photograph courtesy Curt Ward
Curt Ward celebrates his 100th birthday.
There is a website titled “Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience,” which publishes letters — some obscure, many by famous folks — that make the reader happy, entertained, educated, enlightened, or uplifted. I believe there should be a similar platform called “Lives of Note: People Deserving of Wider Attention.” Learning about those people would likewise make the reader happy, entertained, educated, enlightened, or uplifted.
Curt Ward would be one of the people on that list. Last year, in the run-up to his 100th birthday, he summoned me to his apartment at Town Village Audubon Park: “I’d like you to write my obituary,” he said in his pronounced German accent. “But you understand, I’m not in any hurry! And don’t make it too long. I hate reading long obituaries.”
That obituary — whenever it comes — may well not be lengthy, but Curt’s life has been, and our meeting that day started me on a fascinating journey.
Over seven visits, Curt’s story unspooled like a cross between a History Channel documentary and Forrest Gump. At 100, he has a razor-sharp mind, with a memory for details, and he’s the very definition of “spry,” walking with only a steadying cane. His fridge is stocked with wine, ready for entertaining, and although he no longer drives, he maintains an active social life. His only apparent capitulation to age is poor hearing, which he mitigates with hearing aids that squeal when he’s hugged.
Humility is in short supply these days, but Curt’s got it — in abundance. During our first interview, he demurred, insisting he was nothing special. After our meanderings down his memory lane, he finally agreed: “You know, I’ve led a pretty interesting life.”
A German Childhood
Curt (left) with his father and older brother in Hamburg, Germany, sometime in the 1920s.
Kurt Georg Wertheim(he later Americanized the spelling of his name) was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on September 17, 1917, to Hermann and Hertha Wertheim. He was the baby by a long shot to older siblings.
“I was a surprise,” he says, “but I’m glad I got here!” His father was in private banking, but lost his fortune in the Depression. “We were comfortable, but we went from well-to-do to middle class.” Still, the family employed a cook and two housekeepers, and he enjoyed an idyllic childhood, filled with memories of his family, his dogs Tell (for William Tell) and Bobby, and the luxury of being a “free-range” child.
“I started riding a bike early,” Curt remembers. “I went all over the place, and I spent a lot of time in the park near where we lived, with nice botanical gardens and lakes and concerts. I had lots of friends. My mother, particularly, always worried where the hell I was, but when I disappeared, they always knew where to find me.”
His Catholic nanny used to take him to church, and despite his strict conservative Jewish upbringing, Curt enjoyed mass. “I liked the ritual and the singing,” he says, “but my parents didn’t know I was going. When I was about 6 years old, they realized, so that was the end of the nanny taking me. Then I started going to Hebrew School.”
Curt was well-educated, attending the selective German “gymnasium” school, where he learned French, Latin, and Greek. He also took private English lessons.
For 16-year-old Curt, 1933 was a watershed year. Hitler came to power, his father died, he graduated high school, and was apprenticed in Frankfurt to L.S. Mayer, a company that exported German-made products. “We could tell what the future would bring with Hitler,” he says, “and they were already restricting education for Jews, so I went to work, which was an education.” He was promoted to full employee status and moved to Berlin in 1935.
“In 1936,” he says, “Berlin was still wide open, because of the Olympic Games, and the fact that Hitler was trying to put forward a good front to the rest of the world. I did go to the Olympics a couple of times, taking some of my American customers. Unfortunately, I did not get to see Jesse Owens. After the Olympics, things changed very, very rapidly.”
Coming to America
The handwriting wason the wall in Berlin, and it was suddenly quite dangerous to be a young Jewish man in Germany. Curt’s siblings were arranging to move to Belgium, with his mother planning to join them later. The family put its efforts into securing passage to America for Curt, which had been a long-held dream of his.
“It’s really sort of ridiculous,” he says, “but there were two things I admired about the U.S. I got hold of a Sears & Roebuck catalogue, and I was captivated. The other thing, I had heard about drugstores with soda fountains, and I wanted to see them. It’s silly, but these are the things I thought of America.”
He was fortunate to get a visa, because the quota for Jews to immigrate to the U.S. was so low. “I got a strong affidavit of support from Erich Fromm, a cousin, which allowed me to get an appointment with the U.S. Consul in Stuttgart.”
Wait, what? The Erich Fromm? The German social psychologist, philosopher, and psychoanalyst? Author of Escape from Freedom and The Art of Loving?
Yes, that Erich Fromm. Curt’s grandmother and Fromm’s father were sister and brother. The visa was granted, and Curt booked passage on the S.S. Manhattan of the American Line.
