But Strauss was more than just the manifestation of his various denim products. He started his business when San Francisco was a raw, rowdy town and when he was only in his early twenties. The man and the city grew up together, as Strauss helped to make it the commercial capital of the West. He loved his family, and was true to his Jewish faith and its tradition of caring for the less fortunate.
The causes he supported ranged from scholarships for poor students at the University of California at Berkeley to financial assistance for Jewish and Protestant orphanages. He built a business that came back and grew stronger even after it was destroyed in the earthquake and fire.
Strauss was born in the Bavarian province of Upper Franconia, a predominantly Catholic region containing a significant number of Jewish enclaves, which made it a center for Jewish life in the German lands. The three Franconian provinces Upper, Middle, and Lower had been incorporated into the Kingdom of Bavaria in the early nineteenth century as a reward for Bavarian neutrality in the late-eighteenth-century Napoleonic conflict between France and Austria. He had at least one brother, called Lippmann, and his father, Jacob, was a cattle trader, one of the two main occupations for rural Jews in Franconia.
The other was peddling, the work that young Hirsch himself took up as an adult. In Madel Schneider was born in the village, and she and Hirsch were married sometime around the summer of Their children soon began to arrive: Jacob was first, born in , when the family was living at Marktstrasse RΓΆsla came along in , after Hirsch and Madel had moved to the lower floor of Marktstrasse 83, a few doors away.
Jonathan was next in , followed by Lippmann in and Maila in Less than nine months later Madel Strauss was dead. Widower Hirsch Strauss, now a peddler who spent days or weeks away from home, needed to find another wife to help take care of his five children.
