The Lost Marx Brother

Well, not really. But with a name like Zero Marx, he could have been.

Zero Marx, later Dr. Zero Marx, owned a sign company in Chicago and St. Louis in the last half of the 19th century. His name caught my eye so I thought I would find out a little bit about him. He was born about 1850 to a German family living in Russia. He was in St. Louis, Missouri by 1875, when he married Emilie Haase. They were living in Chicago with their three children Fred, Annie and Walther by 1880.

Marx and a German immigrant to St. Louis, Christian Hoell, developed a plan for rescuing people from burning buildings after a devastating 1877 fire in St. Louis. This involved sending trained gymnasts, called "German turners," up into high and hard-to- access places in tall buildings. They brought the hoses up and the people down to safety, and were known as the pompier corps.

Zero Marx became a homeopathic doctor at the age of about 45 and died in 1914 in Rochester, Minnesota. In that year The Clinique noted that he had graduated from CHMC (Chicago Hahnemann Medical College, or possibly Harvey Medical College) in 1895 and was also "president of the Zero Marx Sign Works."

And of course Zero Marx never was in vaudeville or the movies with anyone named Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo or Gummo. They were the sons of a French-German Jewish tailor named Simon (later Sam) Marx, nicknamed Frenchie, and they grew up in the Yorkville section of Manhattan in the 1890s.

Advertisement from an 1879 Puck magazine (vol. 5, Jul.-Dec. 1879) from Google Books.

Information about Marx, Hoell and the German turners from Eating Smoke: Fire In Urban America 1800-1950, by Mark Tebeau (JHU Press, 2003), p. 219.

"Coro Marx" [sic], 30 year old Russian-born Sign Painter, and family in Chicago on the 1880 US Census at FamilySearch. Zero had married Emilie Haase in St. Louis on June 20, 1875, see here.

The American Turners homepage is here.

More on medical education in Chicago in the 19th century at the Chicago Encyclopedia.

COMING UP LATER THIS WEEK : The curious history of the Surf Queen.