August Louis SHOMSHOR

                   Plot 34F
                  

                   Louise Shomshor was born 26 November 1896 to August and Laura (Roemer) Shomshor in Rigdeley Township 7.5 miles SW of Scribner, NE. This was a German settlement.  She was  baptized and confirmed in the  German Evangelical Lutheran  Church, which later was named St. John's Ridgeley Lutheran Church. She attended District #66 school eight miles SW of Scribner and a bit less than mile from her home. After completing the 8th grade she attended Scribner High School for 5 1/2 semester, then Fremont Normal College one semester, finally completing her senior year at Hooper High School and graduating in 1916. She taught in rural schools for 3 years, then enrolled at Midland college for 3 semesters, after which she taught for 2 more years. During the summer months before being confirmed she attended a German school taught by the pastor each Wesnesday evening  to learn to read and write the German language. She also took organ lessons and later piano lessons. After St. John's church installed a pipe organ, she took lessons on it and served as organist for 13 years.

The winter of 1939 was very severe and began after Jan 17 which was a warm, balmy day. The temperature began to drop and the snow  began  to fall. It was -30 F for six weeks. There was a blizzard every other day. The snow drifts were so deep that  many  roads were impassable. The snow plows could not get through. Some roads  were opened by  men using scoop shovels. The banks on either side of the road were so high it seems as if one were driving through a tunnel. John invited Louis Melcher to help with the chores.  One cold morning they  went to the cow barn and found a baby calf. Since it was  too cold in t he barn, they brought the calf into the house and put it into the cob box, which  was 36"x30"x36". Every morning they took the calf to the barn to suckle its mother, then brought it back  in again. The well-behaved calf  became so accustomed to the daily trips that it followed the men to the barn like a dog. The path to the barn was the width of a scoop shovel with 30" banks on either side. One morning after the calf had been in this environment for six  weeks it jumped out of the cob box. Since the cold spell had broken, the calf was  able to stay with its mother in the barn after that.


Plot 34C
                  

                   John A. Shomshor, my grandfather, was born October 28, 1841, in Radegast, Neuenberg, West Prussia, Germany. In 1869 he married Emilie Labun.

In 1870 he came alone (without his wife and children) to the United States. He went to Chicago and from there to Scribner, Nebraska. He took out a 40 acre homestead southwest of Scribner, at Ridgeley. A few months later, in October of 1972, he homesteaded another 40 acres in the adjoining township of Cotterell. Here he built a small one room frame cabin about one quarter of mile north of Maple Creek. Afterwards he was able to buy 80 acres more in Cotterell Township, but most of his subsequent land purchases were in Ridgeley.

In the fall of 1871 my grandmother (Emilie Labun Shomshor) with my father, August, who was only six months old, and with an older son, Gustav, and her widowed mother, Wilhelmine Labun, came to the United States. They crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a sailboat. They were driven back and forth by angry gales, and twice were driven way back by the wind. They were six weeks in reaching the eastern seaboard of the United States.

My mother, Eleonore Roemer, came to the United States with her parents in June of 1884. When the family left Germany, my mother was delegated to take care of her four-year-old brother, Louis. When they got to the train in Germany the little boy said, "I'm not going I'm going home" And he ran away. My mother ran after him and collared him just as the train was pulling out. They were able to get on the train, but in getting on they were several coaches from the car of their family. They walked through several coaches and sat down. Finally, after what seemed like hours to them, Grandmother found them. Mother was only 12 years old and that was a frightening experience.

On the voyage across the ocean there was a severe storm. The ship heaved and tossed and groaned and at times almost lay on its side. The family was very frightened. Then little Louis said, "Why are you so afraid? Isn't God upon the ocean just as well as on the land?" These words calmed their fears and gave them a renewed hope for their safety.

All of the family was seasick with the exception of my mother. Grandmother told her to go up on deck and get some water. The waves washed up over the deck, and she lay on the floor and hung on, and almost got washed overboard. The Captain scolded her and warned her never to come on deck again.

The provisions which they had brought with them were depleted. When they landed in Baltimore, the owners of a hotel came to meet the ship. They yelled, "Come one, come all, food for all"  They enticed the people to go to the restaurant. Because they were so hungry this took all their available cash. Consequently, when the family rode the train to Chicago they didn't have anything to eat because they didn't have the money to buy. Fortunately, they met a lady on the train who had been visiting her sister in Chicago and lived in the Ridgeley area near Scribner, Nebraska. She offered to share her lunch with them. Grandfather Shomshor, accompanied by my father, met the train in Scribner, and brought the family to Ridgeley.

