Right place, right time

'Outspoken, peppery' pioneer excelled in business, politics

BARBARA YOST
Special to Jewish News

The Ganz family at Niagara Falls in 1900, en route to Europe and a visit to Emil's hometown of Walldorf, Germany. Left to right: Julian, Emil, Sylvan, Aileen, and Bertha.

Photo from "Immigrant Banker: The Life of Emil Ganz"

As three-time mayor of Phoenix, Emil Ganz saw the city take its first steps toward becoming a major metropolis.

When Ganz died in 1922, Phoenix had doubled in size since his first elected term, had become the capital of the Arizona territory, had taken over what had been a privately owned community water system and was benefiting from the building of Roosevelt Dam.

Much of the growth was thanks to a group of civic-minded Jews and Ganz himself - Phoenix's first Jewish mayor.

"He was one of hundreds of businessmen who helped build up the town," says Mark Pry, a professional historian who has just written a biography of Ganz. "He's witness to a substantial amount of growth. You see the outlines of a real city."

Pry's work was commissioned by Joan Ganz Cooney, Emil Ganz's granddaughter and founder of the Children's Television Network, which created the public television program "Sesame Street." Pry's book, "Immigrant Banker: The Life of Emil Ganz," will be part of Cooney's papers donated to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.

It was writer Gay Talese who persuaded Cooney to explore her grandfather's history, she says, though he suggested she write the book herself. Instead, she tracked down Pry.

"I thought it would be interesting to get the details of the story," she says.

Neither she nor her siblings, including Scottsdale resident Sylvia Ganz Houle, had known their grandfather. And her father, Sylvan, was just 30 when Emil Ganz died.

"I still don't know what he was like to be around," Cooney says.

What she did know before Pry began his research was that Ganz had intense drive, was a firm disciplinarian but was personable. Since reading Pry's book, she now sees her grandfather as "relentless, energetic and ambitious," a man who had a "social conscience, that he really cared about Phoenix."

Pry, who earned his doctorate in history at Arizona State University, runs a consulting firm, Southwest Historical Services. His previous projects include profiles of several Arizona cities and towns. He is the author of "The Town on the Hassayampa: A History of Wickenburg, Arizona."

Cooney hired Pry in 1998. It took him three years to piece together the life of a man once so prominent in Phoenix but who left behind no papers to aid historians. With no one still alive who knew Ganz personally, Pry's sources were public records, newspaper articles, a thinly disguised fictional memoir and advertisements for Ganz's hotels and banks. Pry traveled to some of the American cities where Ganz lived and filled in the blanks with a historian's instincts.

What he found was a man who had only a primary education but who was "smart and a quick study" and was well liked by friends and members of the community. Ganz was also described as "outspoken and peppery" and once walked off the mayor's job over disputes about where the town's first fire station should be located.

Emil Ganz was born in 1838 in the small town of Walldorf, Germany. Pry believes he immigrated to the United States in 1858 or 1859 and spent time in New York or Philadelphia.

By the summer of 1860, bachelor Ganz was living in Cedartown, Ga., northwest of Atlanta, working as a tailor. When the civil war broke out, he enlisted in the Confederate Army and served in its infantry until the summer of 1864 when he was captured and sent to the notorious prison camp in Elmira, N.Y.

In January 1865, he was released and returned to Georgia, where Sherman's march had devastated the state's economy. Single and Jewish, Ganz had few support groups in the predominantly evangelical Protestant South, though anti-Semitism was rare.

In 1866, Ganz became a U.S. citizen and moved to Kansas City, Mo., where he had cousins in the clothing and dry goods business. He joined them as a merchant tailor, selling ready-made clothing and doing alterations.

But his business failed as mass production of clothing began to put tailors out of work. Markets were volatile in those days, Pry says. When his cousins moved their business, Ganz headed west to Colorado, settling in Las Animas in the southeast part of the territory. He abandoned the clothing trade and partnered with another Jew in a bakery, restaurant and grocery. He married a non-Jew named Elizabeth.

When the Arkansas Valley Railway chose to build its station away from Las Animas, Ganz relocated his bakery and grocery to Granada, Colo. But business needed a nearby railroad to survive, and in 1875 the Ganzes decided to move farther west. They loaded their belongings onto a wagon and struck out for the Arizona Territory.

