Long before the government betrayed him, Fred Dusek believed in the essential fairness of American democracy. A child of the new century, he was born in a sod house in Nebraska on May 31, 1900, the first of his parents’ eight children.[1] His father James had come to the United States from Bohemia in 1889 at the age of 14.[2] After two years in Iowa where he worked, learned English, and saved money to help his siblings immigrate to the United States, James moved west to Nebraska and homesteaded at a place called Sweetwater halfway between the village of Pleasanton and the small railroad town of Ravenna.[3] There he met his future wife, Barbara Maulis, another Bohemian who had immigrated with her parents at the age of 19 and arrived in Ravenna in 1891.[4] After Barbara left the community to live with a cousin in Omaha and work as a housemaid in a private home, James could not forget her. In 1899, James traveled to Omaha, proposed, and they were married.

Years after he had moved to Rapid City, Fred Dusek would long for the sense of family and community he had experienced in Buffalo County where Bohemian and German immigrants greeted one another in their native languages, and on Saturdays farm families gathered in town to shop and to socialize.[5] Throughout the growing season, farmers helped one another plant and then harvest their crops.[6] Fred would later conclude that the agrarian life promoted a sense of community and cooperation. In contrast, in the city “everyone is for himself.”[7]

Likewise Fred remembered the landscape of his youth where his father had worked to not only turn a profit, but also transform his land into a place of beauty, smoothing uneven and broken banks into gentle slopes and planting fruit trees and ornamental shrubs.[8] By the time Fred was in his mid-20s, his father had built a fine home with a well and a hand pump that brought water into the kitchen. By then, he owned three farms that included eight thousand acres.[9]

James and Barbara Dusek ran the farm like a factory. The mid-day meal was always served at noon, supper was at six. The whole family worked long hours. As the oldest son, Fred carried the most responsibility. One of his many jobs was to carry water to the young trees that his father had planted to block the wind that raked across the Great Plains.[10]

Before they were teenagers, the children walked to the country school two miles from the homestead, which they attended until the eighth grade. After that, most boys in that part of the country went to work fulltime on the farm, but Fred was ambitious and restless in his youth. To continue his education, he rode his horse through the winter months five miles to the town of Pleasanton.[11]

To ensure sufficient water for the crops, the livestock, and the family, James Dusek had erected windmills. Fred had to climb these windmills to make repairs and oil the gears. Afraid of heights, he dreaded the work, but feared his father’s disappointment more. One day, however, he had had enough. After an argument with his father, Fred packed a few things and left.[12]

Fred was always good with numbers. In Omaha, he enrolled in the Dworak Business College, which was run by a fellow Bohemian. President and Director of Instructions Anton Dworak was a certified public accountant and head of the Nebraska State Board of Examiners of Certified Public Accountants. He advertised that he trained young men “to meet the demands of Modern Enterprise,” offering courses in stenography, dictaphone, Comptometer and Burroughs Calculating Machines, bookkeeping, accounting and auditing.[13] “By our training,” the school promised, “you will succeed.”[14]

Fred was intent on success. In 1920, Omaha was a city teeming with opportunity and nearly 200,000 people, including a large percentage of immigrants from Bohemia, Germany and other central European regions. Many of these immigrants worked in the slaughter and packing houses that processed meat to ship by rail to the growing cities in the east. They lived in ethnic neighborhoods where people still spoke the languages of their home countries and shops sold the processed meats and sausages and breads of the old country. Meanwhile, their children went to school, learned English, and aspired to a new life as Americans.[15]

With the skills he developed in business school, Fred found work in the legal department of the Square Turn Tractor Company.[16] Tractors were revolutionizing farming, but the business was still wide open with competition. Established in Norfolk, Nebraska in 1917, Square Turn had expanded its operations after the Armistice and sold stock locally to raise capital.[17] In 1921, however, the company suddenly stopped paying its workers, ceased manufacturing, and went into receivership owing nearly two years’ worth of back taxes.[18] Creditors reorganized the company, installed a new president, and tried to find buyers for the company’s unsold tractors.[19] In 1924, the company moved its headquarters from Norfolk to Omaha to strengthen its sales efforts.[20] The company offered Fred a job as office manager, and within weeks of starting work, he was also named assistant treasurer.[21] But Fred soon realized that Square Turn was in deep trouble.[22] Within a year, what was once touted as a $3 million company was sold at a sheriff’s auction for the payment of back taxes and $11,000.[23] By then, Fred had already moved on.

