1892 – 1970
There is a way to read a small village through the rosters of the things its people joined. In Bohemia — the Czech farming hamlet that grew up between the cigar factories and the bay on Long Island’s south shore — one name turns up on those rosters again and again across the years between the wars. Fire company. Bowling club. Dramatic circle. School board. Gun club. Men’s lodge. American Legion. The name is Anton Thuma, and the surest way to know him is to follow where he signed his name.
He was born in Bohemia about 1892, a son of Joseph F. Thuma — the village interpreter, problem-solver, and author of the original History of Bohemia Village — and his wife Anna. Anton was one of their twelve children, and the village gave him a name of its own: to nearly everyone in Bohemia he was simply “Tom.” The Thumas belonged to “New Bohemia,” the community Czech immigrants founded in 1855 after leaving the political pressures of the Austrian Empire in search of land and a freer life; by Anton’s day the village ran on two trades, cigar-making and pearl-button manufacturing, and the Thuma name was already woven through its founding families.
In time his brothers and sisters would scatter as far as Fort Lauderdale, Nova Scotia, and the Bronx. Anton never did. He lived his entire life in the few square miles where he was born, and he spent that life making himself useful to them.
The Great War
Anton S. Thuma was inducted into the service on October 28, 1917, and trained at Camp Stewart, Virginia, in Company M of the 4th United States Infantry, 3rd Division — the division that would earn its immortal name, the “Rock of the Marne,” for standing fast on the river that summer. He sailed for France on April 6, 1918, exactly one year to the day after America entered the war, and was appointed Corporal on June 2, 1918, just as his regiment was moving into the line.
What followed was nearly the whole of the American war in France. His service record lists the engagements one after another: the fighting northeast of Rheims, the Marne Sector, Champagne-Marne — where the 3rd Division held the riverbank against the last great German offensive — then Aisne-Marne, St. Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne, the war’s final and bloodiest American battle. And when the guns fell silent, his war still wasn’t over: Corporal Thuma marched into Germany with the Army of Occupation.
That is why he was so long in coming home. He served overseas from April 6, 1918, to August 28, 1919 — more than nine months past the Armistice — and the local press preserved a sharp image of it. Looking back a decade later, The Suffolk County News recalled that when one Bohemia soldier had already come home, “Anton Thuma and Otto Jost were the only two boys from that village who were still on the other side.” He was, in other words, among the very last of Bohemia’s sons to come home from France, and his lifelong membership in the American Legion, open only to wartime veterans, carried the memory of that service to the end of his days.
Emma Bild and a home on Ocean Avenue
In August 1922 Anton married Emma Bild, a daughter of Bedřich and Joseta (Jost) Bild. The couple began their married life, as the notice put it, “making their home with the bride’s father,” and settled into the life of the village along Ocean Avenue, where they raised a son, Stanley, and a daughter. More than a decade on, Anton was still putting down roots in the most literal way: in 1933 the briefs noted that he had fallen from the roof he was shingling on his new home — “somewhat bruised, but otherwise uninjured,” the reporter was glad to add. The Bild marriage would, in time, matter to the whole village.
A workingman’s trade
For all the offices and committees, Anton was first a workingman, and his working life was spent entirely in service of his neighbors’ homes, schools, and graves. By trade he was a plumber, working for many years for Jedlicka Bros. of Sayville — one of the practical tradesmen a growing village leaned on to fit its houses with running water and modern comfort.
It was dangerous work, and it nearly cost him an eye. One Friday morning during his Jedlicka Bros. years, as Anton was tapping out a fitting, a piece of steel broke off the jaw of his Stillson wrench and flew into his left eye. What followed was a small ordeal of country medicine: he was rushed from one doctor’s office to another, every doctor in town out on his rounds, and four and a half hours passed before Dr. Silliman was finally reached. After first-aid treatment Anton was hurried to the Eye and Ear Hospital at 13th Street and Second Avenue in New York, where Dr. Berrans operated and removed a sliver of steel three-quarters of an inch long. “Hopes of saving his eye are very doubtful, however,” the paper reported — but the man who fell into a bear’s den and shrugged it off seems to have weathered this, too, and gone back to his trade.
In his later years he became a custodian in the Bohemia schools, keeping the buildings where the village’s children were taught, until he retired in 1959.
And for years he served as superintendent of the Bohemia Union Cemetery on Church Street — the old burying ground, founded in 1873, that holds the founding families of the village and the Jan Hus monument raised in 1893. It was fitting work for a son of the man who had written the village’s history: where Joseph F. Thuma had kept Bohemia’s story in ink, Anton kept the ground where that story was buried.
The fireman, and the chief
If one institution stood at the center of Anton Thuma’s public life, it was the Bohemia Fire Department. In a village of wood-frame houses and backyard cigar sheds, the volunteer company was both the first line of defense and the beating heart of the community’s social calendar — its masquerades, clambakes, and racing-team tournaments were the events of the season. And Anton did not merely belong to it: he was its first chief.
