Gertrude Leitert

From Immigrant Entrepreneurship

Family Background

Born September 21, 1914, in the manufacturing city of Chemnitz, Germany, Johannes Kluge grew up in a tenement house with his mother and grandmother. His father died in World War I before he was born, and his mother worked six days a week as a typist to support the family. An only child, Kluge often challenged the other neighborhood boys to games of marbles in a nearby park, where he demonstrated his proclivity for risk taking. He played for keeps, and claimed to have won more than two thousand marbles from the other children. Eventually, he noted, they stopped playing with him.[10] When the family moved to Schönau, a different district of Chemnitz, Kluge’s mother met Oswald Leitert, a German-born widower visiting from Detroit. Leitert was an American citizen, and promised to move Kluge and his mother Gertrud to the United States after they wed. When the family arrived in New York harbor on September 15, 1922,[11] Kluge recalled the crowds of immigrants lined up on the deck of the USS George Washington, waving at the Statue of Liberty.  As for many immigrants, the statue became a “symbol of freedom” for Kluge, and he maintained a “soft spot” for the Statue of Liberty throughout his life.[12] The family stayed at the Taft Hotel in the heart of New York City, where the bright lights and sounds of the city enchanted Kluge. He made up his mind to return to New York one day.

Kluge’s stepfather ran a painting and contracting business in Detroit, and at first the family lived in the city. Eventually, they moved to a small farm in Redford, Michigan, on the outskirts of Detroit, where Kluge soon began to demonstrate his entrepreneurial prowess. He sold apples from his family’s fruit trees alongside his uncle, delivered newspapers, and washed windows. He set up a lawn cutting and snow shoveling business, and trained neighborhood boys to work for him so he could increase profits.[13] 

Kluge realized early on that education would be the key to advancement in the United States. When he arrived, he did not speak any English, and attended a local Lutheran school where his schoolmates dubbed him “Hans the Hun.” He began carrying around an English-German Webster’s dictionary everywhere he went for ten years—“to school, to church, back home”—determined to learn English and speak it without an accent.[14] After Kluge finished eighth grade, his stepfather encouraged him to leave school and enter the family business. Kluge refused, and later referred to it as one of the first big risks he took. He convinced his stepfather to allow him to attend one year of high school, and, after earning high marks, asked to finish. When his stepfather forbid him to do so, Kluge left home without knowing where he would sleep. He was “never afraid of making a decision, regardless of the consequences,” he said. Kluge knew that working for his stepfather in Detroit meant that he would remain a “second-class citizen,” with little chance to make his own mark.[15] Education provided Kluge with a pathway to achievement, and he set out on his own.

• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Mar 23 2016, 19:51:30 UTC
• Residence: 1940 - 16105 Stout, Detroit, Wayne, Michigan, USA
• Race: White
  • Reference: 1940 United States Federal Census - SmartCopy: Mar 23 2016, 19:54:27 UTC