Violinists: Grandpa & Arthur
Children in the Huron area were also taught the rudiments of music by persons
like Jacob A. Tscheter, a well-known instructor (The Prairie People, Rod Janzen, p. 115).
(recollections by Arthur Tschetter, son of Jacob)
I was born on December 16th, 1916 right after World War I ended. This took place on a farm about 20 miles northeast of Huron, South Dakota. During the summer of 1918, when I was about 1 1/2 years old, my parents bought a ranch 10 miles east of Onida, South Dakota, and we moved. There I remember we had a lot of cattle, an artesian well on the place, and a nice large house with a bathroom in it. That was the luxury of those days even if we did have problems with the water supply.
At the age of four, I was sent along with my sister, Viola, to a county school about two miles from our home. She was starting the first grade. My parents were both working in the field harvesting, and they wanted someone to babysit me. But I guess I started picking up things like learning to read, etc., so that at the end of the school year, I was advanced to the second grade. I think I would have done better if I had been two years older when I started or stayed out of school for two years somewhere along the line. I started high school when I was 12 and finished college when I was 20. I hardly remember much of my first 3 years in high school, or my first two years of college.
At the age of four my dad bought a small violin, a small bicycle, and a Shetland pony for Viola and me. My father bought himself a violin before this time and taught himself to play it. I could read music and play tunes, or I could play by ear. My father also taught singing school in a rural schoolhouse for anybody who wanted to read music. Of course, I learned to read music right along with everybody else. I remember my dad asking me to show the rest of the group how it should be done. Dad was a good teacher, and I now realize this should have been his profession instead of farming. Where did my father learn to play the violin and how to teach students to read music? I just found out recently that he was directing the church choir in the Bethel Mennonite Church in Beadle County before he was married. In fact, that is where he met my mother who was singing in the choir.
When I was about six or seven years old, we had a tragedy in our family. My sister and I were at home alone on the farm and mother and dad were out in the cornfield picking corn with a corn picker. Dad got his left hand caught in the corn picker. I remember them coming home from the field, and I remember seeing his hand. It was pretty badly mangled and crushed. Most of the fingers were broken. My mother took my dad to the Tieszen chiropractors in Marion, South Dakota over 200 miles away to have his hand fixed. They did not do a very good job because he ended up with a crippled hand. As a result of his hand, he stopped playing his violin with me because his hand was so badly crippled. He could not finger the keyboard. As a result, I stopped playing the violin myself and never did take it up again.