This branch of the Austrian Hesch family is descended from Johann Hesch and his wife Marya (Schlinz) Hesch, who came to America from Oberschlagles, Bohemia with three sons: Paul, Mathias, and Anton. +++Johann & Marya settled in Buffalo County, Wisconsin but moved to Pierz, Mn in about 1885. .+++Mathias settled in Waumandee, Wisconsin and moved to Pierz in 1911. +++Anton never married but farmed with his dad in Agram Township, where he died in 1911.+++And Paul, my great grandfather, settled five miles away, in Buckman, Minnesota. He died there in 1900.

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Saturday, April 17, 2010

A letter to the Editor

My Janson grandpa wrote to the Brainerd paper fairly often re: the Townsend Movement, in 1937, but here's a letter another irate citizen of Buckman wrote in 1933, also curing "what's wrong".  It was not the first call to do away with Prohibition (but by this time, the end was in sight). 
The odd, out of context mention of "Bishop Cannon" and "Smith's campaign" made us google them.  Turns out Smith was a Roman Catholic (the first to win a major-party presidential nomination-1928), so Catholic Buckman would have backed him automatically, but his stand on Prohibition was probably popular there, too.  Bishop James Cannon, Jr. was "a leader of Prohibitionists in Virginia and the nation, and a political activist of such skill and combativeness that he became one of the most famous, and deeply controversial, American figures of the early twentieth century".  Both men had their share of newsprint and radio-time about then, so local people probably understood the reference just fine ☺.

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