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What He Starts, He Finishes by Edna Boardman Introduction: Jacob Wirtz stared in stunned silence at the paper thrust
at him by the Russian officers who had come without warning to Katharinental,
Odessa District, South Russia. "You are called for service in the Russian army,"
they announced to him. It was the second time he had heard those words. By
accepting an advancement the first time he was in the Russian army, the men told
him, he had agreed to serve another four years, and they wanted him to come
back. If he refused, he would relinquish the 40 dessiatines of land that had
been leased to him as a reward for service. Yes, his signature was on the
document, but he could not read anything else. If that was indeed what the words
on the paper said, his life would be destroyed whether he went back into the
army or stayed in Katharinental. The members of the party that traveled together on the steamship were:
In the early stages of the trip, to reduce suspicions, Johanna posed as her mother Frances’s sister. Jacob and Frances Berger claimed young Frances as their daughter. Once on the ship, they assumed their proper identities. On the ship to Uruguay, Johanna Wirtz acquired a skill that was to prove immensely valuable to the family. Somehow, she had come by a German/Spanish dictionary, and by the time they landed, she had mastered a basic Spanish vocabulary. Johanna had been able to go to some school in Russia, but she was very bright and had mostly taught herself to read, the only one in the party who could. They met Philip Berger in Uruguay, which gave them great pleasure, but they soon found that the crop of choice in the area was peanuts. They were not peanut farmers! They wanted to grow wheat. So after just two weeks, they got into another boat and floated down the Parana River, landing near Buenos Aires, Argentina. Things were not going well with pregnant Magdalina. The conditions of the ocean voyage had made her very ill, and she did not want to get into another boat. But the needs of the family as a whole came first, and she went. When they came to Buenos Aires, Johanna took charge. With her knowledge of Spanish, limited though it was, she was able to get the hospital care that saved Magdalina’s life. The child, however, was lost. The family settled on homestead land some 15 or 20 miles from Buenos Aires, in the state of Entre Rios. They often said they were able to see the lights of the city from their farm. Several years after they arrived in Argentina, Jacob and Johanna had another daughter Clementine, and on October 19, 1903, they had a son George. His birth registration or baptismal record, dated October 21, 1903, has the city name Crespo on it. This is a puzzle, because, while Crespo had many German-Russians, it was a considerable distance from where they could have seen the lights of Buenos Aires. One might guess his mother traveled a distance for the birth, but the story George was told was that she was in the field working when she felt the beginnings of labor. She just said she had to go to the house, and there she gave birth to her son, with only her mother Frances in attendance. George’s mother’s name is spelled Juana, the Spanish version of Johanna, on the birth certificate, and the registering official was Tori Gusto. The family lived in adequate circumstances for the time, but as Jacob worked, he reflected on problems his lack of education had brought him - not knowing about the words on the paper that almost drew him back into the Russian army; his inability to discern the best place to which to emigrate. He had seen the advantages even small book knowledge had accrued to his family - the useful information he gained when someone read a poster or a letter to him; Johanna’s Spanish that led to the saving of his sister-in-law’s life. An obsession began to build. The way to a better life lay through education, if not for himself, then for his children. But Frances turned eight, then nine, then ten, and had not yet gone to school. Where were the promised free schools? The nearest was 40 miles away. A family named Hartner, who lived not far from the school, offered to take her, but Jacob felt uneasy about sending her to people he did not know well, even if they were also Germans from Russia. Clementine was a toddler, George had just been born, and they would need a school too. The idea that George would need an education but the girls would not appears not to have occurred to him. Would a school likely ever be more accessible than now where they lived in Argentina? He decided no. Still unable to read, he inquired of anyone who seemed to know anything. Where are there free schools? The firm answer was in North America, in the United States. A fungus infection that was growing under Johanna’s toenails also complicated their lives. It was very hot and moist in Argentina, and that, plus walking barefoot, appeared to have caused the infection. A better life, Jacob saw, lay first in the accumulation of money. Wages