Biography of my Grandpa Bill Wetzel: Gentle Man of Mystery

 

William Wetzel during his early years in America, ca. 1915

Georg Willi Julius “William” Wetzel immigrated from Germany to the United States at the age of 24 in 1910.  It had to be the biggest decision of his life, yet some of his reasons appear to be shrouded in mystery.  One of the motivations, I’m sure, was the political situation in Germany at the time and the threat of conscription into the Prussian Army.  When Grandpa was two years old, leadership of the German Empire fell into the unstable hands of 29-year-old Kaiser Wilhelm II.  Under his reckless and erratic rule, nationalism and aggressive imperialism were setting Germany on a course that isolated them from former allies and would inevitably lead to World War I.

Grandpa Bill’s connection to Wilhelm II is a strange and interesting one.  He was born under somewhat mysterious circumstances literally under the Kaiser’s nose—that is, one block from the grounds of Sanssouci Palace, the Kaiser’s seat of power in Potsdam.  More on this to come.

Explaining why Grandpa left Germany requires guesswork, because he didn’t talk much about his time in Germany.  In piecing together the facts that we do know about him, I believe the reasons were multiple.  The political situation was no doubt important, but Grandpa also had an unsettled, even mysterious upbringing, which very likely contributed to his decision.  I’ll cover what I know of his youth next.  A third reason for emigrating, and the reason he ended up in Wisconsin, is opportunity.  He had family, a great aunt who had come to Wisconsin with her husband and their seven children in 1881 and had settled in the country around Brandon and Waupun in Fond du Lac County.  The oldest of these children, Hermann Wegner, and Charles Guenther, the husband of the third child, Emma Wegner, acted as Grandpa’s sponsors.

Now let us try, as best we can, to penetrate the shroud of mystery surrounding grandpa’s early life.

THE MYSTERY YEARS

Georg Willi Julius Wetzel was born in his mother’s sub-let flat at Zimmerstrasse 7, Potsdam, at 2:45AM on 3 April 1886.  He is named for his great-grandfather Georg Samuel Wetzel and his grandfather Julius Friedrich Wetzel both master masons (bricklayers).  The given name Willi was the one he was known by.

Is there any chance that ‘Willi’ was a reference to Wilhelm II?  Doubtful.  But stay tuned.

Willi was given the family name of his unmarried mother, Anna Marie Wilhelmine Wetzel (Born 19 Mar 1864).  She was a young, pretty woman working in the shadow of two of the Kaiser’s palaces as a maid servant and housekeeper.  She bears a striking resemblance to Princess Victoria, wife of Kaiser Friedrich III of Germany, daughter of Queen Victoria of England, and mother of a certain Wilhelm II.

At left is Princess Victoria in 1867, the way her son Wilhelm II would most fondly remember her (he was 8 at the time) - this portrait is by Franz Xaver Winterhalter.  At right is William Wetzel's mother, Anna Marie Wilhelmine Wetzel in about 1885, near the time Grandpa Bill was conceived.

Yes?  No?  Maybe my imagination is running away with me.

In any case, Anna Marie Wetzel had lived at Zimmerstrasse 7 and worked in the shadow of the Kaiser's Palace since at least April 1882.  Grandpa’s birth certificate does not list the father, which is likely to mean that his mother would not reveal the father’s identity.  That leads me to speculate, without justification other than circumstantial, that the father may have been an employer, and/or someone above her station.

Who was her employer?  There are no records.  Complete mystery.  I’ve had Y-DNA tests done on myself and on my father (Y-DNA is passed down only from father to his children).  No matches so far.

Some Aristocrat or member of Nobility *might* have been my Grandpa’s father.  We will probably never know.  And so, I dream up stories of a tryst between a pretty young serving girl and a distinguished guest in her employer’s house—none other than the impulsive and impetuous 26-year-old soon-to-be Kaiser himself.  There’s a best-selling novel in there just screaming to be written!  Why not?!

Birth record for William Wetzel, requested by his son Erwin in 1971.  I have a copy of the original record no. 355/1886 from Potsdam, but do not have permission to publish it.

But back to reality.  Unfortunately, the church records, and many other records in Potsdam were destroyed in World War II.  Zimmerstrasse 7 itself was leveled by carpet-bombing carried out by the 75^th Royal Air Force Squadron (all crewmen were from New Zealand!) during the “Night of Potsdam” on the evening of April 14-15, 1945.

I have had a professional genealogist in Germany look for records of what became of Bill’s mother and where Bill might have lived during his childhood, but they have come up with nothing.  Family oral information says only that Bill’s mother died.  We don’t know when, where, or how, and the genealogist could not find any marriage or death records or later records of any kind for his mother.

