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Sesquicentennial Interview: Edith and Paul Kempf

When: 1974

This interview was conducted in 1974 as part of the I Remember When  television series produced by the Ann Arbor Public Library.

Transcript

  • [00:00:11] TED TROST: Mrs. Kempf, why don't you tell us how the Germans came to Ann Arbor?
  • [00:00:17] EDITH KEMPF: In the middle 1820s there was a very young German from the Vicinity of Stuttgart, whose name was Conrad Bissinger. He was a professional baker, learned his trade in Stuttgart. He saved his money and got to Philadelphia, came to our country and went to Philadelphia and got a job in a big hotel. He was young and he read in the papers then that there was land that the federal government had land for sale west of the city of Detroit. Now, I have to remember, it's the 1820s, and he decided he didn't want to spend all his life working in a baker shop, no matter how fine a hotel was. He reared on a farm, and he decided that he'd come out here all alone and see what there was, and he made his way here to Ann Arbor. You have to remember, there was no stage coach, there was no railroad he had to walk out from Detroit. But he came out here, but there were already, west of Ann Arbor on fairly big farms, people of English descent from New York State and the New England states. They were there, but there was still a lot of land for sale, and this Conrad Bissinger, walked west of Ann Arbor and southwest, and he was here for some days and he saw with his own eyes that there was fertile land. He went back to his job in Philadelphia, and he wrote then back to a village called Tierhaupten to his friend, among the people to whom he wrote was my great-great-grandfather Jacob Paul, who came then as soon as that Erie Canal was open. Then quite a few Germans came, but they came on the say-so of Conrad Bissinger because they knew him. It turned out then that Conrad Bissinger married one of my great-great-grandfather's sisters who came along to make her home here, so now that started a big influx from the area of Stuttgart. I was remembering that was if you stop and think what that meant, selling everything you owned, saying goodbye to everybody. Most of those Germans went over through Strasbourg, either walked, there couldn't have been any train in 1828? Could there? No.
  • [00:02:52] TED TROST: Of course no.
  • [00:02:53] EDITH KEMPF: Strasbourg to Paris and to that big French port of Le Havre. There wasn't any Cherbourg. Big French port of Le Havre have sailed from there. Most of them did. Anyway, that started it. They all knew Conrad Bissinger, and that was one way they got started, and they were all Lutherans.
  • [00:03:14] TED TROST: How did the Kempf family then come to Ann Arbor?
  • [00:03:19] EDITH KEMPF: In 1830, there was a young man by the name of Jacob Kempf, who lived in a beautiful little village called Stammheim at the edge of the Black Forest in the county of Calw which is an historic place. This young man had lost his wife, and he had a six-year-old boy, and he decided to remarry, and the new wife had a sister here in Ann Arbor. This is 1830, and her name was Mrs. Sipley. She was here with her husband. These young people and the little six-year-old boy, made all their plans to come to that far away distant place. This is 1830, when young Kempf had a letter from a former neighbor who was in New York City, said, ''Please bring my wife. Couldn't take her and didn't have enough money. I will repay you when I meet the ship", so young Jacob Kempf paid this neighbor's wife's passage. Neighbor met him at the ship in New York and didn't have any money. The Kempf family was almost stranded. What to do. The money that he had paid to pay for the passage of his former neighbor's wife was what was going to bring them to Ann Arbor. [MUSIC] That meant Erie Canal, a ship from Buffalo to Detroit. That's where they all came. Then they had a walk out from Detroit to this little village through the woods and the Potawatomi Indians not very funny. There was no such thing as Chicago. Therefore, there wasn't a stagecoach, do you see? People forget that Chicago is not very old city, so what was young Kempf to do? He didn't know a word of English. He was a farmer. I think that New York City in 1830 had 275,000 people. But they knew somebody in Berks County, B-E-R-K-S in Pennsylvania, they had enough money to get themselves to Berks County. The young couple with a little six-year-old boy. There they were for eight years, never wanting to be in Pennsylvania. After eight years, they had enough money saved, they finally made it to Ann Arbor, and there they stayed [LAUGHTER].
  • [00:05:38] TED TROST: That's very interesting.
  • [00:05:39] EDITH KEMPF: It's tragic kill, you know, to get marooned like that.
  • [00:05:44] TED TROST: What business did they engage in when they came here out of there?
  • [00:05:47] EDITH KEMPF: They were farmers.
  • [00:05:48] TED TROST: All farmers?
  • [00:05:49] EDITH KEMPF: All farmers. But what happened to the next generation was something different, and the third.
  • [00:05:55] TED TROST: What happened then? How about the family of Reuben Kempf?
  • [00:05:59] EDITH KEMPF: Reuben Kempf was named for his two uncles, Reuben and Henry, who ended up being practically owning the town of Chelsea. The Chelsea Commercial and Savings Bank and a great big wool business over there in Reuben Kempf. The great uncle of Reuben Kempf, founded the Farmers and Mechanics Bank here in Ann Arbor and built that big house across from the old entrance to St. Joe Hospital, doctor's offices at Ingalls there that's very different. They were all businessmen.
  • [00:06:30] TED TROST: For now Reuben Kempf was a musician.
  • [00:06:32] EDITH KEMPF: Yes. But he's born and brought up on a farm which is now a part of Briarwood, on Waters Road. Was sent then to Western Europe for his education, was three years at the Royal Conservatory of Music and graduated, and that was a school that was famous for wonderful teachers and discipline with a capital D. That was it, and there were no female students, just male students. I'm talking about boarding students. So with the best education in music that could be had in the 1870s and 80s and right through the 90s, a wonderful music school. That was where he had his education and returned here to Ann Arbor and immediately put out his shingle to be a piano teacher and was so well that he taught for 66 years.
  • [00:07:31] TED TROST: Is that right?
  • [00:07:31] EDITH KEMPF: Sixty-six years. Many of those years right down in that little house on Division Street. What? Piano.
  • [00:07:41] EDITH KEMPF: He was also organ. And he was also an organ teacher but an organist he'd also been trained at the music school to play the organ.
  • [00:07:51] TED TROST: He played the organ in St. Thomas Church.
  • [00:07:54] EDITH KEMPF: One year.
  • [00:07:55] TED TROST: One year?
  • [00:07:55] EDITH KEMPF: St. Thomas Church when he first came back and soon after that, then he was hired by St. Andrews and there he was 33 years.
  • [00:08:04] TED TROST: He was in charge of the boys choir, wasn't he?