With help from his mother’s sister and her husband, Fred took a job as assistant cashier at the Farmers State Bank in the town of Witten, South Dakota, just over the border from the Rosebud Indian Reservation.[24] [25] Fred served as assistant cashier of the bank. He made loans for automobiles and tractors, wrote mortgages for farms and homes, and sold insurance.[26] He also began moonlighting to run the local pool room on Saturday nights and the Corner Drug Store on Sundays.[27]

Within a year after he arrived in town, Fred was smitten by a local school teacher. Viola Aurora Struve was a smart, outgoing, and assertive young woman with round cheeks, bright eyes, and brown hair cut to a bob.[28] The daughter of Prussian immigrants, she was born July 12, 1901 and grew up on a dairy farm west of Chicago near Joliet with her two older brothers, George and Alfred.[29] On the threshold of her teenage years in 1913, she showed a lackluster interest in school, but improved substantially over the course of the school year, earning nearly straight As and demonstrating a strong interest in history.[30]

When she was a teenager, Viola’s parents [sold the farm] moved into a blue collar neighborhood on the north side of Chicago where William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson was elected mayor in 1915.[31] For decades, Chicago’s working class neighborhoods were a battleground for the war between labor and capital at the turn of the century. With World War I raging in Europe, Mayor Thompson was an outspoken critic of US involvement. He often referred to Chicago as the sixth largest German city in the world because it had over a half million residents of German extraction.[32] Many of the city’s German immigrants, including the Struves, were proud of their heritage and actively opposed American intervention.

In 1919, in the midst of a national “red scare” sparked by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Viola’s brother Alfred refused to participate in an Armistice Day remembrance at Crane Technical High School, where he and Viola were students. His actions were reported on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. According to school administrators, Alfred acknowledged no government and would not stand for the national anthem. Defending her son to a reporter, Viola’s mother Lizzie declared that “the war has turned all of us against all governments and God.” The only reason her daughter had not protested as well, she said, was to avoid trouble. “My daughter and Alfred agree with their father that there is no God or government.”[33] School administrators promised to bring the incident to the attention of federal authorities and expel Alfred if he didn’t withdraw. Meanwhile, fellow classmates threatened violence against Viola’s brother.

“My daughter and Alfred agree with their father that there is no God or government.”

LIZZIE STRUVE

As reporters chased after her to explain her views, 18-year old Viola was unabashed. “Sure, I’m a Socialist,” she told one newshound. “I got it from reading Marx and Liebknecht and speeches of Mayor Thompson, but mostly from reading Jack London. Oh yes, Jack London did more to make me a Socialist than anyone else.”[34]

After graduating, Viola left her brief moment in the political spotlight behind. She transferred to the Lewis Institute, a coeducational liberal arts college that later became part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, receiving her bachelors of science in June 1923.[35] Perhaps inspired by London’s adventures, the intrepid 24-year old Chicago native paid a $70 fee to the Sioux Falls Teachers Agency, which found her a job teaching in Mellette, South Dakota, a farming community south of the city of Aberdeen.[36] When the school year was over, she boarded the train home to Chicago.

Viola was on fire to learn, and that summer she took classes at the University of Chicago. While she was there, the Woman’s International League for Peace and Freedom held its “summer school” on campus to organize and advocate for the abolition of the armed forces. Veterans organizations protested their presence.[37]

At the end of the summer, Viola returned to South Dakota to teach English, drama, public speaking, and history in the town of Witten. She also oversaw the Glee Club and directed class plays.[38] In Witten she met the handsome young Bohemian banker. One can only imagine what they saw in each other at the time. He was ambitious and hard working, smart enough to be looking for the angles to get ahead, but also grounded in the importance of family and community. She was equally driven and looking for a man who would give her the freedom to pursue her intellect and passions. Where he was stiff and taciturn, she was boisterous and affable.

On Sundays, with Fred dressed in a suit and tie and Viola in a dress, they took drives into the countryside in a Ford Model T and stopped to take pictures. When the school year was over, Viola returned to Chicago again to take more classes. For Fred the relationship was serious from the beginning. During the summer he wrote to Viola several days a week. It was a curious epistolatory courtship, expressions of affection mixed with homilies, moral admonitions, and financial advice. He told her that he had negotiated for a raise, but had not gotten what he wanted. He had another job offer at a higher salary, but he was not going to take it, noting that he was making a financial sacrifice to be near her. Unabashedly, he recounted how others in town had said he was a hard worker and trustworthy.

In his letters he explored the framework for a life they might share together. He confessed that he had not been raised in any particular faith and had been taught to respect all nationalities. Nevertheless, he had a strong moral code. Growing up, he was expected to be forthright and tell the truth.