were very low, but he was skilled in handling what money he earned. He set about to parlay the combination of farmer and carpenter skills into a nest egg. He learned of a widow who needed someone who could work with her binder and repair it when it broke down. The McCormick binder, touchy and imperfect at first, had been invented in the United States. Despite distances, it did not take long for such a useful machine to appear in other wheat-growing areas of the world, including Russia and Argentina. The parts that broke most often were made of wood, and here Jacob’s carpentry skills became useful. Soon, Jacob got the idea of contracting himself and the binder to neighbors, who still used scythes to harvest their wheat, and this profited both the widow and himself. Through the work with the harvest, Jacob saved the equivalent of $3,000.00 in gold. Johanna made a belt for him and he carried it always around his waist. The money was going to get them to the United States. One day, Jacob walked into the house and said to Johanna, "We are going to North America." Again the choice of place was governed by the presence of relatives. Johanna’s sister Pauline and her second husband Mike Bullinger lived on a farm near Mandan in North Dakota. The plan was almost as audacious as had been the plan to go from Russia to Uruguay, though there was not the same danger. He would just have to plot and negotiate. Jacob arranged for permission for the family to immigrate to the United States. It was May 1904. He purchased steamship and train tickets for the whole family group to travel from Argentina, through Ellis Island in New York, to Mandan, North Dakota. Their ship caught fire in New York Harbor, and this became part of the family’s coming-to-America story, but they all passed inspection at Ellis Island. Passage for the Bergers was understood as a loan from Jacob, but they felt they would have no trouble in the United States earning the money to repay it. Members of the group that traveled to the United States from Uruguay were:
The party arrived in Mandan in May, in the middle of an unseasonable blizzard. Nobody in the family had been able to come to the depot to meet them. Jacob learned that his sister-in-law and her husband lived in St. Anthony, 15 miles away. He walked the distance in the cold, got a sleigh, and took his family to the farm. His lungs were so unaccustomed to exertion in the cold that, as a result of that walk, he developed pleurisy and other lung problems that lasted for years. When summer came, the Wirtzes and Bergers took up land in the Solen area south of Mandan, in Sioux County, and had a farm of their own. Farming went well at first, and they put in a good crop. Jacob had been skillful with horses in Argentina, but one day his horses ran away, and he began to wonder if there was not another way to live in America. On the farm, the old dream of education for his children seemed as far away in America as it had been in Argentina. When he looked around and asked, “Where is the school?”, the answer was, “Nowhere near.” Were they to be disillusioned again? They sold the land, moved to Mandan, and rented a house in Dogtown, a part of the city where many German-Russian immigrants lived when they first arrived. Jacob developed an affection for the Indian people who were his neighbors when the family moved to Mandan. George thinks they reminded him of the natives he knew in Argentina. Frances immediately went to school. Less than a year later, they were living in their own home with a barn nearby, both structures having been built at a cost of $611.00, paid for with gold from Argentina. Jacob became the family banker. He lent money when it was needed, and he always got paid back. The gold fulfilled yet another desire, the need to connect with the old family. Jacob reached back into Russia and assisted the immigration to Mandan of his father Melchior Wirtz, his mother Katherine Boehm Wirtz, and their unmarried son Steve, Jacob’s younger brother. Jacob’s carpentry skills earned him a job helping construct St. Vincent’s Catholic Church at St. Vincent, a small town near Mandan. Jacob looked around for what was admired in the social life of the city, and, in their first year in town, bought a piano for the girls to play. Jacob was broad shouldered and 5 feet 11 inches tall, taller than many German-Russian men. He weighed 180-185 pounds. He was clean-shaven except for a brown-red mustache that covered his whole upper lip. He probably maintained the mustache to cover a scar he had gotten in his youth. His hair thinned when he was quite young. One day, when George was 3 or 4 years old, a man named Andrew Thorberg came to the Wirtz home and said to Johanna, "You tell your husband to come up to the store." The store he was talking about was a local general merchandise store, the forerunner of such stores as Sears, Target, and Woolworth. It was based in Minneapolis and called Cummins, Thorberg, and Thies. When Jacob went to the store, Thorberg offered him a job. Jacob said he would