Clark County Press, Neillsville, WI

September 4, 1952, Front Page

Contact: Dolores (Mohr) Kenyon

 

 

Mr. and Mrs. Lynn Jaseph Observe 50th Anniversary

 

Half Century Ago They Wed at Longwood and Set Out to Win Way in the Law

 

Lynn D. Jaseph, son of Clark County, is enjoying the fruits of labor at the law in Green Bay, Wisconsin.  He and his wife, who was May Flower, a daughter of Clark County, recently celebrated their golden wedding anniversary.  They are here re-introduced to Clark County 50 years after they left it.

 

It was 1902 that Lynn Jaseph hired a surrey "with the fringe on top" to drive from Neillsville to Longwood to claim May Flower as his bride.  He had been the teacher at the Hemlock School and she had been his pupil there.  The wedding ended the one-way teaching.  Within a month the couple headed for Madison, where they set up housekeeping and had their first baby.  After graduation in 1906 Mr. Jaseph took his family to Green Bay and there set out to make his way.

 

From time to time the older residents of Clark County have had opportunity to follow the career of Mr. Jaseph, but a busy life has kept him from continuous contact with old friends and old surroundings.  Learning of his golden wedding, the publisher of The Press wrote Mr. Jaseph and asked him to tell the story of the 50 years intervening since his departure from the county of his birth.  The purpose was to use the material thus furnished in a story written by the Press.  But Mr. Jaseph’s letter, responding to the request of The Press, is so human and so modest that The Press ventures to insert it here, just as Mr. Jaseph wrote it, with little or no editing.  This is his letter:--

 

The Truth Not Stretched

 

"I am quite conscious of the flattery implied in your invitation contained in your letter of the 26th inst.  Like the elderly maiden lady in response to praise of her beauty I know you stretch the truth, but I love it!  All of this arises from the celebration here of our golden wedding anniversary.

 

"Upon my graduation from Neillsville High School, in June 1899, I was employed summers at common labor, and taught country schools for the following three years, in the Ackerman district, west of Neillsville, and afterward at Hemlock, north of Greenwood, and the last term, in order to get in ten months, near Withee.  My wife was a pupil at Hemlock and after her people moved out of that district into Longwood, I courted her there and married her in 1902, just about a month before entering the University of Wisconsin law school.  We kept house, and lived very frugally indeed for four years at Madison.  I was enabled to finish largely because our old family and personal friends, Charles C. Sniteman, H. M. Root and Charles Bradford endorsed my note, upon which I borrowed the several hundred needed dollars.

 

Called on Old Friends

 

"Needless to say, I never failed to call on these gentlemen as long as they lived, whenever I visited Neillsville, which was often, in the earlier years, until the death of my father, Sol F. Jaseph, in 1922.  I have always called on our few remaining old friends whenever my business has taken me near Neillsville.

 

"After my admission to the bar in 1905, I was employed in the law office of Olin and Butler of Madison for one year, my compensation being almost entirely experience, but extremely valuable.  I then came to Green Bay in 1906, being first an employee of Samuel H. Cady and afterward a member of his law firm for ten years.  In 1916, I entered into partnership with John A Kittel, which, with younger partners afterward admitted, continued ‘til his death in 1933.  Our firm broke up soon afterward, and I have been alone since 1935.

 

"During my nearly 50 years of active practice, including much trial work in lower courts, some 80 cases in the State Supreme Court and two in the U. S. Supreme Court, I have done almost every kind of legal work.  Green Bay has during my residence here grown from a city of 18,000 people to one of more than 52,000, with some 20,000 more in the suburban territory immediately adjoining.  Green Bay is recognized among Wisconsin lawyers as one of the five or six legal centers of the state.  It has always had a very able bar with many men of the highest professional ability and character, so that to succeed in competition with them has required great industry, and at least better than average ability.

 

Family of Five Children

 

"I have worked hard and while I have not acquired great wealth, I have successfully, with my wife’s splendid cooperation, raised a fine family of five children, all of whom have had college training above high school graduation, and all of whom are happily married and raising families of their own.

 

"In my legal work in Wisconsin, I have tried cases in every circuit, and in most of the counties of the state, about two or three of them at Neillsville.

 

"Without making this letter too long, it is hardly possible to describe, as you suggest, my interesting cases.  I sustained in the U. S. Supreme Court the validity of the Wisconsin compensation act; in our state Supreme Court, the validity of the Bulk Sales Law of Wisconsin; tested the validity of the Ton-Mile Tax laws against common carrier trucks; tested the right of Indian illegitimates to inherit from the natural father; established the validity of Creasy Corporation contracts with member merchants; and many other disputed questions of fact and law.

 

Keeps Them out of Trouble

 

"The most satisfying part of a lawyer’s work is not, however, the litigation which meets the public eye, but the years of faithful counsel to clients who have come to trust one with absolute confidence.  It is my own source of greatest satisfaction that the great majority of such clients, some of them with important business affairs, have been kept free from the worries incident to litigation, by sound advice, much of it based on personal rather than legal considerations.  It is a heart warming experience to have clients of forty years’ loyal friendships still come to me, an old man, past the hey-day of my legal work, and to assure me that they and their families will look to me for advice so long as I remain in business.

