OLD NEWS: Producer proffers coffins as war looms

Excerpt from Page One of the March 27, 1917 Arkansas Gazette
Excerpt from Page One of the March 27, 1917 Arkansas Gazette

In March 1917, with Congress about to declare war against Germany, Arkansans eagerly displayed their patriotism.

A hundred years later, some of the efforts look excited, some look defensive and a few look a little ... hmm. For instance, this item from the March 27, 1917, Arkansas Gazette:

Casket Company Offers

Use of Plant to Nation

Special to the Gazette

Texarkana, March 26 -- The Texarkana Casket Company has tendered to the government the use of its plant for the manufacture of any woodenware that may be needed for the army and navy in case of war. The offer was made through Senator Morris Sheppard, and stipulates that the company would accept no profits for anything manufactured for the government.

On the one hand, a nation at war very likely would require a coffin maker's expertise, and the military needed other wood products, too. Offering to forgo profit was a patriotic gesture.

But what was announcing that the offer had been made? Today, it looks like smart marketing or even, if we overthink things, possibly a subversive anti-war statement. But why overthink? Arkansans in 1917 had no idea how many soldiers would die in battle or from the diseases that troop movements would spread. Their most recent war experience had been the National Guard's 1916 adventure in New Mexico: few deaths, a lot of boredom, some eye-opening travel.

And it was not unusual for leading businessmen to see themselves as called to set a good example for everyone else. As goes Texarkana Casket Co., so goes Texarkana.

So who owned the casket factory?

Leo Krouse (sometimes spelled Krause in the Gazette) is mentioned briefly in Carolyn Gray LeMaster's A Corner of the Tapestry: A History of the Jewish Experience in Arkansas, 1820s-1990s (The University of Arkansas Press, 1994). He was one of the immigrants from Eastern Europe who settled in Texarkana in the late 19th century.

The Gazette saw him as "one of the most active leaders in the city's commercial and civic affairs."

The U.S. Census of 1910 lists him as originally from Hungary, but the U.S. Census of 1920 has "Transylvania (Hun)." From a column that historian Beverly Rowe wrote about the factory in 2007 for the Texarkana Gazette, we know he was born in 1874 and left his native land as a young man.

His business partner, Isaac J. Kosminsky, was an American whose father immigrated from Russia. The parents of Krouse's wife, Esther, also came from Russia, but she was born in Louisiana. Esther and Leo had two daughters, both born in Texas.

Rowe writes that Krouse and Kosminsky opened the factory in 1903 or 1904, and from its earliest days, it could produce 40,000 caskets yearly and had $2,500 in capital. An old postcard shows a compound of nine buildings and two water towers set beside railroad tracks. Rowe says the casket company employed salesmen throughout the southwestern United States.

Krouse presided over the Texarkana Chamber of Commerce and worked on local and state-level projects to boost industry. The state whose level I mean is Arkansas, but news reports from those days don't distinguish between Texarkana, Texas, and Texarkana, Ark. A guide to industries published in 1921 by the Arkansas Bureau of Markets describes an 8-square-mile city "on both sides of the state line" with a population of 30,000.

Small items about his and his wife's good deeds appear in Gazette archives from 1908 until 1925, when they moved to Tennessee where he managed the Memphis Coffin Co.

1912. They host the fabulously famous author Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) during his visits to Little Rock and Texarkana. Hubbard was an Arts and Crafts movement member and a freethinking admirer of Leo Tolstoy who got himself in trouble with the U.S. Postal Service by distributing a magazine containing a mildly naughty joke. Pardoned in an extraordinary manner by President Woodrow Wilson, he was on board the Lusitania and on his way to Europe to interview the Kaiser when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat. He and his wife, Alice, went down with the ship.

1914. Leo Krouse is one of 30 "unregenerated sons of the desert" conducted into the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine at the Al Amin Temple at 21st and Main streets in Little Rock. A parade of the novices, single file, linked together by a long rope was headed by the First Regiment band in Turkish uniform. Then came dinner and a dance. In other words, he was a Shriner, y'all.

1915. Leo and Esther take charge of a lost little girl who took the wrong train while trying to get to Hope.

1917. In April, "Leo Krouse, a former Austrian subject but now a loyal American citizen," presides over a meeting of 500 residents of Miller and Bowie counties, organizing a "crusade" to plant more food crops in a time of war.

1917. In May, he is chairman of a new branch of the National Council of Defense forming at Texarkana.

1917. In June, he passes along the news that Jack Jessup, 19, the son of a merchant at Mount Pleasant, Texas, has died during his first month of service on the U.S. battleship Texas.

1918. In July, he visits Washington, where he is named chairman of the Wood and Glass Products Section of the War Industries Board for the Southwestern States. Accompanied by U.S. Rep. Otis Wingo, he meets President Wilson.

1918. In September, Leo and O.O. Colaw, manager of the Texas Glass Co., travel to Galveston to speak at a war industries department conference.

1919. In March, Leo becomes president of Texas Glass, newly a public company.

1919. In April, Leo is chairman of the Jewish War Relief organization in Texarkana, raising money to clothe and feed destitute Jews in war zones.

1919. In September, his daughter Lucile is in critical condition having accidentally taken a tablet of bichloride of mercury when she thought she was taking Calotab. (We know she recovered because in August 1920, the Jewish Monitor in Dallas reported she and her sister would visit Mount Pleasant while their parents were in Chicago.) And so on, and so forth ... until 1921, when something out of character happens very suddenly to Leo Krouse.

He is beaten within an inch of his life -- daylight, people all around -- at the intersection of Broad and State streets in his beloved Texarkana.

Who would do such a thing to our wonderful Leo Krouse? Tune in next week to find out.

I promise, it's surprising.

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ActiveStyle on 03/27/2017

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