  • [00:08:06] PAUL KEMPF: He was a choir director and he developed the boy choir there which consisted of all approximately twenty boys and probably twelve to fourteen men tenors in a course base. He was a very strict choir master and being his son, of course, I got no favors. I assure you that. We were paid the huge sum of 25 cents a month, as I recall, and if anybody was absent for one of the rehearsals he would dock two cents which has accumulated and then divided among those who hadn't missed any of the rehearsals. It wasn't a very profitable enterprise but father ran a very strict show and he tolerated no monkey business at all. On the other hand, in another side to his character, he had the love of those boys. It was probably developed through the summer camp, which was always held at Widenmann Grove. See my mother was a Widenmann and her mother had this property at Whitmore Lake, which is well known Widenmann Grove still and father would take them out there and put up a couple of tents and he'd hire a cook and they'd be out there for two weeks. It was a great affair. They had a baseball team and everything that the kids would enjoyed, boating and so forth. That was one of the events. Then he also put on several theatrical things to raise money for the camp. Among them was Pinafore and Iolanthe and the choir always was a chorus on these things and he did bring in some professionals to take the leading part. In fact, quite a character from Ann Arbor the name of Bliss, he took the part of Dick Deadeye in Pinafore and he had experience in that in New York so we did have some festivals along with him.
  • [00:10:26] TED TROST: Well now while we're on the subject of music I had an opportunity this summer to be out at the German Park for the festival and I understand you were mighty closely associated with that festival this year.
  • [00:10:38] PAUL KEMPF: Well my association was developed as the result of being a commissioner on the Sesquicentennial Commission. I picked for my project, with the consent of the director, the German Day Affair. Now, the park had been there and under operation for many years so that was not a new thing, but it was a development to bring all the Germans we possibly could from the area together so they could all participate and become a part of this event. It involved three major organizations and the Schwaben Verein which group owned the park. They conducted the operation all the way through, and the other two groups joined and they shared the expenses. They brought out here a chorus from Detroit, had about forty voices as I recall, and they entertained a group. We had here at that occasion the Mayor of Tuebingen, that's Ann Arbor's sister city and he had with him a reporter from that town, and also several others from there. They enjoyed it tremendously and they were highly honored being here as guests of the City of Ann Arbor. Well, the publicity that was given to it, thanks to the Ann Arbor News and Mr. Heusel with his, what do I say?
  • [00:12:26] TED TROST: Community Comment Program.
  • [00:12:27] PAUL KEMPF: Community Comment Program. It was well advertised and well attended. If I did not mention it before, in two days, I think there were approximately 2,000 people a day attended that, and they represented all phases of Ann Arbor personality. It wasn't strictly Germans, and everybody attended out there and they served regular German dinners with beer and it was well run and quite an event.
  • [00:13:03] TED TROST: I know it was [LAUGHTER] But now isn't this festival with a picnic a forerunner of German Day. Though you might not have been there, you know something at least about what German Day was like established I guess in the 1870s or 1880s?
  • [00:13:21] EDITH KEMPF: Well I'd say that German Day was an occasion for parade, picnics, some athletic contests out at the Turnverein Park, a little fragment of which remains off of West Madison near Seventh. There's a little street called Turner I believe, Turner Park there. I think it was quite a large park, I don't know how many acres but that was owned by a Turnverein Society and they had annual celebrations there summer only, I believe. I think it all died out by 1900. I think so.
  • [00:14:14] TED TROST: Those vereins were associations sort of like the Masons or groups like that or were there different organizations that did some things in the community?
  • [00:14:25] EDITH KEMPF: I don't think there was anything secret about it.
  • [00:14:26] TED TROST: Nothing secret about?
  • [00:14:28] EDITH KEMPF: No. If you were athletically inclined, you could belong to the Turnverein but I believe you didn't have to be.
  • [00:14:36] TED TROST: I see.
  • [00:14:37] EDITH KEMPF: You didn't have to be. I don't think that took anybody except people of German descent or German born because in that time there were thousands of German born citizens in Ann Arbor.
  • [00:14:49] TED TROST: Well I'm sure that there are many customs from Germany that are meaningful or carried over to this day. What are some of them? Some of the events that you remember?
  • [00:15:02] PAUL KEMPF: Well I don't know whether you call this typically a German event. In fact although they participated in the same way that the others did here in Ann Arbor, it was primarily at Christmas time. I think the Germans probably made more of it, at least in my family, that was the greatest day of the year. It was a ceremony, and of course with my mother who was taught singing, she was a music teacher and father being piano and organ music was the predominating characteristic of the family and the affair usually took place in a family way on Christmas Eve. Of course, there was a tree with a garden, which my mother made out of old crates and then covered up with rugs, and then they would go out to the woods and bring in moss and they would put the moss over the rugs, and then they would have a looking glass in the middle there for representing a lake, and a little bit of a canoe on the lake, and so it went right across the end of the room. Then of course the presents which were for my sister and myself. Now my sister was 12 years older than myself, but we were kids at that time and the presents would be placed around this garden. We weren't allowed in there all day long there was busy activity there. My grandmother and mother in the kitchen making springerle and lebkuchen and what have you, and we could sneak one out the back door if we were quick, but on the other hand the place was kept all curtained off, and we would sit down to dinner that evening and it was always the same. The kids, myself and my sister were primarily anxious to get inside of that curtain, that was the thing that interested us most. However, we didn't get in there until after dinner was over when father or mother, whichever one happened to be closest to the piano sat down and they played Holy Night, Silent Night and several other Christmas carols, which we had to stand in there and sing all the time recognizing the fact that we want to be out in the other room and see what we got for Christmas. After that was over, father went out and he would open the curtain and it was a free for all at that point. It was just a wonderful time. Our presents were rather modest, but things like a baseball glove for me and perhaps a dress for my sister or something like that, nothing in the extreme but the tree was beautiful. They made a great deal of the tree and the garden. Of course, father being the director of the Episcopal Choir at that time he had to get up for that early service on Christmas morning so it meant he would have to retire practically early, and then of course I was in the choir. I had no choice in that matter.
  • [00:18:43] PAUL KEMPF: I had to be down there along with him when he went to choir, and then we had a service at 7 o'clock in the morning, another one at 10:00, and then a children's service at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, which practically took up the entire Christmas day. But the spirit was always there. It was really a very wonderful occasion.
  • [00:19:03] TED TROST: You were at Zion Lutheran Church for Christmas. Sure, they had some glorious festivities.
