BACK STORY: A PULITZER-WINNING JOURNALIST EXAMINES HIS OWN FAMILY
by Nick Kotz on November 7, 2013
After many years as a journalist—investigating presidents, congressmen, and labor union officials, examining the military-industrial complex, civil rights and social justice issues—I never imagined that the most challenging and rewarding story would be about my own family.
Growing up in San Antonio, I knew little about my Kallison grandparents in whose home my mother and I lived for the first twelve years of my life. They were two of 23 million men, women and children—two million of them Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe—who surged into the United States from 1880 through 1920—and they rarely spoke of their pasts.
Why hadn’t I asked them about their early lives: Where in Russia were they born? What was it like living as Jews under the autocratic thumb of an oppressive czar? How did they escape from Russia? Why did they come to Texas? How did they grow their harness shop into the largest farm and ranch supply business in the Southwest? How did a Jewish merchant become a path-breaking Texas rancher? I had plenty of opportunities to ask those questions and many others. Yet I knew more about Sam Houston and his victory in the Texas War of Independence from Mexico than I did about my own grandparents’ escape from a different revolution in Russia.
I have discovered that my lack of knowledge about my forbearers is not an unusual phenomenon. Like the Kallisons, millions of American families have poorly documented and preserved their past—a loss for the families themselves and for a wiser understanding of our nation’s history. With the Internet and digitization of so many primary source documents, unearthing your family’s past now is possible even for amateurs with limited computer skills.
Key to the exploration of my roots was a Google search of the Kallison name followed by a letter-writing campaign to those who shared it. Of the 100 letters sent, several bore fruit. One distant cousin provided a family history tracing a common ancestor to the tiny Ukrainian village of Ladyzhinka. Googling that town name led me to the Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago where photographs on headstones revealed identities of unknown ancestors in our family photos: my grandfather’s older and younger brothers, Jacob and Samuel Kallison and their mother Dina Elloff Kallison.
Using ancestry.com and fold3.com (formerly footnotes.com), I accessed ships’ logs, census documents, military records, marriage and death certificates, fifty years of city directories, and even high school and college yearbooks. Those primary sources yielded invaluable information about my grandfather, his extended family and the world in which they lived. The census documents alone were a treasure trove of information. Beyond names, addresses, ages, occupations, income, immigration information, and citizenship status, they revealed who could read and write in English, who suffered the loss of a child, who had servants or took in borders, even who owned a radio in the early 20th century.
At Newspaperarchives.com, I found a story on published poll tax lists noting that Nathan Kallison was among those who paid for the “right” to vote in Texas in 1911. Spanning decades, I found hundreds of ads for the Kallison’s downtown store and their Bexar County ranch showing the growth of the family’s dual enterprise. Even the local society pages yielded important minutiae from the everyday lives of Nathan and Anna Kallison and their four children: Parties attended; piano recital pieces; debating team topics; roles in school plays; membership in religious, charitable, and community organizations. Together, they gave me a unique picture of who the Kallisons were and what they valued.
For anyone interested in delving into their own family’s past, agencies at all levels of government are digitizing records. It surprised me to discover that in 1927, during Prohibition, the U.S. government indicted my grandfather and Uncle Morris Kallison for violating laws against the production, sale, and transport of alcoholic beverages. I read the court transcript and looked at the photographic evidence against them using digitized National Archives records. I also easily accessed Bexar County, Texas’s amazing collection of online files. Among the land records, licenses, and agreements, I found the 1902 contract for the first parcel of land purchased by my grandparents–who as Jews were denied that right in the Russia of their youth. My grandfather signed his name in Hebrew script; my grandmother, with an “x.”
I now realize that the most important history of our country is not found in the grand events of wars and presidencies, but rather in the everyday lives of our citizens: how they worked hard to support their families; how they coped with hardships, discrimination, and human tragedy; and how they contributed to their own communities and nation. There has never been a better time to research your own family’s past. That is the story only you can tell.
Nick Kotz’s book The Harness Maker’s Dream: Nathan Kallison and the Rise of South Texas was published recently. Kotz has received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, the National Magazine Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award, among others.
The Texas Institute of Letters has announced that The Harness Maker's Dream is a finalist for their Carr P. Collins Award for Nonfiction. 
SAN ANTONIO - Author Nick Kotz discusses his book titled: The Harness Maker's Dream Nathan Kallison & the Rise of South Texas. The book is about the Kallison family and their journey escaping anti-Semitic laws in Europe, and finding a new home in Texas. Kotz will be at the The Twig Book Shop (306 Pearl Pkwy, San Antonio) on Dec. 6, 5-7pm, and during the Tamale Festival on Dec. 7, 3-5pm.
