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JAMES C. M. KRUMTUM
Vol. 3, p. 1318-1319

In the present day and generation, as of marked contradistinction to
conditions that obtained and action that was taken at an earlier
period in American history, it is exceptionally rare to find a youth
who has depended entirely upon his own exertions and resources in
baffling adverse conditions and has literally paid by his own labor
the entire financial cost of a higher collegiate education and of his
general maintenance while making his way forward from the plan of the
public schools to that on which is made possible his reception of a
university degree. In the great southwestern portion of our national
domain there have been many young men of ambition and high
aspirations who have overcome many obstacles at intervals in that
progress toward the goal of liberal education, but he whose name
initiates this paragraph has wrought his own path from beginning to
end and that he is a man of high intellectual attainments and the
incumbent of an important position in the field of pedagogics must
consistently be designated as the result of his own ability and
efforts, as even the brief narrative here offered will clearly
indicate. Professor Krumtum is head of the department of foreign
languages in the Southeastern State Normal School of Oklahoma, at
Durant, and he secure prestige and vantage-place as on of the
representative figures in the educational field of the vigorous young
commonwealth within whose borders he has maintained his home since
his childhood.

When Professor Krumtum was four years of age at the time of his
parents' removal from Iowa to what is now the State of Oklahoma, the
family home being established in Indian Territory shortly before
Oklahoma Territory had been segregated therefrom. The father Charles
W. Krumtum, has previously been a resident of Holstein, Ida County,
Iowa, and from that place he and his family came to what is the
Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory and established their residence
at Sallisaw, a little village then having a definite preponderance of
Indian inhabitants and situated in a some what wild region of the
nation mentioned, though it proved the nucleus of the present
thriving little City of Sallisaw, which is the judicial center of
Sequoyah county, Oklahoma. As a lad in this locality Professor
Krumtum witnessed such undignified performances as Indians making
their way to Fort Smith, Arkansas, twenty-five miles distant, there
obtaining liquor, with which unlawful equipment they would return to
Sallisaw for their drunken orgies and brawls, which were of not
infrequent occurrence in those early days in the Cherokee Nation. The
rudimentary education of Professor Krumtum was acquired in the
primitive schools of the Village of Sallisaw, and it may well be
understood that the facilities and the scholastic standards were of
meager order.

In 1894 Charles W. Krumtum removed with his family to a farm near
the present Town of Coalgate, Coal County, in the former Choctaw
Nation, and here the subject of the review made good use of the very
limited and ineffective advantages of the ill-ordered school system,
the while he found ample demands upon his time and attention in
assisting in the work of the farm, his father having in the meantime
received appointment for the position of postmaster in the Village of
Nixon. At the age of fourteen years Professor Krumtum began to make
his own way. For two years he was a student in the Atoka Baptist
Academy, at Atoka. While attending this school Professor Krumtum
defrayed his expenses by doing any kind of honest work that came to
hand. He did chores for local families of prominence, acted as
servant in a boarding house, and otherwise applied himself diligently
to earn the money for his living expenses. By the same policy he
defrayed later the expenses incidental to the completion of a two
years' course in the Ottawa University, at Ottawa, Kansas, and while
there a student he earned money by selling newspapers and by serving
as a night clerk in a hotel. Who thus feels the lash of necessity is
the most appreciative of the results, gains the bearer idea of the
duties and responsibilities that canopy the places true valuations
upon men and things, and has the tolerance begotten of knowledge and
of abiding human sympathy. Professor Krumtum's early experiences have
but fortified him the better for his work in the field of education,
for his example is one worthy of emulation, offering both lesson and
inspiration, and his own struggles, his own undaunted ambition, make
it possible for him better to aid other aspiring young men and women.

After providing by his own indefatigable labors the means which made
possible his completion of the preparatory course in the University
of Oklahoma, he then put his scholastic acquirements to practical
test and utilization by teaching one term of school in District No.
84, Comanche County, where he received a salary of $37.50 a month.
His success in this initial period of his pedagogic career augured
will for his future and fortified him more firmly in his
determination to follow the work of the profession in which he has
achieved such desirable results and made so excellent a record. Two
years previously to beginning his work as instructor in the school
just mentioned Professor Krumtum, then seventeen years of age, had
obtained a teacher's certificate in Comanche County, but he failed to
procure a position as a teacher at that time, owing to his youth and
his even more youthful appearance.

In 1905 Professor Krumtum was matriculated in the literary or
academic department of the University of Oklahoma, and again he faced
the problem of adding by the means to his inadequate financial
resources. With naught of false pride and with characteristic
fertility in expedients he supplemented his limited capital by
working as a waiter in a semi-public dining room and by serving as
sexton of one of the churches in the university town. Zealously
applying himself to his studies, he was graduated in 1909, with the
degree of Bachelor of Arts and with grades that ranked among the
highest in his class of fifty-four members.

Within a course of his pedagogic career since his graduation
Professor Krumtum has had diversified and valuabe experience. He held
for a time the position of teacher of German and Latin in the New
Mexico Military institute, at Roswell, and later was professor of
Latin at the Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute, at
Lafayette. In 1912 he was elected to the chair of which he is now the
able and valued incumbent in the Southeastern State Normal School of
Oklahoma. He has brought his department up to a specially high plane
of efficiency and students from the same are much in demand as
teachers of Languages, the demand being, in fact, appreciably greater
than the supply.

Professor Krumtum is a vital, buoyant, optimistic and popular member
of the faculty of this excellent Oklahoma institution, and his
enthusiasm extends outside the domain of mere academic work, as shown
in his effective services in connection with the development and
maintenance of athletics and other incidental student activities. He
is a member of the classification committee of the of the
institution, makes his interest in the student on of individualized
order and has the power of causing enthusiasm in those who come
before him in the class room or whom he meets in connection with the
social affairs of the school. He is a member of the Classical
Association of the Middle West and South and a prominent and
influential in his affiliation with the Oklahoma Educational
Association.

Professor Krumtum was born at Holstein, Ida County, Iowa, on the
12th of November, 1884, and his parents now maintain their home in
Oklahoma City, where his father, Charles W. Krumtum, is living
virtually retired, after having been identified with agricultural and
mercantile pursuits after coming to this state, about the time that
the Territory of Oklahoma was created. Of the other children it may
be recorded that O. M. is engaged in business in the City of Lincoln,
Nebraska; Otto resides in Kansas City, Missouri, and is in the employ
of the Chicago, Rock Island, & Pacific Railroad Company; Corbett is a
broommaker by trade and vocation and maintains his residence in
Lincoln, Nebraska; R. C. is in the employ of the Oklahoma City
Railway Company; and Thomas is a student in the Southeastern State
Normal School of Oklahoma, as a member of the class of 1918.

In June, 1913, was solemnized the marriage of Professor Krumtum to
Miss Alma CARNEY, who had been his childhood schoolmate in the Atoka
Baptist Academy and who had been a successful and popular teacher in
the Oklahoma public schools prior to her marriage. She is a woman of
culture and most gracious personality, holding acknowledged
leadership in the social activities of her home community, where both
she and her husband have a circle of friends that is limited only by
that of their acquaintances.

Typed for OKGenWeb by Charmaine Keith, October 11, 1998.