  • [00:19:10] EDITH KEMPF: Many of my relatives were members of Bethlehem, so I heard what went on there. The big Bethlehem congregation and the big Zion congregation had hundreds and hundreds of children in their Sunday school. There wasn't anybody with a German name in Ann Arbor who didn't go to Sunday school, one of those two churches and that meant practicing for weeks and weeks before Christmas Eve for the big celebration on Christmas Eve, which meant being there promptly at 6:00 and marching two by two down the aisle, which looked very long. It really wasn't so long, but to a child it did and everyone reciting or taking part in a chorus. I never saw the Christmas tree at Bethlehem, but I am told it was huge. At Zion, there was a Christmas tree that must have been 25 feet high. Huge, just huge, all beautifully decorated and that was Christmas Eve for people of German descent. The Sunday school celebration. Then home, and then whatever way people wished to celebrate but all the Ann Arbor people of German descent, baked lebkuchen, springerle. All those things were baked in the kitchens west of Main Street and south of Huron Street. I think you could smell the lebkuchen baking all around. I have to tell one little thing about springerles. That's really a South German cookie made in a mold that we call a model and many of the people had brought their models with them. I have some right here. All hand carved brought them from the old country with them, which was extremely important. You made the springerles out of your own models and had the same pictures every year you see but that was important. Going into the country long before Christmas to gather hickory nuts, for hickory nut drops, without trespassing on any farmers land because there were many hickory nut trees all around Washtenaw County. You could just pick them up, and then you'd have to spend many Sunday afternoons, at least I did for weeks before Christmas picking up hickory nuts picking the nuts out, nut meats out, but that was a very important family time too, especially on Christmas Day. Now one thing I would like to add about springerles. In October of 1930, the Prince Louis Ferdinand, the second son of the crown prince of Germany, grandson of the abdicated Kaiser, came to spend a day with us at the Kempf House because he was working in Detroit, at Ford Motor Company. He was very young, and he had learned to speak English very well. Now, when we told him about the springerles, he had no idea what they were, but the Hohenzollern family, although they came from near Stuttgart, they've been up there in Berlin for so many years. They didn't know what springerles were. I always thought that was very funny. They didn't know, never heard of them, but then you have to remember that he was a child during World War I. See, and that did things too to everybody in Germany, but anyway, the Christmas cookies were extremely important. Everybody baked German Christmas cookies.
  • [00:23:03] TED TROST: They still do.
  • [00:23:04] EDITH KEMPF: They still do. I have a model right here.
  • [00:23:10] TED TROST: What would you say were some of these?
  • [00:23:12] CATHERINE ANDERSON: I just want I want a description of the Christmas tree.
  • [00:23:15] EDITH KEMPF: Trees were always the ordinary short. What do we say?
  • [00:23:25] PAUL KEMPF: What we call a short needle tree and I'm sure it was the same in your house, as it was in my house. It went practically to ceiling. When my children grew up, I think one of the nicest things which I happen to think of by accident, I had them go out and cut their own Christmas tree each year. We'd go out West Liberty Street.
  • [00:23:52] EDITH KEMPF: Scio township.
  • [00:23:53] PAUL KEMPF: Scio township, and there was a farmer out there who would sell trees on the ground, but we'd go out with an ax and chop them and bring them in. I'm sure my children are there for that just a part of the sentiment and the pleasure that came along with Christmas.
  • [00:24:09] CATHERINE ANDERSON: How did you decorate them?
  • [00:24:12] PAUL KEMPF: I didn't hear.
  • [00:24:14] TED TROST: How did you decorate these trees? Mrs. Kempf?
  • [00:24:20] EDITH KEMPF: With old ornaments that had been used for several generations.
  • [00:24:25] TED TROST: Using candles at some time?
  • [00:24:26] EDITH KEMPF: Always candles.
  • [00:24:27] TED TROST: The real thing.
  • [00:24:29] EDITH KEMPF: The real thing.
  • [00:24:30] TED TROST: To wonder.
  • [00:24:31] EDITH KEMPF: I don't know why we didn't have lots of fires in Ann Arbor, but I don't think we ever did. I think that was because parents and grandparents watched you.
  • [00:24:40] TED TROST: Very carefully.
  • [00:24:42] EDITH KEMPF: While the candles on the trees were lighted, do you see?
  • [00:24:46] PAUL KEMPF: They were heavily decorated, I might add. I can recall our tree which is about the height of this room with this garden in front of it and it was certainly had a hard time seeing the needles sometimes, for beautiful Christmas ornaments all over the tree. Very few carried any special significance. I recall one little one, I have downstairs yet. I saved that as a trinket. It was what you might call a ground keeper's lantern, probably thinking of the Schwarzwald in Germany or something of that sort where the keeper would travel, and he had to have a light at night, and that lantern was about that high and square with isinglass in it and well, that's the only thing I remember. It was really an old piece.
  • [00:25:35] EDITH KEMPF: Basic difference is, lebkuchen are molasses, flour and many other things, cinnamon and whatnot, nuts, and citron, but a springerle is white flour with eggs and lots of sugar. They're very different and see down the bottom but the cinnamon stars are the works of art that are so expensive. The finest sugar with egg white and ground almonds and cinnamon. They are works of art, but there you can imagine what they will cost this year and the other little pfeffernusse, have a lot of pepper in them.
  • [00:26:25] TED TROST: It's delicious.
  • [00:26:26] EDITH KEMPF: Yes, very good. Not many people bake them anymore.
  • [00:26:32] TED TROST: Well, could you tell us too about what you think are some of the strengths of German family life because the family was very close, right?
  • [00:26:41] EDITH KEMPF: Discipline with a capital D. That was the anchor of the life in Ann Arbor of Germans. All the children of German descent were disciplined alike. Therefore, you didn't know you were disciplined. You understand what I mean?
  • [00:27:00] TED TROST: That's interesting.
  • [00:27:00] EDITH KEMPF: Everybody was disciplined. Everybody went to Sunday school. Everybody, the girls did their chores on Saturdays at home. The boys always had chores to do, things to do around the house and discipline of obedience to family.
  • [00:27:17] PAUL KEMPF: We developed, I think, probably an unusual respect for our parents in those days. We wouldn't think of going too far astray, because it might have been most disastrous. Matter of fact, my father had a little woodshed out in the back of the house. In it was a coal bin. On occasion in the fall of the year, he would put a small barrel of cider out there, but if I got out of line anywhere, it was out in the woodshed where we settled the dispute. I can assure you I can remember that very distinctly. [LAUGHTER].