“The crossing took about five or six days. I was 20 years old, and I arrived in the U.S. on November 11, 1937, with my personal belongings in one suitcase.”
Within the Erich Fromm Archives at the New York Public Library is a folder labeled “Wertheim, Kurt,” containing correspondence surrounding Curt’s quest to escape Nazi Germany. There are letters, in German, between young Curt and Fromm. In one, Fromm asserts that he is “very fond of Kurt Wertheim,” and invites him to come and “make his home” with him in New York.
When Curt’s ship docked in New York, Fromm came to the boat, signed the paperwork admitting him into the U.S., and announced, “Excuse me, I have an appointment. Come see me for lunch tomorrow. Then he was gone.” So much for Fromm inviting Curt to “make his home” with him.
“That was a rough beginning,” understates Curt. “But I met a man at the pier that night, and he took me to the Hotel Belleclaire on Broadway, where I spent the first few nights until I could situate myself.”
Curt loved New York, where he lived from November 1937 until the spring of 1939. “I made $15 a week, but I never missed a meal. My furnished room on the Upper West Side was $8 a week. Subway fare was five cents; I got breakfast for 25 cents at a place called Nedick’s, and you could get dinner for 75 cents at the Automat.
“The most exciting thing was the vibrancy and the enormous amount of entertainment and education available at little or no charge,” he continues. “I took English lessons at night school, and I had a lot of friends, and we had get-togethers on the weekends. I wouldn’t take anything for those two years in New York.”
Heading South to Memphis
One of Curt’s most markedcharacteristics has been his ability to make friends wherever he goes. Through one of his New York acquaintances from Hamburg, he met a woman who said, “If you ever go to Memphis, you must look up my niece, Mildred Haas.” This would prove to be a fateful connection.
Since the Depression still gripped New York, Curt decided there might be more opportunity if he were to take the advice of people who told him to go west. He had a friend from Frankfurt, Walter Bacharach, who was living in Memphis, so he decided to add “south” to the “west” dictum. In spring 1939, he boarded a bus, arriving three days later in Memphis.
Upon his arrival, Bacharach met him and introduced him to Bertrand Cohn, a local lawyer. In keeping with the custom of the times, Cohn suggested Curt Americanize his name. “I changed my name from Kurt Georg Wertheim to Curtis George Ward,” he remembers, “and I’ve always regretted it, because I lost my identity.”
Cohn’s wife’s family had a lumber mill in northern Louisiana, and Curt moved there briefly to take a job working in the “company store” for employees.
“That was a culture shock,” Curt says. “All the employees were black, and I’d never really seen any black people in Germany or New York, and I didn’t know there was supposed to be any difference. So I treated them well, and they all liked me, and I became the top salesman. At first, I didn’t even know what ‘two bits’ meant, and it was hot as hell down there. The food was good country food, so I probably gained more weight than ever in my life.”
In the fall of 1939, a call came about an opening in the Mayer-Myers paper company, and Curt returned to Memphis. Shortly thereafter, because of his Mildred Haas/New York connection, Curt contacted Edgar Haas Sr., who had opened his own mattress manufacturing company on South Parkway — Slumber Products. Curt soon began to work for Slumber Products, an association that would last the rest of his professional life.
The War Years
During WWII, Curt was stationed in Belgium.
In 1941, Curt’s draft number cameup. He was not an American citizen, but still had to register. He decided to volunteer, which in peacetime would give him a shorter term of service. Curt took leave from Slumber and enlisted in the Army. Then Pearl Harbor happened.
“We had no idea where Pearl Harbor was,” he says, “and that canceled everything. I was now in the Army as long as they needed me.”
He was first stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was naturalized as an American citizen. With pride, he notes there was a report of this event in the Columbus, Georgia, newspaper, complete with photograph.
A new camp opened in Maryland — Camp Ritchie — and Curt was transferred there. “A good percentage of the soldiers there were Jewish-German refugees,” he says. “We took courses on interpreting and interrogating German POWs, and a class on the German army — acquiring deep knowledge of the German army. I was reclassified as Military Intelligence.”
Curt went on to interrogate German prisoners in Europe, as the last days of WWII approached. “The more we got toward the end of the war, the more information we got from them,” Curt says. “According to them, none of them were Nazis, they were just enlisted men who wanted to go home. But we did find some, and we turned them over to the military police.” Curt speaks of the way in which they interrogated the German POWS, and he mentions that “we tried to make them comfortable, at home. The more comfortable they felt, the more information they gave us.”
The war was winding down. The word came out on February 4, 1945, that Belgium (where Curt’s family relocated) had been liberated.
