Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children's Literature

1. Ruth Krauss’s Charmed Childhood

9 1 Ruth Krauss’s Charmed Childhood There should be a parade when a baby is born. —Ruth Krauss, Open House for Butterflies (1960) During a midnight storm on 25 July 1901, Ruth Ida Krauss was born. She emerged with a full head of long black hair and her thumb in her mouth. According to Ruth’s birth certificate, twenty-one-year-old Blanche Krauss gave birth at 1025 North Calvert Street, a Baltimore address that did not exist. This future writer of fiction was born in a fictional place. Or so her birth certificate alleges. But it was filed in 1933, at which time the attending physician did live at the above address. Presumably, she was born at 1012 McCulloh, which in 1901 was the doctor’s address and a little over a mile from the Krauss home. Her father, twenty-eight-year-old Julius Leopold Krauss, was in the unusual position of being able to afford to have a doctor attend to his child’s birth—at the turn of the twentieth century, 95 percent of children were born at home, and physicians were present at only 50 percent of births.1 Ruth came home to the three-story frame house at 2137 Linden Avenue, where she lived with her doting mother, father, and paternal grandfather, Leopold Krauss, who had been born in Budapest, Hungary, about 1839. His wife,Elsie,had been born in Frankfurt in about 1848.After the failed European revolutions of 1848 and the German wars of unification in the 1860s, Leopold joined the great wave of U.S.-bound immigrants, and by 1863, he had settled in downtown Baltimore, where he operated a furrier’s business. In 1869 and 1872, his furs won gold medals from the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts.2 Elsie emigrated to the United States at around the same time and soon met and married Leopold Krauss. They and their two children, Carrie (born 1871) and Julius (born 1872), lived a comfortably middle-class life. Both children attended school, Elsie kept house, and Leopold ran a thriving business in a rising clothing industry center. Although Ruth recalled that Julius “liked to draw & paint,” he followed his father into the furrier’s trade. By 1893, he was 10 Ruth Krauss’s Charmed Childhood working for Leopold as a salesman, and five years later, Julius had become manager. In 1899, the business changed its name from“Leopold Krauss” to“L. Krauss & Son,” but within two years, Leopold Krauss dropped “& Son,” and in 1902, Julius Krauss opened his own furrier shop, though he returned to his father’s firm a year later and remained there for the rest of his working life. He may have had to cede his creative ambitions to his father, but his daughter would be able to pursue her dreams. Julius would see to that.3 Just before the turn of the twentieth century, Julius Krauss met Blanche Rosenfeld. Born in about 1879 in St. Louis, Blanche had moved to Baltimore as a child. She, too, was the daughter of an immigrant—Australian-born Carrie Mayer—and her husband, Henry Rosenfeld.4 On Sunday, 14 October 1900, Blanche and Julius married at Baltimore’s beautiful new Eutaw Place Temple. The young couple soon moved with Ruth’s father and grandfather into the Linden Avenue house. (Grandmother Elsie died before she could meet her daughter-in-law.) Like many other affluent Baltimore Jews, the Krausses migrated northwest through the city into the neighborhoods just south of Druid Hill Park. Although the Krauss family moved frequently during Ruth’s childhood, they never resided more than half a dozen blocks south the park. Established in 1860, Druid Hill was part of the same urban parks movement that inspired Central Park. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was Baltimore’s largest park, with fountains, a duck Ruth Krauss at six months. Image courtesy of Betty Hahn. 11 Ruth Krauss’s Charmed Childhood pond, gardens, stables, a greenhouse, a zoo, tennis courts, swimming pools, and a lake for summer boating and winter ice skating. Because Baltimore was a segregated city, the park also had separate facilities for use by black visitors, an injustice that left an impression on young Ruth.An active child, Ruth made frequent use of the park—when she was well.5 As an infant, Ruth developed a severe earache, and doctors discovered that her ear...