BIO: Gottlob Hauser, Tillard Pen Pictures, 1911, Blair County, PA Contributed April 2003 for use in the USGenWeb Archives by Judy Banja Copyright 2003. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/pa/blair/ _________________________________________ Pen Pictures of Friends and Reminiscent Sketches by J. N. Tillard Altoona, PA: William F. Gable & Co., Mirror Press, 1911 GOTTLOB HAUSSER, Thinker, Teacher While He Is Not a Visionary, He Never Mistakes The Shadow for The Substance, but Lights Obscure Paths by His Own Intelligence THE world owes most of its progress to the idealist. Now don't confound him with the mere visionary, because there is a distinction. The visionary may be the most selfish of men, who would drive all his fellows off the earth if his wild schemes could only be translated into fact, while the idealist is simply seeking for the eternal verities. He is always frying to create or adapt without any thought to a division of the spoils. There are many men who pride themselves upon being severely practical, whose instincts are purely porcine. Their relative position in life are determined mostly by the accident of birth or circumstance, and from the cradle to the grave they are simply trying to get the best of their fellows, devoting all the inches of their souls to the grabbing of the substance of better men. If they happen to be born in the employing class, they lay awake nights figuring how they can squeeze two dollars worth of labor out of some helpless dependent for one dollar, or, if the positions are reversed, as they frequently are, the laborer exhausts his mental energies in the effort to abstract two dollars in wages for one dollar's worth of service. While the idealist does not despise the material good things of life, but, on the contrary, keenly enjoys their temperate use, he is happily above and beyond the sordidness that chains man to a mean environment and will not prostitute his powers for a material consideration or sell his soul for a mess of pottage. He believes that the means of subsistence will somehow be his, and he places no false values on wealth or power. Such a man is the subject of this sketch. Gottlob Hausser came to this city on Christmas 1865, and the town got many a worse gift. His advent was not heralded by trumpets, neither was he ever known to blow his horn in the intervening years. He has been too busy doing better things. It scarcely lies in the German character to mistake the shadow for the substance, and Gottlob has all the philosophy of his race. About all that he wants in this world is that the idler shall keep out of his mental sunlight, and not bother him with fool notions of beating the game. He realizes that any fool may acquire a pedestal, clamber awkardly upon it, and look all the worse after he has got there. In fact, the higher he gets, the more obvious becomes his inanity and foolishness. If he had stayed off the perch, he might frequently have saved his reputation. Mr. Hausser has all his life long been a substantial builder of pedestals for others with but little desire to occupy them himself. He is essentially a teacher of truth and intelligence and too keen a judge of human nature to be fooled a minute by the pretense of the superficial. He has never sought public office because the tinsel did not appeal to him with the same force that it did to men of lesser minds, and he has not grasped for wealth for the reason that the game was scarcely worth the candle, and he had better and more substantial things to do. Men who measure the results of all effort by the dollar mark, or their relative importance to the community by the political place they achieve, cannot understand this attitude of mind, or apprehend the fine contempt that such a one feels for the mere muckraker. And indeed they never discover that he entertains any such feeling. He always has too much regard for the feelings of inferiors to allow it to become apparent. Besides he is usually so absorbed in the effort to accomplish things of real importance in life, that he is scarcely conscious of any such attitude in himself. In his simplicity of mind, he always pities and never envies, and it is envy only that produces invidious comparisons. With the home-seeking instinct of the true German, a year or two after his settling in Altoona, Mr. Hausser climbed to the woods that covered the hills on East Twelfth Street and, selecting a lot, builded him a home, and he lives there yet. The surroundings in that locality forty years ago were rather primitive and wild, and in his own words, "about all the aboriginal conditions were there except the Indians." He has been there a good while, but civilization has come his way and they are just now paving the street and the trolley car passes the door, so his Teutonic patience has been rewarded and his silent and unpretentious thrift has brought comfort in his declining years. All of this time he has been a faithful employe of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, like the tentmaker of Tarsus, working with his own hands; but his intellectual development has gone right on. A number of the city's ablest men in all professions can bear witness to his powers as a linguist and a teacher of languages, and he has never lacked for congenial society or intellectual intercourse. More than anything else, he has been a student of men and a helper of his kind. In the eyes of the materialist this may be rankest nonsense, as, in their estimation, the only profitable study of humanity is that which enables men to pick the sucker for purposes of exploitation. But because of their superficial views, the exploiters are often exploited. It is exceedingly hard for the scoundrel or fakir to understand the motives that actuate men of simple lives and they consequently overreach themselves. Always in the market themselves, they cannot realize that there are some men who will not prostitute themselves for a price, and they are defeated in any contest with the honest man. Mr. Hausser has a keen appreciation of the fitness of things, and would not allow himself to be placed in any stultifying position, nor accept any place where he could not deliver the goods. While he takes a keen interest in all the social affairs of the German-Americans of the city, and is loved and honored by them, no designing politician has ever been able to use him as a tool or secure his political influence unless he was satisfied that the purpose was honest, upright and for the best interests of the community, and it is not easy to deceive him. Feeling that the greatest study of mankind is man, "with malice toward none and charity to all," he is ever looking for opportunities to assist his fellows. A dreamer he may be, but not an idle or unprofitable one. The immortal dreamer in Bedford gaol, seeing the wretch go by in chains on his way to the gibbet, said, "But for the grace of God there go I," put his finger on an indisputable truth; for, call it Providence, chance, fate, or whatever you will, in most human lives there is a parting of the ways where the most trivial circumstance may decide the destiny of the soul. The writer once stood with the famous warden of a great prison when a thousand men were marching in lockstep to the cells to which society had condemned them, and this veteran reader of the thoughts of men said: "While many of those you see are the victims of heredity and pre-natal influences too strong for them to overcome, the fact remains that a very small thing turned the faces of most of them here." So, after all, the most useful citizen of any community is the man who, only giving his personal affairs the perfunctory attention essential to his immediate well-being, gives his best thoughts to the mental and moral advancement of his neighbors. With all his modesty and unpretentiousness, Mr. Hausser has been a student of events, as well as individuals, and the history of the world and its epoch- making characters are to him familiar facts. He is acquainted with the rise and fall of empires and the causes that led thereto, and as he looks over the panorama of the marching hosts of the race, he sees with the clear intelligence of the ripe scholar the causes that have wrought disaster in the past. Aside from his exhaustive reading, he has looked over the earth's historic points. While he realizes that a foal can never be converted into a philosopher by mere tramping, yet when he visited in recent years historic spots in the old world, his absorption of the masters' description of history-making battles so inspired him that in fancy he saw the charging hosts on the field of Waterloo and heard the thunder of the artillery as Napoleon went down before Wellington, and his graphic descriptions, as published in the "Volksfuehrer," will still be remembered with pleasure by those who read them. Mr. Hausser is much too broad a man to attempt to mould any individual into any particular religious or mental cast, but he believes that it is much easier to rescue the erring than to attempt to lift up the fallen, and, better still, to create such human conditions, so far as possible in a poorly balanced world, as will offer the least incentive for going wrong. Intelligent moderation in all desires are typical tenets of the German philosophy, and in his quiet, undemonstrative way he has through the years of his life devoted his superior intellect to the assistance of those with whom he has come in contact, and the community in which he lives is the better because of his presence. #