The following recollections are from Mary Kaiser Conard, written in 1988, she describes her memories of  her maternal Grandparents as well as her mother and each of her Aunts and Uncles. Please do not copy these or otherwise distribute them without permission from Mary Kaiser Conard.

AUNT CLARA

  Aunt Clara was different from her four older, gentle, soft-spoken sisters.  She, the only one not stifled by the Schuster attitude on decorum, and I attribute that to not leaving been raised under Grandpa Schuster's thumb, being only 8 when he died.  The only sister who could be brassy to the Nth degree at times.  She had her own ideas about church.  Unlike the rest who were regular and faithful she said, "I go when I darn well feel like it." She could hold her own in a good argument, and shouted her side with gusto.  That could have come from having only brothers as siblings close to her own age at home. 

Uncle Mike was always good-natured, could cuss like a trooper, yet he was the only uncle I ever saw open a car door seating the ladies in his company. 

The photos did not photocopy well, and I hardly think of Aunt Clara without thinking of Uncle Mike at the same time.  On the family portrait she is about twelve, and it appears that she had plenty attention showered upon her by older sisters ... Look of those long curls.  Mom once said, "She was the most willful, destructive little pest in the world." Grandma Klara, while not objecting to Uncle Mike, thought she was too young to get married just two months short of her 17th birthday, but guess who did anyway. 

As I remembered them, they always lived in Quinter, though his "obit" says they didn't move there until they'd been married a couple of years.  About the time I was ten, or so, he worked on the section crew of the Union Pacific railroad out of Collyer.  He drove back and forth and occasionally after work would stop and bring one or two of us along home with him to Quinter to visit for a couple of days. 

Aunt Clara was one of a kind.  She seemed always to know the "spice" in the family and area and regaled it with humor and relish.  She must have been a very good mother, for her own children did not give anyone any reason to do the same number on her kids.  Every once in awhile she'd get a batch of "nerves", which Mom said she got because she didn't have enough to do. Though I don't think she ever had the habit, she's the only one of Mom's sisters that I ever saw with a cigarette. 

In the family there were four kids.  Robert (Bob), Michael Jr. (Mickey), Clarence (Red) and Verdella, their only daughter.  It was at their house that I first encountered firecrackers.  The only time 1 went fishing as a kid was with Uncle Mike Red and Verdella.  We went to the lake north of Quinter, and I didn't catch anything.  Maybe I didn't then, nor do I now, see any reason for sitting with mosquitoes biting, getting an awful sunburn waiting on the whims of a stupid fish ... especially if it's only a muddy-tasting catfish, at that. 

Verdella had the first pair of slacks worn in the family (in her generation).  Aunt Clara in her's probably too.  It was Aunt Clara that persuaded Mom that they were much easier to care for in summer duds than ironing dresses.  Remember that this was a time when women weren't allowed to visit a Catholic hospital wearing slacks (what rot!) Mom might have worn them in her lifetime ... if she did it was rarely.  At any rate we begged Mom to make us some, and she did.  Daddy called them, "slats." Rose's were a colorful stripe, and Frances' and mine were navy background with red and white sailing ships on them. 

Aunt Clara and Uncle Mike were an attractive dancing couple, and I can say from experience that Uncle Mike was incomparable as a dancing polka partner.  The rhythm seemed to surround him like an aura.  (He was the only other of the Schuster relatives as Dad was, that was of the German--Russian decent, and I think that bunch comes out of the womb dancing.) Mom said dancing was a part of the social life when she was a girl, though I don't think to the extent that it was in Dad's world. 

We share cousins with Aunt Clara's family.  Daddy's brother John Kaiser married Uncle Mike's older sister Theresia.  And to this I might add that a greater contrast in the two women couldn't be more apparent than the differences in the two Aunts.  I doubt that Aunt Theresia Kaiser ever wore a dress shorter than mid-calf.  She wore lots of black, stockings and all.  She wore her hair in the center part braided style of South Russia. Her first language was German all her life.  Devout to the limit, and completely under the dominance of Uncle John.... all this what Aunt Clara was not. 

I think, from this Aunt I learned something special too, about the zest for living your own person.  She still calls it like she sees it, and if you don't like it, TOUGH. 

By Mary Kaiser Conard, 1988