DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.14547#0013
INTRODUCTION
On a summer day in 1926 the President of the Archaeo-
logical Institute in Berlin had a wonderful surprise. Out of
the blue, so to speak, an American gentleman, Mr. Gustav
Oberlaender of Reading, Pennsylvania, called to offer a most
generous grant for excavations in Greece. And what made
this unexpected gift even more welcome was the reason given
for it. Mr. Oberlaender said he always remembered his high
school years in Duesseldorf very gratefully, and most of all the
thrill which Homer had given him. A second Schliemann
seemed to have come to gladden a classicist's heart, at a time
when opposition to Greek studies was rampant. Here was
a man, orphaned at the age of nine, who had worked his way
through school, had landed in America in 1887, a lad of twen-
ty, with thirty dollars in his pocket, had fought against adver-
sity with scant success, for another twenty years, and finally
became a partner in the great Berkshire Knitting Mills, Read-
ing, Pennsylvania, which had been founded by Mr. Ferdi-
nand Thun and Mr. Henry Janssen. The genuine type of
American millionaire, owing his great achievements to his
own initiative and to the unlimited possibilities of the New
World, he yet claimed that his training for all future success
began in that old school where impractical professors taught
the even more impractical stuff so sternly despised by many
modern educators, and by a vast proportion of the public. No
wonder that we all welcomed Mr. Oberlaender joyfully.
Moreover, he had an exceedingly lovable personality.
Tall and strong, youthful in his bearing and in his eager ap-
preciation of anything interesting and beautiful, he "enjoyed
life in his own way to the fullest and gave to life the very
best of himself," as his daughter wrote of him a few months
ago. As I first knew him, a man of sixty, one would not have
guessed that decades of toil, hardship and poverty lay behind
him. His eyes shrewd, discerning, humorous, would sparkle
On a summer day in 1926 the President of the Archaeo-
logical Institute in Berlin had a wonderful surprise. Out of
the blue, so to speak, an American gentleman, Mr. Gustav
Oberlaender of Reading, Pennsylvania, called to offer a most
generous grant for excavations in Greece. And what made
this unexpected gift even more welcome was the reason given
for it. Mr. Oberlaender said he always remembered his high
school years in Duesseldorf very gratefully, and most of all the
thrill which Homer had given him. A second Schliemann
seemed to have come to gladden a classicist's heart, at a time
when opposition to Greek studies was rampant. Here was
a man, orphaned at the age of nine, who had worked his way
through school, had landed in America in 1887, a lad of twen-
ty, with thirty dollars in his pocket, had fought against adver-
sity with scant success, for another twenty years, and finally
became a partner in the great Berkshire Knitting Mills, Read-
ing, Pennsylvania, which had been founded by Mr. Ferdi-
nand Thun and Mr. Henry Janssen. The genuine type of
American millionaire, owing his great achievements to his
own initiative and to the unlimited possibilities of the New
World, he yet claimed that his training for all future success
began in that old school where impractical professors taught
the even more impractical stuff so sternly despised by many
modern educators, and by a vast proportion of the public. No
wonder that we all welcomed Mr. Oberlaender joyfully.
Moreover, he had an exceedingly lovable personality.
Tall and strong, youthful in his bearing and in his eager ap-
preciation of anything interesting and beautiful, he "enjoyed
life in his own way to the fullest and gave to life the very
best of himself," as his daughter wrote of him a few months
ago. As I first knew him, a man of sixty, one would not have
guessed that decades of toil, hardship and poverty lay behind
him. His eyes shrewd, discerning, humorous, would sparkle