Some Descendants of George Weller

The following is information I received from Steven Trier, great-grandson of George Weller, who lived in Faculty Lane House 1 from 1895 to his death in 1924. The surviving Weller family continued to occupy the house until 1930.

Mr. Trier sent me this information in several messages, and I have organized it into one essay.

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George Weller was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. His real name was John Weller but he was called George from infancy on. (When he himself had children, his eldest son was named John, after his own real name, and it was many years and several children later that a son was named George, after his assumed name.) At an early age George Weller's family moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and he grew up there.

George Weller eventually married a woman named Clara Erich, who had three brothers who all were all Lutheran pastors. They had attended the seminary (or the school that eventually become the seminary) in Fort Wayne.

George and Clara Weller had about eight children, who included Anna, Hulda, John, Bub and Elsa. (The Wellers all had nicknames -- Rubs, Pussy, Dolly, Bing, Bub, Petey, Mortz, etc. Maybe I'll have to setup a cross reference to follow. I am still trying to clarify details about that Weller family.)

George Weller was my great-grandfather, and his daughter Anna Weller was my grandmother. Anna Weller eventually married Herbert Trier, who was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana. (There ae many associations between the Weller, Erich and Trier families and between Seward, Nebraska, and Fort Wayne, Indiana.)

During Anna's childhood growing up in the Weller family in Seward, Nebraska, there were still small groups of Indians in the Seward area, and the White and Indian children sometimes would play together. It is more than likely that the Concordia children were the only Whites allowed to do so. German was the language spoken in the Weller home as well as in the church services. (It is interesting to read the St Johns history and see that there were still German services in the 1950s).

Herbert and Anna (Weller) Trier had four children -- John Weller Trier, Eric Trier, Barbara Trier and Herbert Peter Trier. The youngest, who was called Pete by the family, is my father. He was born in Fort Wayne in December 1927.

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The Trier family had settled in in Fort Wayne in 1828. When George Weller had lived in Fort Wayne, he and his family had socialized with the Trier family. My great uncle (a Weller) was the Director of Music at St. Paul's in Fort Wayne, and my Dad and his Trier family lived literally in the shadow of the Church. So the Weller and Trier families knew each other well and so became inter-married.

The Weller and Trier families also have a connection to the Seminary in St. Louis. Missouri. The real push to set that school up came from the Fort Wayne Lutherans, including my great, great, great-grandfather Conrad Trier. He was one of the founders of St Paul in Fort Wayne as well as Trinity Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne.

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Because of economic hardships during the 1930s and early 1940s, the two youngest Trier children -- Peter (my Dad) and my aunt Barbara -- were shipped out to live with their Aunt Elsa and Aunt Hulda (the Weller sisters of my grandma Anna Weller) in Kearny, Nebraska. During those years, Peter and Barbara occasionally visited the Weller family in Seward.

Because of his years living in Kearny, my Dad probably knows more about those Nebraska Wellers than anyone still alive. He says that Uncle Bub Weller (a son of George Weller) attended the University of Nebraska in the early 1920s and was a team captain and All-American. Uncle Bub's older brother John Weller (the oldest son of George Weller) attended the University of Nebraska in 1902-1906 and was a team captain too. Bub was a big man and played tackle and was the key in Nebraska's upset win over Notre Dame. John was smaller and played in the backfield. I believe John eventually worked as an engineer on the Panama Canal.

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The woman standing second from the left (in the dress with horizontal stripes) is Elsa (Weller) Williams, and the woman standing second from the right (in the dress with the red collar) is Anna (Weller) Trier. Elsa and Anna were daughters of George Weller, the first President of Concordia College in Seward, and so they grew up in Faculty Lane House 1. The picture was taken in 1971, when Elsa was living in Lincoln, where Anna visited every year from Fort Wayne.
(Click here to see the image in larger sizes.)

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A few days ago my uncle Eric Trier celebrated his 85th birthday. Eric and my Dad are long in years but they are not old. My Dad works out every day for a couple of hours as does my uncle Eric. My Dad is a medical doctor, still in practice.

One of my Weller uncles (my great uncle) was the head of a local FBI office at the onset of World War Two, and when he was directed to confiscate fire arms from second generation German-Americans, he resigned.

