Created by Herman Kurz

Dr. Herman Kurz was a professor of botany at Florida State College for Women. Born in Iowa in 1886, he was adopted when he was ten years old. During his teenage years, he was at various times a bell boy, a clerk, and a waiter. He was selling newspapers when President William McKinley was assassinated. By the time he was 20, he became successively a night clerk, a ditch-digger, a "chicken picker," a canning factory employee, a waiter in a hot dog stand, and finally an apprenticed barber. He traveled from town to town as a barber, and at 26 he went to Chicago and operated a barber shop. In his speech to the Kiwanis Club delivered in 1932, Kurz noted that his work in barber shops had brought him into contact with educated men and he had "dreamed of an education."

At age 25, Kurz became interested in music and tried first the piano and then the violin, but then switched to pre-medical study at a Chicago Y.M.C.A. He later switched his interest to chemistry and finally changed to botany during his senior year in college.

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