have to talk it over with his wife. Also, he said he could not read or write, but Thorberg, who knew a hard, intelligent worker when he saw one, said, "We’ll teach you." And so it was that, at $40.00 per month, Jacob got the job he held for the rest of his life. He did maintenance work at first, using his excellent manipulative and carpentry skills. He would go to the store very early on the winter mornings and fire up the furnace to get the store warm enough for the first customers. When Clementine and George grew up, they went to school too. George’s first school was the newly opened parochial school in Mandan. Jacob purchased a violin for George and found a teacher to give him lessons. George was teased unmercifully by the other kids for playing the violin. In a roundabout way, the violin was responsible for his interest in boxing and eventually in dentistry. More about that later! Frances and Clementine took on the task of teaching their father to read and write. He mastered the English language well enough to handle sales, writing up the name of each item and its price on the receipt. He assumed responsibility for the store basement where yard goods, paint, and bicycles were sold. After awhile, he graduated to men’s haberdashery, where he learned to dress well. In time, he learned written language well enough to pass the tests that made him an American citizen. He never earned more than $125.00 per month, but on that the family prospered. Johanna, who was fair complexioned and had light brown hair, was smaller than most women in the German-Russian community. She took pride in wanting to be petite, and the family is still amused at how they helped promote the fiction that she weighed 4 or 5 pounds less than she really did. Johanna always worked outside her home. She cleaned people’s houses, often earning as little as fifteen cents an hour. She would come home after a full day’s exhausting work with $1.20 in her hand and save part of it for her children’s education. Frances graduated from Mandan High School, the first German-Russian girl in that large German-Russian immigrant population to do so. Jacob’s push for education for his children did not center on a love of the life of the mind. He had never had the opportunity to learn that. More, he saw it as the route to practical and economic advantages. For the eighth grade, George transferred to the public school because the family thought it would better prepare him for high school. He admits that, at first, he was not the best-motivated student. Success in fighting off his tormentors over the violin told him he might have some skill in boxing. He found a man, Paul Foster, a house painter, who was able to give him boxing lessons. He carefully hid the inevitable injuries from his parents. George still recalls his father’s outrage when he saw the bandage he had tied over a bruised eye. But even at age16, George was becoming his own man, and when the opportunity came to go to Glendive, Montana, to fight in a setting that substituted for a bar just before prohibition, he hitched a train and went. During a fight, he broke a tooth. The pain was so severe that, when someone said he knew of a local dentist who might be able to help him, he went to a dentist for the first time in his life. The treatment, oil of cloves, relieved the pain immediately, but the dentist said he should check with a dentist back in Mandan for a more complete treatment of the tooth. The dentists had been so friendly that the thought came to him that maybe this is what he would like to do with the education his father was pushing onto him. When his father learned of George’s interest in dentistry, he said, "What he starts, he finishes." Once George had decided what direction he was headed, he made friends with the Mandan dentist who treated him. The dentist told him that he would have to apply himself in school and study all of the advanced math and science he could get. George had preferred manual training; he liked to produce something he could hold and look at. His high school principal did not encourage him to attempt an academic program. No German-Russian boy, much less one with professional ambitions, had ever sat in his office before, and he hardly believed George would improve his record as a student. George accepted the challenge for himself, and his indifferent attitude toward his studies began to change. He enrolled in all the advanced science the school offered and graduated with excellent grades - the first German-Russian boy to graduate from Mandan High School. Jacob’s plan for his daughters was that they learn to be teachers. When one of them suggested to him that she would like to be a secretary, he laid down the law. Teachers and only teachers they would become. Nor did he want them to have ordinary summer jobs because he feared they would quit school and stay with the jobs. George tells how his sisters took in washing to earn some money and recruited him to make deliveries, but they had to hide the enterprise from their father. Both Frances