Love Songs Lost

I've written about Gundella off and on for close to fifteen years and probably know as much about her as anybody alive does now that her daughter Madilynne has passed. At least the newsworthy stuff and not necessarily the personal aspects of her life which she didn't publicly share in her writings.

One thing she never discussed publicly was her first marriage to Bernard Mulleague. She simply stated that he had died in a car accident despite the fact that he lived nearly forty years after their divorce some time in the 1950s. Having always been interested in the man's backstory I did some digging and found out that he had a shady past having gone to juvenile lockup and prison for theft on numerous occasions.

I'm not certain of the time frame when Marion and Bernard divorced but I would assume that it was sometime after her daughter Madilynne was born in 1952. Since Marion was a school teacher she wasn't dependent upon him to provide, which may or may not have contributed to the demise of their marriage.

Anyway, here are two songs that Bernard apparently wrote music for in collaboration with lyricist David Garcia DeLao. I'm not sure if it is a typo but DeLaO's name is spelled with an uppercase O on both entries in the Library of Congress Copyright Office. I've searched for both unpublished songs and haven't been able to find anything else about them but this is a start in that direction.

Central Chooses Top Speakers

Saginaw News, November 19, 1948

Much of Marion's early life is unknown to me outside of her related stories in her Witch Watch columns. This article shows that a young 18-year-old Marion was attending Central Michigan College in 1948 and participated in the extempore speaking contests and spoke on "Evaluation of the Junior College Movement."

Witch's recipes fit for a prince (ribbit)

The Oakland Press, October 29, 1978 (enlarge)

There are numerous mentions of a second Gundella book release called Kitchen Witch that mirrored her newspaper column of the same name but I've never seen in an instance of it being physically available. Which is the exact same thing I said about her audio cassette Ghastly, Gruesome, Ghostly Tales until some guy contacted me on YouTube that he had posted it there. Eventually, it will emerge from the shadows.

She claimed that the recipes "show that fragrances and taste have psychological effects on people" and geared them as such. "The recipes are modetn, but at the same time use age-old knowledge of flavoring, seasoning, mixing and blending to achieve the desired results, she says."

Also, she is pictured with her cat Sally who looks like a normal tabby and nothing mysterious, black or spooky.

Witch Watch: From a legacy of death this father glories in life

Redford Observer, June 17, 1982

I did not expect to find this biography of Gundella's second husband John Kuclo in an 1982 Witch Watch column written by her son John but here we are. 

It tells an amazingly harrowing tale of living through the Russian Revolution, being in a Nazi concentration camp as a POW and then transferring into an American displaced person's camp after WWII before finally emigrating to the United States in 1949, having lost all of his family. 

He would later meet and marry Marion and father two children with her. He became partially disabled in 1965 after falling off a platform on the top floor of an apartment building but having lived through far worse setbacks he persevered and amazingly lived another 40 years.

I had no clue about any of this and was a bit shell-shocked after reading it, having suspected that he was just your normal everyman Detroiter. 

A sad footnote to the story is that John and Marion divorced sometime in the early 1980s.

Witch Visits Bay Area

Bay City Times, July 16, 1970

This article coincides with Gundella's visit to Delta College for an interview on Channel 19's show Face to Face with host Andy Rapp. A program which featured controversial guests such as the Grand Dragon of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan and a member of the White Panthers. She also had friends and former students on the faculty at the college.

There are also mentions of her Scottish witch ancestry and dying of the skin. In her case it was green due to her lineage of nature witches. She usually performed this way in her children shows as she told fairy and folk tales and other fantastical stories on witchcraft, charging $100. Adult shows were $50 and included card and wax readings.

There is also an important mention of her first joining the Au Sable coven, to which her mother was a long time member, in 1948 and later transferring to the Ann Arbor sect when she moved south to the Metro Detroit area. There is a mention of a member of the Ann Arbor coven travelling from Butler, New Jersey, which I had not seen mentioned before in my rather scant expose of the three so-called Michigan Gundella covens. She states that witches do not get involved as a group with social issues, though her mother's coven "they do things for each other - like catching a man."

While the article butchers her name, spelling Kuclo as Kutslow, it does provide some additional information on her then second husband John. He was of Ukrainian descent and spent some time in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II cleaning the showers which the Jews were gassed in In this article she provides that he taught her about Ukrainian witches and her usage of some of those chants in her witchcraft practice. John was a practicing Catholic and their children grew up in that faith but also practiced witchcraft as they grew older. He and Marion divorced sometime in the early 1980s.

Gundella Brews Small Hubbub in Waterford

The Pontiac Press, March 2, 1972 (enlarge)

A decade before her highly publicized visit to Plymouth-Canton schools in 1985 Gundella was riling up parents and local clergy with an appearance at Waterford Mott High School. 

Her talk that day was the typical positive energy message she routinely gave which seemingly irked protesters more than if she had come out in support of the Devil.

Unlike the later protests, the rebukers were allowed to ask questions of the guest. One posited the gotcha question, "But have you been saved?" to which Gundella responded, "I was never lost."

 

Afro Tarot Cards

Here are two cards and explanations of them from Wayne May and Madilynne Mulleague's Afro Tarot Card deck which appeared in the 1978 "The encyclopedia of tarot Vol. 3" by Stuart Kaplan. I ran the black and white shots through a colorizing app to give an approximation of what they look like. 

I believe that Madilynne passed away a year or two ago and probably was one of few people who actually owned a deck.