“I left that night,” he says. “It was a harsh winter and I drove all night in an open Jeep, and the exhaust pipes kept freezing up, so we had to keep stopping. We got to [a pay phone in] Brussels and after a couple of calls, I found some friends of my brother, and they found him. It was an emotional reunion.
“My mother, my brother, and his wife were okay, but my sister and brother-in-law and their daughter had been deported shortly before the liberation and died in Auschwitz.
“For a long time,” Curt says, breaking from his usual sunny demeanor, “I didn’t talk about the Holocaust. In the last couple of years, I’m beginning to because that generation is dying out, and people need to remember.”
Toward the end of the war, he commanded a team that interrogated German POWs. This gave Curt leeway to commute back and forth from Brussels to be with his family. His group was quartered in a picturesque part of the Bavarian Alps, where then-Captain Ward was even able to pursue his childhood hobby of horseback riding. He has another vivid memory of those last days in Germany: “When FDR died, I stopped my Jeep and I cried.”
The Next Chapter
Curt, by this time working in Memphis, poses with his wife Hedi and son Jeffrey in the 1960s.
Back home in Memphis in 1946,Curt resumed work for Slumber Products, rising to the position of plant superintendent. “The reason I went back to work,” he says, “instead of college, which was available to Army veterans, was because I wanted to bring my mother over to the United States, which I did in 1950.”
Curt established his mother in an apartment on New York’s Upper West Side, and sent her on vacations with Erich Fromm’s mother to the Catskills and Lake Placid. Along with his financial support, Curt made frequent visits to see his mother. During those visits, another coincidental connection was taking shape.
Hedi Schulenklopper was born in 1930 and lived in Frankfurt with her family, where her father owned a shoe factory. Around 1935, her father was picked up by Nazis and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. He was allowed to come back to Frankfurt on the condition he turn over his factory. Realizing this would not be the end of their troubles, the family decamped for the U.S.
Hedi’s family settled in New York. She graduated from New York University, and became a social worker in Harlem.
The coincidence: In Frankfurt, Curt’s family lived two doors down from Hedi’s, and he remembers her birth when he was 13. After Curt brought his mother to New York, she became reacquainted with the Schulenkloppers, and during Curt’s many visits, he began dating Hedi. They dated long-distance for seven years, marrying on November 10, 1957, at New York’s Hotel Brewster. “I’ve made many mistakes,” Curt says, “but the biggest was not marrying Hedi earlier.”
Curt and Hedi set up housekeeping in Memphis. Curt was at Slumber Products and Hedi began working for the Shelby County Department of Welfare. Segregated Memphis was an alien culture to Hedi, coming from progressive New York, where her best woman friend was African-American. “Hedi was super-liberal, and very outspoken, so I told her to keep her mouth shut,” Curt remembers, laughing. Their son, Jeffrey Bernard Ward, was born on Halloween in 1960, completing their family.
Curt’s career with Slumber Products flourished as he cycled through many positions. Around 1957, Slumber became the exclusive Sealy mattress manufacturer for most of the Southern states and areas east of the Mississippi River to Georgia.
One of Curt’s tasks was spearheading the company’s “dealer trips.” Starting in 1963 with a trip to Puerto Rico, Slumber sponsored incentive trips for furniture store owners. Any store that sold a certain number of Sealy mattresses earned slots on the weeklong vacations. Every couple of years, upwards of 300 people would board a charter plane for destinations across the globe. Although a travel agency organized the nuts-and-bolts of the trips, Curt was the point person at Slumber to make sure the trips were perfect.
When the Haas family sold Slumber Products to the Ohio Mattress company in 1986, Curt stayed on a year to help with the transition. He retired at the age of 70. He and Hedi then traveled with gusto, returning to their favorite spot in California — Carmel — 19 times. A yearly trip to Brussels to visit Curt’s brother was always on their agenda. Hedi and Curt were married nearly 50 years when Hedi died in 2007. Today, Curt wears two wedding rings — “One for Hedi, one for me.”
For Curt’s 100th birthday last year, 25 friends and relatives — from Israel, California, New York, Utah, and Memphis — gathered at Erling Jensen’s restaurant to toast him. Afterward, he sent handwritten thank-you notes, along with this message: “I’ve had happy times throughout my life — I never had a bad day.
“The essence of my life is that I was blessed with good fortune. I was blessed with a happy childhood. I was blessed to be able to come to the U.S. I was blessed with so many happy coincidences ... I was blessed to have a very happy marriage with Hedi, and to have a fine son in Jeffrey ...
“Memories are very select. We can disband bad ones and cherish the good ones. The best one in my bank of memories was my 100th birthday party … I shall cherish this experience forever!!”