  • [00:27:53] TED TROST: We have discipline of children, respect for parents, but there was also a great deal of love.
  • [00:27:59] EDITH KEMPF: Yes, that went with it and another thing outstanding. I knew very few families who didn't have under their roofs a grandmother or a grandfather. All the old people always were taken care of by their children or their grandchildren, everyone. In the Kempf House, there was a grandmother for 33 years. Yes.
  • [00:28:25] TED TROST: My home too, our grandmother came in.
  • [00:28:29] EDITH KEMPF: Sure. Grandparents were taken care of with love.
  • [00:28:34] TED TROST: What do you think looking over the history of Ann Arbor, I know you've seen this community change, but what do you think is the real contribution that the German population has made to our city?
  • [00:28:46] EDITH KEMPF: Well, a lot of hard work to begin with and founding many of the institutions, and the influence of those two big congregations, the Bethlehem and the Zion Lutherans, very important over the years, although there was only the one Bethlehem Church for many, many years till 1875, and it was pure Lutheran. All the Germans went to Bethlehem Church. That's very important. But the Germans worked so hard and many of them came to own their own businesses, which was something too. Some of them became quite well to do. Now all those pioneers who came to Ann Arbor, all were farmers without higher education, except the clergy, the medical doctors, there were a few who came very well educated, of course, from German universities. The ancestor of the Eberbach family. He was an educated chemist, but all the rest were farmers.
  • [00:29:56] TED TROST: He was the founder of the Eberbach Pharmacy.
  • [00:29:59] EDITH KEMPF: Yes. But all the rest were farmers. There weren't any educated Germans that came to Ann Arbor people would [OVERLAPPING] They worked hard.
  • [00:30:09] PAUL KEMPF: Another thing you can add there, getting back to music again, Father developed this men's chorus, which aroused great interest in that male chorus idea throughout the state. He took this group from Ann Arbor, and they went to, like, Saginaw and Detroit and other towns, and they in turn all developed choruses there, too.
  • [00:30:37] TED TROST: Was that the Zahner fest?
  • [00:30:38] EDITH KEMPF: Lyra Gesangverein.
  • [00:30:40] TED TROST: Lyra.
  • [00:30:40] PAUL KEMPF: It was a forerunner to bring about something we haven't got today, a great comradeship among these groups. It made Ann Arbor a central part on the music which later developed by the May Festival, which we have here. In fact, the first May Festival that I recall, because I was impressed, it's held in old University Hall. At that time, Father had the only grand piano in this area. They would come down with a truck and take the piano out of Father's front room, take it up on the truck, and it was used for the concert. I can remember, Schumann-Heink she was a close friend of Mother's, and she came down there as a piano was being moved, and Mother, being a teacher in music had a large mirror at one end of the room to teach proper posture, I think. Schumann-Heink looked at that. She saw the piano go out and she said, could I have that mirror sent up there, too, said, I have a dressing room, but I've never had a mirror in Ann Arbor. The mirror finally went along, too. But I think the of course, I'm naturally prejudiced having been raised in a musical family, where you heard music from 7:00 in the morning until it was too late to see, well, in daytime, mother teaching voice, Father teaching piano. These developments which came out of that, the early music history of Ann Arbor, the boy choir. Father that was his forte, and Mother turned out many well known, like Robert Dieterle, for example. That family. He developed a wonderful voice and father placed him in a New York choir. It was a start of the enterprise of music, let me put it that way, in the Ann Arbor area, and it was a forerunner to what is today the great May Festival which is here.
  • [00:33:04] EDITH KEMPF: German Day of the 70s and 80s and 90s was an outdoor celebration with parades and lots of food and games. Game, what?
  • [00:33:20] PAUL KEMPF: Bands.
  • [00:33:21] EDITH KEMPF: Yes. That ceased, I think, about 1900. The celebration of that I think ended about 1900. Now, what is now celebrated at the German Park out on Pontiac Road came about because a group of German born citizens wished to have a place in the woods or the country where they could meet in the summer for picnics and celebrations and that is how the German Park on Pontiac Road began to be used for such thing, how it was bought by a group of German born citizens. Most of who came between World War I and World War II.
  • [00:34:19] TED TROST: They've continued to have these festivals. Right there till present and you are.
  • [00:34:23] EDITH KEMPF: Yes.
  • [00:34:24] TED TROST: In charge of the one we had this year? Well representing really sesquicentennial.
  • [00:34:29] PAUL KEMPF: I represented the sesquicentennial and I didn't have much to do after I got things started. They took the ball out they're pretty able. Yes.
  • [00:34:38] EDITH KEMPF: That's right. Good. Question.
  • [00:34:42] CATHERINE ANDERSON: The other thing I wanted to know was, what else do they do? They must raise. You have three groups. The Schwaben Verein.
  • [00:34:50] TED TROST: What are the other two?
  • [00:34:54] EDITH KEMPF: No. I can't even tell you.
  • [00:34:56] TED TROST: The only the only group that's left now, Catherine, is a Schwaben Verein.
  • [00:35:00] CATHERINE ANDERSON: We had three presents.
  • [00:35:02] TED TROST: Well, they have two insurance groups. Is that tied in with this.
  • [00:35:07] EDITH KEMPF: That's right. There was an Arbeiter understood shrine or something. Yeah. But those are not very old society.
  • [00:35:15] TED TROST: No, those are.
  • [00:35:16] EDITH KEMPF: Schwaben Verein came about because all these people came from south Germany.
  • [00:35:23] TED TROST: We talked a little earlier about music. Tell me about this Mr. Fischer. I understand there was a man by the name of Fischer who the father of the Michigan band in some way. That's what I've heard.
  • [00:35:34] EDITH KEMPF: That's not Ike Fischer.
  • [00:35:36] PAUL KEMPF: He Fischer, I'm thinking of ran a bunch of orchestras.
  • [00:35:40] TED TROST: That's the man Ike Fischer. That was Ike.
  • [00:35:44] EDITH KEMPF: But his father was Bethlehem Organist.
  • [00:35:47] TED TROST: But this man was the band man.