Anna Marie Wilhelmine Wetzel gave birth to my grandpa Bill and then just utterly and completely disappeared from the record.  Perhaps someday this ‘brick wall’, as genealogists call it, will be torn down, just as the Berlin Wall itself was.  We can only hope.

Bill himself never spoke about his childhood.  The first thing we know about him is that at age 15 he became an apprentice cabinet maker back in his mother’s hometown of Greifenberg, now in far NW Poland.  More on that in a moment.

One of the problems Grandpa surely faced as a child was the significant stigma that being illegitimate carried with it in those times.  He would have been looked down upon, even humiliated, by adults and child peers alike.  How this was manifest in his daily experience, and how it affected him, I cannot even begin to guess.  I imagine that the death or disappearance of his mother, presumably sometime during his early childhood only compounded the hardship.

We have one glimpse into this time of Grandpa Bill’s life, written in his own hand on December 8, 1956.  I was 8 years old, and had innocently sent him a letter asking him to describe what Christmas was like in Germany when he was a boy.  I think it was for a school project.  How could a grandpa refuse to reply to such a request?!?  The two-page letter he wrote in response begins:

“I am going to write you about Christmas in Germany 60 years ago when I was a boy 11 years old.”

And as of this writing (December 2024) the letter itself is 68 years old.  He was describing Christmas in Germany in 1897!  Below is the image of that first page—the only letter I ever got that was written by him (all correspondence was normally handled by Grandma Betty):

The letter goes on: “The Christmas season and the Christmas holidays were a very big occasion.  The Christmas season started Dec. 10.  Before that date there were no trees or toys on display.  But when that day came, the stores were decorated and full of toys from the floor to the ceiling.  Then the children would go in the evening from one store to the other and ask the Storekeeper for permission to look over all the toys.  And when you were very polite, he would let you in.  Then the children go through the store single file …”

Here I interrupt to offer my Dad’s interpretation, to which I concur.  Being herded through a store single file sounds like he was in a group situation—possibly an orphanage.  Unfortunately, all orphanage records from Potsdam were destroyed in the war, so this remains rank speculation.  He writes further, continuing to describe a group setting rather than a family setting:

“…  but there were signs all over (Alles besehen aber nicht enfassen) it means that you could look at all the toys but you should not touch them.”

I’ve moved to page 2 of the letter:

“When you had the stores all visited and seen all the toys, then all the Boys and Girls wrote a letter to Santa …”

(Again, this implicitly sounds like a group setting.  He then uses the term ‘parents’ in a generic sense that just doesn’t sound like a family situation, but an institutional one.)

“… but before they mailed the letter, the parents would look the letter over and crossed some of the toys off because we always ask for too many things, never thought that the other children wanted some too.  So finally when Christmas Eve came, everybody had to go to church at 6PM.  If you did not go, you would get nothing for Christmas.”

(If this doesn’t describe a tough and austere childhood in an orphanage, I’d be very surprised.)

“When we came home from church, the Christmas tree was lit and the present for every one was there.”

One present for each child?!

“That sure was a big event.  The tree had candles, and for ornaments we had stick candy, gilted nuts, cookies, and apples.  We always celebrated Christmas 3 days, and a good time was had by all.”

Bill’s grandmother, Wilhelmine Goetsch Wetzel had remained in Greifenberg, and was apparently far too poor to take him in.  She appears to have been widowed, possibly soon after the time Grandpa describes in the letter.  Family oral history describes life in a small, rented cottage where they could afford to own only one pig each year, which they would slaughter for the holiday season.  Here the veil of mystery begins to lift when Grandpa appears in Greifenberg at the age of 15 and began a three-year apprenticeship at the shop of master cabinetmaker Emil Greul in about September 1901.  He was living with his grandmother according to the oral histories.  My uncle Bill kept in touch with the descendants of Emil Greul at least through the end of the 20th century, but none of them could recall more detail about Grandpa Bill’s life.

Postcard showing Emil Greul’s furniture and coffin-making shop in about 1910.  Emil is the man on the doorstep.

Emil Greul and wife Toni in the mid 1920's

Based on the letters from Emil's family, I suspect that Emil was the closest to a father that Grandpa Bill ever had.   Bill made many toys for Emil and Toni's kids that they remembered fondly.

