Densho Digital Archive - Melvyn Juhler Interview (denshovh-jmelvyn-01-0005)

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KP: So what kind of, what kind of religious background did your parents have?

MJ: Well, we have a little bible of Dad's back when he was probably sixteen, eighteen, somewhere in there. And it, by looking through there in the notes and stuff he took, it sounded like he was real active in a church at that time. But I think after he started farming he got away from it. I know he always yearned to get back into a church because he would talk about it and after he did retire he joined a little church there in San Benancio, a little community church for a while. Well, actually he, after he retired he only, he died about three years later. So he died in 1955. So he, he didn't, he wouldn't, he wasn't off the farm for very long. 'Cause I think the freeway went through in '50 or '51, somewhere in there.

KP: So, in your, with your siblings, kind of go way back, your dad was thirty-eight when you were born. He was born in 1903, you said.

MJ: Uh-huh.

KP: He was in his late thirties.

MJ: And it was a ten year difference between my... my mother was ten years younger. Yeah.

KP: And where are you in the, with your, what are, who was...

MJ: I was, I was the last child. I have a, I had a brother that was eight years older --

KP: And his name?

MJ: -- and a sister that was five years older.

KP: Your brother's name?

MJ: Bob, Robert, Robert, Robert Juhler. And he still lives in San Benancio on the ranch. He's, he, he took a little bit of the property and, and built his own home there. So he still lives in San Benancio. And my sister is deceased. She died in, oh about five years ago. Yeah.

KP: I've got another name, Anna Wilhelmina...

MJ: Wilhelmina Kugler?

KP: Yeah, who is she?

MJ: That is my father's mother, my grandmother. And she was a Kugler and she was the, her family was the one that was in the retail business in New York. Okay. They had a department store in New York. And of course she married Jess and then they moved out west. But she's really the one that had the savvy of store, of retail business. She... when did she die? She died in... you got it over there what it, when it was?

Off Camera: '47.

MJ: Wasn't it?

Off Camera: When you were eight.

MJ: Oh, okay, when I was... so, anyway she, she was the Kugler. She died when I was young so I don't remember. I don't ever remember Jess at all. He was alive when I, in 1939, but I don't remember him. He died shortly after that.

KP: There's also some talk about how Anna and her parents were involved with slavery somehow or...

MJ: Well, from what I understand is that they, they let slaves, not runaway but that were you know, after slavery was abolished, that they were to live in the basement of their store and hide them down there. Because there was a lot of, a lot of still problems with whites didn't, didn't want the slaves free. They wanted 'em back on the plantations where they thought they belonged. Well they ended up migrating into the New York area and she hid 'em down in the basement, from what I understand.

KP: So this was after the Civil War and the...

MJ: Yeah, it was after the Civil War, yeah.

KP: Eighteen... '80s, '90s?

MJ: So that's way back. [Laughs]

KP: Yeah, yeah.

MJ: Yeah.

KP: Hmm. That's interesting.

MJ: And the Kuglers were, were from Germany. And during the war my aunt sent care packages to Germany, probably, oh, probably once a month or, or more than that. I can remember as a little kid goin' over there and helpin' her pack these packages and we'd send 'em to Germany.

KP: Do you remember what went in those?

MJ: Do you remember what?

KP: Do you remember what went in those packages?

MJ: Oh, food. Nothin', nothin' but food. Dry food, anything that would, would make it across. And I don't, all I remember is food goin' in. But there was probably other things that she put in there. Because they had a lot of good German friends in Germany and they were sufferin' during the war so they, they kept sendin' the stuff over there.