To Darlene Angeline Tondre Mechler Schuchart, hard work was a way of life.
Starting life on her family’s dairy farm, Schuchart was milking cows and watching out for her younger sister by the time she was 6.
Once in school, she walked 3 miles to St. Mary’s Catholic School in La Coste by herself, across the Medina River and through the woods.
“She started out early having to do things on her own,” daughter Janice Roberts said. “She was always fiercely independent.”
Schuchart died at home Jan. 7 at 91.
Descended from Alsatian immigrants, Schuchart spoke only Alsatian when she started school.
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“They used to make fun of the kids who didn’t talk English, ridicule them,” Roberts said. “She had to learn pretty quick.”
Raised during the Depression, Schuchart told her children that even through the hardships, “they always had food on the table,” Roberts said. “My grandmother made their clothes out of feed sacks; you didn’t have to go out and get things, the resources were there.”
Graduating from the now-closed St. Louis High School in Castroville in 1945, Schuchart at first lived with her aunt and uncle in San Antonio while working at Bexar County National Bank.
Later that year, Schuchart married World War II veteran Marlin Mechler, eventually settling in at a home on Mechler Lane, the same street on which her in-laws lived.
In addition to raising her three children, Schuchart helped run Mechler’s Place, a combination gas station and beer joint established by her in-laws.
“It was … built out of ammunition boxes left over from World War II,” Roberts said. “The wives would run it during the day, and then Dad and his brother would come home from work and run the beer joint at night.”
The business was always a family endeavor.
“We did our homework there, cooked dinner there,” Roberts said. “We would stay a lot of times after my mom would go home; we had to stay … lock up the pumps, swept and cleaned up.”
Losing her husband to heart disease in 1972, Schuchart remarried in 1975, moving to Rio Medina, where she and her new husband raised cattle.
“She got right in there with him,” Roberts said. “They’d feed, vaccinate, everything you do when you’re raising cattle.”
Schuchart moved back to Mechler Lane after her second husband died in 1999.
Living in the tight-knit community most of her life, Schuchart became the historian not just for her family, but for the community.
“It was amazing the people she knew,” Roberts said. “You could ask her anything about the connections out here.”
mheidbrink@express-news.net