Grandpa graduated from his apprenticeship, becoming certified as a master carpenter on 1 September 1904:

Graduation certificate

I have Grandpa’s worksheets that show that within a year (by September 1905) he had moved to Berlin, possibly with his grandmother, and taken work at a shop there.  His last known address was at Fichterstrasse 7 in Steglitz bei Berlin (from a postcard mailed from Greifenberg in March 1910).  Although there is a Fichtestrasse 7 in Teltow, about halfway between Steglitz and Potsdam, Fichterstrasse as a street name in Steglitz is unknown according to my German genealogist.

The earliest known photo of Bill is from this period, sometime between 1905 and 1910.  The portrait, processed (background removed), cleaned up, and colorized, appears below:

William Wetzel ca. 1905-1910

On July 20th, 1910, Bill applied for and received a passport in Berlin.  He quit his job by 23 July (last work stamp), left Berlin, and boarded the S.S. Bremen in the port of Bremen, bound for New York on August 6th.  This was a massive steamship that carried 2000 to 2300 passengers, probably packed together like sardines.

The S.S. Bremen in 1905

His arrival notes at Ellis Island on August 16th list his grandmother as living in Potsdam at what looks like ‘Lenne Strasse’.  He was to meet Charles Guenther, husband of his Grandmother’s sister’s daughter, in Waupun, Wisconsin.

AUTO MAKER TO THE STARS

How much time grandpa spent in Waupun is unknown.  He began buying tools (I have several hand-written itemized receipts that were in the same folder with the passport) and soon found work at the Kissel Motor Car Company in Hartford, Wisconsin, which is 40 miles SE of Waupun, and about halfway to Milwaukee.

Kissel Motor Car Company was founded in 1906 and began production in 1907.  From then until it went bankrupt in the depression in 1930, the company made 35,000 “KisselKars”.  Its cars were high-end sports and luxury vehicles.  One of their speedsters was owned by aviatress Amelia Earhart.  Wikipedia lists other stars who owned KisselKars:  Bebe Daniels, Jack Dempsey, Ralph DePalma, Eddie Duchin, Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo, Gladys George, Ruby Keeler, William S. Hart, Al Jolson, Mabel Normand, Mary Pickford, and Rudy Vallee.

The vehicle frames were crafted from wood, and among the company’s products were multi-seat passenger transport busses.  The reason I mention this is because an auto enthusiast book on the Kissel Company, published on 1 Jan 1990 and written by Val V. Quandt, includes a photo of Bill and eleven other Kissel employees standing atop the frame of one such bus, demonstrating its sturdy construction:

From “The Classic Kissel Automobile” by Val. V. Quandt, Kissel Graph Press, 1990, page 61.

It is in Hartford that Grandpa Bill came to know Bertha Anna Augusta “Betty” Uber.  Betty was three years older than Bill and probably felt as though she was headed for life as an old maid.  She was the last of the children still living with her parents in the 1910 Census.  She was approaching age 30, working at W.B. Place Tannery in Hartford making gloves at the time Bill appeared.  Her parents had immigrated to the US from Germany as children in 1854, actually arriving just two weeks apart (August 4th and 17th respectively) and apparently traveling to Wisconsin together, with their parents buying adjacent farms in Washington County, just east of Hartford.

No stories of how Bill and Betty met have been passed down, at least none that I’ve heard.  The next thing we know for sure is that they got married.  The date was a traditional fall date, after the harvest was in, though neither of them were involved with farming:

Bill and Betty’s Wedding Certificate, 16 October 1917, provided by St. John’s Lutheran Church, 228 W. State St., Hartford, Wisconsin, where they were almost surely married, the service probably conducted by Rev. E.A. Kuhn, who signed the certificate.

Based on the certificate, it was probably a German Language ceremony.  The German immigrant community was slow to adopt English, and church bulletins and brochures produced by St. John's were all in German up until the time of World War I.  They probably spoke German at home in Betty’s household when she was growing up, and she and Bill probably communicated more in German than in English.

Witnesses to the wedding were Bill’s good friend and fellow German immigrant Charles Kaslo and his wife Ellen, who was Betty’s younger sister.

Bill was 31 years old.  Betty was 34.  Was there a honeymoon?  I have no evidence of one.  Here’s their wonderful wedding photo, enhanced and colorized:

Wedding photo, William Wetzel and Bertha Uber, 16 Oct 1917

At the time of the wedding, World War I was, without doubt, the hottest topic of the day.  The US had entered the war on April 6th, 1917.  Bill was required to register as an enemy alien; and by marrying an enemy alien immigrant, so was Betty!

Here’s what the U.S. National Archives web site has to say about it:

“With the declaration of war on April 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called on residents in the United States, citizen and immigrant alike, to loyally uphold all laws and to support all measures adopted in order to protect the nation and secure peace. For individuals termed “alien enemies” – all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of Germany and its allies (including American-born women who married German men) – showing loyalty required a number of additional parameters and processes.

