Ok, it has changed, and if you talk to anybody else, you’ve probably found that my mother’s side of the family, and my father’s side of the family, they were here before the 1920’s. And . . . my grandfather on my mother’s side, they came from Cleveland, and he was a machinist; and even though he came from an agricultural area in Slovenia, in this country he worked, like I say, as a machinist in Cleveland. But, he wanted to take his family, which is a large family, he wanted to move them out of the city—he thought that Cleveland was getting too big, and they didn’t want them to have a cow and chickens in the city anymore. So he got a box car, because . . . his job was a machinist on the railroad, so he was able to get a boxcar and load all his belongings and his family and what have you up here, and they settled here in New Smyrna.
I can recall my uncle telling me about taking produce to the New Smyrna area, to the stores, very much like I mentioned about my dad having a route. They had a route in New Smyrna, from Samsula, and their first experience with delivering to New Smyrna area was with horse and wagon. And so my uncle would tell me that he and his dad—my grandfather, of course—would get about half way to New Smyrna and they would stop and they would unhook the horse, let the horse rest and feed the horse and give her some water; and they would make a little fire and brew a pot of coffee. And then after they got through with that they would, you know, continue on to New Smyrna and make their deliveries. So that was some of the very first part of marketing in the early days of farming in Samsula and probably one of the very earliest that I know about, and that’s the way they did it. And later on, my grandfather was successful in what he did, and he enlisted his, I think it was three boys, and he bought them old model A trucks or what have you. And one of them would deliver in New Smyrna, one of them went to St. Augustine, and one went to Deland. And as I recall, most of those did that during their later years, they still had customers and routes for those areas, so that was how the early days of farming started out, at least on my mother’s side of the family.
Well, there was farms that had their own chickens for eggs and even chickens for when you butchered chickens. But when my mother was a little girl, I can recall her telling that her mother boiled some, boiled eggs, hard boiled eggs, and gave her one for her birthday, and told her to go out in the corn patch and eat it so nobody else would see that she got a boiled egg. And the reason for that was eggs were a cash crop, and they actually were 2 or 3 dollars a dozen back years and years ago. Well, you know, now, all that’s done very efficiently, and in big houses where they just house—it’s like a manufacturing business—and so eggs are produced relatively more reasonable than they were then. And so yeah, eggs actually sold at a higher price than they do now, so that was a cash crop for the family.
They were farmers. They were truck farmers; it was a farm where the whole family worked. The wife worked just as hard as the husband, maybe even harder, and the children, you know, when they were—my mother used to say she nursed me at one end of the field, laid me down, hoe down the field and come back, nurse me again, you know, and that was my introduction into farming, right there. So, I tell people when I was in the third grade I would come home from school—my mother was a big baker—you had plenty of cookies, you had two milk cows so we had milk coming out our ears, you had to drink more milk than you wanted, so you’d get home, you’d gulp down two glasses of milk, big plate full of cookies, but then you was expected to be out in the field with a wheelbarrow.
You pushed the wheelbarrow, you loaded the collard greens on it, or whatever, you pushed it up to the barn, put them in the cold water, keep them good and fresh, then worked them up and down, took them and stacked them on the cart, laid them twelve in a row, so we knew exactly how many dozen we had, and that was something I did every day. I knew what I had to do when I got home, and then we worked up til dark, and maybe we’d have about thirty minutes in there to play; and my brother Frank and I, we’d usually run off somewhere.
When we got back home, we got a spanking for being late, that was just a daily ritual. We got to be where we were immune to pain. And the more our mother would spank us, the more we’d laugh at her. So, that was the burden she had to bear.
My father retired one day, and my brothers Joe and Frank took over the farm—I was still in the service—and then, a year later, I got out of the service and the three of us formed a partnership. So, in the beginning, we were using this—my father bought some fairly new equipment in the early 50s; he retired in the mid-60s, and it was fifteen years old, and it was pretty well kept. He had one tractor, and one this, one that, and he kept it up and maintained it well. But here we were in the late 60s with some 1950s-style equipment, and they were going to newer types of equipment.
The hydraulics—Massey-Ferguson came up with a new hydraulic system—they came up with a three-point hitch hydraulic system where, instead of taking a wrench and lifting up ten bolts to change your implement on your tractor, you backed up, hooked up with three pins, and put it in, you took off and went. Now, you had to have more equipment, because you had to have a toolbar for everything—you had to have something for every implement. But, if we got into more mass production of vegetables, you just didn’t have the time to be making all these adjustments, and you couldn’t hire somebody . . . to do it. You know, you were just limited to what the farmer himself could do.