  • [00:35:51] PAUL KEMPF: Not a band man, really. He was he had 22 orchestras, at one time, composed almost about an agent or something like that. Composed almost entirely of students. I know quite a bit about it because I was on one of those bands, and there comes a little story. Father tried to convert both my sister and myself, and my mother joined him in becoming somewhat of a classical musician, if such a thing were possible. But it didn't take very well because I think we heard so much music from the morning we went to bed at night to with music. But however, when I did get into college, I took up the banjo. My father took a very dim view of that operation. He said, now, if you insist on that thing, it'll be all right with me, but you buy your own books, you pay your own tuition. This is your home, you'll make your headquarters here, but you're going to pay for your own education. That was all right with me because I was doing very well with the banjo. [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:37:01] PAUL KEMPF: I forgot what I backed up on that story.
  • [00:37:04] EDITH KEMPF: That Ike Fischer was a university graduate. I think he graduated from the law school.
  • [00:37:10] PAUL KEMPF: He did.
  • [00:37:10] EDITH KEMPF: To him, that sounded dull because he was a gifted pianist. He had two sisters, very gifted pianists. But Ike, his proper name was Eugene, couldn't stay away from the piano. In the 1900s, at the turn of the century, when he was a very young man, everybody danced. He had to have lots of had to have orchestras. He founded one orchestra. He organized one in which he played the piano. From that point on, he really controlled the dance bands on the University of Michigan campus.
  • [00:37:55] PAUL KEMPF: A lot of talent in among the student groups.
  • [00:37:59] EDITH KEMPF: Sure.
  • [00:38:00] PAUL KEMPF: He'd got five to eight piano players, that many violin players, and so many so forth. He split these orchestras up. It was a circus. Here in Ann Arbor, we had at that time, Granger's Academy. You probably have heard of that. We also had the Armory. I played at the Armory every Saturday night for several years. Those were the two big spots. Then, of course, the orchestras got pretty good here in Ann Arbor because there was so much young student blood in them. We were, finally, we would play for the DAC in Detroit. To other places, I can remember playing in point of bark. Large groups from Detroit would have these formal parties, and they had to have Fischer's orchestra. I did all right. He was a good musician.
  • [00:39:00] EDITH KEMPF: Among the very the most gifted pianist was Professor Phil Diamond, who taught German here for many years. He played for Ike Fischer for a long time.
  • [00:39:12] PAUL KEMPF: We finally branched out and formed his own group.
  • [00:39:16] TED TROST: Young people are doing that today, too.
  • [00:39:18] PAUL KEMPF: It's a little different type of music.
  • [00:39:20] TED TROST: Music.
  • [00:39:21] TED TROST: But I don't know. I had trouble when our boy took up the drums. I thought he would take something a little more like the piano. But that could have been like the banjo, the drums you need in every [OVERLAPPING]
  • [00:39:37] CATHERINE ANDERSON: The other thing I wanted to know was, well, anyway, going back to the Schwaben Verein, how else do they make money besides fair that German Festival Park Day? I don't know what's called.
  • [00:39:54] EDITH KEMPF: Shall I answer? Well, to begin with, it's a very old organization, and they own real estate on Ashley Street. You see? They've owned that for many years. The financial background for them on Ashley, between West Washington and West Liberty. It says on the door, Schwaben Hall. They've owned that from.
  • [00:40:19] PAUL KEMPF: They keep their operation going through dues. As a unit, they're not a money making outfit. It's not a tax free outfit or anything like that. It's like a club. You belong to Barton Hills, you take out a membership. That's what keeps these groups going. Does that answer your question? I think that's probably the best answer.
  • [00:40:49] TED TROST: What else you got got almost everything, Catherine.
  • [00:40:56] CATHERINE ANDERSON: Oh, do you have any anecdotes that you'd like any other things that you can think about? [LAUGHING] I can't think of anything that's happened in the last 50 years or so? Language?
  • [00:41:25] EDITH KEMPF: That's the sad just died out. The language has died out. There are no more German services in Bethlehem Church.
  • [00:41:37] TED TROST: No, not yes. There are. Christmas they have one and Good Friday.
  • [00:41:41] EDITH KEMPF: And good Friday. There are none at Zion Lutheran. Haven't been for a long time. German, I believe, can still be heard at St. Paul's.
  • [00:41:51] TED TROST: Yes.
  • [00:41:51] EDITH KEMPF: Yes. But by and large, you see, here we are thousands of Ann Arborites with these German names and younger generations don't know the language, which is sad. Very sad.
  • [00:42:06] TED TROST: I can give an anecdote.
  • [00:42:08] CATHERINE ANDERSON: When?
  • [00:42:09] TED TROST: I had one of my elders come in one time very much concerned about the problem of not having enough young people in the church. He said the answer is that we teach the catechism in German again. Now, I didn't believe that, but he did. Isn't that interesting? That was just within the last year and a half.
  • [00:42:29] PAUL KEMPF: That's great.
  • [00:42:31] TED TROST: But I think what he was saying, and I think this is very significant is that somehow, some of these glorious customs of the past, some of these marvelous traditions that were meaningful to his parents and to grandparents. They should be valuable today, and somehow this generation feels they've lost something. I think that's all he was trying to tell me. I think in that sense, he was on to something very meaningful.
  • [00:42:54] PAUL KEMPF: I think you're right.
  • [00:42:55] EDITH KEMPF: Confirmation in the Lutheran Church was a once in a lifetime thing, something you were prepared for from the first day of Sunday school. Confirmation today is a different service. There is no more pre-form, which was a question Sunday before confirmation, a question shot at you at random by the pastor, and you'd better know your Martin Luther's catechism or else, because if you couldn't answer the question, you were not supposed to be confirmed. You sat in fear trembling, but you answered.
  • [00:43:39] TED TROST: We've still done it down at Bethlehem except we don't require that the answers be memorized, but I don't tell them what questions they're going to get. But it's different, and our confirmation always used to be on Palm Sunday.
  • [00:43:55] EDITH KEMPF: Yes.
  • [00:43:56] TED TROST: Now they moved it to Pentecost. I don't like that.
  • [00:43:58] EDITH KEMPF: I know you don't like that either, even for Zion. Another thing, well, every girl preparing for marriage had a very large aussteuer, a trousseau, and that was supposed to last a lifetime and you were supposed to stay married. The divorce was not very common, don't you see? Among that wasn't among the people of German descent. It was not common. No. That took a lot of doing to get a trousseau ready.
  • [00:44:38] TED TROST: A lot of preparation.
  • [00:44:41] PAUL KEMPF: Probably hand made.
  • [00:44:42] EDITH KEMPF: Make a lot of it yourself. Sure.
  • [00:44:46] CATHERINE ANDERSON: There's not a lot of cohesiveness among the German community now is there?
  • [00:44:50] EDITH KEMPF: No.
