Paul was a fun-loving uncle to our two children, Drake and Eden.  We selected Paul as one of Eden’s godparents.  He didn’t get to know Eden as well as we would have hoped, because she was only 2 years old when he died.  At that age, she was just a bit fearful of men that she didn’t see terribly often, and that included Paul.  Drake, on the other hand, really enjoyed his Uncle Paul.  One time we asked Paul to help install some new light fixtures in our first home.  Drake, who was two at the time, spent the afternoon following his Uncle around “helping.”  Another favorite memory that Drake has was when Paul was driving truck for Bluebird Nursery.  He was bringing a load of plants to a nursery in Omaha and decided to stop by our house. Imagine the excitement a little boy would feel seeing a semi-truck pull up in the street in front of his house. Drake even got to see inside the cab.  One of Drake’s favorite memories was having Paul show him the fire trucks in Clarkson.  Drake even got to ride inside one with Paul as they drove through the Czech Days parade the summer before Paul died.  Drake got to throw candy out the window, but due to Drake’s generosity with the candy, he ran out by the time they got to where we were sitting on the parade route.  According to Drake, riding with Paul in the parade was better than sitting on the curb catching candy himself.

The last time we saw Paul was Saturday, February 19, 2011. This was the day after his 30th birthday. We had called him on the 18th to wish him Happy Birthday. He wanted to know what time Drake’s basketball game was the next day. Paul said he was going to drive to Omaha to watch the game on Saturday morning. I assumed that this wasn’t actually going to happen. After all, this was a kindergarten YMCA basketball game (so, calling it a basketball game was a bit of a stretch), and it was happening the morning after Paul’s 30th birthday, for which I assumed he was going to be out late, celebrating.  However, he was there on Saturday morning. We learned later on from some of his friends that Paul went home early the night before, specifically stating that he was doing so because he wanted to drive to Omaha to see his nephew play basketball the next morning.

Like many men and women in rural communities, Paul was a member of the Clarkson Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department.  Some of the skills that he learned in the Marine Corp were useful in this role.  Paul was also a life member of the VFW Cornhusker Post 6419. As part of the VFW, he often presented at the local schools for Veteran’s Day, and was a member of the VFW Honor Guard at a number of funerals.  Lastly, many people remember Paul for his Toys for Tots drives that he conducted while he was a reservist with the Engr Maint. Co., 4th Maint. Bn. based in Omaha. He would keep a donation box in Garden Angels Floral and Gift (Mom’s flower and gift shop), and run ads in the Colfax County Press.  In honor of Paul’s memory, Mom and Dad have continued to hold their own Toys for Tots drives each Christmas.

As an adult, Paul played in a local pool league and bowling league.  He owned his own pool and foosball tables.  He went to “open gym” at the high school on Sundays to play pick-up games of basketball.  He also played on the Brass Rail men’s fast pitch softball team (just like his Dad years before). 

Paul tended bar at the Brass Rail in Clarkson.  While some people may consider this a job, Paul likely viewed this more as a hobby since he was able to socialize while “working.”

Paul also had a keen interest in landscaping.  He was the mastermind and physical labor behind beautiful landscaping around Mom and Dad’s house on the farm.  Photos of two of his landscaping projects are on this website.  One of his most extensive projects was creating a waterfall that runs down the wall of sedums in the backyard into a pond.  There have actually been two versions of the pond.  He created the first pond in 1999, before he left for boot camp.  In 2003, after he was done with active duty, he decided it wasn’t big enough for fish, so he dug out a larger area.  Paul had always considered turning his interest in landscaping into a career, but it never came to fruition.  After he died and Mom and Dad were cleaning out his apartment, they came across a draft of a flyer that he had made to advertise his own landscaping business that he was apparently considering starting as a side job.

We didn’t get much of a chance to take summer family vacations when we were kids.  Being a farm family didn’t really lend itself to that, from both a time and money standpoint.  The most extensive family vacation that we took involved a trip to South Dakota.  I think we drove across the entire state of South Dakota from the Corn Palace to the Black Hills and back home in about 3-4 days.  Paul and I were typical siblings in the back seat with each other – each actively trying (and succeeding) to get on each other’s nerves. 

Some of the best vacations that Paul took were later on in his life…fishing trips to Canada with Dad and Uncle Regg.  They took two of these trips, the first one being in 2004, not long after Paul got done with active duty in the Marines.  A whole group of men would drive up to Canada, stay at a lodge, go fishing all day long, drink beer, and get fed very well (including some of their daily catch) by the owners of the lodge.  On the second of these trips, in 2008, Paul hooked a 38 inch Northern.  Dad claims that the catch was really his, because he was Paul’s “net man” (no net = no fish, according to Dad).  This fish came back to Nebraska, where they had a local taxidermist mount it.  The person who mounted it does taxidermy as more of a hobby than as a job, so it took quite a while to get this job done.  Sadly, Paul was never able to see the finished product.  It was finished about a week after his death.  It now hangs on the wall of Dad’s office. Photos of Paul’s big catch are on this website.