Where if you had a better set of bedders, on a three-point hitch, toolbar, you could hire employee to back up there, hitch it up, and just start driving, you know. But with the old, what we call the old Farmall International Harvester system, you spent maybe an hour just hooking everything up, then you make your first couple passes through the field, then you readjust all your equipment, get it where the bearings in this hiller aren’t taking the grease like this one does, so you got to, this one’s like this, and this one you’ve got to turn like this, so that it makes the bed even and your crop grows uniform.
But, it’s just . . . we started out, we could grow nice vegetables but we just didn’t have the equipment, and the truck, and the packing equipment, and all that to back it up, too. I mean, sure, you can go out there and plant ten acres of yellow squash, but if you can’t harvest it, get it in the packing house, get it in the box, find somebody to ship it for you. You know, we went from a marketing aspect of we grow it, we take it to the retailer, and he sells it, and that’s all we grow, to where we grew it, we still went to that retailer some, but we could grow all we wanted, because we could go to a broker in Sanford and he’d ship it to New York City, you know. A few people in Daytona, a lot of people in New York City.
We sadly lost Anna Lou in 2014, and she is greatly missed.
Anna Lou Luznar shares her recollection of school transportation from her youth, including her memories of how students from Samsula got back and forth to New Smyrna:
Yes, when I was in high school, which was really my first contact with Samsula, because Samsula was a long way away, Daytona Beach was a long way away. My family would go to Daytona Beach about once a year just before the holiday season to Christmas shop, and that was it. I have been in Daytona twice in one day in recent times, but Samsula I didn’t know anybody in Samsula, it was just a long way away. The elementary students had their own school in Samsula, and there was no contact.
And when I was in high school, there were some Samsula students in the chorus with me that I got to know a little bit, but in my memory, the Samsula student’s school got out at 3 o’clock, and most of the buses did not come to the school ‘til like 3:30, but the Samsula bus, it was a small bus, and it left that school at 3:00, because those kids had to get home to help on the farm, and they were students that stood out, they were, had a lot of leadership qualities, and for them to be involved in sports and clubs, that kind of thing, it was a really big sacrifice for their families.
There was, the transportation was a big thing, and the time was a big thing, but that was my first contact with Samsula, and at that time, state road 44 did not exist, Pioneer Trail was the highway between New Smyrna and Deland, and our Samsula Drive as we know it now, wound around off of Pioneer Trail and South and then hit what is South State Road 415 now and travelled on toward Osteen. There was nothing but woods and swamp where 44 is now. (Recorded March 8, 2012)
When I was a young woman and had a child of my own, I had been living out of state but I returned to New Smyrna and I was living with my mother, and the school board of Volusia County wanted to close Samsula school. Some of the parents protested and campaigned and they got the school board to change the zoning line to the Glencoe Road, which is really a long way away from Samsula school, but any family that lived on the West side of the Glencoe Road was zoned for Samsula. And my mother lived like one block west of the Glencoe Road, and so my younger brother and sister were zoned for Samsula and came to school in Samsula.
My mother got involved, and Jessie Luznar, who was my husband’s wife at that time and the mother of his two sons, invited my mother to come to the SNPJ lodge for an end of season pepper party. My mother was a very social creature and she went to the lodge and she felt like she had died and gone to heaven. And, at that time you had to be 55 or younger to actually join the lodge because it was a fraternal organization and you took out insurance to belong.
My mother was too old to belong and so she put my younger brother and sister in the youth group and also my son, because at that time you could insure a child for 18 cents a month. And she insured the three children and then harassed me until I took out some insurance and became a member, and that’s actually how I met my husband and his family and became more or less a little part of Samsula because I became involved in the SNPJ lodge.
Ray talks about Sopotnick’s tavern, and how it got its nickname:
Well, this is a bit of history. We leased the property from Sopotnicks by the Cabbage Patch. That’s where “the cabbage patch” comes from. Because one year, they had; all the bikers would come down because they could run their bikes wide open out there and drag race, be crazy, you know, there wasn’t cops out here then. Well everybody went up to the airport, because, you know, that’s where they’d race. And then they’d come stop at Palm’s Corner and Sopotnicks—after Palm’s Corner burnt down there was you know, Ollie’s, Sopotnicks, because they had gas tanks. You could get gas there. And beer. And anyway, the one year that cabbage was so cheap, daddy said they went through and cut it a couple times and they didn’t go back to it, they just went out there with the mower and just mowed it down because it was so cheap. Of course, you chop up the cabbage with the mower, it would just stink. And all the bikers at that time it stunk so bad during bike week, and the bikers go eeew–that’s where they got the name Cabbage Patch from. They’d go out to the old stinking cabbage patch and drink beer. That’s where the Cabbage Patch name comes from. Quite bizarre.
