Russian-born Gustave Kadysh Klausner was 35 when he registered for St. Louis University's new commerce school in 1910, and he worked with fierce urgency at his studies. Gus Klausner was having to start his education all over again. Anti-Semitic pogroms had driven him and his wife Anna to the U.S. from Vilna, in White Russia only three years before. Working in St. Louis' garment industry in the daytime, Gus earned a bachelor's degree in night school, then a master's, ended by teaching night classes himself. In 1920 he quit his clothing-store job to teach at Roman Catholic St. Louis University full time.
At St. Louis' midyear commencement last week, stubby little Professor Klausner stood with bowed head while Father Paul C. Reinert, university president, placed on his shoulders the black and purple hood of a Doctor of Laws. It was the first time in the school's 132-year history that a faculty member had been thus honored, the ninth time in a half century that St. Louis University had granted an honorary degree to anyone. (Among previous recipients: Marshal Foch, Belgium's Cardinal Mercier, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, now Pius XII.) "He has been more than a teacher," read the citation. "He has been a symbol."
A Hand for Students. For 35 years Gus Klausner had guided students through the bewildering columns of cost accounting and budgetary control, never tired of showing the way. "I may be as sick as can be," he said, "but once I get into class I forget myself." Each student, no matter how bright or dull, was Gus's personal concern: "Perhaps never again will anybody take him by the hand and say 'Look, this is the way you must do.' So that is the way in which I can serve."
Professor Gus never wavered in his devotion to his own Jewish faith—nor did he ever fail to remind his Catholic students, at the approach of holy days, of their own churchgoing duties. "In religion as in commerce," said Gus, "a good man must be faithful to the principles that guide his living." He spent hours writing lengthy comments on test questions, devoted Sunday after Sunday to tutoring students who were having a hard time. When someone asked Anna what Gus's hobby was, she answered, "Hobby? His classes are his hobby."
Trees for Israel. St. Louis University had showed its esteem for Gus by making him a full professor in 1943. Zionist circles had honored him too. In 1946 when friends took up a collection to buy Gus a gift for his work in Zionism, he asked them to spend the money for trees for Israel. Last fall Gus learned that the ten-thousandth tree had just been planted in a section of Israel's national forest named for him.
St. Louis University and its alumni and friends wanted Professor Klausner to be remembered in St. Louis too. By this spring, when he retires from teaching, the university expects to have the $250,000 needed to establish a Gustave Klausner Chair of Accounting. Gus's former commerce students and others have already subscribed $180,000 of it, following bare announcement of what the university proposed to do.