Obit: Listeman, Kurt (About 1876 - 1972)

Contact: Dolores (Mohr) Kenyon
E-mail: dolores@wiclarkcountyhistory.org 

Surnames: Listeman, Krultz, Grieg, Bryant

----Source: Clark County Press (Neillsville, Clark Co, WI) 12/07/1972

Listeman, Kurt (About 1876 - 5 December 1972)

Written by Robert Harvey, Press Editor

Kurt Listeman is dead.

The venerable area benefactor died at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday in Memorial Hospital, where he had been a patient for approximately a week and one-half. Only hospital staff members were present in the room from which he had barred all save a few visitors.

He was 96, (making his birth date as 1876 or 1877.)

Arrangements are being made by the Georgas Funeral Home. Efforts were being made to determine whether Mr. Listeman had left any written instructions as to the disposal of his body or rites attendant to that purpose. In the absence of such specific requests, however, plans were being made for private services and cremation of the body. The ashes are to be buried in Neillsville City Cemetery, beside those of his late wife, Marguerite.

Mr. Listeman was the last member of a distinguished family. Two brothers and a sister died several years ago. The family, except for Mr. Listeman, centered in the Boston, Mass. area, where his father was a widely known musician. Other members of the family followed in his footsteps.

While the Listeman name (for this branch, at least) has gone with the passing of Mr. Listeman, the name will live in a myriad of civic improvements that have been fostered over the last 14 years through the Marguerite Listeman Foundation, and which will continue to be developed through that source.

With no heirs to whom to leave their considerable estates, Mr. Listeman in 1958 made an agreement with Northern Trust Company of Chicago which formed the basis for the Listeman Foundation. By April 20, 1959, the organization of the foundation had been completed, using the estate of his late wife as the basis of the Foundation’s wealth. The first meeting of the Foundation Board was held on that date.

At the time of the estate of Marguerite Listeman was probated in Clark County Court, a value of $635,595.15 was placed on it. Mostly, the estate was in stocks, for Mrs. Listeman displayed an unusual talent at investments.

Since the foundation was established, a total of $380,594.00 has been disbursed in grants for various enterprises of a civic or quasi-civic nature within an area of 20 miles of Neillsville. At the same time, the market value of the investments administered by the Northern Trust Company for the Foundation has increased to $878,000 in market value by September 21, 1971, the date of the last report of holdings immediately available here. The probability is that the total worth is considerably higher now because of the rather sharp increase in stock values in the last year.

Several times over the years Mr. Listeman had told friends here that he anticipated turning his own rather considerable estate 8into the Foundation funds on his death. The value of the estate at that time was estimated by him at approximately $275,000; but his holdings of one stock which went through a rather serious downward adjustment, but recovered at least in part, have made his earlier estimate speculative at best.

Mike Krultz, Jr., secretary of the Marguerite Listeman Foundation, said that he has instituted an inquiry with trust officers to determine whether they are in possession of a will from Mr. Listeman and to advise them that efforts should be made to protect the Listeman home on Grand Avenue and its contents.

Many antiques are contained in the home, according to some of the few people who have been privileged to enter the house in the years since the death of Mrs. Listeman.

Many residents of the area will have memories of Mr. Listeman and of his many talents. As a young man, he was schooled in a military academy in the east, and his military bearing was unmistakable throughout his life. As a young man, Mr. Listeman also studied the art of brewing in Germany, and came to Neillsville as a brew master of the old Neillsville Brewery. At that time the brewery owner had a young daughter by the name of Marguerite. She later became Mrs. Kurt Listeman.

The Volstead Act passed in 1918 brought about the demise of the Neillsville Brewery, and it was not re-constituted when liquor was made legal one more in the mid-thirties.

At one stage during the depth of the depression, Mr. Listeman once told the writer, both he and his wife were nearly destitute, as were so many others in the country at that time. He told of Mrs. Listeman taking the $600 “fortune” which remained her lot, studying endlessly the financial statements of industrial concerns, and prudent investments. He showed records she had kept of her investments which showed that she had bought and sold the stock of one individual company (an automobile manufacturer) 12 times during the course of a year. Her profit from the trading in this stock in that one year amounted to (as memory serves) approximately $3,000.

Mr. Listeman was a many-faceted man. At one time he made a thorough study of the human heart, and would match is knowledge of that organ with that of any cardiac specialist. He was wont to do that type of thing in many other areas of study. His was a mind that was intrigued by statistics, and he frequently used statistics to make a point or to confound a listener.

One of the talents of all members of the Listeman family was that of music. Kurt Listeman was no exception. Had he chosen to do so, he could have made a better-than-adequate living on the concert stage. In his earlier years here, Mr. Listeman Occasionally played a concert for selected friends.

On these occasions, just prior to the start, lights were turned off; then a spotlight was snapped full on Mr. Listeman, dressed in formal attire. He demanded silence as he played; and his renditions were always of classical works.

The writer recalls being given a private concert, along with his wife, when a guest in the Listeman home one evening. Mr. Listeman played on the grand piano what he said was a Grieg concerto. He played from an original manuscript which he said Edvard Grieg the Norwegian composer and Listeman family friend had given his father many years before. With that rendition that night, Mr. Listeman said he would destroy the manuscript and it would never be played again.

We hope the manuscript was not destroyed for, as one who is particularly fond of Grieg’s piano works, we were much impressed by this piece we had never heard before. It should live, and we trust it will be found among Mr. Listeman’s effects.

The facets, of Mr. Listeman are endless. Largely through his gift to the city of the Listeman Arboretum (42 acres of natural wooded area along Black River) he was recognized as Wisconsin’s “Conservationist of the Year,” three years ago. The award was given pursuant to the recommendation of his friend, the late Edwin E. Bryant then president and chairman of the board of Nelson Muffler Corporation.

One could recount almost endless philanthropies and interests of Mr. Listeman, as well as many hang-ups. For instance, he was a physical culturalist and told of swimming in O’Neill Creek Pond as a young man, even during the coldest weather as long as the pond was not ice-covered. Yet at the same time, he frequently let it be known that he did not favor spending money on a swimming pool.

A speaker and writer of considerable merit, Mr. Listeman in his younger years, frequently would talk to a point almost without termination. Yet, in the last two or three years and while still capable of doing the same, reversed his style almost completely. On being given an opportunity to speak in late years, he would rather stand and acknowledge the recognition with a stately bow and be seated again.

Nothing of that nature he did was ever spontaneous, as some might believe. On several occasions he asked the writer’s opinion on the handling of a situation he knew would confront him. Always he did it his own way: and that usually was in the manner in which he had earlier indicated his thoughts were running.

Most people who knew him knew that Mr. Listeman was contemptuous of physical frailties. Many could not understand why he seemed to break in on a conversation without regard to another who might be speaking; or why he never answered a telephone or a door bell.

The reason, this writer discovered quite by accident. For many, many years (and we don’t know how many, actually) Mr. Listeman was hard of hearing. Yet, because he had made such a show of physical fitness all of his life, he would not admit even this one little frailty to himself.