  • [00:44:50] CATHERINE ANDERSON: Like there was?
  • [00:44:50] EDITH KEMPF: No, there isn't. No, sad to say. No, there isn't. They don't have that fierce pride in ancestry that they used to have.
  • [00:45:01] CATHERINE ANDERSON: What do you think has caused that?
  • [00:45:05] EDITH KEMPF: I've often wondered about that. Parents, not talking to them about being proud of ancestry for one thing. I think that's one of the things that has done it. I was remembering that there are many of us here who are descended from those Germans who came before there was a Michigan Central Railroad. Pioneer days were the hard days. Once people started to come here in the comforts of the New York Central Railway coach, such as those comforts were, that's a different story. But to be so we seem to have lost that pride in ancestry and what those ancestors had to accomplish because when those first Germans came out to Scio Township, there still were Potawatomi Indians out on Jackson Avenue. I know that to be a fact, and they were there for, I think, until the middle 1830s. Well, and there was the land to be tilled, that was really hard labor.
  • [00:46:14] PAUL KEMPF: Well, perhaps that's the difference. In those days, the men of the family were educated in farming, raising cattle, and things of that sort as opposed to what the young man does today. He goes into a university. He becomes a business administrator, a lawyer, a doctor.
  • [00:46:41] PAUL KEMPF: When he gets through, he doesn't have the necessity for falling back on his father. His father's father, for the trade that they developed, he goes off on his own. To me, that's a very important factor in the change that has occurred. Years ago, they not only farmed, but they did trapping around here. We have a doctor across the street who was raised in the Upper Peninsula. He recalls very well putting himself through school by running a trap line. Well, of course, that's entirely different today.
  • [00:47:16] TED TROST: Wouldn't you say also that with the decrease and the use of the language, this obviously has an effect? But I think there's something else, and I just think this out as a suggestion. The fact that I think the role expectation, what was expected of a father, of a mother was much more, and of a child, was much more clearly defined within the culture and by the culture. I think also the opportunity to identify with fathers in these roles, and with mothers too, was much greater because you'd see dad at work on the farm or you're working at the shoe shop. You just didn't buy bread at the A&P. Mother would bake it. That contributed to cohesiveness don't you think?
  • [00:48:02] PAUL KEMPF: I think that's very important.
  • [00:48:04] TED TROST: You remember some of the things mother did? Maybe?
  • [00:48:05] PAUL KEMPF: Sure.
  • [00:48:08] TED TROST: Other times than Christmas?
  • [00:48:10] PAUL KEMPF: Yes. Sure.
  • [00:48:12] EDITH KEMPF: Well, the truth of the matter was that Mrs. Pauline Widenmann Kempf was so busy giving singing lessons and singing around Ann Arbor that she always had to have a hired girl. That was different.
  • [00:48:24] PAUL KEMPF: Then Grandma Widenmann lived with us too. She had a strong hand in the kitchen, but you're absolutely correct. There was something that came down from generation to generation. For instance, the boy on a fire might wind up shoeing horses. Or he'd be an expert with a hammer and a hot fire for bending iron and making things of that sort. They aren't here today that specialization.
  • [00:48:48] EDITH KEMPF: Now, when World War I came along here in Ann Arbor, that was something. A group of people here in this town were backers of the French Red Cross. They gave a bazaar and sale in Harris Hall. Now, there were thousands of people in Ann Arbor of German descent you see it at that time, and this was months before we declared war on Germany. These German women, men got together, rented the Ann Arbor Armory which was quite a new structure then. This was in May of 1916, and they put on a bazaar, and a sale, and raised $6,000 in two days and sent it to the German Red Cross. Then we entered the war and our boys went overseas. Here we were our company I, I think half of the boys in Company I later changed to Company E and became a part of the 32nd Red Arrow Division. Really got in right away to the Battle of the Marne and all the other big battles. Here were these especially in that division because here were boys of Ann Arbor, German descent, boys from all over Michigan. Soldiers from that was Wisconsin also. You see what it did here were these German speaking boys fighting in France. Now then, things really changed after World War I in Ann Arbor. Some people, and I knew some of them, were terribly ashamed of their German ancestry. They were. Well, but they were. Not me. I've always been proud of it, the pioneer. Now, but that's one thing. Some people even left the so called German churches. They were just ashamed of their German ancestry, which was too bad, I think for them, but that's what happened.
  • [00:51:00] PAUL KEMPF: At the consequence of the war, you're torn in one direction and you're torn in the other direction, and the young kids don't know which way to go. I think it would happen if we started war with the Turks today. The same thing would be prevalent. They don't get the price of gasoline down where we're going to have to have a war, I'm afraid.
  • [00:51:19] TED TROST: What are our Greek friends going to do?
  • [00:51:22] PAUL KEMPF: That's important.
  • [00:51:23] EDITH KEMPF: Good people like us descended from those first Germans. We never wavered if you understand. No one could ever make us ashamed of our German ancestry. That's not possible. Not possible.
  • [00:51:35] CATHERINE ANDERSON: How did you feel during World War II? What was the sentiment here?
  • [00:51:40] EDITH KEMPF: That's another story. There were a number of Ann Arbor residents, German born who got it. Well, I think they talked a little too much. Now, I'm talking about Germans who came here after World War I. For us, descended from those early pioneers, we thought it was a dreadful situation. We had been in Germany. Just three years, my husband and I had been there on a long visit in 1930, and our German relatives had told us then that the president von Hindenburg cannot live much longer. He had a firm rule over Germany, the great General from Hindenburg. They said, Here is this man by the name of Hitler, this foreigner, this Austrian, coming in and getting his fingers into everything. You see, we understood the situation. When Hitler became powerful, people like us were shocked. We couldn't believe it. Couldn't understand it.
  • [00:52:50] TED TROST: There was less confusion though, about fighting in World War II.
  • [00:52:53] EDITH KEMPF: There was no confusion.
  • [00:52:54] TED TROST: No confusion at all.
  • [00:52:55] EDITH KEMPF: There was absolutely no confusion.
  • [00:52:56] TED TROST: That we felt.
  • [00:52:57] EDITH KEMPF: No. World War II was something else. After all, that was very different.
  • [00:53:04] CATHERINE ANDERSON: The Germans are still in a majority here in Ann Arbor?
