John Krogmann’s grandson, John Faulstich, recalls his grandfather:
John Krogmann
John Krogmann was born in Chicago, Illinois in March, 1868 (I think on March 3) of immigrant parents from Germany. Apparently, his father died when he was young, for his mother remarried and John had at least one younger half-sibling.
The only half-sibling I ever knew was Fred Voelsch. John and Fred were friends as well as half-brothers, and both had artistic talent. John made a profession out of his; Fred made use of his for the fun of it. He would send me homemade Valentines and birthday cards, decorated with all kinds of animals and clowns. Even my name and address on the envelope had delightful little creatures clinging to the letters and numbers. Fred was a conducter on the Santa Fe Railroad, doing the run from Chicago to Los Angeles and back. His gregarious and fun-loving personality must have made him a hit among all the passengers. I loved it whenever he and his lovely wife would visit or we would go to Chicago to visit them. Uncle Fred and Aunt Hattie were among my favorite people in my growing up days.
As a young man, John Krogmann attended classes at the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago. Other than that, I do not know to what level he carried his formal education. Certainly, he was highly self-educated and well-read. He married Sophia Thon, also a child of German immigrants. She was a few months older than her husband. She grew up on a farm in the rural village of Naperville, Illinois, now an affluent suburb of Chicago. She had a brother Harold, whom I never knew except from a story my mother used to tell me. The Thon family had a parrot. From time to time, the parrot would give out with “Harrrrrrr-old!” apparently sounding just like Harold’s mother. Back home scooted Harold, wanting to know why he was wanted. This delighted his sister, my grandmother, enough that it became a family legend. At night, as my mother tucked me in, I repeatedly asked her to tell me the story and I would go to sleep chuckling to myself, wondering if the parrot had any understanding of the torment he was causing poor Harold or the delight he was giving sister Sophie. My grandmother always did have a bit of a mischievous sense of humor, even into her eighties and nineties.
I do not recall the year in which John and Sophie were married, but I have a photo of them from their 50th wedding anniversary. They had three daughters and a son. They were, in order of birth, Sophie (later Sophie Viewig, mother of my cousins Marguerite and Doris), Wilhelmina (known as Aunt Billie, later Billie Holm, mother of my cousin Vernon, now deceased), Helen (later Helen Faulstich), and Daniel (Uncle Dan was father of my cousin Newell Krogmann). All four children are deceased, Uncle Dan dying at a relatively young age.
My Grandpa John and Grandma Sophie lived in a three-story building on Fullerton Avenue, a major commercial street on the near northwest side of Chicago. The first floor was the frame shop Grandpa founded and which Uncle Dan ran. They made frames for Grandpa’s paintings and sold custom-made frames. The frames themselves were works of art, following the rather gilded style of the late 19th and early 20th C. Grandpa’s work as an artist during his earlier years was part commercial and part recreational. His main income from those early years was to do portraits from photographs, mainly for families who wanted a portrait of a deceased family member. His recreational art was to do landscapes. He did sell his landscapes, so they were somewhat commercial, but he so enjoyed tramping in the woods and sketching scenes of rivers or going to the Indiana Dunes State Park (now the Indiana National Seashore), that these landscapes were great fun for him to do. Even in his later years, he would spend time in the summer, living as a hermit at the Dunes, sketching the dunes scenery. A summer ritual for me was to accompany my father as he drove Grandpa to Tremont, Indiana, where he rented a little cabin for a month, and he wouldn’t be heard from again until we went out to pick him up, carrying his many filled sketch pads and his little suitcase. He looked like he hadn’t shaved or bathed for a month, and likely he hadn’t. He hated to come home except he missed his dear wife and her homemade bread.
