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Reunion celebrates Montana immigrants of 1916
Reunion celebrates Montana immigrants of 1916
By LANCE NIXON For The Gazette
7 hrs ago
Courtesy photo
The Obrachs' new wooden house in Phillips County, shown on left, allowed them to donate their sod house for use as a public school.
There will be about a hundred of them in all from a dozen or more states, traveling by car or train or airplane, and when they gather in Montana at the end of this month it will be to celebrate another kind of journey — the one their families made by ox cart a century ago. ... As John Gutierrez, of Northridge, Calif., explains, it was 100 years ago, in 1916, that several related Ukrainian families — having left their homeland behind when they moved to Canada a few years earlier — made the trek across the United States border. They homesteaded on the open prairie some 40 miles from Malta, the nearest town of any size.
“We’ve really got to remember these people and the sacrifices they made so we could have what we have today,” Gutierrez said. “It was a tough place because you’re totally on your own — it’s entirely up to you to succeed or fail. There’s no doctors, no medicine, nothing. You’re 40 miles from the nearest town. You lived in a tent until you built that first two-room house and then you’re working in the fields. It just took a lot of stamina and endurance and hope.” ... A centennial reunion of the Obach-Wachula and Ivanovitch-Walchuk families will celebrate the legacy of those immigrants when the descendants gather June 24-26 in Malta.
....
Gutierrez, who worked on the Saturn 1B and Saturn V Launch Computer Complex for RCA Radar Systems Division in Van Nuys, Calif., from 1961 to 1969, said he sometimes marveled at the way that Obach family — one in which education was stressed — arrived in America.
“What is amazing to me is that my grandparents immigrated to the United States in 1916 on an ox-drawn cart — a two-wheeled ox-drawn cart in which they moved to this promised land. In two generations their grandson, me, John Gutierrez, I’m working for RCA Radar Systems Division, I’m working on the Saturn IB and Saturn V launch computer complex, which helped launch a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth. My grandparents came here in an ox cart and I helped land a man on the moon — only in America could this happen — in two generations. It just boggles my mind.”
By LANCE NIXON For The Gazette
7 hrs ago
Courtesy photo
The Obrachs' new wooden house in Phillips County, shown on left, allowed them to donate their sod house for use as a public school.
There will be about a hundred of them in all from a dozen or more states, traveling by car or train or airplane, and when they gather in Montana at the end of this month it will be to celebrate another kind of journey — the one their families made by ox cart a century ago. ... As John Gutierrez, of Northridge, Calif., explains, it was 100 years ago, in 1916, that several related Ukrainian families — having left their homeland behind when they moved to Canada a few years earlier — made the trek across the United States border. They homesteaded on the open prairie some 40 miles from Malta, the nearest town of any size.
“We’ve really got to remember these people and the sacrifices they made so we could have what we have today,” Gutierrez said. “It was a tough place because you’re totally on your own — it’s entirely up to you to succeed or fail. There’s no doctors, no medicine, nothing. You’re 40 miles from the nearest town. You lived in a tent until you built that first two-room house and then you’re working in the fields. It just took a lot of stamina and endurance and hope.” ... A centennial reunion of the Obach-Wachula and Ivanovitch-Walchuk families will celebrate the legacy of those immigrants when the descendants gather June 24-26 in Malta.
....
Gutierrez, who worked on the Saturn 1B and Saturn V Launch Computer Complex for RCA Radar Systems Division in Van Nuys, Calif., from 1961 to 1969, said he sometimes marveled at the way that Obach family — one in which education was stressed — arrived in America.
“What is amazing to me is that my grandparents immigrated to the United States in 1916 on an ox-drawn cart — a two-wheeled ox-drawn cart in which they moved to this promised land. In two generations their grandson, me, John Gutierrez, I’m working for RCA Radar Systems Division, I’m working on the Saturn IB and Saturn V launch computer complex, which helped launch a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth. My grandparents came here in an ox cart and I helped land a man on the moon — only in America could this happen — in two generations. It just boggles my mind.”