Stifft Siblings

In 1869, after giving birth to her seventh child, Bertha Levendorf Stifft died. Her husband, Michael Stifft, a Polish veteran of the Mexican American war, admitted his five youngest children – Henrietta, Fanny, Peritz, Nathan, and David — into the Home.  

After discharge, Nathan worked in his father’s engraving business in Little Rock, Arkansas. Fannie married and moved to Chicago. Henrietta became a school teacher and public stenographer in Little Rock.

Peritz, known as Peter, graduated from Tulane Law School in 1889 and became a lawyer, likely the first Home alumnus to do so. He established a lucrative law practice collecting the city’s debts, yielding him sufficient prosperity by 1908 to purchase land in Metairie for $20,000 which by 1923 he sold for five times that amount. Parlaying the political savvy he gained as honorary president of his ward’s democratic club, Peter won appointment by several governors as Orleans Parish Custodian of Notarial Records.

In 1913, Peter Stifft made news for successfully representing the Orleans-Kenner Interurban Electric Railway Project (known as the “O-K Line”). As recounted by the press, Peter’s effective and often sarcastic cross-examination elicited not only testimony that signatures on a petition to stop the transit line were obtained by misrepresentation, but also enthusiastic applause from the public in attendance, a newspaper caricature, and a legal victory. In 1936, Peter Stifft sought the pardon of a black Pullman porter sentenced to life imprisonment, an effort which the petition board rejected as “too soon” and a “rather bold move.”

Peter died in 1948 at age 79, having been an active member of the New Orleans bar for fifty years. 

Perhaps the most famous Stifft sibling, however, was David. In his professional life as president of the National Casing Company of Minneapolis, Minnesota, David Stafft earned the respect of customers who dubbed him “the man who put the sauce in sausage.” In his life as a celebrated amateur magician, David Swift made news as a “well-known prestidigitator, conjurer, magician, and sleight of hand artist” who turned eggs into rubber balls, pulled snakes from astonished audience members’ pockets, and painlessly pierced his own limbs with sharp objects. 

David died in 1955 at age 86 in Minneapolis.