Much of what he wrote foreshadowed the partnership they would develop as husband and wife and as entrepreneurs. On one hand, he articulated a conventional view of a wife who followed her husband’s ambition and supported him along the way. “I believe a man’s position in life depends a great deal on the backing that he gets from his wife,” he wrote, but he also noted that “the advice she gives him” was essential to success. He promised to be faithful to her and to have a marriage of equals. “I would like to see a home with the closest cooperation,” he wrote, “and no one boss.” “I am willing that you name your goal,” he wrote, “and I will work towards that end.”

Fred was both attracted to and intimidated by Viola’s education, intellect, and energy. While he sought to convince her that he would respect her independence and embrace a marriage of equals, he was also unsettled by her “eastern ways” and her perception that there was no opportunity in the West. If they were going to make a life together, one of them would have to compromise, he wrote, with the clear implication that it should be her. But even as he adopted a paternalistic tone in one letter, he confessed in the next, “I often think I can handle anybody else better than you. Let’s be pals, study, think, plan, love, and fight together.”[39]

He pushed back against her desire to live in Chicago or some eastern city, saying “city life and environment destroy cooperation. Everyone is for himself in the city.” After two years teaching in rural South Dakota, Viola must have become enamored of rural life. Maybe Mellette and Witten reminded her of her childhood in the countryside near Joliet. Or maybe she idealized the sense of community that Fred also found compelling. But he could see that she was still uncertain about where she imagined her future, and he was afraid. “If I lost the only girl that I ever loved,” he wrote, “I would be through with matrimony for life.”

For Fred, the secret to success at home and in his career was self control. “There are a number of things which are important such as perfect control of the mind so as to make me a better husband and pal,” he confessed. “This I feel comes first because success in business never comes without success in a home.” Indeed, he said, with her love, he was bound to be successful in business. “A kiss and a hug form you will close more collections than all my efforts, a million “no’s” cannot stop me when my mind is free and carries the love of you.”

While she was in Chicago, he wrote to a dealer in Los Angeles to buy a diamond ring. The dealer sent him a ring by mail. In a series of letters, Fred pointed out flaws in the stone and bargained for a better price. Then apparently, he was satisfied with the deal.

Three days before Christmas in 1925, Fred and Viola eloped and were married in Stanley, South Dakota. They kept the marriage secret so that Viola wouldn’t have to quit her job as a teacher. The couple remained in Witten for another year, but these were hard times to be banking in farm country. In 1925, as agricultural commodity prices plummeted and farmers failed to make mortgage payments, the life of a rural banker got very difficult. That year, 174 banks in South Dakota failed. Newly married at the age of 25, Fred worried about his career and the future of his marriage.[40]

---

[1] https://www.ancestry.com/mediaui-viewer/tree/16772673/person/1632533870/media/53c904b3-1fd7-4cc5-af11-e958f0995df0?_phsrc=gyn699&_phstart=successSource. See also, Barbara Dusek Stock, student report on Fred Dusek, June 28, 1984. Dusek Family Archives.

[2] Barbara Dusek Stock, student report on Fred Dusek, June 28, 1984. Dusek Family Archives.

[3] Barbara Dusek Stock, student report on Fred Dusek, June 28, 1984. Dusek Family Archives.

[4] Mrs. Vernonica Maulis Dead,” Ravenna News, September 18, 1925, 5.

[5] Winona Snell, “Ravenna, Buffalo County,” University of Nebraska, Lincoln. https://casde.unl.edu/history/counties/buffalo/ravenna/

[6] Interview with Barbara Dusek Knott, September 13, 2021.

[7] Barbara Dusek Stock, student report on Fred Dusek, June 28, 1984. Dusek Family Archives.

[8] “James Dusek Farm One of Most Modern in State,” Kearney Daily Hub, May 11, 1925, 6. Note, the paper later published a correction saying this story was about Joseph, not James, Dusek. The two were brothers. “Error in Name,” Ravenna News, May 22, 1925, 2.

[9] Miloslav Rechcigl, Jr., Encyclopedia of Bohemian and Czech-American Biography, Volume 1, 2016. Entry for Joe Dusek (1866-1943).

[10] https://www.ancestry.com/mediaui-viewer/tree/16772673/person/1632533870/media/53c904b3-1fd7-4cc5-af11-e958f0995df0?_phsrc=gyn699&_phstart=successSource. Barbara Dusek Stock, student report on Fred Dusek, June 28, 1984. Dusek Family Archives.

[11] Barbara Dusek Stock, student report on Fred Dusek, June 28, 1984. Dusek Family Archives.

[12] Barbara Dusek Stock, student report on Fred Dusek, June 28, 1984. Dusek Family Archives.

[13] “Rise to a Good Position,” display advertisement, Omaha Daily Bee, August 21, 1922, 8.

