TWENTIETH
CENTURY MAN

Born into a Round Top cotton field, he has made the best of his 97 years

Imagine the simple life you would lead on that small farm, picking cotton in the hot sun, growing to become a young man speaking a foreign language because your parents are unable to converse in English.

Now, imagine that you live in our modern world, satellites plying the skies, supercomputers managing your daily affairs, science on the verge of modifying the genetic structure of your fellow human beings.

Now imagine that there have been over 97 years between your birth in that cotton field and the life you have today.

Can you imagine such a life? Arthur George (A. G.) Wiederaenders can. He lived it. Born in Round Top, Texas when the twentieth century was only a couple of years old, he is still alive and well today, living in Seguin, Texas, a joyful, interesting man relishing the climactic years of a rewarding life.

“Wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world, even if I could,” said A. G. when I asked about his life. “To me it’s been exhilarating. To this day I am so grateful for the multiplicity of experiences, from so many different angles, that have come my way. And, really, all I did was swim with the stream the way the Lord led me.”

His parents were cotton farmers of German lineage. They had a farm on Cummins Creek at Hwy 237 and spoke no English at all. A. G. was educated in German as well as English, which was to turn out useful in later years. “I learned from my mother,” he remembers. “My mother was a linguist. She wrote with the old German script as it had been printed.”

He went from grammar school in Round Top to high school in La Grange. Each week, he rode a bicycle the eighteen miles to La Grange over unimproved country roads, in order to gain his diploma.

“I was the youngest of seven,” explained A. G.” ‘What can we do with little Arthur?’ That was a big question. We had only so many acres and my brother decided to stay on the farm and got married. There was nothing for me there. My parents wanted me to study for the ministry but I said ‘I’d rather be a cat doctor!’ (laughter)”

A. G. left for the University of Texas in Austin, his mind set on becoming an electrical engineer. However, he left with some regret. He lost a girlfriend who had pledged her love. “She said she would marry me; or she would stand on her head! But, when she found out I was going to go off to the University of Texas...she said ‘I can’t wait that long,’ and she married a wealthy farm boy in the community.”

Perhaps his lost love was for the best, because early in his college career, a series of lectures on religion at U. T. changed his life.

“There, the Lord took me by the scruff of the neck, so to speak, and…convinced me to become a minister. And so, I gave up electrical engineering.” Part of A. G.’s decision was due to the fact that it appeared he had no talent for math. He was enrolled in a trigonometry course at UT and was not doing well. “I finally came up with a 58.” He went to his professor and asked to be passed with a D minus. His teacher was reluctant.

“‘Hell!’, he said, ‘You don’t know enough trig to be an engineer.’

I said, ‘I’m not going to be an engineer.’

‘Oh, what are you going to be?’

‘I’m going to be a Lutheran minister.’

‘Oh,.....hell’ he said, ‘You know enough Trig to be a preacher.’ (laughter) He gave me a D minus, and when I came to school here (Texas Lutheran), to study for the ministry, I got Doc Gustafson, who was a mathematician, and I made an A minus in analytical geometry to finish off my math. So it wasn’t that I was stupid. It was that I just had a bad teacher.”

A. G. came to Texas Lutheran in 1921-22 to study for the ministry. There, he was a member of football, basketball…and baseball teams that never lost a game. “We had an undefeated season. And I had the privilege of being on all three of those teams. I was a good, hard-working country boy and developed my little body.”

From there, he went to Dubuque, Iowa to study for the ministry and after three years, emerged as the valedictorian of the class. He came home to Round Top to be ordained in Bethlehem Lutheran Church, a church that had been built by his great-grandfather, Carl Siegismund Bauer, in the 1860’s. Many years later, A. G. came back to that historic parish for its 165th anniversary and preached a sermon...all in German.

He married a girl he had met at Texas Lutheran and got his first parish near Corpus Christi. Later, he served the church as a missionary all over West Texas. “I eventually founded a number of little preaching missions, I guess you’d call ‘em, until I got an invitation to come to Texas Lutheran to teach German.”

When he arrived at the college to make a run at an academic life, his sponsor warned him that he would have to go back to school and get additional degrees if he wanted to keep the job.

He did so and earned a masters at Sul Ross University, a masters at the University of Texas, and later, at that same university, a Ph.D. During that period, his graduate advisor was Walter Prescott Webb, perhaps Texas’ most famous historian. Webb, who was for many years Director of the Texas State Historical Commission, launched a project to compile an encyclopedia of Texas. It was published in 1952 as the Handbook of Texas.

While I was visiting with Reverend Wiederaenders in Seguin, he showed me a book he had written, a history of Texas Lutheran College entitled Coming of Age.

While reading through the book, I discovered the following quote on the dust cover. It was taken from the 1972 issue of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. The editor, Dr. Joe D. Frantz, stated “Walter Prescott Webb used to tell me regularly that Wiederaenders was the finest graduate student that he had ever turned out.”

That’s high praise for a farm boy from Round Top.

So, Reverend Doctor Wiederaenders accomplished a few things along the way in his ninety seven years.

