Kapp & Peterson

At almost every retailer’s internet site, pipe smokers can still read the Peterson story: Friedrich and Heinrich Kapp, German immigrants to Ireland from Nürnberg, Germany, founded the famed Kapp Brothers store on Grafton Street, Dublin in 1865. Shortly thereafter, a Latvian immigrant, Charles Peterson, strolled into the Kapp workshop and declared that he could make better pipes than they. Armed with an imaginative flair for pipes and a craftsman's background, Peterson not only proved himself correct, but became the third partner in the fledgling firm. Friedrich and Heinrich have been shrouded in mystery for so long that, in anticipation of the book launch early next month at the Chicagoland Pipe Show, I obtained permission from Briar Books Press to release the following tiny excerpt concerning Henrich as well as a sidebar anecdote about he and his brother.   Heinrich Johann Sebastian Gottfried Kapp (1832–92) Heinrich Kapp, c. 1882 . . . . So much, then, for Friedrich’s early flights of fancy, his strong interests in the women of Bavaria, and skill as a pipe-carver that led to the numerous gold medals previously enumerated. But what about his younger brother, Heinrich Johann Sebastian Gottfried Kapp, affectionately known as Zweite Banane by Friedrich and his family? A Johann Kapp - Sobwasser Snuff Box According to DeBaum’s genealogy, Heinrich was the younger of the Kapp twins by one minute and four seconds and was born on the first day of the month in the tiny village of Plumpsen Upper Bavaria, April 1819, to Johann and Brunhilde Kapp. Johann was a town musician who gave flugelhorn lessons in the family’s rooms over the town stable and painted female portraits (often using his wife as model) on lacquered Papier Maché snuff boxes for the celebrated Stobwasser between gigs to support his family. From his childhood, Heinrich desired a musical life above all others, yet despite his devotion to the flugelhorn (which he played all his life), a bad fever in his teenage years left him puny, cross-eyed and deaf in one ear. Friedrich's flugelhorn (Peterson Museum) Brunhilde finally dissuaded Heinrich from following in his father’s footsteps as a town musician and obtained for him an apprenticeship for him in the Nürnberg Nachttoph Guild, where he tested various juvenile chamber pots as well as packing them for export. His work in the warehouse rapidly developed the kind of physical strength and precision necessary to pack and ship heavy wooden crates of fragile pots. What today we would call a “concrete sequential” personality type, Heinrich found this type of work also developed his actuarial skills, and within two years he was in charge of all shipping accounts. (Courtesy Nürnberg Nachttoph Fabrik Museum) Friedrich having meanwhile obtained his journeyman’s certificate as a carver, as seen in the previous chapter, was working at the original Pfeifen Bayern shop in Munich making traditional Bavarian wood, porcelain and meerschaum pipes as well as learning to turn silver and engrave. His work became so well known that the Pfeifen Bayern shop commissioned…