JHS German Exchange will be welcoming our second group of German students on April 2nd. They will be staying with us until May 16th. If you have the opportunity to meet them, please welcome them. They come from a small town in Thuringia called Poessneck. They were in the former Eastern Block of Germany and they have a unique perspective on life and happiness. Many of their parents stood in food lines and anxiously awaited smuggled goods such as fruit and jeans.

These students were between ages of birth and 2 years old, when the iron curtain opened, so they are the first generation of children born into freedom in Eastern Germany. It will be interesting to hear about their perspective on life.

The students will be accompanied by 2 English teachers, who are interesting to visit with. If you would like to entertain them one evening, please contact Marie Hendry. They are very interested in our way of life and in practicing their American English.

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JHS German Club had an exciting and eventful trip to Muncie, Indiana on the weekend of February 22nd. We participated in the 2003 Staatskongress cultural and academic competition.

Please congratulate our own Nathan Humbert, who won the office of President for the statewide organization of the Indiana Association for Students of German. This means that Jasper High School will be the base organizational institution for the 2004 Staatskongress.

Amanda Nordhoff won the Mühle competition and the Gingerbread House contest, and Cassie Humphries won the baked goods contest with a Blackforest Cherry Cake. Most of all we had a wonderful time together.

If you see one of these students please congratulate them! It was a long weekend and many of them had to return to work, schoolwork, and play performances immediately upon our return.

I am so proud of all of the students at JHS, who stay involved and busy and proud of the parents, who support them. Keep it up!

Contributions to the Jasper Deutscher Verein German Heritage Endowment for the month of February 2003

In memory of Leonard Wehr:

      Linus and Sally Lechner

A group of Master Gardeners have undertaken a project to install and maintain a medicinal plant garden at the Indiana Medical History Museum, which is located in the Old Pathology Building at Central State Hospital - built 1895.

Levi Strauss (1829-1902) – Levi Strauss, the man who gave the world blue jeans, was born in 1829 in Bavaria. Orphaned at 16 years of age, Levi Strauss decided to join his five brothers and sisters in the United States. In 1843, young Levi sailed from Bremerhaven to New York where his two older brothers, Jonas and Louis, had already established a successful wholesale textile and tailoring business. After a stay of two days in New York, he continued on to the ranch of his uncle, Daniel Goldman in Louisville, Kentucky. There he spent the next five years learning the language and ways of his new homeland in order that he might someday take over his uncle’s ranch. But Levi had dreams of becoming an independent businessman, and for several years he walked the roads of Kentucky, selling cloth and notions from the pack on his back. In 1853 he returned to New York upon hearing reports of gold being discovered in California. He persuaded his two brothers to provide him with a supply of silk, cloth, and a few luxury items, which he planned to sell in San Francisco. In addition, he took a supply of canvas intended for the Conestoga Wagons made by German wheelwrights in Pennsylvania and used by many gold prospectors to cross the continent. In 1850 he took a ship for San Francisco. By the time he reached California, he had sold everything to fellow passengers, except for the canvas.

A gruff old prospector chided young Strauss for not having brought along a supply of pants, because prospecting for gold was rough on pants. Strauss cut his canvas and stitched it into trousers that were an instant success and were known as “Levis”. The success of his durable trousers was so overwhelming that he soon opened his own company, Levi Strauss & Co. on Battery Street in San Francisco. Since that time, nothing essential has changed in this “piece of national heritage”, except that the Strauss Brothers switched from canvas to serge de Nimes –denim—dyed with indigo.

Levi Strauss disliked the name "jeans" and always referred to them as "overalls".

Another prospector, Alkali Ike, was to play a role in the evolution of jeans. Each time he returned to the saloon of Virginia City, he complained to his tailor, Jacob W. Davis, of pockets torn from his habit of carrying nuggets in them, and asked why Davis couldn’t make his pockets as strong as those in Strauss’ Levis. Davis, tired of his customer’s constant complaining, riveted the pockets together with copper wire. When Alkali Ike retuned a few weeks later, the entire boom town expected to witness the usual drunken spectacle, but this time the gruff miner, instead of getting drunk immediately and going round through the tents cursing, went to his tailor to show him that his pockets had held together. Davis reported the incident to Strauss, who applied the Davis for a patent on July 5, 1872. The patent, number 139,121, was granted on May 20, 1873, the date regarded as the birthday of the firm. At that time the jeans were sold for 22 cents each. Some of the early Levis are now in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.

Strauss made money with one hand and gave it way with the other, endowing 28 scholarships at the University of California and contributing to several San Francisco orphanages. A lifelong bachelor, he left the company to four nephews, whose descendants still control it. Today Levi’s are sold around the world, with about $5 billion in annual sales.

Labor Day Trip