Life on Colorado plains was filled with adventure for Bob and Millie Vinduska
By ROWENA PLETT
Staff writer
Millie Vinduska of Pilsen knows what it is like to live out on the vast open prairie of eastern Colorado.
"I loved it," she said. "It was a challenge."
She married Robert "Bob" Vinduska in October 1946, after he returned home from serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II. She was 19 years old.
Bob decided to farm and was attracted by the cheap price of land out west. He bought approximately 320 acres including a farmstead near Burlington, Colo., for $25 an acre.
The Vinduskas lived on their farm during the growing season and returned to Pilsen for the winter.
Their house in Colorado was made of sod, with stucco on the outside. It had two rooms and a lean-to wash house. It was old and had no electricity or plumbing, but the water was excellent, being deep, cold, soft mountain water.
Bob grew barley and wheat. Some of the land was left fallow each year to conserve moisture.
The first wheat crop produced a bountiful harvest. Grain bins were filled and excess grain was piled on the ground.
Bob and Millie were excited about the potential extra cash.
"I'm going to buy an accordion," Bob said.
"I'm going to buy a refrigerator," Millie said.
However, one night a cloudburst occurred, and much of the wheat on the ground was ruined and washed away along with their hopes for something extra.
Millie was pregnant with their first child that summer. One day, while Bob was away visiting a neighbor, she was sitting at the kitchen table making out a catalog order for baby clothes.
Suddenly, the dog started barking ferociously, and Millie saw a rattlesnake come crawling into the room, rattling its tail, coiling, and hissing at her. It had come through a hole in the stucco.
Millie screamed, yelled at the dog to hush him, then jumped up on the windowsill with her feet on the table.
"I had wanted to see a rattlesnake," she said. "And there it was, right in front of me."
Every move she made put the viper in attack mode, so she kept very still. After a while, the snake crawled under the stove.
Thinking she could get away, Millie moved, but immediately, it stuck out its head and hissed at her, shaking its rattlers.
She kept her place until the ugly serpent finally crawled out the same way it had come in.
Two days later, they found a large rattler under a tree in the front yard, and Bob killed it.
A few weeks later, Millie went to pick plums from a fruit tree in the garden when she spotted a small rattlesnake curled up in its shade.
"I could have stepped on it," she said.
She was able to get away, go back to the house, and get a rifle with two shots left in it. She injured the snake, making it immobile so Bob could kill it later.
There were a lot of prairie dogs in the area. Millie enjoyed their presence. Every evening they would come out of their burrows and bark.
During rainy spells, buffalo wallows scattered throughout the plains would fill with water. These little water holes attracted wild ducks and geese.
One day, Ernest and Ruby Holub of Pilsen, who were visiting relatives in Colorado, stopped at the Vinduskas for an overnight stay.
Bob and Ernest went to a water hole and captured a duck. Millie kept it and tried to feed it, but she couldn't tame it, and it finally died.
They had two pets, a goat named Goat and a dog named Touser. The two became pals and sometimes walked together into Vona, the nearest town. Bob would find them there when he stopped to pick up the mail and would bring them home.
Whenever Touser was gone, Goat would walk around and around the house, bleating for the dog.
Goat liked to jump on top of the cab of their 1938 Chevy truck. Bob kept it parked under a tree, and the voracious forager liked to stand on her hind legs and eat the tree leaves.
"She did that for a few minutes, then jumped off and ran away," Millie said. "She knew Bob didn't want her on his truck."
One time they were away for a few days visiting relatives. When they came home, they discovered that Touser had killed their 10 chickens and dumped them all on a pile.
Their daughter Laurel was born that November, and a year later, in December, Kay was born.
The couple was contemplating selling their farm and moving to a farm in South Dakota when Laurel came down with polio at the age of 20 months.
Bob and Millie took her to St. Francis Hospital in Wichita. The hospital was full of children with polio, including Monty Stuchlik.
Laurel didn't walk for several months, and when she did walk again, one foot was smaller than the other and she walked with a limp.
"But it didn't slow her down," Millie said. "She is a go-getter."
In business in Kansas
Because of Laurel's condition and ongoing treatment, the couple decided to remain in Kansas. They farmed for a while, then lived in Wichita for eight and one-half years while Bob worked in the aerospace industry. Two more daughters, Carol and Lillian, joined the family.
After a son, Joe, was born in 1959, the family moved to Pilsen, and Bob took over his father's business, known as Pilsen Automotive Machine & Repair (PAMAR).
