Interview with Bob Mitchler # VR2-A-L-2011-028.01 Interview # 1: June 29, 2011 Interviewer: Mark DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge. DePue: Today is Wednesday, June 29, 2011. My name is Mark DePue, the Director of Oral History with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Today I’m in Oswego, Illinois, with Senator Bob Mitchler. Good morning, Senator. Mitchler: Good morning, good morning. DePue: We’re going to talk a lot here, and we’re going to have three sessions; two of them are going to be in what we call our Veterans Remember project, because you’ve got a fascinating story to tell about being in the Navy in World War II and then a fascinating chapter of being in the Navy during the Korean War— that’ll be this afternoon in session two. And then we hope to finish off tomorrow morning because you came back after these two wars and decided you wanted to be an Illinois State Senator. We’ll talk about that one tomorrow, and that’ll be in our Illinois Statecraft project. But as we always do, let’s start with a little bit of your background, and tell us when and where you were born. Mitchler: I was born in Aurora, Illinois—that’s in Kane County—on June 4, 1920. My parents were John and Clara Mitchler, M-i-t-c-h-l-e-r. And it was known as the Aurora Hospital at the time, and it later became the Copley Memorial Hospital; Ira Copley, publisher of newspapers, was the instigator and great founder of the Copley Hospital. And it still bears that name, Rush–Copley Hospital. Now they have a new one out on Route 34. But the original one, the Bob Mitchler Interview # VR2-A-L-2011-028.01 Aurora Hospital, was located on South Lincoln Avenue in Aurora, and that’s where all the children and babies were born in Aurora. DePue: Were your parents both from the United States? Mitchler: No. I’m a first-generation for my father. My father emigrated from Hornbach, Austria, in the early 1900s. I do not have the exact date, and like many fathers and sons, never really thought that information was important. I knew that he emigrated from Hornbach, Austria, which shifted around in those days from one country to another. DePue: Do you know if he came in before or after the First World War? Mitchler: That would be before the First World War, early 1900s. Now, they came over as most immigrants did. My father was the oldest of the family, and he came over with his father, my grandfather, Henry Mitchler. My dad’s name was John Mitchler. And then they brought their oldest sister with them, naturally, to help take care of the gentlemen. You know, somebody’s got to cook and make sure that they’re all right. So the three came over in advance of the other members of the family. Katherine, Kate, was the oldest daughter in the family. So they came over, and then they were followed by the other members of the family: his brother, Henry Mitchler; Jacob Mitchler—actually, they called him Jack; and little Freddy. Freddy was a lot like a baby. My grandmother Mitchler, who was married, died over in Hornbach, Austria, before she could come over with the last group. Now, in the last group coming over, there was also Rose Mitchler, my aunt. So they came over as a group following. I think they all came through Ellis Island. I tried to check in Ellis Island one time to determine that, but I couldn’t find the information and what have you. But they came through as an early… They settled out in Rosebud, Pennsylvania. I’m trying to give you the little that my father told me about. We made a trip back there in my youth one time, to Rosebud, and he pointed out the house they lived in, the church they attended. Very religious family, my father. Lutheran religion, Christians. And he was active in the church in Rosebud, Pennsylvania. He said he played the piano or the organ, sang in the choir, and later on he played the cornet in several bands after he got back to the United States here. So he liked music. That wasn’t his big forte. When he first moved over into Pennsylvania, there was a lot of people from Hornbach, Austria, in his community, and that was typical of the immigrants at that time; they’d naturally try to settle where the other immigrants are because they could get along, and that’s just a natural trend of people. He worked in the coal mines for a while, until they had a minor disaster or something and he discovered that’s not for him; he’s going to get the heck out of the underground. DePue: Do you know why they came to the United States in the first place? 2 Bob Mitchler Interview # VR2-A-L-2011-028.01 Mitchler: Well, as near as I can figure out, Austria at the time—the history that I’ve read and tried to figure out—was a huge empire, and you were either with the wealthy class or you were just with the so-called peasants, the workers. And they were always fighting, always having wars, this war, that war, and they’d conscript the men and have them fight their wars. And when they’d move the whole entourage from one place to another at great expense and everything. It was a lot of autocracy, and he just wanted to escape that type of a thing. Now, in early 1900s, that’s when World War I was starting to brew. DePue: Well, your grandfather and your father would have been from Austrian– Hungarian Empire at the time— Mitchler: Yes. DePue: —and you get to 1914, and they’re going to be drafted if they’re of age. Mitchler: That’s right. And I think the thought of another war and all that, my grandfather thought better get his boys out of there because the trend. Get over to the United States. Of course, there was a great immigration to the United States at that time by all countries. I mean, this was just opening up in the early 1900s after the Civil War, and they were getting settled, so it was only proper that he would come over here. And like most immigrants, they tried to settle in communities where they had friends, you know. DePue: But how did they end up in northern Illinois? Mitchler: I don’t know what brought him to Aurora. He had some relatives in Aurora, and I think that’s what brought him to Aurora. DePue: You obviously aren’t going to be coal mining in Aurora. Mitchler: No coal mining in Aurora. No. He came to Aurora, and he got a job at Richards–Wilcox manufacturing in Aurora. It was a manufacturing company. They made steel door tracks for overhead doors and doors that operated… The Fox River Valley, along the Fox River, all the way from Elgin down through Aurora, was a very highly industrialized area. They had many factories, manufactured just about everything. The Fox Valley manufacturing district. And I think that’s what attracted him here, because there was work, jobs. And he got a job there. His employment there—he had very little education coming over. I think he was probably about—I don’t know his exact age, but maybe twelve, fourteen, something in there, so he didn’t have much of a formal education. Not many did at that time, but I mean— DePue: For the rest of his life did he keep a pretty strong German accent? Mitchler: No, he lost the German accent. He could talk German fluently. My mother at one time, (laughs) I remember—I was, oh, maybe about ten years old or something, eleven, twelve years old, something in that era—and she suggested 3 Bob Mitchler Interview # VR2-A-L-2011-028.01 to my father, “You know, John, we should talk German to each other so that our two boys”—I only had one other brother, younger, five years younger than me—“that they would learn German, the German language.” That brought on a very discomforting feeling in my father. “No. You’re in the United States; you talk English.” And oh, he was… It was almost a family argument that time because he was so opposed to it. Yet he would talk with his friends, you know, joke back, and he had Germans that he’d talk German, and he had a lot of German words that I picked up and so forth.