He never really left the firehouse after that. The papers of the mid-1930s refer to him, plainly and often, as past chief and ex-chief — an old hand whose word still carried. In 1934 he was named one of the department’s instructors, charged with teaching its many new members the use of the equipment, “thoroughly familiar with all kinds of fire-fighting” gear. He served as a timer and, later, a general judge at the Islip Town firemen’s tournaments, and he carried his standing beyond the village as a member of the Islip Town Chiefs Association.
A joiner’s life
Outside the firehouse, Anton seemed to belong to everything. As early as 1920 he was elected captain of the Bohemia Bowling Club. He trod the boards with the village’s Dramatic Club, taking the part of Jack Worthington in the four-act melodrama A Noble Outcast at the Sayville Opera House, and appearing again in Civil Service. He sat on the executive committee of the Jan Hus Men’s Club, was a member of the Czech C.S.A. Lodge, served as recording secretary of the Bohemia Game Protection & Gun Club, and was re-elected a trustee of School District No. 7 — the same schools he would one day keep.
A Roll of Service Corporal, Co. M, 4th U.S. Infantry, 3rd Division — 1917–19 First Chief, Bohemia Fire Department — founding Captain, Bohemia Bowling Club — 1920 Trustee, School District No. 7 — 1920s Rec. Secretary, Game Protection & Gun Club — 1934 Chaplain, American Legion Post 1146 — 1936–40 Superintendent, Bohemia Union Cemetery — — C.S.A. Lodge & Islip Town Chiefs Association — —
The Legion — and the ground
It was in the Joseph Kovarik American Legion Post 1146 that Anton’s wartime service and his civic instincts came together. He served the post as its chaplain through the late 1930s and into the 1940, reading the invocation at its meetings and helping the Legionnaires raise their own building by hand.
That building is his lasting monument. When Bohemia’s veterans resolved to make the memory of Joseph Kovarik permanent — a young Bohemia soldier the post was named for — they needed land. It was Anton and Emma Thuma who gave it. The Hubal Street parcel came from the Bild family, donated by the Thumas in memory of Emma’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bedřich Bild. (The period press credited the gift jointly to Mrs. Anton Thuma and her sister, Mrs. Charles Thuma — two Bild daughters honoring the same parents.) The Legionnaires built the post largely with their own labor and donated materials, and on September 21, 1941, they dedicated it. More than eighty years later, Joseph Kovarik Post 1146 still stands at 826 Hubal Street, on ground a Bohemia family gave so that the village would always have a place to honor its own.
The man himself
The briefs also caught Anton off duty, and they reveal a man with an easy sense of humor about himself. In the summer of 1934 he and his brother Julius set out after snappers, came home proud of their catch, and generously handed a share to a neighbor — who gently informed Mr. Thuma that his snappers were in fact “a fine bunch of bunkers.” Anton, the paper reported, consoled himself with the thought that the trash fish would at least make good fertilizer for his trees.
Two years later he turned up in another tall-but-true tale. On an up-state hunting trip in November 1936, his party of five returned with a fine seven-prong buck — and Anton with a story, having “had the misfortune to fall into a bear’s den, but fortunately for him, the bear was not at home.” That same season he was seen driving a brand-new Plymouth touring sedan, a small mark of the comfortable, settled life he had built.
In 1955, Anton helped carry his father’s legacy forward, co-editing the reprint of History of Bohemia Village — the book Joseph F. Thuma had written to keep the founding generation from being forgotten. Between his father’s book and the cemetery he superintended, Anton spent his life as a quiet keeper of Bohemia’s memory.
What the rosters remember
Anton S. Thuma died on March 11, 1970, at Brookhaven Memorial Hospital, at the age of seventy-seven — still of Ocean Avenue, Bohemia, the lifelong resident of a single small place. He was survived by Emma, his wife of nearly half a century; by his son Stanley of West Sayville and his daughter, Mrs. Howard Reeve of Sayville; by five grandchildren; and by the far-flung siblings he had never followed — his brothers Julius and Joseph of Fort Lauderdale and August of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, and four sisters, Mary Perina and Josephine of the Bronx, Anna Herman of Bohemia, and Jennie Kovanda of Sayville.
The village saw him out the way he had lived. The Bohemia Fire Department held its own services for its first chief at Raynor’s Chapel on Friday evening; the funeral followed on Saturday, with the Rev. Joseph H. Bond, rector emeritus of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, officiating; and he was laid to rest in the Bohemia Union Cemetery — the very ground he had tended as superintendent, among the founding families and, now, his own.
He held no high office that history records in capital letters. What he left instead was something a village cannot do without: the steady, repeated act of showing up — to fight the fires, to teach the new men, to captain the team, to keep the schools and the graves, to read the chaplain’s prayer. And once, with Emma, to sign over the very ground beneath one of the institutions he served. The fire bells he answered have long since fallen silent. The post he prayed over still opens its doors. The name on those old rosters belongs to a man who understood that a community is built the same way that Legion hall was — by hand, by neighbors, out of donated ground and borrowed evenings, by people willing to enroll.