Paul started playing trombone in junior high and would continue as part of the Clarkson High School band for four years with this same instrument.  However, prior to playing the trombone, Paul’s instrument of choice was his armpit. He particularly enjoyed accompanying me with his armpit as I played the piano, just as you might envision a little brother doing to irritate his big sister.  His favorite song for a duet was Hava Naglia.

Paul’s interest in music extended beyond armpits and trombones. He took up guitar while in the Marines. He bought an acoustic guitar, and had a Marine buddy get him started on lessons. This guitar was as well traveled as Paul while he was in the Marines, as he had it with him in the Mediterranean, Okinawa, and Iraq.

Paul’s first official job as a teenager was working as a “Sandwich Artist” at Subway in Schuyler, NE.  He also worked at a telemarketing company in Stanton for a short time. Then, as most Clarkson high school kids do, he ended up working at Bluebird Nursery, primarily doing maintenance work. 

As high school was drawing towards a close, Paul was unsure of what to do next. He was accepted into Southeast Community College in Beatrice for horticulture (an interest he would maintain his whole life), and Northeast Community College in Norfolk for computer programming.  However, his interest would soon turn towards the military.  Paul considered the Navy for a while, no doubt because his Grandpa Svik had been in the Navy. Then, a Marine recruiter came to Clarkson High School and that got him thinking about the Marines.   Also, Rich Little, the town cop at the time Paul was in high school, was a Marine and someone Paul considered a mentor (Paul probably also wisely thought it couldn’t hurt to have the town cop as a friend!).  Paul drove to Omaha to the Marine recruiting office one day to get more information about the Marine Corp, and returned home having already signed on the dotted line. He hadn’t told Mom and Dad that he was going to officially join that day. We aren’t sure if he went there already knowing that he was going to join, or if he just decided then and there. He said that if he was going to join the military at all, he wanted to be part of the best (no offense meant to any other branches of the military!).

Paul left for the Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego in September 1999. Even though Paul was not a regular at church during other times of his adult life, he regularly attended services while in boot camp.  Recruits had a choice to attend religious services, or engage in extra PT (physical training), so it was common for Marine recruits to find religion at that time of their lives.  Paul also served as a prayer leader for the Catholic members of his platoon. He graduated from boot camp in December 1999, and Mom, Dad, and I would attend this graduation ceremony. There are several photos on this website from his graduation. 

Paul’s primary Military Occupational Specialty was that of a combat engineer, meaning that he was trained in demolitions, construction, mine clearing, maintenance and repair.  Paul initially served with the Second Combat Engineer Battalion at Camp Lejeune, NC. When not in uniform, he would sometimes wear a Marine t-shirt that said “I’m a bomb technician. If you see me running, try to keep up.”  While serving in active duty, he also received training as a maintenance management specialist, and as a non-lethal weapons instructor. 

As anyone with knowledge of the military understands, his leave time to visit home was infrequent. For that reason, we feel very fortunate that Paul was able to be home for my wedding in March of 2001.  However, he almost didn’t make it. There was an error in his original leave papers, such that he wasn’t set to start his leave until Saturday, March 31, the day of my wedding. However, he was able to get the error corrected, and his flight home into Omaha from Raleigh arrived at midnight, the night before the wedding.  Paul served as an usher in our wedding, wearing his dress blues for the ceremony.

Later in the spring of 2001, Paul was sent to the Mediterranean area, where he was part of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a deployment responsible for patrolling ships for drug smuggling, and sweeping for mines in Kosovo. He was still there when 9/11 happened.  As he tells it, all military personnel in the area immediately loaded on US military ships – it didn’t necessarily have to be the ship to which they were assigned. For a while, there was the possibility that military personnel already in that area of the world would go straight to the Middle East, but the group that Paul was deployed with would end up returning to the States, and he would then be deployed to Okinawa, Japan to serve with the 9th Engineer Support Battalion.   Paul would spend his last year of active duty there.  He would often express frustration about that, because he knew guys from boot camp who were being sent to the Middle East and he was “stuck in Japan” unable to do “what I have been trained to do.”

Paul was honorably discharged from active duty in September, 2003 at the rank of Corporal. He served one year in the Inactive Ready Reserve and joined the Active Reserve Marines, Engr Maint. Co., 4th Maint. Bn, out of Omaha in January 2005, as a Sergeant. As a reserve, Paul was trained as an Engineer Equipment Mechanic.  He served as a squad leader, and later as a Platoon Sergeant.