I said he was self-educated and well-read. He could recite Bible passages from memory, in English and in German. I can recall his regaling us with dramatic recitations of long passages, in German, of Goethe and Schiller. I didn’t understand the German, but I fully grasped the emotions, to which he gave full vent, and his own love of this literature. He also taught himself to play the piano, although it never progressed beyond playing beloved hymns. He even composed his own hymn,
Take a good look
At the Good Book
Take a good look at God’s Word
He would pound away (the only way he knew how) at the keys with his arthritic fingers, barking out the words with the positive energy that was always his hallmark. In traditional Germanic style, he ruled the roost at home. He was a solid Republican, read The Chicago Tribune (at the time, a most conservative major newspaper), and was a rip-roaring American patriot during the 2nd World War. I recall his reaction to my preferring tea to coffee as a high-schooler: “Britisher!!” It was the ultimate put-down in his estimation. That makes it all the more ironic that, once during the war, because he was enthralled by the energy and drama of the steel mills on the south side of Chicago, he decided to paint a night scene of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube factory, featuring its fiery furnaces. How he convinced the cop who questioned him that he was not a German spy sketching a defense plant, I never knew, but he did it.
When they were in their 70s, Grandma and Grandpa moved from Chicago to Hammond, Indiana. Aunt Billie and Uncle Ivar Holm had lived in the apartment above the Calumet Blue Print Company on Gostlin Street, a few blocks from where we lived. (When we moved from Chicago to Hammond in the summer of 1941, my Dad went to work as the photostatitioner for Calumet Blue). When the house next door became available, Aunt Billie and Uncle Ivar moved there and Grandma and Grandpa left Chicago to take the upstairs apartment. Grandpa could keep up with his painting, but not with the framing, so the move made good sense. Besides, they were now of an age where it was better for them to be near their two younger daughters in Hammond. My job was to mow the lawn behind the apartment and the shop in the summer, and to drop in on Grandma and Grandpa on a regular basis to run errands for them. I was compensated highly for this with Grandma’s famous homemade bread or her potato pancakes. I would be greeted by Grandpa with a hearty, “Well, hello Sonny Jim! How are the Cubs doing?” He and I shared a deep love for the Chicago Cubs and for Grandma’s baking. Why I was “Sonny Jim” and not “Johnny,” as I was to the rest of the family was never explained. One didn’t question Grandpa’s choices.
The move to Hammond meant that they lived about four blocks from our house. Every evening, Grandpa would take his “constitutional” and walk over to our house. That was the occasion for hearing his stories from his years of painting and his being Superintendent of the Sunday School at St. Peter’s Evangelical and Reformed Church in Chicago for some fifty years. As head of the church’s boys club, he would take the boys out camping for the weekend. On one such trip, from what my father told me, he said to his future father-in-law, “Someday I’m going to marry one of your daughters.” Grandpa’s nightly walks to our house was also the occasion for his declamations, quoting Goethe in German at length.
Though in his late 70s and his hands severely crippled and disfigured with arthritis, he kept up with his painting. He also played ball with me and amazed my friends that he was willing to pitch and to bat (he didn’t run bases, however) in our empty-lot ball games. I thought it was pretty special of him!!
As I understand it, he was about 65 when he decided to give up painting portraits from photos as a business and take up painting large religious murals for churches. He still did landscapes and did his annual hermit/artist trek to the Dunes, but now he concentrated his major efforts on the religious murals. I can recall the living room, first in Chicago then later in Hammond, being filled with enormous canvasses on which he would be in the process of doing a work commissioned by a church. Most, if not all, of his religious murals were copies of the German artist, Hans Hoffman. A favorite gift my parents would give would be his smaller “Head of Christ,” another copy. John Krogmann became quite well-known among Evangelical and Reformed Churches in the Chicago area and in Ohio and Pennsylvania for his murals. Even at an advanced age, he would go to the church to hang the painting and to speak at the dedication. When he died at age 86 in the fall of 1954, he was at work on one of his murals. Sophie would survive him by another 14 years, dying a few months short of 100. “Papa,” she said, “will have everything ready for me.”