Little Louis was not happy in the United States. Every day for the next six months he would roll his clothing into a bundle and tie it on a stick to make a knapsack. Then he would walk round and round the dining room table and say he was going home. At times he would place his clothing in his little red play wagon and pull it around and say that he was going to tie the wagon in back of a ship and go home.

Just preceding the war of 1870 (Franco-Prussian War), Grandmother Helene Roemer and her sister (Barbara "Betty," first wife of Henry Westphalen) were working in Paris. One day Grandmother was ill and didn't go to work. When her sister returned from work at 5:00 p.m., she informed Grandmother that the border between France and Germany had been closed. Consequently, they packed up their clothing as fast as possible and headed for the border. Here they happened to find a farmer with a load of hay about to cross the border. They hid in the hay and thus made it back to the German lines and into Germany. Due to border disputes their home are was annexed back and forth between Germany and France.

Great-grandfather John Roemer, who had served in the French Army, preceded the family to the United States and joined the Forty-niners in the gold rush to California. He staked a claim which he owned jointly with a partner. He wrote several letters back home with money enclosed telling them that he had a good mine and urged the family to follow him. One day they received a letter stating that he was going to San Francisco to sell some gold dust. That was the last letter they received and he was never heard from again. Presumably he, like many others, was robbed and killed.
                  

                   The Washington Post
1977

'Lady Irene': All Her World's Onstage
by  Judith Martin

Lady Irene appears  at the John  F. Kennedy  Center for the Performing Arts from three to six nights a week, a schedule she has maintained ever  since  the Center opened.

"I haunt the Kennedy Center," is the way sheputs it.

If you haven't caught her onstage - and there has been ample opportunity to do so during the  Opera House's 1976-77 season - you may have glimpsed her in the audience or at the stage door. Sometimes, she is in all three places in a single evening:  on stage for Act I,   in the  audience for Acts II and III, and waiting at the stage door after the curtin has gone down.

"Lady Irene" is actually a theatrical name, in that it was given to her by Kennedy Center staff members, who describe her as "extremely gracious, extremely sweet." Her real name is  Florence Irene Shomshor and her real career, before she retired,  was as a librarian  for the Air Force.

Since she first came to Washington as a young woman entering the Civil Service, she was always at Constitution Hall, Lisner Auditorium, the National Theater.  And  she started planning her relationship with the Kennedy Center years before it was built.

"Therem was all that controversy about where they were going to put it, and  I guessed correctly that it would be on the Potomac." So by the time it opened,  she was comfortably ensconced in a cooperative apartment right across the street, ready for the curtain to go up every night.

Others who live alone may use television for continuous company. She wants to be out  among live  audiences at the very best of live performances.

She buys a ballet subscription   every   eyar,  and series tickets for the Phihladelphia and International orchestras. And she buys tickets for nearly every other concert and many of the plays. "There are few things I don't see."

After  the performance, she would take  her program backstage to be autographed. But it wasn't  until recently that she conceived the desire to go on stage herself.

"I saw 'Boris Gudonov' three times in  one season," she reminisced, "and I saw so many people on stage that I decided there might be room for me., too."

Up until  then, her stage experience  had been "a recitation in German when I was 3," in  her Nebraska hometown;   "the leading  role in 'Snow White'  in junior high school," and "a piano recital when I was 17 or 18."

In Washington, she appeared  in two films:  a crowd scene with Cary Grant in "Houseboat," a job she got because extras with security clearance were requested,  and she had that because of the Air Force; and a spectator role in a Russian film made  of the Hermitage exhibition  here, which she got because she happened to be looking at the pictures when the film crew appeared.

But last summer, she began  her careere as a super at the Kennedy Center.  She made her debut in La Scala, as a panhandler in the crowd scene of "La Boheme."  And then she was in the Paris Opera production of "Faust,"  once in the crowd scene and later "on the balcony, with just two other supers." A few weeks ago,  in the American Ballet Theater production of "Petrouchka," she was the little old lady  who stepped forward from the crown, mesmerized by the Charlatan's flute.

It has been, she said, a thrilling season.  "I love all the excitement,  the confusion, Before when I went to a performance, it might be lovely, but it would just fade away afterwards. These will be with me, always,"

So she was left her resume with the Kennedy Center production office, givingher age as "39  plus," and mentioning the skill of "ballroom dancing."  She would "dearly love to do more, if I qualify," and has her eye on a coming production of "Carmen," where she figures "they'll needa cigarette vendor in the street scene."

Does this mean her ambition is growing?  "Oh, dear, no," she said. "Absolutely  not. It's so relaxing just to sit there and listen to artists - I wouldn't want to have to be one. It's enough to be on stage with a great artist."

But  she does  have one unfulfilled theatrical dream. "I  would dearly love to be in 'Boris Gudonov,' rubbing elbows with all t hose elegant robes and beautiful jewels."