 Paul would eventually get his chance to go to Iraq, as part of his reserve unit. He left Clarkson in May, 2007, spent a week in Omaha, then the summer in North Carolina while training to go.  He spent August 2007-March 2008 in Iraq, stationed at Camp Al Taqaddum.  He was the heavy equipment mechanic chief in charge of maintenance of three battalions worth of equipment coming in and out of the maintenance bays.  The Marines he led were responsible for maintenance of heavy machinery and up-armoring military vehicles.  He was recognized for his group’s efficiency while there, and was promoted to the rank of Staff Sergeant. Thankfully, the only times he needed to leave the base (that we know of) was by helicopter, rather than by ground.  He would travel to other bases to share what he had learned about improving the efficiency of up-armoring military vehicles.  Even though he had returned from Iraq in March, he would remain activated for the remainder of a calendar year, returning to purely a reserve role in late May, 2008. Paul was honorably discharged from his reserve unit in April, 2010.

After Paul was done with his first four years of active duty, and while he was a Marine reservist, he of course held jobs as a civilian.  Initially, these jobs were in the realm of construction. He was part of a crew that assembled pivot irrigation systems and machine sheds for Vacin’s near Clarkson. Later on, he was part of a crew building pre-fabricated homes in the Clarkson area.  Then, he returned to Bluebird Nursery to do maintenance and drive straight and semi-trucks delivering plants to other nurseries in Nebraska.  During the last year of his life, Paul worked as a crop adjuster for the same company that our Dad works for, Rural Community Insurance Services.  Dad served as his mentor when Paul took this job. At first, none of us thought that this was a great idea (Dad and Paul working for the same company, and Dad training him, no less).  However, Paul actually deferred to Dad’s expertise in this area.  Dad would jokingly tell staff at various insurance agencies, “This is the first time in his life that Paul has ever really listened to me.”  Paul really thrived in this job, being particularly skilled at the customer service aspect with the farmers with whom he interacted. 

Paul and Dad would spend countless hours together during the last year of Paul’s life as they drove around working on claims.  It was during these road trips that Paul would bring up the idea that he and Dad should consider farming together.  Paul did a lot of work on the farm during the last year of his life. He was responsible for cleaning out a lot of the buildings, and hauling away scrap iron.  He made one of the machine sheds into a more functional workshop by insulating it, putting in a heater, and creating a workbench. He put a wood floor and new lighting in Mom and Dad’s kitchen. Paul was also looking to become a homeowner himself. He was looking at various houses as they came up for sale in Clarkson, particularly ones that might be suitable for Mom and Dad, should they be interested in switching homes when they were ready to move off the farm.

When Paul initially transferred into grade school in Clarkson, I was already attending high school and driving on a school permit. Therefore, Paul would ride into town to school with me.  Paul would tell Mom and Dad that he thought that there was an imprint of his body on the passenger seat of my car because I drove too fast (like he would have any room to talk once he started driving in a few years!).  Paul eventually started driving to school himself on a school permit when he was a freshman in high school and after I moved away for college. 

One weekend after I moved away for college, but before Paul had a driver’s license, he was in town one weekend evening, hanging out with some friends.  Both Mom and Dad were in town as well, each with separate cars.  Each of them assumed that Paul was going to be riding home with the other.  As you can probably guess, Paul got left in town.  In an age before cell phones were common, Paul had to go into one of the local bars to call home for a ride. He was not happy about getting left behind!

Paul’s first car was a gold Buick Somerset.  The Somerset wouldn’t last forever however, as Paul put it in a ditch on a gravel road north of Clarkson when he was 16 or 17 years old. He had been at a friend’s home that night.  He lost control as he came over a hill, heading toward a bridge and a curve in the road at the bottom.  Paul was very lucky to walk away from this accident relatively unscathed.  A post from a sign came through the windshield on the driver’s side.  Paul wasn’t hit by this post because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt to keep him in the driver’s seat, one of the few times that it was likely better to not be buckled up.  He wasn’t sure if he avoided the pole because he was thrown from the car, or because he was thrown to another spot within the car.  He remembered re-entering the car to shut the car off, but didn’t remember if he had exited the car on his own accord, or if he had been thrown out.  He had to walk back to his friend’s home to get help that night.  He was lucky that the only injury from the accident was a broken collarbone.

Paul’s second vehicle as a teenager was a 1974 green Ford pickup truck.  This would be the vehicle that many of Paul’s friends would come to associate him with, as he drove it regularly during his junior and senior years of high school and even had one of his senior pictures taken with it.  He would own this truck the rest of his life and was actively working on restoring it up until his death.  The afternoon before he died, he had hung plastic sheeting up in the machine shed on the farm because he was planning on sandblasting and repainting it.  He also had plans to put the body of the truck on a 4-wheel drive chassis.  The truck still sits in the machine shed on Mom and Dad’s farm.