If you're San Antonio today head over to the Tamales at Pearl Festival. Nick Kotz will be there from 3-5. Grab lunch and learn how Nathan Kallison escaped from Russia and built a new life in the Great State of Texas! It's free and open to the public. 
SAN DIEGO–I suppose the thing that makes me the saddest about The Harness Maker’s Dream is that the “villain” in this excellent-reading story about the Kallison family empire in San Antonio, Texas, was a man that so many of us San Diegans admire: Sol Price, although he is not mentioned by name in this family memoir by journalist Nick Kotz.
Sol Price and his son Robert are among the merchant philanthropists of whom we Jews are most proud in San Diego, just as many Jews of San Antonio revere the memories of Nathan Kallison and his sons Morris and Perry. From what was initially a harness maker’s store, Nathan expanded his enterprise into Kallison’s Big Country Store, and then, so he could understand his customers better and sell them products he could personally recommend, he purchased and developed Kallison Ranch where he raised Texas Polled Hereford cattle. Today the ranch is part of the sprawling South Texas state park known as the Government Canyon Wildlife and Natural Area.
At the beginning of Chapter 14 of this book, the conflict between these two generous, community-minded Jewish families–the Kallisons of San Antonio and the Prices of San Diego–comes to light, but to recognize it, you need to know that Sol Price was the founder of Fed-Mart, in which he pioneered a mass merchandising concept that he later brought to fruition with Price Clubs, which since have been merged into Costco’s. You should also know that Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, freely admits that he got his inspiration for his big-box, discount stores from everything that Sol Price was doing.
Writes Kotz: “Perry Kallison had first glimpsed the dawn of a new era in 1954, the day he attended the grand opening of Fed-Mart, a different kind of department store. Thousands had gathered for the festive evening event in front of the nearly block-long store at Military Road and Zarzamora Street in San Antonio. As the crowd surged into the store, giant searchlights lit the sky like those at
a Hollywood movie premier (sic). In the postwar era, the giant new discounter was promising that its Family Saving Centers would ‘save you money on just about everything for your family, your home, and your car.’ Flanked by four of his department managers from Kallison’s store, Perry carefully checked the prices on the displays of leading brand names in furniture, appliances, clothing and sporting goods equipment. He was stunned.”
In that Sol Price was saving money for the consumers, even more money than they could save at Kallison’s, you’d have to say that Price was doing a service. He was a force for progress in the retailing world, a force which Perry Kallison recognized, but to which Perry, set in his ways, just couldn’t adapt. This was a big difference between Perry and his father, Nathan, the harness maker, who in the early 20th century saw automobiles become increasingly popular and realized that he needed to find some other way to make money besides harness-making.
The truth be known, brothers Perry and Morris had become too complacent in their status as the second-generation owners of a famous store and ranch. Morris had turned his attention to downtown real estate and to being a kingmaker in municipal politics. Perry had transformed what originally was an extended commercial to promote the store into a popular, home-spun “Trading Post” radio program in which he gained celebrity as the dispenser of advice about conservation, sermons on good ol’ fashioned, kindly American values, and purveyor of tidbits about his listeners’ personal accomplishments. The third generations of Kallisons, college educated, tried to convince the brothers that the sprawling store needed to adopt modern accounting methods, and eliminate outdated departments, but the youngsters were brushed aside. Eventually Kallison’s Big Country Store, a landmark for a half-century, went under.
So, the Kallisons’ undoing as a retailing family was not only Sol Price’s fault, but, to a large extent, their own as well.
Nevertheless, you can’t help but feel a measure of regret, especially after reading Kotz’s account of the empire built up by his grandfather Nathan and the generosity of his uncles Perry and Morris. Besides being moving forces in many of San Antonio’s civic and Jewish charities, the Kallisons also helped Israel establish a mohair industry (based on Angora goats raised in Texas). They also were early friends and supporters of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who as a young congressman from Texas was a supporter of federal programs to bring the benefits of electricity to rural ranchers — the Kallisons’ best customers.
What makes Kotz’s book rise above a family memoir is that he skillfully weaves into it nearly a century of social and political history of the United States. In addition to an extensive section on LBJ, I counted references to nine other U.S. Presidents dating back to Theodore Roosevelt. Kotz, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, won fame his exposé about unsanitary conditions in meat packing houses. Given his roots in the cattle industry, his reportage may be construed as yet another example of the Kallisons’ philanthropic legacy.
