Guila Bustabo (Teressina Bustabo)

She was born Teressina Bustabo in Manitowoc on February 25, 1916, to Alexander and Blanche Kaderabek Bustabo, Italian-Bohemian parents who both played violin. Around age two the family moved to Milwaukee. At three she played privately for Chicago Symphony conductor Frederick Stock. Juilliard followed, with Yehudi Menuhin in the next studio. On November 2, 1929, at ten, she appeared in a New York Philharmonic children’s concert at Carnegie Hall in the first movement of Wieniawski’s Concerto No. 1. The hometown stop came later: Lincoln High School in Milwaukee on January 17, 1938, Guarnerius and all.

During World War II she and her mother settled in occupied Paris and continued booking halls under Axis control. She later said Adolf Hitler sat in one audience. Patton’s men arrested mother and daughter in 1945; the Army then hired her to play for the Seventh Army. The American public was slower to forgive. A planned 1948 New York Philharmonic date drew a letter from Gen. Robert McClure noting she remained blacklisted for concerts with “special permission of [the] Nazi Propaganda Ministry.” She married American military musician Edison Stieg in 1948; they divorced in 1976.

She ended her working life in the Alabama Symphony section and later at a Birmingham YWCA, sometimes pushing a grocery cart. “Menuhin got away from his parents. He was lucky. I never got away from mine,” she said. She died in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 27, 2002. Manitowoc is the birthplace; Milwaukee held the childhood after about age two. The thin hometown stretch is declared, not padded.