Page:Czecho-Slovak Student Life, Volume 18.djvu/302

Gothic style, and the windows, altars and the pulpit are imported from Innsbruck, Austria. The paintings on the altars, however, are Father Murgas’ own handiwork.

As soon as the debt on the church was paid off, a new school building was erected. It contains twelve class rooms and a spacious auditorium. The school is at present attended by 550 Slovak children and is under the supervision of eleven Sisters of Sts. Cyrill and Methodius from Danville, Pa. The value of the property acquired for the congregation during the pastorate of Father Murgas is estimated at $650,000.

Father Murgas has, further, added to the scientific equipment of his school by donating his unique collection of three thousand specimens of moths and butterflies and his private scientific library.

He is also active in social life, being a member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society, the American Society for Psychical Research, the National Geographical Society, the American Nature Association, the First Catholic Slovak Union, and of various sporting clubs.

Certainly he has combined, to a high degree, the various and manifold interests, of the priest, the leader, the artist, the scientist and the patriot.

Mr. John A. Cervenka, President of the Czechoslovak National Council and formerly treasurer of Chicago, has done such an inestimable amount of good for his people and has been so closely affiliated with all of the Czech and Slovak activities in this country that his selection to chairmanship of the Natinal Council, consisting of representatives of three leading national bodies, namely, the Czech National Alliance, the Czech Catholic Alliance and the Slovak National Alliance, was only a matter of course. Those who come in contact with him admire his amiable disposition and those of the old guard who have known him for many years fully realize that it was through the suffering and hardships of his humble start that love for his people crystelized and led him to strive for things seemingly impossible.

He was born in a little village of Bohemia and came to this country at the age of twelve years. Here his immediate task was to find means of earning a living; and hence after a short term of employment in a Chicago cigarshop, he located a job in a furniture factory and there proceeded to learn the cabinet making trade, the choice of his young dreams, which he worked at as a journeyman for a number of years. The last part of the year 1893, after the closing of the Chicago World’s Fair, proved disastrous for mechanics and laborers in Chicago, thousands of them walking the streets unable to find employment because the shops and factories