John Baptiste Leineweber

1870s–1890s

Born 27 February 1879 in Iowa and raised on the family farm in Peru Township, Dubuque County, the son of German immigrant Michael Leineweber and Katharina Gansemer. Studied at the normal school in Dyersville.

1900s

Taught school in Iowa, then sold barber supplies out of Chicago. Came to Portland, Oregon, around 1905 and from 1907 worked for M. L. Kline Co., wholesale plumbing and steam supplies.

1910s–1920s

Married Margaret Marie Madigan on 15 February 1911 and raised five children on Flanders Street. A salesman for Kline until 1928, then for the Stone Supply Company. In 1926 Archbishop Howard asked him to revive Portland's St. Vincent de Paul Society.

1930s

First president of the Society's Portland council from 1929, opening a salvage store and, in 1935, a chapel and reading room for homeless men that served 220,000 visitors in two years. Died at home on 4 September 1939.

From the Iowa Farm

John Baptiste Leineweber was born on February 27, 1879, in Iowa, and baptized on March 5 with John Koltes and Margaretha Gansemer as godparents. He grew up on the family farm in Peru Township, Dubuque County, near Sherrill, the son of Michael Leineweber, a farmer born in the Rhine Province of Prussia, and Katharina Gansemer, and he spoke German with his mother. He had an older sister, Catharine, and an older brother, Peter; a younger sibling died as a baby in 1881.

His grandmother, Katharina Duhr Gansemer, hoped he would become a priest, and he went to the normal (or seminary) school in Dyersville, a year or two behind a student named Edward Howard who would one day be Archbishop of Portland. John Baptiste chose teaching instead. For about three years he taught school in Iowa, half the day in German and half in English; in 1901 and 1902, at Petersburg, he was known as "Prof." Leineweber. He had hoped to study law in Chicago, and he did go to Chicago, selling wholesale barber supplies. He and the other young salesmen would loiter outside the Palmer House hotel pretending they had just dined there.

A Portland Salesman

Around 1905 John Baptiste came to Portland, Oregon, the year of the Lewis and Clark Exposition. After a year as a clerk for the Pacific States Telephone and Telegraph Company, he joined M. L. Kline Co., wholesale plumbing and steam supplies on Front Street, in 1907, first as a clerk and from 1911 as a salesman. In 1913 he went with his boss to the Commercial Club's banquet at the Multnomah Hotel for the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, and that fall to a farewell banquet for visiting New York Giants and Chicago White Sox players. He bowled for the Kline team with a 147 average. Mr. Kline had promised John Baptiste and two other salesmen that they would run the business when he retired, but when he did retire, in 1926, he left it to his son, who sold it. John Baptiste quit, took his customers with him to the Stone Supply Company, and sold for Stone for the rest of his life.

On February 15, 1911, he married Margaret Marie Madigan at the Cathedral parish. They lived in a boardinghouse in an Irish neighborhood on Irving Street and on East Lincoln Street before settling in 1913 in the Madigan family home on Flanders Street, where they raised Peter, Jim, Pinky, Tom, and Peggy alongside Margaret's father and her sister's family. In 1919 John Baptiste bought his first car, a Dodge touring car, for Sunday drives in the country, and in 1927 he drove Margaret and the three oldest boys to Iowa in a new Dodge sedan to visit his mother and brother, a week on the road each way and a month there. He was a tall, handsome man with dark curly hair, and in Pete's early memories he had four gold front teeth, replacing ones a baseball had knocked out when he was young.

Father and Fan

Pete remembered "a gentle man, with a strict code of ethics and a sense of right and wrong," who "worshipped his kids." "Dad was a very religious man, but never forced his practices of religion on any of us. He taught by example," going to Mass daily and paying, at real sacrifice, for his children's Catholic schooling. He loved sports. "Nearly every Saturday he was out to the old Vaughn St. ball park to watch the AAA baseball, Portland Beavers," with a regular seat near the first-base bleachers, a big bag of peanuts for Pete, and a running banter with the right fielders. "I'll never forget my Sunday afternoon graduation from college," Pete wrote, "when he was in the audience … his round moon like face glowing a bright red … from a ballpark sun exposure of the day before." He went to the prizefights at the old Armory until he found himself wincing at every blow and gave boxing up, bowled in the Kline league, and did gymnastics at the German Turn Verein club well into middle age, and he came out to Columbia Prep to watch his sons practice football and baseball.

Rebuilding St. Vincent de Paul

John Baptiste was a lifelong worker for Catholic causes. In 1907 the Cathedral men's club put him on a committee campaigning against "treating," the custom of buying rounds that was blamed for heavy drinking, and in 1916 he captained one of the Cathedral parish's teams raising $100,000 for the Christie Home for orphan girls. In 1926 Archbishop Howard, his old schoolmate from Dyersville, called on him to lead the revival of Portland's Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and when the Portland Particular Council was created in January 1929 to oversee eighteen parish conferences, John Baptiste was made its first president. He held the post for the rest of his life.

Under his leadership the Society opened a rummage store and then a larger Salvage Bureau that sold donated goods cheaply and provided jobs. On September 1, 1935, it opened a chapel and reading room for homeless and transient men at SW Third and Ankeny. In its first two years it served 220,000 men from all forty-eight states and from Canada, Mexico, England, Norway, Italy, Cuba, and Hawaii, providing more than 11,000 free baths, 5,000 meals, 2,750 nights' lodging, and 930 jobs, along with books, games, a radio, and Mass in the chapel. When John Baptiste described it to the Catholic Charities convention in Seattle in 1936, he could say that no other St. Vincent de Paul society had anything like it. He chaired the Society's first annual dinner in 1937, visited parish conferences in rotation, and organized bazaars, card parties, and film showings to pay for the work.

Death

In the summer of 1939 John Baptiste fell ill, and after a slight recovery he died of a coronary thrombosis at home on NW Glisan Street on the morning of September 4, 1939, at sixty. Archbishop Howard paid tribute to him at his funeral at St. Mary's Cathedral, and he was buried at Mount Calvary Cemetery. The Catholic Sentinel wrote: "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." Father B. V. Kelly 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."