Joe's brother, Bob, dubbed "Little Bob," was born four years later, and the two boys grew up around the business.
In 1964, Bob, who became known as "Big Bob," erected a steel building. The new building had "His" and "Hers" restrooms, offices, and its own water well. The mechanics wore uniforms.
Plans to install gas pumps never materialized.
PAMAR offered complete service and overhaul of cars and trucks as well as agricultural and industrial equipment.
The business expanded into selling used cars, then buying and crushing vehicles for salvage.
Sometimes, when money got tight, Big Bob worked in Wichita.
The Vinduskas ran the Standard station in Marion for two or three years. It was located where Ampride is now. Used cars also were available there.
Big Bob liked fixing up old cars and making them run. As teen-agers, Joe and Little Bob ran around in a 1962 Nova their father had traded from Ted Miltz of Lincolnville.
One time, the C600 Ford truck they used for transporting junk vehicles broke down on a country road. Big Bob proposed chaining the Nova to it and pulling it home. The boys laughed at him, thinking a little car like that could never do it.
But it proved to be "the little car that could," spinning its wheels on the gravel and pulling grudgingly for six miles to bring the truck home.
Big Bob fixed up a 1963 Ford Fairlane he had gotten from Godfrey Jirak. He used it to go back and forth to work in Wichita.
According to Joe, Dean Pippin of Marion had left his Jaguar in a shop in Wichita. When it was fixed, Big Bob agreed to take him along on his way to work to pick it up.
Neatly attired in his salesman's hat and suit, Dean realized when he got into the car that it was "a piece of junk." He asked Bob to let him get out a block or two away, but to his embarrassment, Bob drove him right up to the front door.
Big Bob sometimes worked on Monsignor Arthur Tonne's car. Joe said the two had a great relationship.
One time Big Bob was taking Msgr. Tonne's car on a test run when he was stopped by the sheriff and fined for speeding. He admitted it to Msgr. Tonne, who offered to pay the fine, but the offer was refused.
Salvage stories
Big Bob died in 1988, but Millie and her sons have an endless collection of memories of their time spent in the business. Numerous memorable experiences occurred while hauling abandoned vehicles out of old farmsteads.
Once, they found a hen setting on eggs in the cab of a pickup truck they had hauled to Pilsen. The hen never left the nest. They gently transferred the hen and eggs to a box and returned them to the owner.
Another time, they were pulling a car home when they noticed it was full of huge rats with long tails. The rats exited one by one as the vehicle was being pulled along.
One time, Big Bob was dragging a long exhaust pipe when he suddenly was swarmed by bumble bees.
"Where are these bees coming from?" he asked his sons. "They're coming from out of the end of the tail pipe," the boys said, pointing, whereupon he judiciously dropped the pipe.
Pilsen Automotive's crushing business started out with a homemade affair which took two days to crush and load six cars.
Then they acquired a saw to cut the tops off, which speeded things up. In the 1980s, they got a commercial crusher to further expedite the process. After Joe acquired a loader tractor, they could do six cars in half a day.
One of the most tedious and messy jobs was removing steel out of cast iron engines. The cast iron was valuable without the steel.
Millie was the bookkeeper for the business. She also was employed at various times at Marion Manor, AMPI in Hillsboro, and Sterling Drug in McPherson.
When her husband fell ill, she quit her job to be with him.
"It was good that I quit," she said. "We had three months together before he died."
When Big Bob died, he left a large inventory of used cars. Joe bought a house and lot in Lincolnville along U.S.-56/77. Millie established the "Memories and More" gift shop in the house, and Joe displayed and sold used cars in the lot.
Between the lots in Pilsen and Lincolnville, they sold the entire inventory.
Little Bob gradually got away from the business, working at other jobs.
In 1998, Joe decided to quit, too. The used cars, equipment, and Lincolnville property were sold, and he went to work as an employee of the City of Lincolnville.
In 2001, he and his wife Tish began an auction service called Pilsen Packrats. They held auctions in the former shop but soon outgrew that. Now auctions are held at the Pilsen Community Building.
Last month, Millie sold the shop building in Pilsen to the county, for use by the road and bridge department.
Millie still runs the Pilsen Gift Shop at her home in Pilsen, although it is closed at the present time. She will celebrate her 80th birthday later this year.
Millie loves to recall those days when Pilsen Automotive was a going business.
"I liked the bookkeeping," she said. "We had a lot of fun working together, and we experienced a lot of interesting things."
