Nick Lopin was drafted and served in the imperial Austrian army for 18 months around 1901. When he finished his stint, he received orders to re-up, and that prompted him to move to America. I have no idea what legal stunts such a thing must have involved, but he evaded a second draft and successfully escaped to New York. But something of his military service must have stuck. His five children called him The General.
As family lore has it, in New York, he went to work for the gas company. So, during my first few weeks as a New Yorker, I frequented the history room at the Astor-Lenox Library to see what I could discover. Yes, I found employment records for the gas company during the years my grandfather worked there, and yes his name was listed. It also gave an address. It turns out that he lived about a block away from where I eventually settled for the next 15 years, but in a building no longer extant. Still, it was mind-bending to consider that passing the row of brownstones that comprised most of the side of West 49th Street that I lived on was a part of his daily routine. It made me wonder what thoughts he may have had looking at the building I was to move into eighty-five years later.
That area of Manhattan was, and still is — to whatever extent ethnic neighborhoods are now possible — the Croatian quarter. There is an imposing Catholic church in the area with a Croatian coat of arms above its door. Some of the older mom and pop stores are owned and operated by people with names like Stanitch and Verkitch. I moved there because it was a good situation that I could afford, and had no idea I was moving into a part of town established by my countrymen, much less a neighborhood I had in common with my maternal grandfather.
I didn’t know Grandpa Lopin well, he died when I was six. What I do know of him came through stories told by his children.
Nick, the General, had preordained opinions as to how children should behave, as to how a woman should comport herself, and about a man’s position in society. For instance, he absolutely forbade his wife or daughters to wear even a hint of makeup. That wasn’t severe for that time and place. The wearing of makeup was a city fashion, and unusual even there. But my mother’s young life was full of pronouncements; makeup would not be tolerated in his house, a woman’s crown is her (long) hair, her clothes should reveal nothing of her shape.
In second grade, my mother was cast in the school play. She was thrilled, thoroughly enjoyed rehearsals, and looked forward to performance. All the students’ families were invited, of course, and although stage makeup had been referred to prior to performance, she didn’t expect her father to attend so it caused no alarms. Make up was applied, the play began, she peaked through a curtain, and there in the second row was her father. Panic. She couldn’t go on with make up! He would stop the show and embarrass her! So, she locked herself in the bathroom.
Her entrance cue came. No Annie Lopin. The teacher read her lines to keep the scene going, then in a panic herself, searched for her wayward actress. She suspected the bathroom when she tried the door. She knocked. Annie whimpered. Furious whispers ensued. At intermission, Mr. Lopin was summoned. He spoke almost no English. The teacher managed to get him to the bathroom door where his eldest child was hiding, and in Croatian he discovered why she had missed her scene.
“An actor has to wear makeup, it’s alright in this case,” he told her.
Annie cracked the door, Nick took her hand and led her home. She’d only that scene in the first act, so her second grade theatrical career ended there.
When, a few years later, Annie bobbed her hair, however, there was the devil to pay. Nick was in a fury for a week. But years passed, Ann went to beauty school and received her license as a hairdresser, and opened shop with a thirty-five dollar loan from her father, despite the fact that she was applying makeup and shortening hair from 10 to 6 every day. And opening her own business.
The General learned from fatherhood. By the time I knew him, he was a quiet, gentle soul. I was never quite able to put his reportedly fiery temper together with the man I knew.
In Zuljana, at least, it was common for children to drink a splash of wine in a glass of water with meals. I tried drinking straight water my first lunch there. Everyone objected. When I insisted, they looked bemused in a horrified sort of way. When I spend most of the rest of the day frequenting the outhouse, I began to understand. The water in many of the coastal towns is not particularly kind to the intestinal tract; the wine kills the bacteria.
But preferences developed around this necessity. Growing up in Sunnyvale, our Croatian neighbors – especially the older ones – always cut their wine with water, usually half and half. It was considered odd, or perhaps profligate, to drink wine uncut.
At the age of about ten, most parents thought it wise to begin to gradually increase the wine content of a child’s glass so they would become accustomed to something more than dollop enough to kill bacteria. At so it was that in fourth grade, Annie began bringing a small bottle with lunch filled with a red liquid that resembled a light wine. It also happened to be the year that prohibition had been ratified. When her teacher saw Annie happily uncork her wine and drink it with her sandwich, she was a little at a loss as to what to do. So, the first day it was ignored. The second, the teacher inquired about the bottle’s contents.
“It’s my pop’s wine,” she said simply.
Mr. Lopin was summoned. His English had not improved in the couple of years that had passed since the makeup debacle. Nor had his understanding of American society. The notion of prohibiting alcohol, if it ever entered into the conversations he had with neighbors or countrymen, would have sounded absurd to one who kept three barrels in his basement. Annie was able to explain to him the teacher’s concerns, and translated for her his response.
“There’s nothing wrong or unusual about it! Where else is a child going to learn the proper way of enjoying alcohol if not under the guidance of her parents? And her teachers?”
The teacher made it clear that further bottles of wine brought to school would be confiscated and replaced with a glass of good drinking water. One wonders if confiscation ever occurred, and what the teacher did with the wine if it did.
As far as I know, Nick kept making wine right through prohibition. His family had been doing it for millennia.
Photo: the only image I have of my grandfather Lopin, stolen from the snow picture of 1932. My aunt Mary is in the foreground.