Buna, my Romanian grandmother

Buna (left) and her sister Vetica, aka Betty.

My maternal grandmother, was born in Chicago to Romanian parents, Vincent and Fema Muntean. She was known to me as Buna, and known to most as Helen although her Romanian name was Elena.  She was born in 1906.

I have early memories from the 1950s of Buna in her small kitchen.  She made wonderful baked goods.  I often watched her roll out dough on the Formica-topped table with the chrome-like trim.  I’ve always liked that her pastries weren’t overly sweet.  I still like my desserts that way.  

She and my grandfather lived on the second floor of a small flat in Chicago.  My grandfather’s Romanian name was Dimitrie but he had it changed to Michael when he was naturalized in November of 1937.  The flat was near Wrigley Field.  I remember going to Wrigley Field with Buna and my mom on Ladies Day.  I was too young to know anything about baseball at that time, but I am still a Cubs fan.  Buna was a Cubs fan until she passed away at the age of 103-1/2.

Buna in her Cubs cap at her 102nd birthday.

I didn’t see much of Buna for years because my mother left when I was 8 years old.  We didn’t hang out with that side of the family any longer.  In later years, however, I made a point to visit Buna.  I think I started mostly after I had my daughter in 1968.  About 1990 I started to make more regular visits to Buna, and I asked her about the family.  I made notes and even made some audio tapes of her answers and some Romanian words. 

Buna had quite a few photos.  Some were in albums and many were loose.  Fortunately, she had written on the backs of almost all the photos.  During a couple of visits in the mid-1990s, I took the photos to a copy shop and made photo copies of the front and back.  Then, I asked Buna about the people in the photos and made notes on the copies.  I embellished on any notes from the back of the photos.  Those copies have been a great help.  In addition to the photos, Buna had saved all of the memorial cards from the funerals she had been to over the years.  They, too, have been a great source of information.

This is just a brief introduction to Buna.  I’ll tell more about her in later posts.  I mostly wanted to mention the great information I got during my “interviews” with her during my visits.  See a later post for the results of some sleuthing I did based on notes from one of those interviews.