Annie Aurelia Berger

Annie Schwartz was born January 31, 1909, the daughter of Joseph and Sophie (Loika) Schwartz.   Annie attended Moravia High School,  In the days when Albert and Annie were courting, Albert and George Hrnčiř (the boyfriend of Annie’s sister Louise) were well aware of the Saturday baking done for the Schwartz Sunday feast of kolaches and other desserts and together would come to the home to court the young girls.  

Days before Virgin Ann’s sixth birthday in October 1936, the family moved 300 miles away to West Texas, following the migration of six of Annie’s siblings, who began arriving in 1925.

For two years, the young Berger family lived in the house of Annie’s Uncle Dick Loika, three miles west of Wall.   This house was torn down to make more farmland.  

In 1946. In 1960, they built a modern one-story cream-colored brick stone house to replace the original wood clapboard house and lived in it through their retirement years.  By 1956, when the ground was too dry to grow abundant crops, the family went into the egg business, with 2,000 laying hens.   Albert was meticulous about his lawn.  His biggest pleasure was “to keep everything in tip-top shape.  He is known for having the best kept place in Tom Green County.   Annie tended her summer flowers that included zinnias on the west side of the long driveway, every shade of red, as well as a large vegetable garden with squash, beans, okra and tomatoes and a fig tree on the north side of a chicken house.   A stroke in 1975 made it necessary for 70-year-old Albert to retire from farming. He had a second stroke in 1988.  Albert died March 8, 1993, at the age of 87.   Annie, who had always enjoyed hard and steady work as a farm housewife, lived on the farm until 1996, when she moved to a nursing home in San Angelo. Annie died on April 24, 1999, at the age of 90.  At that time, her grandson Carl Block had acquired the farm that he now calls his home.  Carl has built a new brick home on the exact location of that bungalow house.