Thanks, Mom and Dad!

I think it's time to go back to the beginning and recognize the ones who started the farm. My parents, Paul and Caroline Kovac, were married in 1948 - here's a picture of them taken on their wedding day.

At the time, they were living in a little apartment over my grandfather's restaurant in Cleveland. They started looking for a little house, maybe "out in the country" with a couple of acres, so they might have a garden. On nice weekends, they'd drive out and look for properties for sale. And one day, they happened on a sign in front of two big stone pillars. So they drove in, and saw this beautiful property and .... they fell in love.

First, they tried to talk themselves out of it: 'it's too much land for us', 'we're not farmers', 'it's too much money'. But they couldn't get it out of their systems and that night, they went back and told my mother's parents about the place. And my grandmother, bless her heart, said: 'let's take a ride back out there tomorrow - I want to see this place'. And as soon as she saw it, she said, 'you have to buy it'. She loaned them the down payment and they became farmers.

In the beginning, they still lived in Cleveland, and came out weekends. By the time I was born in 1952 they were living there full-time. Then we had oats, wheat, hay, chickens and cattle. Later came a small flock of sheep. And blueberries. My sister was born in 1955 and brother Paul in 1956. My dad regarded us as free farm labor and we worked hard! While Villa Mir was never a fully working commercial farm, it provided us and many of our friends and neighbors with home-grown food and a deep and abiding love for growing things.

Paul died in 2000, after a long battle with Alzheimers disease. Caroline - mentally youthful, curious and funny, sharp in her wits to the end - passed away in 2004, leaving us this wonderful legacy.