  • [00:53:09] EDITH KEMPF: German descent? Well, I don't know. I'm wondering. I think probably, but remember, the pioneer days, it wasn't the Germans who settled this town. It was the English people from Virginia, New York State, the New England states. They were the pioneers because there weren't any Germans here until 1828. Remember our town dates from 1824. See? We had very many wonderful people, like the pioneer Rufus Knight who had 600 acres out on Scio Church Road and a lot of people like that who are pure English. The Germans couldn't get here until the Erie Canal opened. That brought it. They just couldn't get here. Didn't even try to. I was mistaken when they said they walked. Those Germans I'm told, would sell everything they had, but a big wagon and two horses. Then they would make their way would from their farms. They could go drive. It took a long time all the way to Strasbourg and up through Paris to the big French Port of Le Havre sell the team and the wagon there. My own great grandparents, Frederick and Maria Barbara Wildt Staebler did another thing. They went to Rotterdam where they changed. Do you say exchanged their German money? There wasn't any United Germany, you must remember that or just kingdoms. What money they had, they changed into Dutch gold coins because they were sure that if they sailed from Rotterdam to New York, that in New York City, the Dutch gold coins would have full value because the Dutch have never had any great financial upheavals in their monetary system, but not very many Germans did that. That's a long way from Stuttgart up to Rotterdam.
  • [00:55:11] CATHERINE ANDERSON: Can you think of anything else?
  • [00:55:12] TED TROST: No, I think all you've been out there.
  • [00:55:14] CATHERINE ANDERSON: Alright, the only thing I want to do is
  • [00:55:16] PAUL KEMPF: Would you like one of those, if you haven't seen?
  • [00:55:22] EDITH KEMPF: Yes. I really would. Very much. I've given so many away
  • [00:55:26] CATHERINE ANDERSON: Picture of the Kempf house.
  • [00:55:28] EDITH KEMPF: Oh, we'll show you something in the hall here.
  • [00:55:30] MALE_1: Mr. Kempf, can I ask you a question about the banjo?
  • [00:55:32] PAUL KEMPF: Yeah. You're a musician. I can tell.
  • [00:55:35] MALE_1: I'm a budding musician. Was it a five string or a four-string tenor?
  • [00:55:41] PAUL KEMPF: A four-string tenor.
  • [00:55:42] MALE_1: Did you just strum it or get fancy and pick it?
  • [00:55:47] PAUL KEMPF: I started out and I could only play in one key. That was my start. I had just picked it up rather quickly and I can remember Bill O Donald, who was one of the best piano players we had. He was a student here in the university in the School of Medicine. Bill would turn around from the piano. He'd say, Kempf, no banjo. We're in three flats. [LAUGHTER] That was until I learned do you see?
  • [00:56:12] TED TROST: That's beautiful.
  • [00:56:15] PAUL KEMPF: What do you play?
  • [00:56:16] MALE_1: Basically on a guitar right now.
  • [00:56:18] PAUL KEMPF: Guitar.
  • [00:56:19] MALE_1: I'm learning keyboards for school.
  • [00:56:21] EDITH KEMPF: You're learning what?
  • [00:56:22] MALE_1: Keyboards, organ, piano.
  • [00:56:24] EDITH KEMPF: Oh, I see.
  • [00:56:26] CATHERINE ANDERSON: My husband plays the piano.
  • [00:56:28] TED TROST: Very nicely, he's doing the music on the background music that starts the show.
  • [00:56:33] EDITH KEMPF: Oh, is that so? A teacher?
  • [00:56:35] CATHERINE ANDERSON: No, my husband's an architect.
  • [00:56:37] EDITH KEMPF: He's an architect. Oh, what do you know?
  • [00:56:39] TED TROST: A darn good piano player.
  • [00:56:41] CATHERINE ANDERSON: A darn good piano player.
  • [00:56:42] EDITH KEMPF: Good, and you don't play the piano?
  • [00:56:46] CATHERINE ANDERSON: I played for a while. I don't enjoy playing the piano. I like to sing.
  • [00:56:50] EDITH KEMPF: Oh, that's nice. That's fine.
  • [00:56:53] CATHERINE ANDERSON: We don't make a very good team though, 'cause we're both hams.
  • [00:56:56] EDITH KEMPF: Oh.
  • [00:56:57] CATHERINE ANDERSON: Play so we aren't very good together, but oh, dear.
  • [00:57:03] EDITH KEMPF: I think one reason there was so much music in years gone by in Ann Arbor, every child in the big Sunday school, Bethlehem, Zion Lutheran, sang. Every Sunday, you sang in Sunday school, you sang in church. You learned from the time you were five-years-old, you sang. You see? Sure, you sang Sunday school hymns, but you sang and in church, the great chorales.
  • [00:57:27] TED TROST: You learned those.
  • [00:57:29] EDITH KEMPF: Learned a great deal of music.
  • [00:57:31] TED TROST: That's one of the most precious part of my heritage those chorales. I love them.
  • [00:57:37] EDITH KEMPF: When Marilyn Mason Brown dedicated our pipe organ at Zion Lutheran Church, she asked me if I had a book and I said, I did have one that had been my grandfather Michael Staebler's. He'd been a forsch herr in Bethlehem Church. But anyway, I still have it here. The book was printed in Stuttgart. That's the real thing for the Lutheran chorales and from that book, then she made her own arrangements for the dedication of the pipe organ and what was then the new Zion Lutheran Church on West Liberty. Do you know what I'm talking about?
  • [00:58:09] TED TROST: We went past Zion Lutheran when we went out yesterday.
  • [00:58:14] EDITH KEMPF: Marilyn Mason Brown is certainly our best known organist for miles around. Is the first woman ever invited to play Westminster Abbey. In 1955, we're going through Westminster Abbey here, we're some great big posters, Professor Marilyn Mason of the University of Michigan will give a recital here. Imagine that. But anyway, the Germans, God bless them. The German pioneers.
  • [00:58:46] TED TROST: I'll never forget a story, and I haven't told the kids yet.
  • [00:58:49] EDITH KEMPF: What's it?
  • [00:58:51] TED TROST: What my father said to me. He said, Teddy, you're going to have to learn German. I said, Yes father, but why? He said so you will know how to answer on the great day of judgment. That's the language of Heaven. Fortunately, my mother tampered it, and there was a little humor, but I thought, it might be true. I've noticed that the Germans feel very much toward their language as the Jewish people do toward Hebrew because word is so important and there are expressions, as I read Luther's sermons, and he was a tremendous communicator, powerful man, that you just don't get the full force of it, except in the German. The language is so open, so vivid creative representation.
