Farkas Vilmos Molnar

This is my paternal grandfather, Farkas Vilmos Molnar, in Budapest in 1927. My paternal grandfather was born in 1869 in Veszprem as Volf Vilmos Weisz. I don't know much about my grandfather's youth. I only know from the documents that between 1884 and 1887 he was an apprentice of Ignac Kohn, baker and confectioner master in Papa, and in the meantime he went to the industrial school in Papa. Then he served in the Hungarian Royal 17-infantry regiment as a soldier for twelve years and three months, and because he served 'fairly,' he was entitled to wear the 'jubilee medallion.' This is written in his demobilization papers he got from the military in 1911. In World War I he wasn't called up for military service anymore. In 1896 he magyarized his name to Farkas Vilmos Molnar. He got married to my grandmother Roza Molnar, nee Polnauer, in 1897, and at that time he already lived in Budapest. According to the marriage certificate he was a baker's apprentice. One year after they got married, my father, Miklos Molnar, was born, and three years later my Aunt Margit. Though my grandfather had learned confectionery, too, he was mainly a baker. He was a stubby, robust, very strong man, and he loved the girls. It seems that the situation in Hungary must have been very bad; he didn't have a job, so in 1901 he immigrated to New York. I have found the money-orders with which he sent home sometimes 5, sometimes 10 dollars from New York, which was a big amount at that time. He was there for two years. He was in New York throughout and he worked as a baker. Then he was homesick and came back. After he came back from America, he worked as a baker. They had a small shop on Vorosmarty Street for quite a long time and at the beginning of the 1930s or perhaps already at the end of the 1920s, I don't know exactly when, they opened the shop 'Vilmos Molnar and Co.' on Thokoly Street. The sign read 'MOLNAR SWEET-SHOP CANDY.' The associates were my father and my father's brother-in-law, Janos Rona. The shop functioned so that they bought the goods from candy-makers and passed them on to retailers. The business prospered, and later they opened another shop on Thokoly Street no. 8, too. They opened the wholesale section in the courtyard of Thokoly Street no. 14, and as a matter of fact that was the big business, which made them prosperous, not the two shops.

Photos from this interviewee