 

"I have been disappointed in my greatest ambition, to win a judgeship.  I was always defeated by a sitting judge by narrow margins, but never won in four such elections.  I felt that I was deprived of an opportunity to serve unselfishly without any of the parasitic influences which make lawyers, to some extent, dependent upon the faults and weaknesses of our fellow men.  But in spite of these disappointments, I have not let these defeats wound me too deeply; in fact, at this time not at all.

 

They Get Around

 

"You asked me particularly to comment on my travels.  On business or for pleasure, I have been in every state of the Union except Delaware, and twice across Ontario and Quebec in Canada, and across the Mexican border on three occasions. While our winters are too long, I still feel that, everything considered, Wisconsin is one of the best states in which to live, and that none offers more toward a good way of life.

 

"In our western trips, of which we have made four during the past five years, we have visited Bert Hart, also a Neillsville boy, at Sacramento, Calif.; Ella Ketel George at St. Helens, Ore.; Dorcas Borgers Pickering at Potlatch, Wash.; Eben Borgers at Tacoma, Wash.; Viola French Delaney and her brother, Ed French and niece, Viola Youmans at East Los Angeles.  Here at Green Bay, Bert James, Pearl Campbell James, his sister-in-law, and Timothy King, formerly of Granton, and a Neillsville High School graduate of later years, are all living, and I see them fairly often. Leah McGinnis Jorgensen, who died here about four years ago, was a near neighbor whom I often visited.  My widowed sister Hazel Jaseph Ericson lives with her daughter, at Fond du Lac.

 

"I already have made this letter too long, and for that reason will not attempt to tell you about my father’s business life.  If you think it of enough interest will write you again at some later date.

 

"In a spirit of deep gratitude to the community where I spent my entire youth and received my real education, I wish everything good to it as a community and to the old friends who still live there."

 

The Jaseph Line

 

As the years have passed the Jasephs have accumulated quite a progeny. For their golden wedding they had all five children with them, plus the grandchildren, 24 in all.  They were: Lawrence Jaseph and his family from Memphis, Tenn.; Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Jaseph from Denver, Colo.; Ronald Jaseph, Traffic manager in Green Bay for the Red Owl stores, and Ronald’s twin sister, Ruth, now Mrs. Oscar F. Spalding of Oshkosh, with her husband and three children; Mrs. Harry J. Bronander of Green Bay, the former Marjorie Jaseph, with her husband and two children.

 

Lynn Jaseph’s father, known commonly as Sol Jaseph, was of great versatility.  He was once sheriff of Clark County, and engaged in merchandising and commission business, as well as in farming and gardening.  He took great pride in his surroundings, his home place being notable for neatness and beauty.  The following is gleaned from the Curtiss-Wedge History of Clark County, published in 1918:

 

Solomon Fordyce Jaseph was born in Cattaraugus County, New York.  His father was Fordyce Jaseph and his mother’s name before her marriage, was Rachel Elizabeth Loomis.  Both parents were natives of Vermont.  At the age of eight years Solomon started to make his own way in the world as he went to live and work for his grandfather Loomis at Wyocena, Wis.  When he was 19 he went to Lake Benton, Minn., and was there at the time of the Indian Massacres in that section.

 

He returned to Wisconsin and at Poynette he learned the harness trade.  He came to Neillsville in 1872, at the age of 24, and went to work for P. S. Dudley, the owner of a harness shop. At the end of a year he left Mr. Dudley’s employ and operated a harness shop for himself for the next four years.  He then sold the harness business and stocked his building with groceries and crockery.

 

In The Post Office

 

After two years he sold his store and became assistant postmaster under J. W. Ferguson until his next business venture.  This was a commission business which he carried on in the basement of a building where the Neillsville Bank now stands.

 

Mr. Jaseph spent two years in the commission business.  He then built a store on the north side and operated a general mercantile establishment for two more years.  He started a drug store, which later became Victor Woelfer’s store.  But Mr. Jaseph operated it only for two years and then opened a confectionery and restaurant, which he conducted for a while.

 

In 1907 Mr. Jaseph ran for sheriff on the Republican ticket and was elected.  He held that office until 1910 and then served as undersheriff for two years.

 

At the end of that time Mr. Jaseph bought 15 acres just south of Neillsville, then covered with brush and with dilapidated buildings, and converted it into a place of beauty.  He built a fine residence out of the old house, and landscaped the yard so that visitors came to see it.  He raised chickens and vegetables and had fruit trees.

 

He was married in 1873, one year after he arrived in Neillsville, to Nellie E. Dole, of Poynette. They had three (four?) children: Florence, Lynn Dole, Hazel, and Hollis W.  All four children graduated from the Neillsville High School.

 

 

 

 

 

 


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