John (Johann Evangelist) Greiner

John Greiner arrived in Eudora with his family in 1872 from Germany, and he and his wife took over the task of ringing the Angelus.

They lived in a house adjoining the church grounds to the south. John Greiner was very accurate as to time; in fact so accurate, that practically every workman in town started and stopped working at the sound of the Angelus. It was interesting to watch John Greiner ring the bell whenever there was a funeral and the procession formed outside the church to go to the cemetery.

He would always be seen standing at the bell rope. We don't think there ever was a man who could toll a bell as poignantly as John Greiner. He would reach and pull, and bend - relax the rope - reach and pull, and bend again in perfect rhythm. A few years before his death he lost his sight and the ringing of the Angelus was taken up by another. The custom of tolling the bell for funeral processions has almost died away, but we somehow wish when the time does come - that John Greiner, if such could be, might ring the bell for us, so that its doleful tolling might echo up and down the streets of Eudora, the town we love.

In Eudora, John was custodian of the Holy Family Catholic Church. His duties included building a fire to keep the church warm for services and ringing the bell.

He was also a carpenter and built his home on two lots next to the church (to the Southwest). The house is still standing. Tena Ziesnis remembers going to his house as a child and that he raised canaries. He died in September, 1912 of old age at 87. He and his wife Anna are buried at Holy Family Cemetery, in the first row of graves just inside the East gate.