Dorris Marxhausen

Karl Marxhausen, in his own blog, has an article about the humor that characterized his family and in particular about his mother Dorris and her sense of humor. Below is part of Karl's article, with a few of the pictures. Read the whole article.

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Growing up under the Marxhausen roof has been a dance with literature. This was where I learned to love reading. My mother introduced me to Sam And The Firefly, an adventure about an owl and his friend, whose tail light filled the night sky with illuminated words. She read books to me when I was young.

She loved to read newspapers and worked in the library at St. John's Elementary School. She loved to compose her thoughts on her royal typewriter with its carbon papers. Letters came to me the summer I worked in Galena, Illinois, bringing me up to speed on all the family news. She wrote letters to the editor and tried her hand at politics as well. Simply put, my love words came from her. Much thanks to Dorris Marxhausen.

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(This is Mike again.) I remember Dorris mostly as she looks in the third photograph.

I remember Dorris Marxhausen as someone who laughed a lot.

She was also a rather serious person, though. She was very interested and active in Nebraska politics, which was unusual for a woman in those years. She was a Republican, but in Nebraska in those years, the Republicans were the liberal party.

Here is a picture of the Marxhausen family now:

Seated (left to right): Reinhold Marxhausen and Jerry Lodwig.
Standing: Kim Marxhausen, Paul Marxhausen, Karl Marxhausen, Dorris Marxhausen and Marie Lodwig.

Reinhold Marxhausen's Sound-Making Sculptures

Some guy named Ramon Galvan has a blog named Outer Tumbolia. I looked through the blog for a while, and I must say that I do not get the blog's theme or direction. Maybe he is writing articles about sound.

Anyway, the blog includes an interesting article about how Reinhold Marxhausen began to make sculptures that make sounds. Whenever I visited Marxhausen's studio, he would show me some sound-making sculpture he was developing.

The relevant part of the blog article follows:

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Reinhold Marxhausen grew up in the 1920's and 1930's, the son of a pastor and one of eight children in Vergas Minnesota. He played the musical saw, he played water-tuned bottles, and he found piano lessons boring. He carried stardust in his pocket.

After military service, followed by degrees in art and biology, Marxhausen took a teaching position at Concordia College in Seward Nebraska, where he remained until his retirement in 1990.

It was in 1962 that he first began to work with sound objects. "It was a boring Saturday at the sculpture studio; no plans for the day," he recalls. "I found a door knob on the table and welded some wires on one end just for the fun of it. I placed the door knob to my ear and strummed the wire on the opposite end."

"WOW."

Since his discovery, Marx has made a wide variety of sound sculptural forms, and he has developed the door-knob idea in two main directions. One form consists of objects with exposed, external spines. some of the most successful have been his manual walkmans, (below) made like a pair of headphones, with spines sticking out from the metal ear pieces and sometimes rising from the over-the-head connecting piece. They make a stereo concert of lovely sounds, on a minuscule one person scale.

The other form is a small, chunky, metal object, fully enclosed, with no hint of what is inside. Sound comes from within when you shake or rock it, audible only when you hold it close to your ear. What is in there? Marx is not telling.

The objects are just pocket-sized and, recalling the meteor of his childhood, Marxhausen has given them the name Stardust. He makes them as plain in appearance as can be; they look like worn and dirty stones. There's a Marxhausen message in his having put so lovely a sound in such a homely thing.

The Order of Concordia Presidents

J. George Weller Before becoming the director of the "Lutheran Seminary" in Seward in 1894, Weller was pastor of a congregation in Marysville, Nebraska. He relinquished the presidency in 1914 after two decades in that position but continued to serve as a professor at Concordia for ten more years.

F.W.C. Jesse President Jesse has just resigned the presidency of a Lutheran College in Clifton, Texas, when he received the call to suceed Weller in 1914. After almost ten years as Concordia's president, he accepted a call into parish ministry in Atchison, Kansas, in 1923.

C.F. Brommer President Brommer initially declined the call to be president of Concordia. He was sent the call a second time, whereupon he accepted. Before coming to Seward in 1924, he was pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Hampton, Nebraska, and the Southern Nebraska District president. Following his retirement for the presidency in 1941, he continued to teach at Concordia until 1944. He spent his remaining years in San Diego, California.

A.O. Fuerbringer President Fuerbringer, having a broad background in Synod ministries, was serving as pastor to a small mission congregation in western Kansas before becoming president of the college in 1941. He left Concordia, Seward, in 1953 to become the president of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. He held that position until his retirement.

Paul A. Zimmermann President Zimmermann, though having had pastoral training, had been serving as a science professor on the Seward campus when he was called to the presidency in 1954. He left Concordia in 1961 to become president of the newly organized Concordia College at Ann Arbor, Michigan. He later became president of Concordia College, River Forest, Illinois.

W. Theophil Janzow Janzow had been a parish pastor and president of the Southern Illinios District. He then came to Seward to teach sociology before accepting the call to be Concordia's president in 1963. He presided over the school's largest enrollments before resigning in 1977. He then became president at Concordia Seminary Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Michael J. Stelmachowicz After years of teaching and administration in Lutheran elementary and secondary schools in St. Louis, Stelmachowicz became Concordia's director of secondary education in 1961 and later dean of students. He left Seward in 1968 to become superintendent of Lutheran high schools in Detroit, Michigan. Next, he became president of St. John's College, Winfield, Kansas. He was called back to Seward in 1978 to become president. He left Seward in 1984 to become the executive secretary of the Synod's Board for Higher Education Services until his retirement.

