1899 – 1942 Danilo Matulić was the twelfth and youngest child of a large family from Postira, a village on the Island Brač in Croatia, on the Adriatic Sea, part of former Yugoslavia. Danilo married Josephine and settled in Split, the capital of Dalmatia. While in Split they had three children. Irene was born in 1930; Serge was born in 1933; and Milan in 1936. Danilo was director of the postal garage for the region, and when he was promoted as postal garage director* for all Yugoslavia, the family moved to Novi Sad, Serbia. After World War II started and German, Hungarian, and Italian troops occupied various parts of Yugoslavia, the family moved to Belgrade, the capital of the country. As war conditions prevailed and got worse, Danilo thought that Postira, his hometown, would be safer, because of its minor strategic value. They moved to the island in 1942.

1942 – 1946 Alas, the war was just as bad in Croatia because Tito’s partisans on Brač and elsewhere in Croatia were fighting the Ustaše, a faction of Croatians that sided with the Axis powers. When Postira was not occupied by Italian troops, The Ustaše and German military bombed the village by canon from the mainland across the channel between the coast and the island. Finally, after another bombing by air Danilo had enough. The family packed what belongings they could carry, crossed the island on foot to Bol on the west side of the island. There they boarded a fishing boat that would take them to Vis, a small island that had been occupied by the British. After a few days on Vis, the family crossed the Adriatic by the same fishing boat and landed in the southern half of Italy which was already in Allied hands. Over the next three months they were shuttled from one military base to another until they reached the heel of the Italian boot on the Ionian Sea. From there an allied convoy of military ships took them together with thousands of other Croatian refugees to Egypt where a tent city had been built for them in the Sinai desert. First under British care and then under United Nations care, which meant American troops, Danilo, Josephine, and their three children settled down to wait for the end of the war. A tent was their home for the next three years. The children lost three years of schooling, and in the second year of their stay in Egypt, Josephine gave birth to Daniel. 1946 – 1957 In December 1946, after three years living as refugees, Danilo and Josephine brought their four children to America. Their possessions consisted of the clothes they were wearing and could carry. They were processed at Ellis Island in New York and after four days travel by train across the United States, they settled in Sacramento, where the children could attend school. Through hard manual labor in the first two years of life in the US, Danilo saved enough to buy a one-acre farm and borrowed money to build a small house where the family lived, raised chickens, milked a cow, and cultivated a vegetable garden. Within three years of arriving in Sacramento, Irene completed high school, was married and had her first child a week before Danilo died of Hodgkin’s disease, leaving Josephine, her sons, a mortgage on the house, and without an income. At the age of 17 and a high-school sophomore, Serge found himself head of a family with his mother, 14-year-old Milan, and 4-year-old Danny, destitute and in abject poverty. Milan and Serge worked part-time as high school students, and Josephine supplemented their meager income by selling eggs, milk, and butter to neighbors. A period of very hard life of poverty existed while Serge accelerated his high school education to graduate in three years and take a full-time Job in addition to his part-time farm labor. Life was hard for a few years, but we all worked and persevered. In 1954 Serge started his military service in the US Army, followed by Milan who joined the Marines after completing high school. Danny later also volunteered for the Army to become a Vietnam War veteran. 1957 – 2024 Serge met his wife during his military service. He eventually earned his academic degrees with help from the Korean GI Bill. Irene raised three daughters, the oldest of which became a university professor; Serge had a son and daughter; Milan had a daughter; and Danny had two sons. By 1997, Danilo and Josephine’s descendants numbered four children, eight grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. Irene, Serge, Milan, and Danny all live happily with their spouses. Danny, an accomplished artist, retired after a long career with the City of Sacramento; Milan owns and operates a successful winery in California; Serge earned his PhD from UC Berkeley and retired as professor of accounting after 35 years of teaching, and Irene, the current matriarch of the family, continues to study and provide moral leadership for the family. In 2018 Matulich Foundation Inc. was formed to honor the name and legacy of Danilo and Josephine, who faced many dangers and made many sacrifices to give their four children an opportunity to experience the America dream. Serge’s daughter Erika earned her Ph.D. in 1994 and had a successful career as a university professor until February 2018 when she succumbed to ovarian cancer. During the four years she fought her illness, she continued to teach full-time and never missed a class. She was loved by the thousands of students she influenced. Erika loved animals and rescued many of them to become her pets, including horses, cats, ferrets, and others. To continue with benefiting students in higher education the Danilo and Josephine Matulich Foundation created the Erika Matulich Memorial Scholarship, for students whose education is oriented toward the preservation of the environment and animal health and rescue.

^*Approximately equivalent to Administrator under Postmaster General in the US.