and Clementine went to the State Teachers College at Valley City, North Dakota and got degrees in teaching. Clementine became an elementary principal. The rest of the Berger family also put down roots in the Mandan area, becoming farmers and workers, but none caught Jacob’s fervor for education. When George enrolled at the Marquette School of Dentistry at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Wirtz’s German-Russian friends were appalled, and criticism rained down on them. "What kind of nonsense do you have in your head?" some demanded to know. "There’s no way your son is going to make it," a man shouted at Jacob, pounding his fist on the table. Were the neighbors jealous? The Wirtzes would not, for the last time, hear, "Who do you think you are?" The critics had not counted on the Wirtz - father, mother, and son-determination. George worked and earned part of his own tuition and other expenses. Jacob and Johanna were at the graduation on the day George received his degree in dentistry. With tears in their eyes, they realized a lifetime of dreams and effort. Who would have thought that a man who had known the dirt and degradation of service in the Russian army could have a son graduating from an American college with a professional degree! Did the profession of dentistry work for George as his life unfolded? Yes, it did. He practiced for 64 years and says, "I picked the right field. I loved every year of it. I never complained about patients. I’d go back today if I could." George married Margaret Stein and had two sons, James (Jim) and Richard (Dick). Jacob recruited Jim and Dick to work at the store. They would help on Sundays, putting awnings down and sweeping. At the age of 68, Jacob had a stroke, and a doctor told him he would have to retire. But he invented his own physical therapy and was soon back at work. Jacob died at the age of 78, when George was 44. His last words, spoken to George, were, "Take care of your boys and see that they get an education." Jim and Dick later also attended Marquette and became dentists. The three men worked together, in a group practice in Mandan, their whole professional lives. Jim died May 5, 1987. Dick, who still practices, speaks with great admiration and love of his grandfather and shares a rare friendship with his father. After Margaret died, George married "Mac" Makelky, and they live in their own home in Mandan. Mac shares George’s roots. Her family once owned a mill and winery in Katharinental, Odessa District in South Russia. Dick has the heavy spoon the Russian army issued to his grandfather, a painful souvenir. The edge of the bowl is curled from hard use. One can trace only with incredulity the path, the dreams, and the hard work that lay between the day of its usefulness and today. · This account is based on an interview of retired dentist Dr. George Wirtz 93, of Mandan, North Dakota on August 15, 1996. Information was also provided by his wife Mac, and by his son and grandson, Richard and Tom Wirtz.
As this was being written, a Mandan teacher was renovating an older home he had purchased - one that Jacob Wirtz had built in 1914. As the workmen tore away some plaster in a wall, they found Jacob’s Russian passport. The passport date, 1869, suggests the family had planned for emigration for over 25 years. The passport consists of 3 1/2 pages, about 2 1/2 by 3 inches in size. The fragile pages are covered with fine print in the Russian Language, print that consists of many numbered regulations. It gives the reader a sense of what Jacob had experienced those many years ago. What if the print applied to me, a reader might ask, and I was bound by what it said and I could not read it? There is also in the old house a bag of letters, which have not yet been retrieved.
Dr. George Wirtz’s achievements reached beyond his office and daily dental appointments. · He was chosen Dentist of the Year in North Dakota for the year 1987. · He chaired the Custer District Health Unit for 25 to 30 years. In this position, he convinced the Mandan community to fluoridate its water and practiced long enough to see the number of cavities in Mandan decrease significantly. His records of the dental history of Mandan’s parochial school children convinced the public of the value of fluoridation. · In the 1930s, he led a team that evaluated the dental health of North Dakota’s mental hospital patients. He also performed dental surgery at the hospital. · As chair of the Central Region Dental Testing Service, he administered state board tests in the eleven states governed by the board. · He served on the Mandan School Board for 12 years. · In 1958, 37 years after graduating from dental school, he re-took the national board examinations - the oldest man ever to take the tests - and passed with a high average. (He admits to having studied for two years in preparation for the exams.) · He set up a boxing ring in the basement of his clinic building and helped young people with training and coaching. One student boxed his way through dental school. |