Originally published in Slovak in Budimirsky Nove Casy
A strawberry landed next to her in the grass. Another landed by her foot. Then, one hit her in the head. Julia laughed, put the berries in her apron pocket and quickly smoothed down her hair. She smiled when she looked over the fence for John, the young gardener at the grand manor house next door, who had taken a shine to her.
Julia Biacovsky
Strawberries were clearly the way to 18-year-old Julia Gajdos’s heart. Not too long after that, she left her job as a housekeeper in Budimir and agreed to follow John Biacovsky, her young suitor, to another continent to build a new life in a country that she had never seen before and where she didn’t speak the language. Like many people living in countries such as (what was then) Czechoslovakia and Poland in the early 1900s, John and Julia were drawn to the United States by the “American Dream” --- the opportunity for better paying jobs and a different life.
While John and Julia’s story begins in Budimir, Julia’s does not. She lived with her family in nearby Bretejovce and came to Budimir for work. Julia’s family name, Gajdos, is Hungarian and means “bagpipe” or “bagpiper.” Her Hungarian ancestors probably fled north into Slovakia when the Turks invaded Hungary in 1526 and had been there ever since. Julia had two sisters: Susanna, who got married and moved to Newark, New Jersey in the U.S., and stayed in close touch with Julia, and, Joanna, who lived in Slovakia with her family.
John Biacovsky
A long line of Biacovskys lived and still live in Budimir, but John and two of his sisters, Maria and Anna, took the big leap and left their beautiful town for a new life in America. Maria married Albert Stanig and moved to Seattle, Washington on the west coast of the United States, but kept in touch with John and his family by sending photos and postcards. Anna married Ondrej Straka in Budimir and had a son. Then the family settled in NJ not too far from John and Julia and were known as “Nena” and “Baci” Straka to the Biacovsky kids. John’s two brothers, George and Joseph, stayed in Budimir. He also had a sister, Barbara, who died as a baby.
At just 19 years old, John said goodbye to his family and friends and promised Julia that he would come back for her after he got settled in the U.S. His long journey to America began by first traveling to a port city, likely somewhere in Germany. Then, he boarded a ship that sailed across the ocean and through the St. Lawrence seaway to a port off Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He never disembarked in Canada or had to register with immigration because people could move freely between Canada and the U.S. until April of 1908. Many Slovaks and Russians settled in Milwaukee, Kenosha and Racine in Wisconsin, where they worked as industrial laborers.
Once John saved up enough money, he made good on his promise to go back to Slovakia and bring Julia to America. The young couple got married on August 25, 1907 in a small Slovak Catholic Church in Milwaukee called St. John de Nepomuc, which was located on the campus of Marquette University and is no longer there.
Julia and John Biacovsky on their wedding day in Milwaukee in 1907.
The happy couple must have spent their honeymoon searching for work and a place to live (among other things). A few months later, they bought the Hrbek family’s grocery store at 1905 Fond du Lac Ave and the house behind it at 1907 Monroe Street. During the years that Julia ran the store, the couple’s first child and only son, Charles, was born in 1908 followed by Wilma in 1909 and Elsie in 1912. At that point, the growing family decided to start over in a new place yet again. This time, they traveled hundreds of miles east to New Jersey, where other people from Slovakia had already settled – maybe even some from Budimir – in a fast-growing town with plenty of job opportunities.
Upon arrival in Finderne, New Jersey, John bought a large Victorian house, which dated back to the mid-1800s and was once known as the “Windsor Mansion” after the Windsor family who built it. He converted it into a two-family home so that he could rent out half of it and meticulously landscaped the grounds with fruit trees and a large kitchen garden that included a huge strawberry patch. Soon after they were settled, their fourth child, Emma, was born there in 1915.
Their new home was just a berry’s throw away from Manville, a new town that was developed around the Johns-Manville Division plant, which opened in 1912 at the confluence of the Raritan and Millstone Rivers and three railroad lines. The company then sold surrounding land to developers, who advertised their 20-by-100-foot lots as ''model farms.' By 1914, Polish and other immigrant families were flocking to the area because of the many job opportunities in creosote factories, the railroad and the newly-formed asbestos factories.