By Donald H. Harrison
Monday, December 02, 2013
Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via 
Jewish ranchers, Jewish cowboys — in Texas? OK, Jewish cowboys did exist, but it would be a stretch to exaggerate their number. However, in the late 19th century and through most of the 20th century, there were definitely Jewish ranches, small, medium and large, in Texas, as this intriguing book illustrates. 
After many years as a journalist—investigating presidents, congressmen, and labor union officials, examining the military-industrial complex, civil rights and social justice issues—I never imagined that the most challenging and rewarding story would be about my own family.
Growing up in San Antonio, I knew little about my Kallison grandparents in whose home my mother and I lived for the first twelve years of my life. They were two of 23 million men, women and children—two million of them Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe—who surged into the United States from 1880 through 1920—and they rarely spoke of their pasts.
Why hadn’t I asked them about their early lives: Where in Russia were they born? What was it like living as Jews under the autocratic thumb of an oppressive czar? How did they escape from Russia? Why did they come to Texas? How did they grow their harness shop into the largest farm and ranch supply business in the Southwest? How did a Jewish merchant become a path-breaking Texas rancher? I had plenty of opportunities to ask those questions and many others. Yet I knew more about Sam Houston and his victory in the Texas War of Independence from Mexico than I did about my own grandparents’ escape from a different revolution in Russia.
I have discovered that my lack of knowledge about my forbearers is not an unusual phenomenon. Like the Kallisons, millions of American families have poorly documented and preserved their past—a loss for the families themselves and for a wiser understanding of our nation’s history. With the Internet and digitization of so many primary source documents, unearthing your family’s past now is possible even for amateurs with limited computer skills.
Key to the exploration of my roots was a Google search of the Kallison name followed by a letter-writing campaign to those who shared it. Of the 100 letters sent, several bore fruit. One distant cousin provided a family history tracing a common ancestor to the tiny Ukrainian village of Ladyzhinka. Googling that town name led me to the Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago where photographs on headstones revealed identities of unknown ancestors in our family photos: my grandfather’s older and younger brothers, Jacob and Samuel Kallison and their mother Dina Elloff Kallison.
Using ancestry.com and fold3.com (formerly footnotes.com), I accessed ships’ logs, census documents, military records, marriage and death certificates, fifty years of city directories, and even high school and college yearbooks. Those primary sources yielded invaluable information about my grandfather, his extended family and the world in which they lived. The census documents alone were a treasure trove of information. Beyond names, addresses, ages, occupations, income, immigration information, and citizenship status, they revealed who could read and write in English, who suff
ered the loss of a child, who had servants or took in boarders, even who owned a radio in the early 20th century.
At Newspaperarchives.com, I found a story on published poll tax lists noting that Nathan Kallison was among those who paid for the “right” to vote in Texas in 1911. Spanning decades, I found hundreds of ads for the Kallison’s downtown store and their Bexar County ranch showing the growth of the family’s dual enterprise. Even the local society pages yielded important minutiae from the everyday lives of Nathan and Anna Kallison and their four children: Parties attended; piano recital pieces; debating team topics; roles in school plays; membership in religious, charitable, and community organizations. Together, they gave me a unique picture of who the Kallisons were and what they valued.
For anyone interested in delving into their own family’s past, agencies at all levels of government are digitizing records. It surprised me to discover that in 1927, during Prohibition, the U.S. government indicted my grandfather and Uncle Morris Kallison for violating laws against the production, sale, and transport of alcoholic beverages. I read the court transcript and looked at the photographic evidence against them using digitized National Archives records. I also easily accessed Bexar County, Texas’s amazing collection of online files. Among the land records, licenses, and agreements, I found the 1902 contract for the first parcel of land purchased by my grandparents–who as Jews were denied that right in the Russia of their youth. My grandfather signed his name in Hebrew script; my grandmother, with an “x.”
I now realize that the most important history of our country is not found in the grand events of wars and presidencies, but rather in the everyday lives of our citizens: how they worked hard to support their families; how they coped with hardships, discrimination, and human tragedy; and how they contributed to their own communities and nation. There has never been a better time to research your own family’s past. That is the story only you can tell.
Nick Kotz’s book The Harness Maker's Dream: Nathan Kallison and the Rise of South Texas was published recently. Kotz has received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, the National Magazine Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award, among others. 