Ray tells about some of his father’s experiences farming:
He farmed here, and then during the war he went down to Del Ray and farmed with the Machek brothers. He’d farm, and it was sad, but he was like the foreman down there for the Machecks. Uncle Bill went in the Army, Earl went in the Army. Let’s see, uncle Bill, Uncle Earl, and daddy, when he went to the draft board, and told them what he did, he worked on a farm and did the farm effort, and he got exempt because two other brothers already gone and he was doing the home effort, the farming for the troops. When they were down in Del Ray, they’d farm 4 – 500 acres, you know. The Machecks had a big farm down there, big farms. They grew potatoes and beans, all the stuff for the war effort. My mom and dad told me that was a big time for them. Because, everybody had rations, but farmers got away with murder because they got everything—they got the gas, they got the tires, and they could go, it’s life of Riley, they had a big time during the war, that was fun. I’ve heard late night stories about goings-on down south Florida.
Bill: Daddy was born in Kansas, and they moved from Kansas to Auburn, Illinois when he was 2 years old. He came down here when he was 17 the first time, and he moved back when he was like 20. Well, he came down here with Aunt Antonia and Uncle Tony Pleterski . . . Jackie and Rudy’s mom and dad. He met them at a polka festival or something. But, Cleveland is where. . . He came from Auburn, Illinois, and his parents moved down here after he moved down here. And on the Luznar side, they came from Cleveland.
Marcy: ok, they—I heard the story that they loaded everybody up on a railcar
Bill: Yes, they were walking down the tracks. Frank Luznar and Aunt Antonia told us this, Vickie and I; Aunt Antonia told us that they were at Indian Springs—they dropped them off there, and they were walking down the train tracks—Frank Luznar Sr.—Frank Jr.’s dad? He was supposed to meet them and he was about an hour late, and they were walking down the railroad track carrying cages with chickens in it and all that. There was like 4 or 5 in the family then. . . Everybody else was born here after. Uncle Frank and all them were born after they got down here.
In this interview, Bill is talking about how meat was preserved in the days before electricity and refrigeration:
Bill: If they had beef, they would usually have a big cookout and eat the beef and invite everybody around. Somebody butchered a calf or something and they would all eat that night and they would take some meat home, and then the rest of it they would salt to keep it. But the pork, Uncle Frank said they used barrels. They would render all the fat off the hog and then they would cook all the—when they cooked everything, they would keep all the fat. And, then they would take a layer of pork chops, a layer of roasts, and they’d put them in the barrel and put the fat over them in the barrel, and then just keep making layers and keep putting fat over them, and then you’d pull them out of the fat and just reheat them—it would keep them from spoiling.
Marcy: Really?
Bill: Yeah, they were all cooked, but they were immersed in that fat, and that’s how they kept. They’d just pull them out and heat them up.
In this interview, Bob talks about moving a house from the area of the Samsula airport to the Jontes property in the early days:
My dad built this house for these people down on the airport area. There on the left side where the first runway is I guess, it was good wire grass ground in there, and they were going to put an orange grove up. And he built the little house that was on the corner; that lady, [the] man died of a heart attack, he was in his mid-50s, I think, his name was Harrer, and she says there isn’t going to be no orange grove here, she’s going back. Probably come from up in Ohio or somewhere. She said this is yours if you want it, this house that he built. There was only one room on it, and it was nothing, never was finished; anyway, we drug it on down the road. And that’s the one that pulled it (points to the picture of the International).
We had our Fordson hooked to it, and it went ZZZZt! And it was on the ground. We had—I don’t know who the help was that you could get anywhere, these people looking for work—and he had a crew of people with, well they’re already burnt off, these cypress heart posts, and got them out of the swamp there. And over there . . . he got a whole bunch of them as rollers; they’d put one under there, and they’d bring it up to the front, and it’d roll out to the back, and they’d bring one up, and got them all the way down that road.