A DAIRY HAPPY LOVE STORY
From the second she laid eyes on Mike Krajacic one chilly February evening in 1948, Esther Kraeer knew that he was something special.
And the Washington County dairy farmer has proved that time and again during their 68year marriage. He has not only eked out a nice living for his family of five on a 140-acre dairy farm in Avella, but also pulled through several horrific farming accidents that might have made lesshardy men rethink their livelihood.
In the early 1970s, for instance, he was nearly mauled to death by a bull. He also has survived a heart attack, fallen off a hay wagon, almost been buried under liquid manure and has been pinned under a tractor that had flipped over near his farm along Route 844.
“I’ve been hurt so many times, [the hospital] has my mug shot,” Mr. Krajacic, 91, joked last month as he and his wife sat on their porch holding hands, enjoying the fresh air and sunshine under tinkling wind chimes.
Yet it wasn’t until Esther, 89, got sick three years ago and had to be hospitalized that the farmer demonstrated his love and fortitude in a most unexpected way. After a lifetime of relying on the women in his life to fill his belly three times a day, he picked up a spatula for the first time — and learned to cook.
It partly was because he had few other choices. The farm is too remote for Meals on Wheels, he says, and he didn’t want to push extra work on his daughter, Cindy Fraer, or his granddaughter Natalie Hancher, who lives on the property in the original 1832 farmhouse.
His learning to cook also was a carrot he could dangle in front of his wife to help speed her recovery.
“I told her, “If you learn to walk again, I’ll take care of you,’” he remembers urging her.
It was a baptism by fire, with Mr. Krajacic learning the hows and whys of cooking by trial and error. But like so many of his generation, “He was bound and determined,” Mrs. Fraer says.
Today, stuffed peppers are one of the nonagenarian’s specialties. He makes a pretty good pot of chicken noodle soup, too, says his daughter, who lives just down the road, and has perfected sauerkraut and kielbasa. He has taken up baking, teaching himself how to make rolls, desserts and cookies. Ever the farmer, he removes the hot cookie sheets from the oven with a pair of Craftsman pliers.
Just the other day, in fact, after rising at 4 a.m. to raise some rolls,
he made a pumpkin pie using a refrigerated crust because he had a hankering for it.
Eat’n Park makes the creamy orange dessert only during pumpkin season, he laments, and the mass-produced ones from a certain members-only store, he says with a scrunch of the nose, “are the worst I ever ate.”
But his proudest accomplishment are the thin crepelike Croatian pancakes called palacinke that he ate on the farm as a kid. His older sister, Helen Kovacicek, taught him to make them a few years ago, when she was 95 and he was 88.
Helen, who lived nearby until going into assisted living last month, often sent them over as a reward when Mr. Krajacic did something nice for her. She also was known for her cream-filled gobs and flaky melt-in-yourmouth ladylocks.
Their parents, Anton and Filipina Krajacic, immigrated to the United States from the former Yugoslavia in the early 1900s, and moved to Washington County during the Great Depression to become dairy farmers. They eventually had 13 children, and with so many mouths to feed, palacinke — made with milk, eggs, sugar and flour — was a quick, cheap and easy treat.
Helen inherited the baking gene from her mother, who was a wonderful cook and phenomenal baker. Mrs. Fraer recalls there was always something delicious sitting on top of her green Kalamazoo coal- and woodburning cook stove — nut rolls, fried doughnuts, rolls, strudel and everyone’s favorite diamond-shaped “tie” cookies.
That Mr. Krajacic can actually cook might not sound remarkable to the many young men today who know their way around a kitchen. Yet his was a traditional upbringing, with men’s work largely outside, in the fields and pastures and inside the farm’s giant white barn complex with its 70-foot silos.
He started milking cows before heading to school at age 7, and he and his three brothers “worked like dogs” helping to plant and harvest their father’s corn, hay and soybeans while growing up.
Whereas his brothers couldn’t wait to get off the farm, he loved it, leaving school in the 10th grade to help his dad raise 60 head of dairy cattle. He bought the farm from his parents in 1965 and for years shipped gallons of milk to the former Country Belle Dairy in Uniontown and Schneider’s Dairy in Pittsburgh.
“You’re out in the open, see things grow and at the end of the day you’ve accomplished something,” he says. “You help feed the world.”
“His life was his work,” says his wife, who knew nothing about farming when they met at a square dance at Redwood Dance Hall in the tiny farming community of Rea.
“My father worked for Columbia Gas,” she explains.
Not that it mattered. The minute she saw the tall, strapping 19-year-old from across the room, her heart skipped a beat — and not because of the lively music.
“I saw him dancing with a girl I knew, and I thought, ‘why isn’t he holding me close?” she recalls with a chuckle.
Just 20 when they married in 1951, Mrs. Krajacic says she’s glad farm life allowed her to be a housewife and mother and not her husband’s hired hand; all she ever wanted was to have a home and children.
“I was so happy to be a homemaker and keep the home light burning,” she says, with sandwiches made and ice tea poured when he came in from the barn.
That said, she’s so thankful he stepped up to the plate, so to speak, when she needed his help most.
“I never dreamed he’d want to cook,” she says with a laugh. “He didn’t even change a diaper [when the kids were babies] because there just wasn’t any time.”
Now, breakfast is always ready when she gets up in the morning, and the question always on his lips is this: What are we going to make today?
“He lived up to his commitment,” Mrs. Krajacic says. “He does the best he can.”