Last updated: October 3, 2023
Person
Bessie Altman Kosman
Quick Facts
Place of Birth:
Ukraine
Date of Birth:
1886
Date of Death:
1964
Bessie Altman Kosman was a survivor. An entrepreneur, inventor, and member of a close-knit family, she rose from struggle and tragedy to success. Her life feveals the challenges, and the promises, that immigrants to this country have always faced, including those who came to Michigan's Copper Country.
Bessie Altman was born in January of 1886 to Bernard “Bar” and Ada Altman of Gaysin (Haysin), in today’s Ukraine. The Altmans were a part of a large Jewish community there. When Bessie was five years old, her family, including her maternal grandmother, immigrated to the United States, settling first in Duluth, Minnesota.
Bar took a job as a laborer to support his growing family, which by 1894 had grown by two more daughters. That same year a kick from a horse laid Bar (known as William in Duluth) low. Unable to return to work as a laborer, Bar took up peddling oranges from a wagon. He failed to pay the $20 monthly fee for a peddler’s permit, however, and was arrested. The poverty-stricken family, had “always borne a good reputation,” according to county humane officer Henry Haskins, and Bar was released. The family gained the support of their community and opened a grocery store in a rented building.
Tragedy struck again in March of 1901, when the Altman’s Duluth store burned in a fire that destroyed all of their merchandise. With $400 from fire insurance, Bar came to Houghton County, Michigan, where booming copper mines promised entrepreneurial opportunities. A few weeks of successful fish sales from a wagon proved to Bar that business was good in the Calumet area, and he sent for his family to join him in Laurium. Ada had initially wanted to wait until Bessie had finished the school year, but the women of the Altman family boarded the passenger steamer Bon Voyage on May 9, 1901 to journey down Lake Superior to Michigan’s Copper Country. Their voyage would not end in a reunion, but with a terrible loss.
As the Bon Voyage neared the Keweenaw Peninsula, a fire began around its smoke stack. The Altman family was aft on the ship, while most of the crew, lifeboats, and life jackets were forward – on the other side of the fiery stack. Bessie Altman’s later testimony stated that the upper part of the ship was on fire, so they had to go down to the galley and dining room belowdecks. A cook agreed to help and rushed out, the door locking as it swung shut behind him. Trapped in the kitchen, the family found a trap door overhead and used it to escape to the deck where flames separated them from the rest of the passengers and crew. In an attempt to close this gap, the Altman family jumped to a plank that ran along the edge of the ship. Ada Altman slipped and fell into the icy waters of Lake Superior alongside the Bon Voyage. Bessie watched as her grandmother and sister also fell from the plank into the lake below. Letting go of the tight grip she held onto her youngest sister Mary’s hand in order to step around a pillar, the two both fell. Only Bessie was later rescued. The Bon Voyage continued steaming towards shore until it beached, and others who went overboard later in the disaster were saved. The only losses of life were these members of the Altman family. The steamship company was held liable for negligence in the lawsuits that followed.
The four members of the Altman family lost in the Bon Voyage disaster were recovered and interred in the only Jewish cemetery in the Copper Country at the time, Calumet Township’s Congregation Peniel cemetery near Lake View. A. Abraham of Laurium conducted services for Bessie’s grandmother and two sisters; Ada was interred beside them later. Bessie’s mother, grandmother, and sisters rest in Calumet Township in unmarked graves today.
Bar and Bessie, who was now 15 years old, stayed in the Calumet area following the heartbreaking tragedy. Bar did not remain a widower long: He remarried the following year, and he and his new wife Anna Salick welcomed sons Milton and Harry in the years immediately following their marriage. Bessie completed her high school education in Calumet in 1903 and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Returning to Calumet, she taught for a time. In 1908, aged 22, she wed Louis (Leib) Kosman, a typesetter at a local newspaper, The Calumet News. The family lived in an apartment at 335 8th St. in Red Jacket (Calumet) when their first son Victor was born. That same year Louis, who was showing signs of tuberculosis, went to the Union Printers’ Home in Colorado for treatment. Son Milton, named for his uncle, was born during his father’s absence, and the family –now living in a house on Wolverine Street in Florida Location – reunited in August of 1911. Money was still tight, though: Bessie sold her piano in order to pay household bills while Louis was away. Meanwhile, Bessie worked on a special project with her father – an invention! In April of 1914, Bar and Bessie received Patent No. 1,094,186 for a clothes pin design, likely inspired by the windy challenges of doing laundry in the Calumet area.
Bessie cared for Louis and their two sons in their home for as long as she was able. By the summer of 1912 Louis was admitted to the Houghton County Sanitorium in Stanton Township, perhaps to protect his family from the disease and for palliative care. Louis Kosman died at the Sanitorium on September 5, 1912 at the age of 30, leaving behind an impoverished widow and two sons. He was buried in the Jewish section of the Forest Hill Cemetery in Houghton in an unmarked grave. Bessie continued to struggle to make ends meet, appearing in the Calumet News poor rolls of October 1912. An insurance payment from the Typesetter’s Union soon allowed her to move her small family back to her former home of Duluth, Minnesota.
Working as a canvasser in Duluth, Bessie became engaged in social circles. By late 1913, she had become proprietor of the city’s Grand Theatre. Whether it was because she missed her family, the Keweenaw, or both, Bessie set out to move back and open a theatre in the Copper Country. Finding the equipment of Houghton’s Eagle Theater for sale in 1915, Bessie made her move: she built and established The Rex, a movie theater in Ahmeek, Keweenaw County. Her life in theatre was short-lived, however, as new opportunities called: The Rex was sold in 1917 and Bessie joined her father in wholesale grocery sales.
By the early 1920s, the Altman and Kosman families had moved to Detroit where Bessie’s sons finished secondary school. Both Victor and Milton went on to complete their educations at the University of California-Berkeley with scholarships provided by a Jewish Widow’s fund. They became engineers and would go on to have families of their own. With her sons set on their own paths, Bessie decided to settle down once more. She married Gordon McKey at Detroit’s Temple Beth El in 1937, and the couple resided in the Pontiac, Michigan area for the rest of their lives. In the face of repeat personal tragedies, Bessie continued to work to uplift her family and community. Her contribution to Copper Country Theater and commercial history, once invisible in the history books, is restored.
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