saved them...
...Skating on the pond in Winter, with hot doughnuts waiting in the kitchen, made the farm fun, too...
...The Vratils raised every possible ounce of the family's food on their own land...
...Yet, it is America, I think, which owes them a debt...
...The Resourceful Couple Soon an eight-room cottage rose on Vic's farm— and one night just before harvest Mary Svatos Vratil came to Pawnee County to stay...
...Roy is in the Navy...
...or maybe it was the kind things neighbor women said about Mary Vratil's cooking on the days she furnished chicken and noodles, or baked country sausage, for the hot lunch at the district school...
...The Vratils regularly ate two fish meals a week—at no small saving in cash...
...It seemed like no time before the Vratils were yanking out two-pound catfish and bass...
...The best flower garden in the county blazed on all sides of the weathered, comfortable house...
...Vic knew he must make more money...
...Mary showed me an old record of the food stowed away by the family in a single week when all the youngsters were at home: 84 wild ducks, a dozen chickens, four dozen loaves of bread, a slab of bacon, two roasts of beef, 40 pies, 16 cakes, and a hundredweight of potatoes and other vegetables...
...The Vratils, who began as ill-clad and penniless "foreigners," sick with shyness in a strange land, probably feel now that they are merely paying a debt they owe America...
...how meticulously he cleaned and oiled his weapon after reaching home...
...Cor-poral Lester serves an anti-aircraft gun in Panama...
...Squad 2 did the field work, squad 3 the milking, squad 4 looked after the chickens and vegetable garden...
...Even baseball provided extra dollars...
...Eddie, and Henry teamed up and 3hot nearly 6,000 rabbits, netting $400...
...The Victorious Vratils By RALPH WALLACE IWAS VISITING the gang in the newspaper office in my home town in Kansas recently when an item came over the wires saying that Robert Vratil, rawest of Marine rookies, had just broken the all time rifle record at Camp Matthews, near San Diego, with a score of 242 out of a possible 250.We all knew Bob...
...In the first years the family must often have been lonely...
...And one night Mary woke suddenly...
...Eddie likewise is an Army corporal, slated soon to go overseas...
...Frank had to pause for three years between grade and high school to save a little cash...
...Somehow, with ingenuity and faith, the Vratils survived—and with thrift and hard work they got ahead...
...For a full 10 months of one year not a drop of rain fell...
...The Vratils could win against everything, it seemed...
...During the Fall of 1939 he took a turn for the worse...
...They would watch how carefully he shot...
...How were they doing...
...The Vratils loved pets...
...So there could be no anxiety about finances...
...I can still remember Vic pacing up to our car...
...So today most of the Vratil boys are at war...
...Again in 1927, hail struck for a total loss...
...Beside the counter stood a slim, dark-eyed, girl of 18...
...For instance, they made a fish pond on their place —a wonder the whole country talked about...
...Sergeant Louis fights in the Southwest Pacific...
...Death Takes A Hand Vic and Mary passionately wanted their children to be well-schooled...
...A farmer must never quit," Vic told his boys somberly—and went back to work...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 51
