Good Old Reliable LaVerne

Since he was mentioned in the brick house article, I just wanted to take a look at LaVerne Manteuffel and the long-time Hobart business he was associated with.


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From Hobart High School's annual, the Aurora, 1922.

LaVerne Paul Manteuffel was born in 1905 in Hobart, to William Paul and Emilie Manteuffel. Emilie was a widow and a business owner when she married Paul (he often went by his middle name) in 1898.

Her first husband, Herman Carl Piske, had been born in Prussia around 1858, and came to the U.S. with his family around 1868. The Piske family shows up in North Township, Lake County, Indiana (probably Tolleston, as we shall see from a later source) in the 1870 Census. By 1880, Herman was on his own, living in a Chicago boarding house and working as a shoemaker (1880 Census).

In September 1880 Herman married Bertha Boldt in Lake County, Indiana. Her family had also immigrated from Prussia and settled in North Township (1870 Census),[1] so perhaps the young people had met each other there.

Around the time of his marriage, Herman opened a shoe store in Hobart, called the "Reliable Boot & Shoe Store." I do not know how much time passed before the word "Old" started appearing before "Reliable."

In 1885 Bertha gave birth to a daughter, Clara. Not long afterward Bertha died. I suppose Herman's relatives stepped up to help him with the baby.

In May 1886, Herman married Emilie Voigt. She, like Herman and his first wife, came from a German immigrant family, possibly also Tolleston residents.[2] Her 1956 obituary (see below) says that she became a Hobart resident in 1884.

Herman and Emilie had two children: Elsa (b. 1888) and Walter (b. 1890). Herman continued operating the boot and shoe store, probably with considerable help from Emilie.

Here is an undated photo of the Piske store.


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society, Hobart, Indiana.

Although no one in the photo is identified, I suppose that's Herman and Emilie standing in the doorway.[3] The children may be Clara, Elsa, and Walter. Judging by the cut of Emilie's dress (and, if the little boy is Walter, his apparent age), I would guess the photo was taken around 1893-4.

At that time, I believe the store stood at 313 Main Street, a building known as the Stocker Block.[4]

In 1895, Herman died.


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Hobart Gazette, 18 Oct. 1895.

Emilie took over operating the Old Reliable herself.

In the spring of 1896 came the death of her only son, Walter, as described in this story from the Hobart Gazette of May 22, 1896, titled, "Scarlet Fever."

One day last week Mrs. H.C. Piske's little girls were taken sick and in time it was discovered that they had a light type of scarlet fever. On Friday her little boy about 7 years old was taken with it and became much worse than his sisters. On Monday evening about 8 o'clock the little fellow breathed his last.

Owing to the nature of the disease his body was buried on Tuesday and no funeral services were held except at the house where Rev. Schuelke spoke words of good cheer to the family and friends. His death is extremely sad and our citizens sympathize with the mother in the hours of her bereavement.

On April 1, 1898, as I've mentioned, Emilie married Paul Manteuffel, another German immigrant.[5]

Any attempt to sketch out Paul Manteuffel's history is complicated by the fact that there were two local Paul Manteuffels. They were cousins. Their fathers were brothers, Julius and Louis Manteuffel, who married two sisters, Auguste and Hermine Poppe.[6] Louis and Hermine Manteuffel lived in East Gary (Lake Station), and their Paul — sometimes called "Paul C." or "P.C." — eventually moved to Chicago. In cases where those details are included in a newspaper report about a Paul Manteuffel, I'm able to tell the East Gary/Chicago one from the Hobart one, but they are not always included, so I'm not always sure I'm talking about the right Paul.

As for Hobart's Paul Manteuffel — it appears that he did not join with Emilie in operating the Old Reliable: he had other occupations. In 1897 he had begun operating a saloon in the basement of the Hobart House, and continued in that business for several years.[7] In 1903, we find him filling in for the town's ailing night watchman.[8] Around 1904 he started working at Aetna, possibly at the munitions factory.[9] When the 1910 census was taken in April, Paul was working at a brickyard, but in May he took a position as "night foreman at the [Hobart] water and light plant."[10] By 1920 he was again working at the brickyard, and that is the last information I have about his occupations.

In May 1899, Emilie gave birth to a daughter, Evelyn.

Sometime after the 1900 census, Clara Piske left her stepmother's home. By 1904 she was described as "Miss Clara Piske of Chicago" when she came back to Hobart for a visit.[11] Beyond that, I have not been able to find any information about her.

Late in March 1905, the Manteuffels rented the "Gordon brick": 332-334 Main Street, known to us today as the former location of the Bright Spot restaurant. They moved the Old Reliable into the first floor, while the family occupied living quarters behind the store, and/or upstairs.[12]

In May of that year, Emilie gave birth to a son, LaVerne Paul — her last child.

The 1910 Census shows Emilie operating the shoe store while Paul worked in the brickyard. Elsa Piske, 22 years old, worked as a post-office clerk. In January 1918, Elsa married Allen Mummery (Indiana Marriage Collection). The two of them would be lifelong Hobart residents.