As I sat in his room during the interview however, it was not his accomplishments that interested me the most. It was his humility and his sense of joy.

Repeatedly, as he told his story, he downplayed his role in his success. He only mentioned the fact that he was valedictorian of his class at seminary after pointing out that the most brilliant student had drowned in the Mississippi and the next best was missing a few credits and could not graduate.

He was not falsely humble. He was proud of what he had accomplished and it was clear from some of his stories that he had been through his fair share of battles in the field of academia. In fact, he told me a story related to him at the death of one of his academic foes.

“A preacher preached a wonderful sermon, saying we should love our enemies. And, when he got through he asked, ‘Is there anybody in the audience who can truthfully say that he or she has no enemies?’ An old gentleman got up right underneath the pulpit, and he said, ‘Preacher, I ain’t got no enemies.’

“So the Pastor tells the congregation, ‘Let’s listen. This man has the secret. He can teach us something. Go ahead, sir, now tell us how we do that.’

“Oh,’ he said, ‘..it ain’t hard. You see, I’ve outlived all those rascals.’”

A. G. seemed like a down-to-earth, realistic man, not an ivory tower dreamer. Raised on a farm doing back-breaking labor had made him humble and unassumming despite his later accomplishments.

“We had a little cotton farm, not realizing that cotton is very hard on the land,” remembered the reverend. “You don’t find any more cotton raised in Fayette County.

“Well, they mined land. They really did…and my father could just about tell how many bales they were going to make after the cotton had gone to bolls…before the bolls opened. He would walk up and down a few rows, in a few distinct places, and he would come back, and say ‘Well, it looks like we might make six bales…maybe seven!’ Once in a while he predicted eight, but that was unusual.

“I learned how to count in the cotton patch. I picked with my mother. It was nothing unusual for one stalk to have sixty bolls on it, and maybe as many as 20 open every time. I learned to count, with my mother’s help, and stuffed what I picked into her bag.” Later, as A. G. grew into a strapping young man, he took on a man’s work. “I got to where I could pick 400 pounds in a day,” he remembers.

Three women had a profound impact on his life. The first was his mother, who taught him to count in the cotton field and whose tutoring in German came in so handy in his academic career. The second was a Round Top lady named Clara Rummel. She was his teacher in grammar school and it was obvious she had a mighty impact on him.

“I’ll tell you one story about Miss Clara, and you might want to print it. Every year we had at least one big meal for the community. Everybody brought their very best and in large supply. There was this one fellow who was a moocher. He never brought anything except himself, and his enormous appetite. He always saw to it that he sat close to the source of the meal. So, when the potato bowl came by, he took the large spoon and raked about half of them onto his plate to everybody’s dismay. When Miss Clara saw that, she looked at him and said ‘Sir, would you please pass the potatoes?’

“Then, ‘Oh, oh,’ she said in a stage whisper so that everyone could hear her, “I’m sorry, sir, I thought surely your plate was the potato bowl!’ (laughter)

That was the kind of lady she was. She had her Masters’ in English and when she left Round Top, after her mother had passed away, she went back to Austin and became the secretary to the Superintendent of Public Schools for the State of Texas. And she was qualified, yes sir!”

So, according to Doctor Reverend Wiederaenders, almost everything he accomplished in life was actually the result of his mother, his teacher, Clara Rummel or his wife of sixty years. Those women must have been busy because in those ninety-seven years he forged a distinguished academic career that included a BA, an MA and a PhD. He headed two different departments at Texas Lutheran College, founded three Lutheran churches and wrote and published three books on the history of Texas Lutheran.

All in all, I’d say those ladies did a pretty good job. Best of all, they made him into a warm, joyful and faithful man who still carries his faith and a positive attitude with him everywhere he goes.

I asked him how it felt to have lived almost all of the last century of this last millenium and he had this to say.

“In my own life, it’s been a revolution. It’s a totally different world. My goodness! Little old boy carrying a sack in a cotton patch, 100 degrees in the shade. Whew! And then given the chance to go to high school, the University, to college, to the seminary, into the ministry.

“Just think, this country is not very old and now it is one of the great powers in the world. Have you any idea the enormous changes upward? And, we are the beneficiaries...and I just went along for the ride.

“I had some proud moments. I like to think I made a little contribution. But, I never take that too seriously. I don’t lay claim to any kind of fame at all because it came my way, it just seemed to be the natural thing to do.”

“Now I lost my first girlfriend as a result of it. (laughter) …I wonder if she is still living down there. They are all dead. My goodness I’ve outlived them all!”

I asked A. G. what changes he had seen in the way people expressed their faith in God. He answered my question by telling me about his current home.

Every Wednesday morning at ten o’clock, A. G. Wiederaenders leads a Bible study class at the Argent Court Assisted Living Center in Seguin. He says his current home is like a microcosm of the great world outside.

“I’ll tell you what I’ve seen here,” he says. “This is a small world of people from different denominations. People come to my class here and say ‘I’m not a Lutheran. Am I welcome?’ I say, ‘Of course you are. This is the climax to our Christian life and experience. I think the Lord is blessing it.”

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