Ralph L. Reinke President Reinke, Concordia's only non-pastor president, taught in Lutheran elementary schools and at Concordia College in River Forest, Illinois. Eventually he became president of Concordia Publishing House in St. Louis. After leaving that position, he was called to the presidency in Seward in 1986. He served until his retirement in 1990.

Orville C. Walz After teaching in Lutheran elementary schools, Walz served for a number of years as registrar and assistant academic dean at Concordia, Seward. After entering the pastoral ministry, he became president of Concordia College, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He was called to become president of Seward in 1990.

Source

An Old Article About Alfred Ottomar Fuerbringer

My brother Steve Sylwester found an article in an old Time magazine about Alfred Ottomar Fuerbringer, a former President of Concordia Teachers College in Seward, Nebraska. When the article was published (April 27, 1953), Fuerbringer had recently been promoted from that position to the position of President of Concordia Theological Seminary in Clayton, Missouri.

I assume that the Fuerbringer family lived on Faculty Lane in Seward. This article provides some interesting details about him and his ancestry and about campus life while Fuerbringer was CTC President. The article's complete text follows:

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The largest Lutheran theological seminary in the U.S. (enrollment 778) is the Missouri Synod's Concordia Seminary—a well-planned scattering of college-gothic buildings and faculty homes on 71 green acres in Clayton, on the western edge of St. Louis. Last week the synod's board of electors announced that they had selected a new seminary president: the Rev. Alfred Ottomar Fuerbringer, 49. Big (6 ft. 3 in.), even-tempered Pastor Fuerbringer and Concordia will not have much trouble getting to know each other—his father headed the school and his grandfather helped found it.

Faith of the Fathers. Grandfather Ottomar Fuerbringer left his German homeland in 1838 with a group of some 700 Saxony Lutherans for whom German Lutheranism was getting too liberal and rationalistic, and too closely bound up with the state. He and three fellow ministers built the original Concordia—a log-cabin schoolhouse in Missouri's Perry County—and set out to train a New World breed of pastors in the strict, Bible-centered Lutheranism of their conviction.

Concordia and Missouri Synod Lutheranism grew and prospered with the times, but they never let go of the stern Reformation theology of their founding fathers. Under the leadership of Ottomar's theologian son, Dr. Ludwig Ernst Fuerbringer, who died in 1947, Concordia's serious-minded seminarians continued to master both Hebrew and Greek. Almost as intensively as their work in Bible, Concordia's students study The Book of Concord of 1580, in which their church's doctrines are explicitly set forth. Added to courses in history, philosophy and pastoral care, this kind of work leaves little time for wool gathering; classes begin at 7:40 a.m.

Lutheran System. President-elect Fuerbringer attended Concordia himself (his red hair, now vestigial, won him the nickname "Kelly"). After graduate studies in the late '20s, he went into pastoral work. In 1941 came his first summons to a Lutheran education post: the presidency of Concordia Teachers College in Seward, Nebraska.

Missouri Synod Lutherans maintain their own parochial school system of 1,400 schools (which has grown by 6,000 rooms in the last six years), and the training of teachers is therefore a major concern. Coeducational Concordia Teachers' College combines both college and high school; when Fuerbringer took over, it had 83 college students and some 50 in high school. Today these figures stand at 296 and 135.

"Discipline was quite rigid when I came," says Alfred Fuerbringer. From Monday through Thursday no one was permitted off the campus after supper, movies were forbidden except on weekends, and the college choir was permitted brief excursions within Nebraska, but no farther. Popular President Fuerbringer soon changed all that. His students now can get overnight leaves and go to the movies any time they want, and the choir is just back from a tour through Texas and Louisiana.

"Ninety-five per cent of our student body," says Fuerbringer, "are youngsters who intend to enter the church, and do. They know exactly why they're in school, and exactly where they're going. I should guess that in a nonsectarian college it's the other way around: 95% don't know why they're there, or where they're going."

The Faculty of St John School in 1952

The photograph below is included in the booklet published in 1952 for the 75th anniversary (1877-1952) of St John Church. The booklet was described in a previous blog post.

This picture shows the faculty of St John School. From left to right are Herbert Kaiser (principal, grades 7-8), Martha Maehr (kindergarten), Lucinda Bartels (grades 3-4),Edna Grotelueschen (grades 1-2) and Herman Schmieding (grades 5-6).

The Flickr page shows the entire photo.

A Photo of the Construction of St John Church in 1877

The photograph below is included in the booklet published in 1952 for the 75th anniversary (1877-1952) of St John Church. The booklet was described in a previous blog post. The photograph shows the construction of the church in 1877.

Flickr page

A Photo of the Construction of St John School in 1929

This photo is included in the booklet published in 1952 for the 75th anniversary (1877-1952) of St John Church. The booklet was described in a previous blog post.

According to a previous blog article about the school's history, this school building was built in 1929, so this photo must be from that year.

This Flickr page shows the photo in its full size.