Paul was born on February 18, 1981 in the hospital in Schuyler, NE. My earliest memory of him was seeing him in the nursery at the Schuyler hospital, after Grandpa Svik snuck me down the hall to see him there (back then, kids weren’t allowed anywhere in the hospital besides the waiting room). 

Paul grew up on the Dvorak family farm a few miles south of Clarkson, NE. The farm was partially purchased by John Dvorak (Paul’s great-grandfather), for his son, Jerome Dvorak (Paul’s grandfather), and Jerome’s wife, Wilma.  John paid a down payment on 160 acres of land, then turned the mortgage over to Jerome.  After Jerome and Wilma retired from farming, the farm was partially purchased/partially inherited by Paul’s father and mother, Dennis and Rita.

Paul was “pigeon-toed” as a toddler.  To correct this, he had to wear a pair of shoes to bed at night that were connected with a metal bar to help keep his legs better positioned while he slept.  One of his favorite things to do with these shoes was to hit the bars on his crib and make a lot of noise.  He also quickly figured out how to take the shoes off and throw them out of the crib.

As a child, Paul often slept with a number of stuffed animals. This habit must run in the family, as his nephew and niece, Drake and Eden, also have several “friends” that they sleep with every night.

Some of Paul’s favorite things to do when he was a child included playing with cars, trucks, and tractors in the sandbox near the garden.  The sandbox was made from an old tractor tire and was by our garden.  Paul also enjoyed playing with Legos and other building blocks, remote control cars, and racetracks.  The backyard was often the site of a croquet or badminton game, or playing t-ball or baseball with Dad.  We also had a swingset in the backyard. But, you had to watch out for wasps that would build nests in the frame, and if you swung too high and too fast, you could actually make the swingset tip over, because it wasn’t anchored to the ground.

Every summer, Mom would set up a swimming pool on our brick patio near the house.  The pool was no more than 2 foot deep, but it was enough to keep us entertained in the summer.  We always kept a smaller bucket of water next to the pool to rinse the sand and dirt off of our feet before getting in.  One of the photos on this website shows Paul sitting in this little bucket.  He may have been doing this because the water in this bucket always got warmer than the water in the pool. Or, he may have been doing this to prevent me from being able to use the bucket myself to rinse off my feet (I was picky about not getting sand in the pool).

Paul often rode in the tractor, combine, or chopper with Dad on the farm.  His own first set of “wheels” was a Big Wheel, and before graduating to a bike, he actually wore out two Big Wheels by wearing holes in the tires of the big wheel.  When he was a little older, he would sometimes stay overnight in Clarkson during the summer at either Grandpa and Grandma Svik’s or Grandpa and Grandma Dvorak’s home, and ride his bike to the swimming pool each day while he was there.

One of my favorite funny memories of Paul as a child was when he got his legs stuck in a grain tunnel. (He would hate it that I’m putting this story here, but he’s not here to defend himself.  I’m telling this story anyway, because this is what siblings do to each other!)  For those of you who might not know, a grain tunnel is a metal cylinder, about 1-2 feet tall, with the sides open like a grid.  Its purpose is to let air move through piles of ear corn.  Mom also used these around plants or bushes that she wanted to protect from our pets.  When Paul was 2-3 years old, he somehow managed to step both of his legs into one of these, and got stuck.  Dad had to use a hacksaw to cut it off of him.  In my role as the ever-helpful big sister, I captured the event on film, and the photo can be found (of course) on this website.

There were always plenty of pets on the farm.  It seemed that we were often getting a new dog, as our dogs had a tendency to chase cars (and get hit) since the house sits fairly close to the road.  We had several iterations of German Shepherds, all named Fritz, because of this hazard.  Paul had a special affinity for cats, despite having some mild allergies to them.  There were always plenty of farm cats around to play with, as can be seen in many of the photos on this website.  Paul’s fondness for cats would extend into his adult life.  At the time of his death, he owned a housecat named Meg.

Paul spent most of his grade school years attending District 30, a one-room schoolhouse south of Clarkson.  The number of children who attended this school ranged from 10-15 in the years that Paul was there, and they were all taught by the same teacher, Mrs. Donna (Brabec) Stevens.  Paul was always the only child in his grade at District 30.  Paul got in trouble one day at school when he peed outside during recess. He was just doing what he had learned from Dad out on the farm, and didn’t realize that it wasn’t appropriate to do at school.  Other memories from District 30 included playing “Kick the Can,” “Beckon Beckon,” softball, and basement soccer at recess.  Lastly, there was always the annual Christmas program with songs and plays.  When Paul was entering fifth grade, Mom and Dad decided to transfer our farmland into District 58 (Clarkson) and thus Paul moved to the public grade school in town where he finally had some classmates who would become his lifelong friends.