As my cousin and correspondent Frances told me, her uncle (my great-great-uncle) Gustave was a man ahead of his time.  “He exercised, did body building, took a bath every day,” putting a bottle of Franzbranntwein in the tub with him.  This of course, was quite time-consuming, as water had to be pumped and then heated every day, and according to Frances “his father did not understand this and beat him up.”  Like many men who felt ahead of his time, Gustave made the decision to leave his family behind in Europe and come to the U.S. in 1907.  According to Frances, it happened like this: One day, he just disappeared without a trace.  At the same time, she said, his future wife Charlotte, “a model of a girl in looks and attitude also disappeared from a village nearby,” and in Cleveland, Ohio, they married.

The truth of Gustave and Charlotte’s respective migrations appears to be quite different, though.  They did marry in Cleveland, where they raised 2 children, but Gustave left Rybky, Slovakia in 1907, listing his father’s sister Kathi and her husband Markus Freed as his contacts in America (they had made the move to Cleveland in 1904).  Charlotte, for her part, left Slovakia in 1908, joining her sister Bertha and brother Hermann in Pittsburgh.  Far from eloping, Charlotte was still listed as living with her sister’s family in Homestead, Pa. in 1910.  When Gustave and Charlotte did marry around 1912, they went on a honeymoon in Niagara Falls, as their daughter Margaret once wrote to me.

They also happened to be first cousins, a detail Frances and Margaret did not share with me, or else were not aware of. Charlotte’s mother and Gustave’s mother were sisters, but this was not really a strange or bad thing for the time or place.  Indeed, marriage amongst first cousins in the Austro-Hungarian empire in this period was a relatively common and non-taboo thing -- especially in my family, where Gustave’s sister Johanna was married to another first cousin on their mother’s side. 

Gustave died in 1957, Charlotte in 1974.  I am not sure if Gustave lived the rest of his life as if he were ahead of his time, but hopefully the times caught up with him before he died -- giving him at least some vindication on the bathing every day front.

Gustave Bass (1880-1957)