Zumwalt’s On the Wild Side, a Family Memoir
By Dianne Appelt
Doris Zumwalt recently completed a memoir which husband Bob self-published for her. Last week she shared with Art League members a few stories from that memoir about the Joe Wild family.
Especially interesting was the story of Wild’s departure from Germany. By 1929, Hitler’s Brownshirts, an intimidating Nazi militia, had begun to roam the Bavarian villages near Munich, trying to recruit young men. Confrontations were common. One day, Joe Wild and his friends tangled with them, and Joe knocked one to the ground; he later died. Joe soon received word that he and his friends needed to escape. One went to Canada, one to South America, and one to France. Joe was the only one of his friends to choose America, and brother Adolph decided to go with him. Joe later admitted that seeing the old Wild West shows touring Europe in the 1920’s had added to America’s appeal.
At age 22, Joe sailed to America with nothing but determination and a strong work ethic. He arrived in New York with three cents in his pocket, but discovered that admission required a bit more to show he could sustain himself. So Joe’s companions sneaked him a $10 bill, and he passed it back after he got through the line. Doris says that this one $10 bill was used many times that day. Actually, Joe did have some money when he left Germany, but gamblers emptied the pockets of many young immigrants on that voyage.
Joe’s work ethic immediately kicked in. With six years of school and a talent for mechanical things, he soon found a job. He worked day jobs as a mechanic and night jobs in restaurants. In 1934 he married Annie Epple, a German girl he met in New York. Joe continued to grow his business. He soon bought his own auto service garage in Brooklyn. After two little girls arrived, Joe bought a four-story brownstone. They lived on the main floor and rented out the space above. Doris was one of the two little girls.
Life was good. More little girls arrived. Joe bought a second garage, and they continued to rent out the two apartments above them. They even had a pretty flower garden in their back yard. “Joe liked to grow things,” says Doris.
In ten years, Joe had become a successful businessman with property. Then he began to consider other possibilities. When he heard about a 180-acre farm for sale in Delaware, he decided growing things might be better than smelly garage work in the city, and the demand for produce was increasing. So in 1946, he sold out in Brooklyn and moved his wife and daughters to the farm. The place was an overgrown mess when they arrived. There was no electricity and no indoor plumbing in the two-story frame house.
“It was especially hard on my mom,” said Doris. “She’d always been a city girl.” But the five girls loved it. They named all the animals, cooled off in their own swimming hole, and roamed freely whenever farm work allowed. (Doris had to milk the cow before going to school each morning.) They looked forward to late spring when the migrant workers (usually Puerto Ricans) came, and the excitement grew when the big trucks arrived to ship their potatoes to New York. Doris has many positive recollections about life on the farm, but one haunting memory prevails -- seeing her mom sprinkling dusty DDT pesticide on the potatoes in the fields. She still wonders about its role in her mother’s early death at age 48 from cancer.
In closing, Doris acknowledged that the inevitable changes that followed were sometimes hard to accept. Bob added that in 1990, the expanded 500 acre farm was sold to a golf club development. He said that it is still very difficult for Doris and her sisters to go back to the farm site and see The Wild Quail development there. Bob has drawn a map for the sisters and for posterity, showing where the farm buildings were in relation to the current development.
The Wild family tale is indeed an American tale common to many who grew up on “the farm” without electricity and plumbing until the late 1940’s. It was a family enterprise where hard work taught responsibility, independence, and the importance of family unity.
For more stories about the Wild family, see Doris’s book On the Wild Side, available at the Hallet Oak Gallery for $11.