NORTHWESTERN IOWA ITS HISTORY AND TRADITION VOLUME II 1804-1926 C. A. KNAPP The late Clarence Albert Knapp, prominent Sioux City hardware merchant, was born at Green Bay, Wisconsin, April 13, 1846, a son of Willima Albert and Lucinda Amelia (Gilbert) Knapp, who came from England in 1630 and settled at Watertown, Massachusetts. From him and his wife, Unity (Buxton) Brown, the line of descent is traced through their son Caleb and his wife, Hannah Smith; their son Samuel and his wife, Hannah Bushnell; their son Joshua and his wife, Abigail Bostwick; their son Danile and his wife, Lucy Gray, to their son, Ezra Gray Knapp and his wife, Anah Peck, who were the grandparents of our subject. His father became a pioneer hardware merchant of Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1834 and represented Winnebageo county in the Wisconsin legislature during 1865-66. Clarence Albert Knapp was educated in the public and high schools of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and at Lawrence University of Appleton, Wisconsin. In 1866 he began his business career as clerk in a hardware store at Fond ju Lac, Wisconsin, and in 1868 became an independent merchant in the hardware trade at Northwood, Iowa. He then sought a broader field an din 1881 embarked in the wholesale and retail hardware trade at Oskaloosa, Iowa, in association with E. C. Spalding, under the firm name of the Knapp & Spalding Company, In 1887 the firm removed to Sioux City, where they established a strictly wholesale hardware business. In 1885 the company was reorganized as The Knapp & Spencer Company. Mr. Knapp was president of The Knapp & Spalding Company from its organization and continued as head of the reorganized business until about 1916, when he retired from the presidency and was made chairman of the board of directors. In 1916 Mr. Knapp was elected president of the National Hardware Association of the United States. He held membership in the Sioux City Golf and Country Club, the Commercial Club and the Boat Club and was a worthy exemplar of the teachings and purposes of the Masonic fraternity, in which he attained the thirty-second degree of the Scottish Rite and was past commander of Columbian Commandery, No. 18, K. T., of Sioux City. His political affiliation was with the republican party and he was a communicant of the Congregational church. Mr. Knapp was married May 11, 1870, to Sarah Elizabeth, daughter of John Sewell, of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and left two children: Walter S., president of the Knapp & Spencer Company; and Marguerite Clare Knapp. He died in Sioux City, Iowa, November 1, 1918, when seventy-two years of age. The following tribute to Clarence A. Knapp was paid by G. M. Evenson: "A pleasant journey down life's pathway, in the company of one whom I have grown to look upon almost as a father, has been interrupted by the Great Creator of all things who has taken this fellow-traveler from my side and given to him the great reward that awaits all men who have used their lives as my companion used his life. His was a dual personality, but unlike the dual personality known so well to all of us as Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, my companion's two personalities were both beautiful. I wish all of you might have known him as I did. I wish all of you might have seen him in his home life where he exemplified one side of his dual personality. I wish you could have seen how he made his home a beautifully successful home by giving to every detail of it that same careful, gentlemanly, courteous attention that made his business life so successful. I wish you might have sat with my friend in the evening firelight and watched the play of emotion on his face as he told me of some new book he had just read. I wish you could have seen, as I have so often seen, his sincere devotion to the companion of his life, his beloved wife. I wish you could have seen him pay court to the affections of his daughter, and I prize it as one of the most beautiful mind pictures I have of him, the first time I saw him and this daughter together. It was on the first Sunday I ever spent in Sioux City. I was invited to his home for dinner on that day and in the afternoon he proposed that he, his daughter and I go out to Riverside park in order that I might see that playground. His devotion to his daughter, who was then a girl of fifteen, was such as the fairest lady of the land might covet from the most noble knight that ever lived. I stood in profound admiration watching the manner in which he handed that little daughter down from the carriage. And this was the same man in whose presence I had sat the day before and heard drive a shrewd bargain in galvanized sheets. That wonderful business mind could, during the passing of a night, cast aside all thoughts of business and so far as I could see he considered it one of the greatest privileges of his life to wait upon his daughter. "Yet his was not a complex life - it was a simple life because it had