John Ondracek, 87, a longtime Ohio resident, came to his home community in mid-January with the story of an interesting life to share with anyone who might come into his room at the Schuyler Nursing Center.
Ondracek's dream is to write a book about his life, and entitle it "The Immigrant." If it doesn't get written, it won't be because he hasn't lived his epic.
Ondracek's life began in 1899 in a small town of Streter, Moravia. With an alert mind, he is full of dates and memories, that include his youth in Czechoslovakia.
"My father lived on an old mill place. Dad had a team of horses, a team of oxen and some cows. One time one of the oxen fell into the millrace, and it had to be pulled out. Dad also had a truck patch with eight of 10 people working there. When the marketed, they hauled produce in a horse-drawn lorry, a common conveyance in most of Europe at that time. We had to get up in the middle of the night to make the early opening markets of the bigger cities.
"One year my folks took me to Vienna. I saw the boats going under the bridge. I saw my first circus in the Vienna City Square," he recalled.
The first member of the Ondracek family to immigrate to the United States was the oldest son, Karel. He had been working in Germany. German boys talked about the opportunities in the new world, and he went to America with them. He was in America in three years and wrote to his father about the opportunities in farming, etc.
John's parents and family sailed out of Hamburg on the old Hamburg Steamship Line.
"My brother, Stanley, was three or four years younger. Mother looked after him. Dad looked after me. he took me by the hand, led me to the rail and told me to look at the white cliffs of Dover. That was about the only natural phenomena we saw," he recalled.
Ondracek remembers his first sight of the Statue of Liberty and the waiting and registration at Ellis Island in 1906.
The family got to Schuyler on April 6, 1906. When he was seven years old, he started grade school at East Ward in October.
"I was two years behind the rest of the class," he said.
John Ondracek graduated from Schuyler High School in 1919. Several members of his class have come to visit him since his return to Schuyler. His wide vocabulary and conversational English is excellent. A visit in his room slips by very rapidly as he touches on memories of his early years in Schuyler and then talks about the experiences of his lifetime in professional wrestling.
Ondracek was 17, just finishing high and and too young for WWI draft. By WWII he was 45 years old, beyond the top age list.
"I ducked both wars," he said.
The family had experience with wars, however. His brother joined the French Foreign Legion and a nephew, Johnny Machacek, was in the Guadacanal engagement.
While Ondracek lived in Schuyler, he worked at the Folda Bank and also belonged to the Tel Jed Sokols.
"We had good training with instructor Kilobasa. We worked out on all kinds of apparatus. I also played on the basketball team with Ray Bliss, Buresh, and the Otradovsky boys, Ed and Joe."
Wrestling became his sport. He spent a year on the West Coast and then went to Australia to stay over the winter there and participate in the sport.
Ondracek's familiarity with the past greats of the wrestling world and with the promotional work that wealthy people put into the young athletes is a story in itself.
"Wrestling, then, was a different from the showmanship you see in Omaha," he said. A pair of six-pound hand weights rest on the bedside table of his room. "We used them to keep our strength, but not to build muscles. Strong muscled people do not have the stamina for running and wrestling. The muscle tissue crowds out room for blood vessels to function well."
Ondracek wrestled all through the Midwest and both Coasts including Madison Square Garden and Brooklyn.
"I was 23 years old when I got into the large professional centers in Boston, Providence, New Haven, Halifax and New Brunswick."
John married Gladys Easley in 1927, and the couple adopted a son. His wife wanted a home for the child. Since Nebraska was too far from the East Coast where many of his engagements were scheduled, they settled in Ohio.
"I ran across a nice 50-acre farm with a nice farmhouse in Ohio in 1932," he said. At that time he began working as security for an aluminum company in Newark, Ohio.
Eventually, Ondracek's conversation turns back to those first 20 years of his life, the time he spent in Schuyler. The family lived in Goose Town, the northeast part of town where a heavy population of people of Czech and Moravian descent had goose instead of turkey for holiday meals.
"There was a lot of goose feather stripping," he recalled.
On the wall of his room at the Schuyler Nursing Center, is a framed certificate from the Schuyler Volunteer Fire Department. He recalls the fire at the chicory mill and a fire at the creamery on the east end of town. The creamery had a railroad siding from the Burlington there.
Ondracek is a storyteller whose life is full of interesting experiences that allow him to speak in a qualified way on many subjects. Now that he is once again a resident of Schuyler and old friends come to call, his memories of those early days are among his finest stories. --From The Schuyler Sun, Thursday, February 6, 1986 Submitted by Elizabeth Sebranek