declared bankruptcy. He died the following year. Early life Family background Paul Dresser was born Johann Paul Dreiser Jr. on April 22, 1858, in Terre Haute, Indiana, the fourth son of Johann Paul and Sarah Mary Schanab Dreiser. By the age of twenty he had changed his surname to Dresser. His father, a German immigrant from Mayen, was a weaver and dyer who eventually became the manager of woolen mill in Indiana. Dresser's mother, born near Dayton, Ohio, was a Mennonite who was disowned after her elopement and marriage. After Dresser's three older brothers died in infancy, he became the eldest of the family's ten surviving children. One of Dresser's sisters nicknamed him "Pudley" because of his "chubbiness." Dresser's younger brother, Theodore Dreiser, would become a noted author. In July 1863 the family moved to Sullivan, Indiana, where Dresser's father became foreman of the newly opened Sullivan Woolen Mills. Although his father worked in other woolen mills in Ohio and Indiana, he was not a successful businessman or manager of a mill. During Dresser's youth the family struggled with periods of poverty and misfortune. In 1865 Dresser's father temporarily lost his job after a fire destroyed the Sullivan mill; a year later he suffered a work-related head injury. In 1867 his father and two partners purchased and operated a new mill, but the business lost its roof in a storm and the men sold it for a loss. As a young boy living in Sullivan, Dresser may have seen his first minstrel groups and medicine-wagon shows. The town was frequented by bands that played many of the era's popular and patriotic songs at numerous carnivals, festivals, circuses, and fairs. By 1871 Dresser's family had returned to Terre Haute, where his father secured a job in another woolen mill. Education and rebellion About 1870, Dresser's father, a devout Catholic and known for his "religious zealotry" according to his son Theodore, sent his eldest son to St. Meinrad Seminary in southern Indiana to study for the priesthood. While living with his family in Sullivan, Dresser was befriended by Father Herman Joseph Alerding, a local priest who was a St. Meinrad graduate. Alerding may have taught Dresser to play brass musical instruments and influenced the decision to send Dresser to seminary school. Dresser quickly found the Benedictine seminary too strict and confining and decided to leave. Dresser would later claim to have gotten