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SALINGER, Benjamin I., of Carroll, Reporter of the Supreme Court of Iowa and one of the most energetic and successful lawyers and politicians in the state, was born May 14, 1861, in Wronke, Kingdom of Prussia, Germany, and was brought to the United States at the age of nine years. The family settled in Butler county. The father's name is Louis Salinger and his mothers maiden name was Rosalie Slimmer, a sister of Abraham Slimmer of Waverly. Louis Salinger has been in his day a fur buyer and merchant and is now living in retirement in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Benjamin I. Salinger attended school in Germany from the time he was five years old until the family came to America. After that time he had a varied experience in trying to get an education. The family was poor and wanted him to earn money and fit himself for business, for which he had no taste, preferring to read and study. Thge boy had a rather hard life for a few years and engaged in a great variety of occupations, such as farming, clerking, working in a bank and the like, all the time determined to be a lawyer. He studied whenever he could, went to school some, spent a little time in Cornell College at Mount Vernon and then started out as the "Boy Orator," delivering an address entitled "Women Want Bread as Well as the Ballot." He got more compliments than money. He tried teaching school and was befriended by Judge Chase of Webster City, and also J. D. Hunter, then and now editor of the Freeman. He drifted to Spencer, where his extreme youth prevented him from achieving success as a lawyer in a small way and compelled him and his partner, William W. Hughes, to leave the town on foot heavily in debt. They footed it across the prairie to Storm Lake and then to Ida county, where young Salinger taught school near where Holstein now stands. The wages were small and the tribulations many. When his school was finished he herded cattle and worked for farmers at such jobs as he could get, all the time keeping up his reading by getting his books from a small circulating library in Ida Grove. During this time he had almost no human associates, and he and Hughes used to walk fourteen miles to the Ida county line to visit, Hughes being employed as a teacher near Cherokee. While working as a farm hand he met his present wife, and after he began to teach near Cherokee, used to walk across the country fourteen miles to see her. Subsequently he taught the winter term of school in that neighborhood and boarded at her father's house. In the spring of 1880 he was married to this young woman, Miss Lucy M. Boylan, and managed to get to Manning, where he organized a school, the directors paying part and the patrons part. He remained there in that position two years, working under many difficulties. The school grew to six rooms, scattered in store rooms on the main street. He did other teaching at the same time and kept up his law studies. He was admitted to the bar before Judge Loofborrow in Audubon and was soon afterward naturalized in Carroll and went into partnership with Emory S. Blazer, who involved the firm in liabilities, which Mr. Salinger conscientiously paid to the last cent, partly by traveling for one of the insurance compies that Blazer had wronged. After a brief association in the nature of a partnership with L. P. Brigham and J. W. Lindsay, Mr. Salinger practiced alone until the fall of 1897, when he removed to Carroll and formed a law partnership with George W. Korte. He has enjoyed a very large practice for a number of years in all the courts of Western Iowa. |