  • [00:59:48] PAUL KEMPF: Let me give you a sequel on your dad. Your story you've just given. I took German two years in college under Professor Diekhoff. I don't know whether you knew him or not. Always a wonderful German professor and I had trouble with my der, die, and das and one morning on an open questioning in the room, he called on me. He knew father and mother really well and I made the mistake, as usual. He said, Paul, shame on your name. I'll never forget. Of course, the rest of the class. I knew everybody everybody came down. Shame on your name.
  • [01:00:32] EDITH KEMPF: The two big term Lutheran churches have a vital role in the development of this town. A vital role, and then something that to me has been very amusing in those pioneer days that your machine is off, isn't it?
  • [01:00:48] MALE_1: It's just about.
  • [01:00:49] EDITH KEMPF: What?
  • [01:00:49] TED TROST: What is just about it? You can say this. This will be edited.
  • [01:00:53] EDITH KEMPF: In those pioneer days, that were just a handful. Never make friends down in Saint Thomas they were all Irish down there. They made all their friends in the two Lutheran churches. Oh, they did.
  • [01:01:07] TED TROST: That's true to this day. The German.
  • [01:01:11] EDITH KEMPF: Did you ever meet the Monsignor Peek who was the pastor here for quite a few years?
  • [01:01:15] TED TROST: I knew Father Howard.
  • [01:01:17] EDITH KEMPF: Oh, this is quite a while before him and Father Howard was an Ann Arbor native by the way. Anyway, Monsignor Peek was here for quite a few years. He's not very well, and he's old. He's living in some place in Arizona. Sister who keeps came to visit. One of our Irish friends, a member of St. Thomas's, their name doesn't need to be mentioned, said apropos of what's happening down there now. Since the Cardinal put St. Thomas's into the Lansing Diocese and cut it off from Detroit, they have the pastor down there, whose name is Father Myers, and his assistant is Father Koenigsknecht. Wow and those Irish down there? Monsignor Peek said when he was here visiting a couple of weeks ago to this friend of ours, time is short. St. Thomas's is going from the Irish and the Italians to the krautheads, [LAUGHTER] the German clergy.
  • [01:02:27] TED TROST: I always loved the German clergy. Catholic faith, they had a sense of humor. They were a little different from the Italian minister.
  • [01:02:38] EDITH KEMPF: Course you know they came here to Freedom Township in 1840's. That little group, this German Catholics out there, and had a little church first on Schneider Road, and then still had that big rather large cemetery west of Bethel Church. Bethel Church Road there. They had a beautiful little church, and it said St. Franziskuskirche, St. Francis Church, stood until about 1927 or '28. Then everybody had a car and all those German parishioners had to go to mass in Manchester. All of the Fritz brothers and their sister, they didn't have cars, and the neighbors had to take them to Manchester, but there were lots of stories told out there, too. Our town really something nowadays. I'm shocked at the trouble the juveniles get into.
  • [01:03:36] CATHERINE ANDERSON: Professor Wahr mentioned that too. Shocked. No, we talked about that. Some of the crime how he's afraid to go out.
  • [01:03:44] PAUL KEMPF: But I think we're all shocked on that situation. It's taken some pretty drastic positions in our city here.
  • [01:03:52] CATHERINE ANDERSON: I'm surprised, too. Somebody was telling me that they read a report about how Ann Arbor has some of the highest crime rate.
  • [01:03:58] EDITH KEMPF: Yeah [OVERLAPPING]
  • [01:04:00] PAUL KEMPF: Absolutely. That's right.
  • [01:04:02] CATHERINE ANDERSON: I wonder where it's all happen. I don't really find out, but I'm wondering where it's all happening.
  • [01:04:06] EDITH KEMPF: If you hear on a Monday morning that the police have answered what, 595 calls over the weekend? The sheriff's department answered hundreds of calls in a weekend and so many prisoners that we have to farm them out. Some of them are up in the Livingston County jails, some of they're all around.
  • [01:04:32] PAUL KEMPF: We're in a bad situation. I think everybody who is alive around here today is worried. We do things, we lock our home, we do things that we never used to leave. We never had a key to my home when we lived on Division Street. We come home and find people in there, and they're always friends. They're waiting for us to get back.
  • [01:04:53] EDITH KEMPF: The Kempfs would lock the front door if they were going to drive to Whitmore Lake to that large property out there, and we're going to be back in a few hours and put the key on the ledge of the first window nearest the door. Let us suppose then it was a reunion time or commencement time, the University of Michigan. Always were some former pupils coming back and they knew just where the key was. They'd simply unlock the door and go and sit down and wait for the Kempfs to come home [LAUGHTER].
  • [01:05:25] TED TROST: Open house.
  • [01:05:27] EDITH KEMPF: Sure. I have often wished that I knew how many hundred, there must have been several thousand people had piano lessons and singing lessons in that little house because the Kempfs carried a very heavy load. I have my mother in law's book about 1905, and she had something like 60 pupils in a week. Even if it's only a half hour lesson, it's a lot of teaching. You see? It's a lot of teaching.
  • [01:06:02] EDITH KEMPF: This is Abraham Lincoln's signature. This was in Mr. [INAUDIBLE] office where the National Bank is at the corner of Washington Street and this document was stolen in 1874. We know this because Paul's friend became ill, went to retire to Whitmore Lake and died out there. Let's see, that's '74. During World War II, this turned up for sale at the [INAUDIBLE] Gallery in York City and was bought by Mr. Sweet, who was a noted collector. Mr. Sweet was someone who made his living buying only things signed by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He came here to Clements Library and they were about to buy it. But Randolph Adams was told that was Paul Kempf's grandfather, my husband, and my cousin were in a government meeting in Chicago. And Randolph Adams said to me that if you want it, you want to buy it back, and you've got to bring your check tomorrow morning because if you don't Mr. Sweet will be back in New York City and he will buy it.
  • [01:07:13] EDITH KEMPF: This wooden roller suspended between two handles was hand-carved in Germany in 1830 and brought to Ann Arbor by the Kempf family. It is rolled over a piece of the springerle dough, which should be rolled out to a width of well, possibly half an inch. It is very carefully rolled and then the indentures remain in the dough and make what we call the pictures. You see birds, flowers, churches, houses, ducks, bees, so on and so forth anything you want, you see. Then the dough is simply cut so that each little cookie is separate and each one is placed on a well-greased pan and is generously sprinkled with anise seed, and so then they are baked and that's why a real springerle cookie always has anise seed on the bottom and that's how they're made. Thank you.