CHAPTER 1
Ripples
Family History
Books, magazine articles, newspaper accounts, Internet files and Web site data purporting to be "the true story of Johnny Weissmuller, from birth to death"—I have read them all. Most of them are flawed, and many are pure fiction.
Ambrose Bierce once said that history is "an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by [persons] mostly fools." There's a lot of horse sense in that caustic definition, and I suppose that this family history also contains errors as well as information that will be deemed trivial by picky critics. Be that as it may, it is the closest thing to the truth that family records, diligent investigation, and good intentions by this well-meaning fool can make it.
* * *
My grandfather, Petrus Weissmuller, met my grandmother, Elizabeth Kersh, in the year 1902, in the small town of Szabadfalu (later renamed Freidorf, meaning "free village" in German), which was located in the Banat region of Hungary. He was twenty-five, and she was twenty-two. Petrus was a captain in Franz Josef's Austro-Hungarian Army, and he was on leave with a fellow serviceman who lived in Szabadfalu. Petrus and Elizabeth were introduced following a Sunday church service. The chemistry was there.
Petrus courted Elizabeth by mail and promised to come for her when his enlistment in the army expired. The following year he did so, and they were married in Szabadfalu, in the Catholic church where they had first met, on the 18th day of April 1903. The newlyweds lived with Elizabeth's parents in the same town.
Szabadfalu and other small towns in the Banat region—such as Timisoara, Gottlob, Johanisfeld, and Liebling—like most towns in neighboring Transylvania, had been populated by Germanic settlers as early as the thirteenth century. As late as 1919, Banat's population was a mixture of Romanians, Austrians, Serbs, and Hungarians, with the German-speaking Austrians comprising twenty-three percent of the total. The Weissmuller clan (originally Weiszmueller, then Weissmüller—translated as "white miller") were ethnic Austrians.
After boundary changes were made in 1919, following World War I, the Banat area of Hungary became a part of Romania and Yugoslavia (bounded on the north by the Marcos River, on the east by the Transylvanian Alps, on the south by the Danube, and on the west by the Tisza River). It was at this time that Szabadfalu was renamed Freidorf. This caused much confusion in later years concerning records of birth. Many people from that region, to this day (depending upon their birth dates), don't know whether they are legal citizens of Hungary, Romania, or Yugoslavia. Most Austrians, however, don't seem to care so much: "Austrians are Austrians!" they affirm.
On June 2, 1904, Grandmother Elizabeth gave birth to an eleven-pound boy, whom his parents named Janos (John) Weissmuller. Her pregnancy had not been terribly difficult, but Elizabeth did complain, in a letter to her mother, that the baby was "just too heavy." Photocopies of the records of the Roman Catholic Parish of Freidorf, Temes County, Hungary (now Romania), include the following entry:
Baptism Record: Janos (Johann) Weiszmueller, a male, legitimate child, was born 2 June, 1904 and baptized in the parish church on 5 June 1904. His parents were Petrus Weiszmueller, a day worker from Varjas, and Ersebert (Elisabetha) Kersch, of Szabadfalu. The Godparents were Janos Borstner and Katharina Erbesz. Ref: Romanian National Archives, Freidorf Parish Records Baptisms Band 7, No. 40
My grandfather was, apparently, a bluff, hearty man who loved life and people and had grandiose dreams of success and fortune. Mostly, it amounted to just that: dreams. After his marriage, he worked on farms surrounding Szabadfalu, but the work was not steady and generated little income. He began to pressure Elizabeth to emigrate to the United States of America. Elizabeth, who knew that Petrus possessed more imagination than drive, worried that a move to America would change nothing except their location. But Petrus persisted, and, in the fall of 1904, Elizabeth finally agreed. Petrus eventually managed to accumulate enough money to purchase passage for his family on the S.S. Rotterdam, which is recorded in official files as having left the City of Rotterdam on January 14, 1905.
While at sea, Elizabeth wrote a letter to her mother, which she sent after arriving in New York:
I don't know what it will be like there mother. The same for me, I suppose, as it was at home.... I'll be busy caring for Petrus and Janos. Maybe I'll work somewhere. Petrus talks of living in Chicago for awhile. He has some cousins somewhere in the city. I hope things will be good for Petrus there. And I hope Janos will have a life that will make his father and me proud.
The manifest of the S.S. Rotterdam records the arrival in New York on January 26, 1905, of "Peter Weissmuller, age 27, German race, from Szabadfalu, Hungary. Elisabeth, wife, age 24. Johann, child, age 7/12 [seven months old, out of twelve]. No occupation was given for Peter W., and the family was going directly to Windber, Penn. to brother-in-law Johann Ott. Peter W. was in possession of $13.50 and the condition of health is recorded as good for all three members of the family."
Things didn't work out as Elizabeth had hoped. After a brief visit with friends and family in Chicago, my grandparents moved on to Windber, Pennsylvania, at the urging of other relatives who lived there. There was good money, they assured Petrus, to be made in the coal mines of Windber.
Grandfather Petrus went to work in the mines, working long, hard hours. By doing so, he defied local folklore; the people of Windber believed that after the stroke of midnight, the ground shifted and demons appeared—demons who could change human intruders into dust. Ignoring this fable, Petrus worked overtime. He needed money. He was determined to return to Chicago and open a beer saloon. He was, after all, a former captain in Franz Joseph's army, and mining was no career for a man of such distinction. In the meantime, Elizabeth gave birth to my uncle and christened him Petrus Weissmuller, after my grandfather. Uncle Pete came into the world in 1905, and he was the first Weissmuller born a United States citizen.
Upon his eventual return to Chicago, Grandfather Petrus, in affiliation with Keely's Brewery Company, opened his beer saloon, and Grandmother Elizabeth took a job as a cook at Chicago's famous Turn-Verein Society. Located in northwest Chicago, the society sponsored many social events; it offered gym classes, had a fencing team as well as a fife-and-drum band, and ran a public playground. Moreover, the society fed just about everybody who attended its events. Elizabeth was a wonderful cook, and in that capacity she prospered. She was a respected and valued employee of Turn-Verein for many years.
Petrus, however, went bust after squandering money on friends and strangers alike and, presumably, drinking up large quantities of his stock. Elizabeth paid off his debts after the saloon closed, but by that point the marriage had soured. Petrus resented the fact that his wife was a success and he was a failure. That's when the drunken rages and beatings began.
My father, who almost never talked about those early years in
Chicago (other than recalling his...
