WILBER – To bake kolaches for a world leader, you’ve got to start before sunrise.
Rita Patton has spent 10 years perfecting the routine. She and her husband prepare the fillings: apricot, cherry and poppyseed. She mixes and kneads by hand, stirring up enough dough to churn out batches nine dozen at a time. Her team of volunteers — including her brother and her 93-year-old mother who led the effort before her — shape, fill, bake and bag each individual circle of pastry.
Patton’s Czech ancestors came here four generations ago. She’s the third generation in her family to manage the baking at Sokol Hall in Wilber. She has baked thousands of kolaches for the town’s annual Czech festival; for graduations and birthdays; for Santa Claus appearances and pool tournaments.
“If somebody wants kolach, they call me,” she said.
The baker’s most recent order: Thirty dozen kolaches to serve 367 community members and a 37-person delegation from the Czech Republic — including Czech President Petr Pavel himself.
Pavel, president since 2023 and a retired army general, visited Nebraska last week, the first time a president of the Czech Republic has visited the state. And on Thursday, he spent the afternoon in Wilber — home of a Czech Festival that has been going for 65 years strong, a town dubbed “Czech Capital of the USA” since 1987.
“Why Nebraska?” Pavel said when speaking to reporters in Wilber. “Because there is the largest proportion of Czech ancestors in the United States.”
Czech settlers reached Nebraska before the railroad did, some as early as 1854. They walked or came by wagon. They lived in dugouts, then sod houses before building wood cabins.
They were pushed from their homes in Bohemia and Moravia by economic depression and religious oppression, and pulled to the Midwest by the Homestead Act and Nebraska’s familiar terrain.
Between 1856 and World War I, some 50,000 Czech immigrants arrived here. They founded villages made up entirely of Czechs. They laid the groundwork for cultural organizations that still host festivals and Queen contests today.
But the number of Nebraskans who still identify as Czech has dwindled in the 21st century. In 2010, 5% of Nebraskans claimed Czech ancestry. In Wilber’s Saline County, 18% of residents called themselves Czech.
By 2024, the statewide share had shrunk to 3.5% — a decline of 21,556 people. In Saline County, it had dropped to 11%.
But Wilber feels like a Czech enclave frozen in time. Polka music wafts from tinny speakers all along the town’s main drag. The street signs and business names are printed in both English and Czech. The name of the local bar? The Czech’erd Flag.
And on Thursday, as rain poured down, the president and an entourage of Secret Service agents, staff, military leaders and the 12 Czech journalists trailing him all got the grand tour.
The Czechs showed up in business professional attire: Suits and ties, military uniforms, dresses and heels.
The people of Wilber donned their nicest Czech folk attire: Dresses and vests, feathered hats and flower crowns.
There are extra challenges that come with hosting a president in a town of 1,937. Organizers held long Zoom calls with the consulate and members of the Secret Service. Then came the on-site visits to approve seating arrangements and safety plans.
The schedule of the day went through six revisions before being finalized. And then there was the question of the rain: Is he going to want to walk in the rain? Should we arrange a car? the people of Wilber and the Secret Service wondered. No, it’s only rain! Pavel replied.
They showed him the Czech Craft Shop, where little old ladies still hand-sew and embroider traditional vests and dresses, called kroj. They led him through the aisles of the museum, filled with dolls and dresses and photographs passed down through the generations.
“People being so attached to this heritage, you will not see it in my own country,” the president said after the tour. “Because we live there, we consider it part of our daily life. But people here, even though, their first place are Americans, at least one day a year they want to be Czechs.”
Every generation of Nebraska Czechs is another step removed from their ancestral home. They lose the language their great-grandparents spoke, or the recipes that relied on Grandma’s instincts instead of precise measurements. Or when asked how or when their great-great- grandparents got to Nebraska, the answer grows fuzzier and starts to morph into “That’s a great question, I’m not exactly sure.”
In Wilber, they’re still embracing what traditions they can. Kids — some who aren’t Czech — still learn traditional dances. On Thursday, kids as young as 3 skipped, clapped and twirled before the Czech president in Sokol Hall. And the Czechs of Wilber, the organization that hosts the annual festival, still draws about 250 volunteers every year. It takes 51 committees to make the festival happen, said Randy Kozeal, president of the organization.
Now, they have added the president of the Czech Republic as an official member. They’ll be sure to send him their newsletter, Kozeal said from the podium in Sokol.
Kozeal guesses more than half the town owns some form of Czech garb. In Sokol Hall, audience members sport vests with very Czech-sounding names like Kohout, Zoubek or Sabotka embroidered on the back. Some people choose to get the American and Czech flags stitched side by side. Others just choose things they identify with, like a John Deere or Harley Davidson logo, about as American as it gets.
To be Nebraskan and Czech feels like “a very pioneering experience,” Kozeal said. “Yet at the same time, holding onto the culture and the practices and the lifestyle that was brought over… a sense of pride in their heritage.”
After his tour, the president walked into a hall of more than 350 people who greeted him with applause. The people of Wilber gifted him with a key to the city. They even dubbed the day Petr Pavel Day. The president, with his square jaw and head of thick white hair, sat at attention through the speeches and dances. He clapped along to the children’s dances and dutifully posed for a group photo after each performance. One 3-year-old dancer ran to him for a hug.
At the end of it all, a news reporter asked Jen Pospisil: What does this mean to you? What does it mean to Wilber?
The secretary of the Czechs of Wilber got choked up. She was thrilled it was a success. Sad that it went by like a blur.
“If my grandparents were alive, they’d be so proud,” she said.
While others lined up for photos with the president, Patton the baker kept watch over her kolaches.
Bake them dark, a friend of her mother’s told her. That’s what the Czechs like over there. But Patton wanted to be true to herself. “I do not like a dark kolach,” she said.
She made them her normal way.
She watched as people picked their preferred flavors — Americans gravitating toward apricot and cherry and the Czech delegation choosing the more traditional poppyseed.
Soon, a volunteer grabbed her — Rita, you’ve got to talk to this lady. It was a Czech radio reporter covering the visit, who told the baker that the kolache she had just eaten in Wilber was the best kolache she’d eaten in America. What? The baker replied. You’ve got to be kidding.
“To have the comments from the actual Czech delegates that were all with him that just raved about my kolache, it gave me a good feeling,” Patton said. “These people recognize and understand the work and the taste. It was definitely an honor.”
Patton never got to see which flavor the square-jawed president of the Czech Republic tried, or talk to him about his specific preference on how browned a kolache should be.
He had hands to shake at Sokol Hall, where he spent his final half hour taking photos with a long line of Nebraska Czechs.
But the baker knows this: Before all the kolaches disappeared, a Wilber volunteer gathered up a few to pass to the Czech Secret Service for their drive to Lincoln.
This inquiring reporter wanted to know what flavor the president tried, and wrote to the Czech Consulate.
“As far as we know, the President was offered a selection of kolaches at the conclusion of the event in Sokol Hall in Wilber,” they wrote back. “He truly appreciated it.”