[14] At the end of 1920, Fred was injured [or sick] and had to spend five weeks in a hospital. “Ravenna News Notes,” Kearney Daily Hub, January 25, 1921, 4.

[15] Lawrence H. Larsen et. al., Upstream Metropolis: An Urban Biography of Omaha & Council Bluffs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

[16] “Buffalo County Boy Has Good Position,” Ravenna News, January 4, 1924, 1.

[17] “Square Turn Tractor Co. Assets Are Sold,” Norfolk Daily News, September 12, 1925, 5.

[18] “Proceedings of Madison County Commissioners,” Battle Creek Enterprise, April 14, 1927, 9.

[19] “Creditors Will Run Square Turn Tractor Plant,” Norfolk Daily News, March 16, 1921, 5.

[20] “Square Turn Offices Moved to Omaha,” Wausa Gazette, August 21, 1924, 1.

[21] “Buffalo County Boy Has Good Position,” Ravenna News, January 4, 1924, 1.

[22] “Personal and Otherwise,” Ravenna News, February 8, 1924, 7.

[23] “Nebraska News,” Lincoln Star Journal, March 20, 1925, 12.

[24] Fred Dusek to William & Leon Snyder, June 5, 1959 in in Folder: Mayor’s Office-Fred Dusek-Personnel in Box 1, Dusek Archives. Fred had an aunt and uncle living in Witten, Mr. and Mrs. Fred J. Toman. See also, “Mrs. Vernonica Maulis Dead,” Ravenna News, September 18, 1925, 5.

[25] Banks in Witten seemed to have had a troubled history. The German-American State bank in Witten suffered along with the rest of the state during the terrible drought year of 1911. When farmers and local businesses failed, the bank took back worthless land and property, including the Witten Hardware store. As the hardware store lost money, bank deposits slowed to a trickle, and the bulk of the bank’s remaining assets were tied up in so-called “Indian notes,” the bank failed in September, 1912. “Witten Bank Fails,” Rapid City Journal, September 25, 1912, 4.

[26] Fred Dusek to William & Leon Snyder, June 5, 1959 in in Folder: Mayor’s Office-Fred Dusek-Personnel in Box 1, Dusek Archives. Fred had an aunt and uncle living in Witten, Mr. and Mrs. Fred J. Toman. See “Mrs. Vernonica Maulis Dead,” Ravenna News, September 18, 1925, 5. Note that 1925 was apparently not a good year for business in Witten. The Atlas State Bank suspended payments on October 26 and had to be taken over by the South Dakota Department of Banking and Finance. See South Dakota Superintendent of Banks, 1932 Annual Report, 216.

[27] Interview with Barbara Dusek Knott, September 13, 2021. Barbara Dusek Stock, student report on Fred Dusek, June 28, 1984. Dusek Family Archives.

[28] Photos in Barbara Dusek Stock, student report on Fred Dusek, June 28, 1984. Dusek Family Archives.

[29] George came to the US in 1882. Lizzie came in 1870. George was born in 1862. Lizzie was born December 31, 1868. (Find a Grave) US Census 1900. Chicago Ward 21. The 1930 Census, however, says they both immigrated in 1882.

[30] Lombard Public School, Annual Report, Viola Struve, 1913-1914. Box ea001, Dusek Archives.

[31] The Struves were living at 832 Newport Avenue in 1919. “Red Activities Taint Schools; Boys Dropped,” Chicago Tribune, November 14, 1919, 1.

[32] Dennis Thompson, “The Private Wars of Chicago’s Big Bill Thompson,” Journal of Library History, 15:3 (Summer 1980), 261-280.

[33] “Red Activities Taint Schools; Boys Dropped,” Chicago Tribune, November 14, 1919, 1.

[34] “Schools Oust Red Advocates,” Buffalo Enquirer, November 15, 1919, 3. See also, “Charged With Sowing Seeds of Radicalism,” Vancouver Daily World, November 18, 1919, 2.

[35] Lewis Institute Diploma, June 21, 1923 in Dusek Family Archives.

[36] Barbara Dusek Stock, student report on Fred Dusek, June 28, 1984. Dusek Family Archives.

[37] “Women’s Peace League Rapped By Legionnaires,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 8, 1924, 3.

[38] Barbara Dusek Stock, student report on Fred Dusek, June 28, 1984. Dusek Family Archives.

[39] Barbara Dusek Stock, student report on Fred Dusek, June 28, 1984. Dusek Family Archives.

[40] SWCA Environmental Consultants, The History of Agriculture in South Dakota: Components for a Fully Developed Historic Context (Pierre: South Dakota State Historic Preservation Office, 2013), 21.