Leon Kaplan

In 1917, 10-year-old Leon Hirsch Kaplan was admitted from Corsicana, Texas. While in the Home, Leon played in the brass quartet and celebrated his confirmation in the orphanage synagogue along with thirteen other youngsters.

In 1923, with the board’s approval, Superintendent Leon Volmer selected young Leon to complete his education at the National Farm School in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Established in 1898 by Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf, the school offered a four-year agricultural program to give Jewish lads training in farming, landscaping, and animal breeding. Leon was the ninth of twelve boys the Home sent to the school.

At the National Farm School, Leon and a classmate ran Farm No. 4, where they tended two horses, a mule, and fifteen heifers. In addition to millet and wheat, they raised corn, for which the county agent awarded Leon second place at the school’s 1926 “Corn Show.” Despite his nickname “Shorty,” Leon played varsity football. And as one of few Southerners, Leon was credited with teaching his classmates “to speak the dialect of the South.”

Leon graduated from the Farm School in 1926 with a specialization in Farm Management. As reported in The Bristol (PA) Daily Courier, Leon won a $900 scholarship and an apprenticeship with the Walker-Gordon Laboratories in Plainsboro, New Jersey to study the practical manufacture of certified milk. The next year, the Home’s Golden City Messenger reported that Leon had left the apprenticeship for a “position more to his liking and with larger remuneration.”