a unifying motive. It was his principle - yes, it was his life's oath, to give every man more than a full measure. Worry was not a part of my friend's life because there was no confusion. He met each day's tasks with a smile and a feeling of confidence that he was equal to them. His imagination never soured because he kept away from gloom and small, petty things, and instead of letting his life grow moldy as he grew old he let in the sunlight and pure air of which he knew there was such an abundance. It was his philosophy that a life lived in pessimism, which frowns upon gaiety, and takes delight in suspicions and fault findings, grows moldy and poisonous. Love of our own kind, he believed, turns us as naturally towards happiness as a fern in a lady's window bends its stalks towards the sunlight. In all the days that I have been associated with him - during all the trying business periods through which he steered this business ship, I never heard a cross word pass his lips, and no matter what the turmoil of problems that lay before him, he received every caller promptly, and neither his manner nor his face showed other than that each one was welcome, and his business, no matter how selfish or uninteresting, received courteous consideration and attention. But it was in his work as a buyer that he proved that a man does not have to indulge in sharp or questionable practices to be successful in business. He knew hardware and its value as few men did, and the dignity with which he approached a business proposition always called from the seller a like dignity and brought from the seller the best he had to offer. I have seen and heard him drive many a bargain, yet I never knew or heard of a man who had entered into a business contract with my friend who was not happy because of that fact. His business was his life's blood - he loved it, not with avariciousness - not as a miser loves his pot of gold, but just because this magnificent institution that stands at the corner of Third and Nebraska streets is the realization of his dream, while he drive his ox team forty miles across country to his little hardware store at Northwood, Iowa. "Ill since last March, yet with days now and then when there was a partial return to his former strength and vigor, he always wanted, when out for a ride, to 'go down past the store' so that he might once more embrace with his eyes the product of his life's work. he loved his business because it was a part of himself, and into the principles of its conduct, into the rules that governed it, into the very mortar that held the bricks of the walls together, he had put the rules that he had laid down, early in his life, to govern his conduct. I never have known and never expect to know any man whose ideals of business honesty and integrity were higher than my friend's because there are no higher rules. His were the rules of the Great Creator and of His Son whom my friend chose to take as his example. "My friend read the future, not as the clairvoyant does by fakes and bluffs, but he read the future because he read men. His gray eyes under bushy brows looked straight through one, and his keen mind quickly separated the truth from untruth. His prognostications of future market conditions were so true as to cause one to believe that he held the fate of any line of goods being considered in his own hands. Men left his office, stripped of the very best they had to offer in the matter of price and terms and always glad that they had given it up. His going out of the lives of the rest of us leaves a void that can never be filled because God does not make duplicates of men and there will never be another Clarence A. Knapp. ""It is fortunate for the Knapp & Spencer Company that his son, Walter S. Knapp, approaches the task of taking his place at the head of the institution founded by his father, with deep and sincere knowledge of the great task that lies before him. Mr. Walter S. Knapp has for twenty-six years been a close student of his father's methods and so devoted were these two men to each other, so in accord were their ideals and principles, that all of us who are left to continue this business may proceed with a confident feeling that the right man has his hand upon the helm of this business organization and that the principles laid down for the conduct of the business by its founder will continue to be its principles as long as his name remains a part of it. And if it be given to those who have preceded us on the great journey, to pause and look back upon us mortals whose time has not yet come, I know my friend well enough to say that a smile of satisfaction will come over his face when he sees us laboring here below and steering this ship of business true to the course he laid out upon the chart of life." Debbie Clough Gerischer Iowa Gen Web, Assistant CC, Scott County http://www.celticcousins.net/scott/ IAGENWEB: Special History Project: http://iagenweb.org/history/index.htm Gerischer Family Web Site: http://gerischer.rootsweb.com/