Ganz opened a saloon in Prescott. Not long after, Elizabeth divorced Ganz, charging him with abuse. But Pry says that divorce then required such charges, and there is no evidence Ganz was actually an abusive husband.

Ganz opened a different saloon, the Capital, which had not only a bar but rooms to rent upstairs. He dabbled in gold and silver mining.

In 1879, the divorced Ganz moved to Phoenix, the business climate in Prescott failing to live up to his expectations. Phoenix was being hyped as an up-and-coming community.

Staked by a Prescott banker, Ganz opened the Bank Exchange Hotel in Phoenix in April of 1879, the biggest and fanciest hotel in town - out of three. The brick building was located on Washington Street between First and Second streets.

"It was an instant success," Pry says. "It becomes the hotel," with a bar and restaurant and prominent advertising in the Phoenix Herald.

In 1882, Ganz returned briefly to Kansas City and married Bertha Angleman, a Jewish woman selected by his cousins.

Three years later, Ganz, now a prominent citizen and business leader, was asked to run for mayor and won his first one-year term.

At the time, Pry says, there was no anti-Semitism in Phoenix.

"Jews played a major role in business," he says. Most stores were run by Jews, and Jews were civic minded, though holding public office was still a new experience. Morris Goldwater, Barry Goldwater's uncle, was mayor of Prescott in 1879, and a Jew was elected mayor of Tucson in 1882.

Ganz was active in the Masons, which helped him integrate into society. The Masons welcomed Jews, Pry says.

"They had been the conduit for investment capital that Phoenix, like all frontier towns, needed," he says, adding that Jews helped to build many cities of the Southwest. "When he arrived, if Jews brought business acumen, they were welcomed with little or no prejudice."

That would change, Pry says, with the rise in the 1920s of such groups as the Ku Klux Klan.

Ganz's first mayoral term was uneventful, though he earned a reputation for being an efficient administrator. The mayor's primary responsibility was maintaining the city's streets - cleaning up after horses and keeping irrigation ditches free of debris.

That summer, the Bank Exchange Hotel burned to the ground when fire wiped out an entire block. Ganz built an office building on the site and became a landlord.

Re-elected mayor in 1886, Ganz found his second term plagued by controversy. City leaders wanted to build a fire station but argued over its location. When Ganz favored one site, he was accused of promoting a location close to his own businesses. Offended by suggestions of conflicted interests, he abruptly quit the job and took an assignment as member of an oversight board for the state's insane asylum, which would eventually evolve into the Arizona State Hospital.

A year later he opened a liquor business on Washington Street, which he maintained until 1895.

Emil and Bertha had their first child in 1884, when Sylvan Cleveland Ganz was born and named for then-president Grover Cleveland. They had three more children: Helen, who died in 1890 of diphthera; Julien, born in 1893; and Aileen, born in 1896.

Ganz went into the insurance business and became president of the National Bank of Arizona, largest in the territory. There was a strong Jewish presence in the bank, Pry says, further enhancing the prominence of Jews in Phoenix.

Over the years, the Ganz family would live in several homes in Phoenix: Adams and 14th streets, Monroe Street between Fourth and Fifth avenues and at 1324 N. Central Ave., near Willetta Street.

In 1899, Ganz was elected to his third term as mayor. Controversy erupted once again when council members proposed that the city take control of a private company providing water rights. Ganz objected, reluctant to support government take-over of a business. Critics charged he was protecting friends who had investments in the water company.

This time, Ganz did not walk off the job and eventually supported the take-over.

When Ganz had first become mayor, Phoenix covered about 1.3 square miles. By his third term, it had doubled. In 1901, President William McKinley would visit the town, just months before his assassination in Buffalo, N.Y.

After Bertha Ganz died in 1905, Ganz married again, this time a younger woman who would bear him a child, Frances, when Ganz was 70.

Ganz retired from the bank in 1920 and died two years later in his summer residence in San Diego. His death warranted a front-page obituary in the Arizona Republican and services at the Shrine Auditorium. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery.

Ganz's story is truly American, Pry says, and in many ways representative of the Jewish experience in America, which he details in the book.

"It's the story of immigrant perseverance and adaptability and someone who makes sure he's in the right place at the right time. But luck is always part of the story."

Members of the Ganz family and local historical societies will receive bound editions of Pry's biography. Others can obtain spiral-bound copies. Information about the Ganz book is available by calling Pry at Southwest Historical Services, 480-968-2339.

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