Aunt Elsa (Weller) Williams's husband Dwight Williams was a colonel in the Army as well as a school principal.

While I was growing up in Indiana, the Weller family had a lake cottage in northeast Indiana, and it was and is the mecca for all Wellers. So as a kid I got to spend a great deal of time around all sorts of the clan, and it is large. Interestingly, they are fairly liberal for Lutherans in comparison to George Weller being very traditional.

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I have been to Seward several times and even was offered a scholarship to attend Concordia College in Seward after I graduated from Concordia Lutheran High School in Fort Wayne in 1979.

I am intending on a visit to Seward yet this fall with some of my kids (I live in Colorado) so they may see Weller Hall and the house where their great-grandmother Anna grew up. I have been in contact with Dr. Bergman, who now lives in the old Weller house, and he has invited me to visit. I also have discovered that one of my teachers of my grade school (Holy Cross Lutheran in Fort Wayne), Dr. Stan Obermueller, has been living in Seward and teaching at Concordia for the past 25 years.

My Failures as a Paperboy

(This article follows an article about how I became a paperboy and a second article about how I delivered newspapers and a third article about paper-route economics.)

From the beginning of my paperboy career, I understood the importance of increasing the number of customers on my route. The time I spent delivering papers every day was practically constant. Delivering one more newspaper took almost no more time, but my profit increased by more than a penny a day.

I did more arithmetic. If a new customer subscribed to both the daily and Sunday deliveries, then in a year, my increased profit at the end of the year would total (42¢/month * 12 months = ) $5.04. If I put that extra profit into my savings account at Cattle Bank, then at a 3.5% interest rate I would earn 18¢ interest every year afterwards -- EVERY YEAR AFTERWARDS !! -- PLUS COMPOUNDING !!!

And that was just for one more customer. My brain feverishly fantasized about the profitable results of several new customers added to my route every month.

During the first couple of months after I took over my paper route, I spent a couple of hours on Saturday afternoons knocking on doors of non-subscribers in my route area and trying to sell subscriptions.

I had read the guidance in The Newspaper Carrier's Handbook about how to sell subscriptions. The following pages depicted the paperboy scouting for prospects on his route and then approaching those prospects to sell subscriptions.

Click here to see the above two pages fully in larger sizes.

Click here to see the above two pages fully in larger sizes.

Click here to see the above two pages fully in larger sizes.

There also were various sales instructions like this ...

Click here to see the above leaflet in larger sizes.

... and this.

Click here to see the above leaflet in larger sizes.

I did not have the self-confidence or the ability, however, to sell like the boy in the manual did. I was only nine years old and was easily intimidated. When I knocked on a door and someone opened the door, the conversation usually went like this:

Me: Hi, would you like to subscribe to The Lincoln Star?

Adult: No, thanks. [Closes door]

After a few such Saturday afternoons of rejection and frustration, I gave up.

However, the newspaper's distribution office in Lincoln regularly conducted various contests and prizes to entice the paperboys into trying to sell subscriptions. One popular prize was a group trip to the state fair in Lincoln. If all the paperboys in a district together sold a total of so many new subscriptions in a particular time, then all the paperboys (even paperboys who did not sell any subscriptions at all) got to go to the state fair for a day.

I would try to sell subscriptions when the prize was a trip to the state fair. I cannot remember whether I did sell any subscriptions on those occasions (maybe a sold a few) but I always got to go to the state fair, because all the paperboys in the district sold enough for everyone to go.

The trips to the state fair were a lot of fun. In the morning we paperboys would fill a bus, which drove us to Lincoln and dropped us off at the fair. I think each of us received some discount coupons for rides and games. Then in the evening the bus would drive us all back to Seward.

The state fair had a much larger selection of rides and attractions than the county fair in Seward had. The state fair had some burlesque attractions. There were some view machines, where you put a coin in the machine and then you looked into a visor and saw a short film of a woman dancing around in lingerie. Then the woman would start to take off their lingerie and the scene would go black. There also was a live burlesque show with real women dancers. I was too young to get into that, but a couple of the very oldest paperboys were allowed to enter. I spent a few coins looking into the viewing machines. A couple of the guys bought some playing cards that were illustrated with pictures of women with lingerie, and those guys would show the cards around in the bus on our ride back to Seward. This was the funnest day of the year for us paperboys.

