John Baptiste Leineweber

Born February 27, 1879 in Iowa. He married February 15, 1911, at the Cathedral Parish in Portland, Oregon and worked as clerk. He died September 4, 1939 in 2155 NW Glisan Street, Portland, Oregon.

• A teacher in Iowa before moving west.
• Married Margaret at the Cathedral Parish, Portland, on February 15, 1911.

Teacher and Traveling Salesman

John Baptiste Leineweber was born on February 27, 1879, in Peru Township, Dubuque County, Iowa, the son of German immigrant farmer Michael Leineweber and Katharina Gansemer — his own grandmother had hoped he would enter the seminary, and he attended the same normal school in Dyersville as future Portland Archbishop Edward Howard. Instead he taught school in Iowa for about three years, splitting lessons between German and English, before moving to Chicago to sell wholesale barber supplies and, around 1905, on to Portland, Oregon, where he spent the rest of his career as a salesman of wholesale plumbing and steam supplies — over twenty years with M. L. Kline Co., and, after the company was sold out from under him in 1926, with the Stone Supply Company, which kept him on its payroll even through his final illness.

A Portland Father

John Baptiste married Margaret Marie Madigan at the Cathedral Parish in Portland on February 15, 1911, and their sons remembered a devoted, quietly principled father. His son Peter wrote: “Dad was a very religious man, but never forced his practices of religion on any of us. He taught by example... Nearly every Saturday he was out to the old Vaughn St. ball park to watch the AAA baseball, Portland Beavers... I'll never forget my Sunday afternoon graduation from college, when he was in the audience... his round moon-like face glowing a bright red in the audience from a ballpark sun exposure of the day before.” He also boxed as a spectator until the sport's violence began to bother him too much to watch, bowled in a company league, and did weekly gymnastics at the German Turn Verein club into middle age.

Rebuilding St. Vincent de Paul

John Baptiste's most lasting legacy was civic and religious. In 1926 Archbishop Edward Howard called on him personally to lead the reactivation of Portland's Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and in 1929 he was named the first president of its new Particular Council overseeing eighteen parish conferences across the city — a post he held until his death a decade later. Under his leadership the Society opened a Salvage Bureau thrift store and, in 1935, a chapel and reading room for homeless and transient men at Southwest 3rd and Ankeny that within two years had served 220,000 visitors from every U.S. state and a dozen countries, providing free meals, baths, lodging, and job placement — a program John Baptiste told a Seattle Catholic Charities convention was without parallel among the Society's chapters nationally.

Death

John Baptiste died at home on Northwest Glisan Street on the morning of September 4, 1939, after a long illness. The Catholic Sentinel eulogized him at length: “He was just an ordinary layman, with the talents and means of an ordinary layman... Yet he made of himself an extraordinary man, who enriched the lives of others with his kindly ministrations.” His parish priest put it more simply: “There is no limit to the amount of good one can do if he doesn't care who gets the credit.”