 Home | Recent News | Parsons | George Kovaciny 31 Jul 2008 Kovaciny’s Treasures |  | George Kovaciny is documenting his life in story form and sharing it with others at Parsons Presbyterian Manor. | |
By Colleen Surridge - Parsons Sun An antique monkey wrench, its metal dull and dark and its discolored wooden handle grooved and worn from years of use, hangs alone on the south wall of George Kovaciny’s room at Parsons Presbyterian Manor. “My parents were immigrants. They came from Czechoslovakia, formerly the Czecho-Slovak Republic, and raised seven kids here,” he said as he sat in his easy chair and reminisced, his silver hair combed neatly away from his olive-skin face lined with time, knowledge and experience. “That monkey wrench hanging on the wall is a souvenir of my childhood home. We had a buggy and machinery that had to be tightened with the monkey wrench, and that is the one we used on the farm.” Migrating from Bohemia, his parents took up residence on a small farm in Connecticut, where Kovaciny worked in the tobacco fields and lumber yards as a boy. Many years have passed since his birth in 1922, but the memories of the farm remain vivid, as do the many other memories of events that have transpired through his life. By his easy chair sat a small, tilt table covered in copy paper, some loose, some in folders. Each page held words – words that have flowed from his mind, to his hand, to a computer and were printed to document the history of his life. He reached to the table and retrieves a yellow folder. In this folder each week he stores another piece of his life’s story and places it in the library at the Manor for others to read. Inside the folder, one piece of paper is taped. Its heading: “Why I Write.” “I write because I must,” the paper states. “There are so many memories bubbling up, bursting to be put on paper to be shared. Some of them teach a lesson, some record good times, some bad, and some simply tell a story. For as one T.V. program states, ‘Every life has a story.’ In fact, every life has many stories. The common thread in all my stories, whatever the event being described, is an underlying feeling, deeply embedded within my heart, of being connected to each story’s time, place and persons, of being inextricably involved in the total ebb and flow of its life. I invite you to enter into the stories, as much as you are able.” The stories begin before he was born with his family’s history because that is the true beginning. His words weave tails of his youth, and then take the reader through his being a young adult. His stories tell how he took architectural drafting at a trade school, that later led to him garnering a non-combative position with the 733rd Railway Operating Battalion overseas during the war, helping run a railroad across France. His military training to prepare him for the war took him first to Fort Bragg, N.C., and then to Van Buren, Ark., the Missouri Pacific Railroad headquarters. It also took him to Coffeyville, 1,500 miles from his Connecticut home. It was there he met his wife. “Jackie was at Coffeyville Community College and that is when the Connecticut Yankee and the Kansas Sunflower met, courtesy of the U.S. Army,” he said, a smile spreading across his face. Beside his architectural drafting license, inside a small frame hanging on the west wall of his room on paper yellowed by time, is a pencil drawing of a two-story early American colonial house. “My wife was going to community college at the time for interior design and I was in France. She had an assignment to come up with her dream house, and she wrote me and asked me if I could draw a picture of it. That was our dream house,” he said, pointing at the picture, “although our dream house ended up being a duplex here at Presbyterian Manor. The two corresponded during the war, and when he got out they met face to face, fell in love and were married in Galena in 1946, he said. He and his wife then moved to Vermont, where he and his twin brother opened the Kovaciny Brothers Lumber Co. His daughter, Cathryn, was born there in Vermont, but in 1949, the poor economy dried up the markets his business sold lumber to. With the company unable to support two families, he left, went back to school on the GI Bill to get his architectural license. He worked as an architect until retirement age, at which time he and his wife came to Parsons to live at Presbyterian Manor, where he and his wife volunteered to live and work in service to the manor. It was when he first arrived in Parsons that Kovaciny decided to take a creative writing class from Labette Community College. “There was so much history and heritage going on around me, so I took this class to learn to write about it. I learned it is nothing magic if you feel it.” He started writing in 1987 about his earliest childhood. “We lived a fully active life for 13 years living here, volunteering for the church, the manor and the community, then our health began to decline,” he said. The two moved from their duplex into assisted living, and finally, he lost Jackie two years ago to recurring stroke. He had continued to write until then. “The first year I was in complete denial. I was glad Jackie was not hurting anymore, but I sure as hell was not happy to be left alone,” he said. Slipping into deep depression, he said he had no awareness of anything going on around him, only total pitch blackness. “If it was not for the Presbyterian Manor’s heroic attention and care, I would not have made it,” he said. “They brought me back from what I called the land of the near dead. Then I really started to write in earnest.” Where once his wife critiqued his writing, it is now his daughter, Cathryn, who teaches chemistry in Austria at the University of Vienna. “She’s been an anchor for me, and it is she who accused me of being overly full of self-pity and put me on track of hope and expectation that life is still good,” he said. “It is different. It is not what I would have chosen, but it is good. She encourages me to keep my feet to the fire.” Persistence has paid off, because now he is almost to the end of documenting his life story. “The stories I write now are of current happenings, but I am almost done,” he said. His daughter is to arrive this coming week from Austria to help him organize all the stories, put them together, and take them to a typist in Tulsa to put them in literary form. “Then I’m going to see about getting it published,” he said. The title he is unsure of still, but he said he is pondering, “Treasures of a Lifetime Revealed,” because indeed, it is what has made his life rich that he wishes to share with all.
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