During the first year that I worked as a paperboy, a bunch of us won a trip to watch the University of Nebraska's football team play a game. There were a lot of empty seats in the stadium, because the team always had a bad record in those days. Paperboys were allowed to attend free as a promotion, just to fill some of the seats. I remember that we boys spent more time running around and playing in the stands then watching the football game. (The Cornhuskers began to win football games and become popular after 1962, when Bob Devaney became the coach. My father sat next to Devaney on an airplane flight and had a conversation with him when Devaney was flying from Wyoming to Nebraska to take over the coaching job.)

After I quit working as a paperboy, there was one subscription contest where the prize was a trip to Omaha to go on a tour of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) air base. My brother Steve Sylwester went on that trip.

I remember one subsciption-selling contest where I did sell a couple of subscriptions. One summer afternoon each of us paperboys received a phone call telling us we were supposed to report immediately to the home of Austin Neihardt, Seward's distribution manager, for an important meeting. This never had happened before. I rode my bicycle to Neihardt's, where the living room was filled with paperboys. A distribution manager from Lincoln introduced himself and gave each one of us a small catalogue showing prizes we could win for selling subscriptions. The prizes were very attractive. Then he told us that we would get triple credits for all the subscriptions that we sold by 7 p.m. on that very day and double credits for all the subscriptions that we sold by the end of the weekend.

Of course, all we paperboys raced out immediately on our bicycles to our route areas and tried to win these prizes. That day I sold one subscription, and then I sold another subscription by the end of the weekend. The I won a good Swiss Army pocket knife and a couple of other prizes. Normally we had to order our prizes from the catalogue and wait a few weeks to receive them in the mail, but when I returned to Neihardt's house at 7 pm with my first new subscription, the manager had one of the prize knives with him, and so he gave me that prize immediately. I opened the blade and barely touched it to my finger tip, and the blade was so sharp that it cut my skin and caused me to bleed. What a cool knife!

That particular contest has stayed in my memory for several reasons -- the unexpected phone call, the catalogue, the sharp knife and my immediate success selling two subscriptions. This success bothered me, because I felt that I probably could have sold more subscriptions during those years if I had continued to try regularly. I could have improved my sales skills and could have earned more money. I pondered my inadequate effort and sales failure often during my last months as a paperboy.

I did sell a few subscriptions by giving prospects the newspaper free for a week. On the first day we would leave the first day's newspaper at the foot of the door and hang this announcement on the prospect's doorknob.

In my experience, this method worked rather well -- certainly much better than knocking on doors with cold calls. I think that about half of the prospects who received the newspaper for a week eventually subscribed. I wanted to use this method more often, and I do not remember why I did not. Maybe I was supposed to take more initiative and propose good prospects to the district manager. Or maybe these free newspapers were a bonus for paperboys who already were selling more subscriptions with other methods.

In general, my attitude, effort and service declined significantly during the last year or two that I delivered newspapers. I got up later and later and delivered the newspapers later and later. I dawdled. I forgot to deliver papers to some customers. The number of subscribers declined to a lower number than when I had begun delivering the route. I became dissatisfied with the amount of money I earned, but I did not want to make any effort to sell subscriptions.

I made a special effort to deliver the newspapers early only during the month before Christmas, because most of my customers gave me a Christmas bonus. Some customers gave a cash bonus -- as much as five dollars. Other customers gave me boxes of candy. During the Christmas break from school, I would spend my days eating boxes of chocolate-covered cherries and watching television (Jack Benny movies, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movies, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movies, Abbott and Costello movies, etc.).

A major reason why my attitude declined was that I foresaw that I would be able to work in the Concordia College cafeteria during my eighth-grade year. That job payed 60¢ an hour and did not include exposure to freezing, windy weather. I could foresee an escape from my paper route and a big step up in my employment.

For some boys, delivering a newspaper route was the beginning of a life-long career in entrepreneurial business. I, however, grew up in a family of teachers and pastors, and so during those young years I had no role models or mentors or coaches who provided guidance and encouragement for a business career. When I think back at that experience of delivering newspapers, I cannot escape the conclusion that I did not succeed as I initially hoped I would succeed and perhaps could have succeeded.