“Wilson’s declaration of war included twelve regulations that restricted the conduct of alien enemies in the United States. Broadly, the regulations barred owning firearms, established a permitting process to reside/work in areas deemed as restricted zones or to depart the United States, and laid out policies regarding threats and attacks against the United States, along with condemning all aid to the enemy. 

“Significantly, Regulation 12 stated that “an alien enemy whom there may be reasonable cause to believe to be aiding or about to aid the enemy . . . or violates any regulation promulgated by the President . . . will be subject to summary arrest . . . and to confinement in such penitentiary, prison, jail, or military camp.” The War Department established war prison barracks at Fort Oglethorpe, GA; Fort McPherson, GA; and Fort Douglas, UT.”

1918 Enemy Alien Registration cards for Bill and Betty Wetzel.

STARTING A FAMILY – THE ROARING ‘20’S

The newlyweds promptly went about having children.  Their first, William Herbert Wetzel, was born on 20 Sep 1918.  Less than two months later, the war ended.  

It wasn’t until a year later, on October 20th, 1919 that Bill earned his certificate of Naturalization and became a US Citizen.  Interestingly, according to German Law, that makes their son William Herbert, and all his descendants, eligible for a German Passport and a fast track to German Citizenship, if they so desire.

This was also the time of the terrible “Spanish Flu” pandemic.  By April 1920, that had run its course, and a decade of economic prosperity ensued.  It was a great time to be alive.

Two more sons followed.  Erwin in January 1920 and Roland (my father) in April 1923.  Below are a couple of early family photos.  The first was taken in about 1922 before Roland was born:

William Wetzel with sons William and Erwin, 1922.

Family photo of Bill and Betty with all three children taken in 1924

The decade of the ‘20’s was a time of unprecedented progress and economic development, possibly the greatest such decade in human history.  With ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in August 1920, women had secured the right to vote.  The electrical grid burgeoned as the telephone and electric appliances proliferated.  Aviation became a routine business.  Radio and moving pictures became popular forms of entertainment.  One of the major hallmarks of the decade was the rapid spread of ownership of the automobile among the middle classes.  The number of registered automobiles was doubling every three years; and accompanying this came the rapid development of a national highway system.

I was surprised to learn that Wisconsin was the first state to number its highways.  That was in 1918.  The US highway numbering system was adopted in 1926, with famous Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica, California being one of the originals, and possibly the most famous.

Bill and Betty Wetzel were keeping up with the times.  In the summer of 1928, the family loaded into an old Buick Brougham and headed west with another couple who I do not know the identity of.  For the most part they followed US 66, which was still mostly a dirt road.  They passed through petrified forest national monument (they brought back a piece) visited saguaro cactus country, probably around Tucson, Arizona, and ended the journey at the famous Santa Monica pier:

Grandma Betty and the three boys on the beach at Santa Monica Pier, California, summer 1928.

Betty and the three boys with the other couple, relatives or family friends, somewhere in southern Arizona in summer 1928.

Ice Cream Break!  From the 1928 road trip.  One of their stops appears to have been Cedar Rapids, Iowa, assuming that’s where they picked up the banner.  I can’t read the other one, possibly Wisconsin Dells.

THE DEPRESSION AND BEYOND

It wasn’t long before the infamous Black Tuesday of 29 October 1929.  Times got tough quickly for Bill and Betty.  Kissel Motor Car Company went out of business, but based on the address information my Dad wrote down, it appears Bill left Kissel before the depression hit.  Perhaps he had been laid off, perhaps he had found other work, but soon after that 1928 trip out west, the family moved to Fifth St. at Capitol Drive in Milwaukee, just west of the suburb of Shorewood.  Bill may have found work by then with the Shorewood School System as a cabinet maker.  That is where he worked until he retired.  But this first period in the Shorewood area did not last.  In the summer of 1930, it would appear that Bill was out of work.  Bill and Betty went into a partnership with Alfred Eimermann and Betty’s niece Hilda Hahn Eimermann to buy a farm in Metomen Township, Fond du Lac County, near Brandon, Wisconsin, possibly with some influence or help from the Wegner family who had been Bill’s sponsors back in 1910.

Bill and Betty had no practical experience farming, and this experiment did not last.  Betty’s father, Oswald Uber had just died, and in the summer of 1931 they moved back to Hartford and into the house that Oswald had built back in 1915 at 242 Forest St. (number now changed to 535) where his widow Bertha Butzow Uber still lived.  On the other hand, the Eimermanns made that Brandon farm their lifetime home, farming until Alfred retired.  Bill and Betty stayed in Hartford with Betty’s mother until September 1938 then moved with Grandma Bertha to Shorewood where Bertha passed away a year later.

