My Extraordinary Ordinary Life Read Online Free Page A

about fifty miles northeast of Austin, where my father and his brother, Sam, and his sisters, Thelma and Rose, were born and raised. I love the color of yellow wheat against black soil in this part of Texas. The sky is wide and blue, and you can see rain coming from a long way off. The earth is so fertile underfoot that it feels like a living thing. When it’s hot and dry, huge cracks form in the ground. And when it’s wet, the black mud sticks to your feet as you walk around, and you get so tall you feel like you’re wearing stilts.
    For outsiders who think that everybody in Texas is a cowboy on a horse named Trigger, towns like Granger would come as a shock. Granger was—and still is—an ethnic oasis, filled with the descendants of Czech and German pioneers who recreated the old country on the blackland prairie. English was rarely spoken in town until the mid-twentieth century. The kids we played with on our visits were named Bartosh, Zelenvitz, Ehlich, Walla, and Mikolencak. Our family came over from Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic, along with Slovakia and Bohemia, and people in Granger still pronounce Spacek the traditional way: Spot-check. My dad changed the pronunciation to Spay-sik (like basic ) when he was in college. One of his professors just couldn’t get it right and kept calling him Spay-sik ; Daddy figured it was easier to change it than to keep correcting people. (Years later, when I met the Czech film director Milos Forman, he insisted on calling me Spacekova—the proper feminine title. I said, “Please, just call me Sissy!”)
    Daddy was proud of his ancestry and was a great storyteller. His people were simple, hardworking farmers and merchants who knew the value of a zlaty and felt a strong, almost mystical connection to the land.
    The first to arrive in America was my great-grandfather, Frantisek Jan Spacek II, who was thirteen in 1866 when he left his family’s farm in Moravia to sail to Texas. It was a miserable nine-week journey from the port of Bremen to Galveston Bay. The ship was tossed around in terrible storms and everyone on board was seasick. Frantisek later described the giant roaches that swarmed below deck and “flew around like swallows,” dropping into their bowls of rice soup. Finally they reached the Texas coast, and my great-grandfather spent three more days traveling by rail, wagon, and ferry to the small town of Fayetteville, halfway between Houston and Austin. The town was brimming with German and Czech immigrants, who took the boy in and gave him work as a farm laborer. After Frantisek’s mother died two years later, his father and four younger siblings followed him to America.
    In 1875, Frantisek married Julia Gloeckner, whom he had met on the long passage from Moravia to Texas. Frantisek flourished in the new world. He opened a grocery store and saloon in Fayetteville, and at one point he had a six-hundred-acre farm, rental properties, a livery stable, and a beer agency. He and his wife had two daughters, Julia and Albina, and three sons, Frank Joseph, Rudolph, and my grandfather, Arnold Adolph, known as AA.
    All the Spacek children grew up speaking Czech, German, and English and worked hard to get ahead in the world. AA started out laboring in his father’s grocery store and other businesses, then he went away to an English grammar school to master the language he would need to improve his prospects. In 1905, my grandfather opened a tailor shop in the Czech outpost of Granger, where he met his future bride, Mary Cervenka. He bought a grocery store, traded it for some land in West Texas, and expanded his tailoring business to include the first off-the-rack suits sold in Central Texas. He bought and sold farms and businesses all over the state and helped organize the Granger National Bank in 1920, where his picture hangs to this day.
    They still tell the story of how he saved the bank from ruin during the Great Depression. At one time there were three banks in