The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1909 — c. 1925
The silk line beside the cotton giant: In 1909 Theodore F. Thieme brought his brother John into a second company, Thieme Brothers Hosiery, organized to work the silk end of the trade while Wayne Knitting Mills ran at full-fashioned scale. It ran profitably — the biography gives it $65,000 in contributed profit in 1919 and $100,000 in 1920 — and when the Wayne Knitting Mills board sold that company to Munsingwear in 1923, Thieme Brothers Hosiery was expressly not in the sale. Thieme reorganized it as an independent company under himself and ran it until his full retirement in 1925. The brothers came out of cloth: their father's generation kept the J. G. Thieme and Bro. clothing business, and Gottlieb and John Thieme kept a tailoring firm, Thieme Bros. — the family's Fort Wayne clothing trade is documented in the Business section, and the two later companies should not be merged with it. The fashion point stands on its own: in the 1910s Fort Wayne supported not one hosiery name but two, and the second was a family silk house small enough to be carried out of a corporate sale in the founder's own hands.
Sources:
- Businesses, entries for Thieme Brothers Hosiery Company (1909–c.1925) and the parent Wayne Knitting Mills — the 1909 formation, the 1919–20 profit figures, the exclusion from the 1923 sale, and the conflation warning separating the silk company from the brothers' tailoring firm; cross-referenced, not retold.
- Immigrant Entrepreneurship, "Theodore Frederick Thieme" — the 1909 invitation to John Thieme.