John Biacovsky’s work identification card for Johns-Manville.
The town of Manville’s namesake was also a native son of Milwaukee, where Julia and John started their lives in America. Charles B. Manville’s pipe insulation company, which was called the Manville Covering Company, was based in Milwaukee and founded in 1886 on using asbestos for heat insulating material. Manville became a selling agent for the H.W. Johns Manufacturing Company, which was based in New York City and founded in 1858 on the principal uses of asbestos as fire resistant roofing material. In 1901, the two companies merged to become the H.W. Johns-Manville Company in Manhattan. The Manville family moved to New York City in 1910 and remained active in the management of the company through most of the twentieth century.
Once he landed the job at Johns-Manville, John became a dedicated employee and rose through the ranks to become a foreman. He helped countless other Slovak immigrants, many from his beloved Budimir, get jobs at the company and even invented a soap while he was there. He also served on an advisory board for the Manville Bank, along with other prominent businesspeople in the neighborhood, and helped to decide if people would get home loans.
As the Biacovsky family put down roots and deepened their connections to the community, their lives were also touched by tragedy. In 1923, 15-year-old Charles was killed in a hit-and-run accident with a truck while riding his bicycle on the road. In 1929, eight months after their fifth and youngest child, Kathryn, was born in the house, their eldest daughter, Wilma, passed away after a long illness.
No matter what was going on in their lives, their home in Finderne was always buzzing with friends and relatives from the Budimir area who lived nearby. One day, Mrs. Helen Andrews, who lived in Brooklyn but was originally from Kosice, stopped by the house to see John, whom she knew from Slovakia. Her husband, Mr. Andrews (formerly Andrejcak) was born and lived in Budimir until they came over to America and settled in New York City.
Julius and Elsie Andrews on their engagement.
Elsie Biacovsky answered the door in her house dress and let Mrs. Andrews into the home to see her father. Later, Elsie heard that Mrs. Andrews asked John if the lovely woman at the door was their housekeeper and if she was married. Her son, Julius, who was about the same age, was single and ready to mingle and she wanted to fix them up. The two met and hit it off immediately. In 1939, Elsie married Julius Andrews, once again bringing two families originally from Budimir together. The couple got married in the local church in NJ and celebrated at Elsie’s home afterwards.
Just five years later in 1944, the family suffered another loss. Julia, 57, passed away after a short illness. Since Elsie was the eldest daughter and her youngest sister was only 14 at the time, her father asked her to take over many of the household duties that her mother once did for the family. At the time, she was also taking care of her own young son, Robert, who was born in September of 1943.
Tragedy struck again when John passed away suddenly in 1964. The three sisters decided to sell the house to the Kowalenko family, who made it into a funeral home that is now owned by their longtime employee James DeMaio. Once the house was sold, the Biacovsky sisters each bought their own homes with their families. Emma, who had married Joe Keneally, moved to Indiana a few years prior, continued to live there with her five children: Jerry, Patty, Kitchie, Jack and Bonnie, but Elsie and Kathryn stayed near each other in the Bridgewater area. Kathryn and her husband Jim Ashey had three children: Mark, Jeff and Peter and lived just over the hill from Elsie and Julius and their son, Robert.
Four generations of descendants of Julia and John Biacovsky in New Jersey in 2019. (l to r: Kathryn Ashey, Robert Andrews and Dakota Horton)
That’s the house where Elsie and Jules welcomed their grandchildren and extended family for holidays, Sunday dinners and special overnight stays. Elsie loved to take her granddaughters, Heather and Amy, on long walks in the woods and to pick wild strawberries on the hill in her yard. Her kitchen, the heart of her home, was decorated in red and white and had drinking glasses and bowls with strawberries on them, which are now in her granddaughters’ kitchens.
When two-year-old Dakota, Elsie’s great-granddaughter, eats her oatmeal each morning, she gleefully shouts “berries” when she sees those wild strawberries painted on the bottom of her bowl. Her mom, Heather, can’t help but think of how the trajectories of so many lives began with a couple of strawberries thrown over the fence in a garden in Budimir.