Bill was then employed by the Shorewood school system for sure, making cabinets for the classrooms, and he stayed with that job until he retired.  They first lived in a duplex on Newton Avenue, then in August 1941 they bought a house at 4479 North Morris Blvd., two doors down from Dutch and Ivis Auler, whose daughter Muriel eventually became my mom.

I do not know the date when Bill retired.  He would have been age 65 in 1951.  I do not know if he was paid a pension from the city of Shorewood, but my guess is that he was.  They lived comfortably enough in that house for many long years.  And that is how I remember them:

Bill and Betty Wetzel beside their Shorewood, Wisconsin house in July 1964, the way I remember them from our summer vacation visits each year.

We had moved to the east coast in 1951, so most of my memories of Grandpa Bill come from our nearly annual summer visits, one to two weeks in length.  On some of those years we would travel on to northern Wisconsin to a favorite vacation spot on Hunter Lake in Vilas County near Conover, Wisconsin.  There, in 1954, we had a family reunion where every one of Bill and Betty’s grandchildren assembled in one photo.  I don’t think that ever happened again.

August 1954, Hunter Lake, northern Wisconsin. Bill and Betty with the ‘herd of cats’—all eight of their grandchildren.

Bill and Betty with their three boys, Erwin left, Roland center, Bill right, also from the Hunter Lake family reunion in August 1954.

Bill and Betty have been gone for more than fifty years as of this writing, but fond memories linger on, and this biography is an attempt to preserve some of them.

As I remember Grandpa Bill, he was a soft-spoken unassuming man, just as gentle as they come.  He always had a cigar in his mouth, usually just a stub, usually unlit.  But the smell of cigar smoke inevitably takes me right back to that cramped wood shop he had in the basement of their Shorewood home, where he crafted countless items that will be his physical legacy for generations to come.  As a baby, I slept in a crib he had made for my older cousin Jeff.  Since I was the next to be born, it was passed to my Mom and Dad and somehow it stayed with them.  Both my children and now my new grandchild have all been regular denizens of that sturdy old crib.

Baby crib built by Grandpa Bill in 1946, still in use December 2024.

When my Mom and Dad built their dream house in the country in SE Pennsylvania in the mid 1950’s, Dad asked Grandpa Bill to come east and custom build and install the kitchen cabinets.  He was here with us working on that project for a couple months.

Kitchen cabinetry at 500 Church Hill Road, Landenberg, PA, custom-built and installed by Bill Wetzel in 1957 with Formica counter tops and vintage stove and eye-level range.  Photo from August 2004 with my mom in the background.

The works that show Bill’s greatest woodworking skills are his inlay work and lathe work.  He made an exquisite chess set from American Holly and Philippine Mahogany:

Natural wood chess set turned by Grandpa Bill, unknown date, photo from 2024.

One of my most prized possessions is a coffee table with matching serving tray featuring hand-inlaid baskets of flowers.

Superb inlay work and expensive wood.  Curly maple and serving tray handles of Birds Eye maple.

Detail of the above, focused on the Birds-eye maple handle.  Dates of construction unknown, probably 1940's.

Bill made dozens of gavels, many for the Freemasons, of which he was a member, sock darning eggs and variants, and many faux-book jewelry boxes with amazing inlay work:

Assortment of Grandpa Bill's heirloom smaller pieces.

None of the pieces I’ve shown were signed or carry any identifying mark of the craftsman.  In fact, of all the many heirloom pieces we have, there is only one that Bill actually signed—a mantle clock made with oak, inlaid in decorative wood, copper or brass, and mother-of-pearl.

Oak mantle clock, made in 1918 by William Wetzel

His signature and date on an interior side panel

I even found a tiny little photo of Bill and Betty with that clock—the original was a 35mm contact print, meaning it was only 35 mm wide (an inch and a third).

Hard to make a good copy of such a tiny original!  Enhanced and colorized.

I could show more and more of his amazing woodwork projects.  But it’s time to wrap up this story.

Because of his consummate old-school (literally) skill, Bill Wetzel’s legacy is not going to quickly fade.  Given the disadvantaged start he surely had, he had every reason to become a failure and to fade into oblivion.  Many in similar circumstances have done so.  But failure was not part of Georg Willi Julius Wetzel’s makeup.  And oh, how thankful I am for that, and for you, dear Grandpa Bill.