Profile · Oshkosh, Wisconsin
Carl Laemmle
Oshkosh clothier (c. 1894–1906) who founded Universal Pictures; Laupheim-born immigrant; 1930s affidavit rescuer
$5.5 million
Carl Laemmle founded Universal Pictures after a dozen years as an Oshkosh clothier, and that Midwestern stretch is still the city's claim on Hollywood's early studio era. Born January 17, 1867, in Laupheim, Württemberg, he landed in New York in 1884 with fifty dollars and almost no English, was naturalized in 1889, and shocked wheat in South Dakota at $2.75 a day before the clothing job. By 1894 he was bookkeeper for Sam Stern's Continental Clothing Company on Main Street. He learned window dressing, catalogs, and the advertising that made a Midwestern clothier feel like a show. In 1898 he married Stern's niece, Recha. Oshkosh voted him one of the fifteen most eminent local businessmen in 1905. He quit anyway. In 1906 he walked into a Chicago nickelodeon and changed his life. White Front Theatre came next, then a film exchange, then a war with Thomas Edison's Patents Company, and in 1912 Universal. He built a studio-city on a San Fernando Valley chicken farm, opened it to tourists, and put The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, and All Quiet on the Western Front on the screen. He is widely credited with helping invent the movie-star system by billing Florence Lawrence and Mary Pickford by name against Edison's anonymous-player policy. In 1912 he sent a camera crew back to film Oshkosh in Motion. "Uncle Carl" nepotism at Universal was a Hollywood joke, and also how William Wyler got in the door. In the 1930s, locked out of Germany, he signed affidavits that pulled more than 300 Jews out of the Reich, many from Laupheim, until the U.S. government would not take more from him. He sold Universal in 1936 and died in Los Angeles on September 24, 1939. Chicago and Los Angeles bookend the career. The clothing-store decade on Main Street is why Oshkosh still claims him.