By the 1920 Census, Evelyn Manteuffel, at 20 years of age, was working as a "saleslady" in a "store": I suspect it was her mother's shoe store, as the early 1920s newspapers report several instances of her attending National Shoe Retailers' association conventions in Chicago with her mother.[13] Her brother, LaVerne, upon receiving his high-school diploma in 1922, also made the Old Reliable his full-time job.

Evelyn married Walter Boal in 1926[14] and became a stay-at-home wife.

In 1929, William Paul Manteuffel died — that is to say, there is a stone in Hobart Cemetery with his name and "1929" carved on it. But I have not been able to find a word about his death in the Hobart Gazette, nor can I find his death certificate on Ancestry.com. (I have found a record of a Paul Manteuffel dying in Cook County, Illinois, in April 1929, but the record doesn't include enough information to determine whether it was this Paul.) In the 1930 Census, the enumerator describes Emilie as married, which could simply be an error. The 1940 Census describes her as widowed. A search of Indiana and Illinois newspapers available online doesn't turn up any relevant Manteuffel death notices. I am going to have to do some more reading of microfilm.

Emilie carried on with the Old Reliable business. It earned enough money that in 1936 she was able to buy the building it occupied.[15]

The family suffered a tragedy in 1937, when Evelyn Manteuffel Boal died of cancer just short of her 38th birthday. She had no children.

In July 1939, Emilie sold the Old Reliable business to LaVerne and announced her retirement. The following November, LaVerne married Leotta Flick.


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Hammond Times, 27 Nov. 1939.

Leotta had a lovely singing voice, it seems: she was a church soloist and often sang at weddings, funerals, and other social occasions. In the 1940s she was repeatedly elected director of a local choral club.[16] She and LaVerne had two children: Marvin (b. 1941) and Dorothy (b. 1947).

1956 was the year everything changed. On May 14 Emilie died.


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Hobart Gazette, 17 May 1956.

And in August, LaVerne closed the doors of the Old Reliable Boot & Shoe Store forever.


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Hobart Gazette, 9 Aug. 1956.

I think we can attribute the "81 years" and the "1875" in this article to the mutability of memory and oral history. The writer didn't have the 1880 Chicago census at hand.


LaVerne died in 1983.


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Hobart Gazette, 19 Jan. 1983.

His daughter wrote this touching tribute to him:


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Hobart Gazette, 9 Feb. 1983.

A garden still grows around his former home, 465 East 8th Street, but I don't know if any of it is LaVerne's work.

And if you'd like to learn how to play "the bones," there's a cute tutorial here.

♦    ♦    ♦
In conclusion, I would like to post two ads I found interesting.

The first is from the Hobart Gazette of October 31, 1889:


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Per the old-timers' memories collected in 1979, B.W. Strattan did once operate a "general merchandise store" in the Strattan building. The second door south of that would be on the west side of Main Street. Thus perhaps the Gazette was correct in 1905 when it said that the store had been located on the east side of the street only from around 1894 (see footnote 12). (Also, Herman's initials in this ad are "C.H." instead of "H.C." as in the photograph of the store posted above.)

This ad, from the Gazette of April 7, 1910, is mystifying.


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218 Main is now the Ben Ack Building, but in 1910 only a frame house stood there.

_______________
[1] Her brother, William, married Mary Sullivan.
[2] Both of her parents were born in Germany: John/Johann (b. 1829) and Ernestine/Ernstena (b. 1827). The family came to the U.S. in 1874 or 1875 (as reported by Emilie in the 1910 and 1920 censuses). As of 1896, her parents lived in Tolleston ("Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 8 May 1896), and they died there within a decade — Ernestine in 1903 and John in 1905). But I have not been able to find them in any census.
[3] I have no idea who the guy lounging under the awning at left is. Note his sleeve protectors, which were often worn by storekeepers, bank tellers, bookkeepers, and even bartenders.
[4] The history of the store's location is a bit confused and has to be inferred from newspaper articles that don't mention addresses, oral histories that don't mention dates, and anonymous handwritten notes on the back of photographs in the Hobart Historical Society files.
[5] He was a son of Julius Manteuffel.
[6] "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 2 Feb. 1917.
[7] "Application for License," Hobart Gazette, 5 Feb. 1897; "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 5 Mar. 1897; 1900 Census.
[8] "Local Drifts, Hobart Gazette, 1 May 1903.
[9] "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 18 Nov. 1904.
[10] "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 6 May 1910.
[11] "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 27 May 1904.
[12] "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 17 Mar. 1905 and 31 Mar. 1905. The March 17 item mentioned that the shoe store had been in the Stocker Block location (313 Main) for the past eleven years, which would take us back to 1894. If this is not an error, it suggests that the original ca.-1880 store was in yet a different location.
[13] See, e.g., "Local and Personal," Hobart News, 21 Feb. 1921; "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette, 22 Feb. 1922.
[14] He was a carpenter and helped to build the house at 5501 S. Liverpool Road.
[15] "Hobart," The Hammond Times, 5 Feb. 1936.
[16] "Leota Manteuffel to Direct Choral Club," Hobart Gazette, 27 Sept. 1945.