Doris & Harry Vise

The People Behind the Building
 By Rick Brown, Library Assistant

 Cumberland University students know Vise Library, if not from its stacks than from its distinctive archway. Yet few know the individuals behind the building. Long before Doris and Harry Vise became namesakes of CU’s library, they were people with an uncommon story. That story began in the unlikely location of Weimar-era Germany.

 Dr Harry Vise was born in Coblenz, Germany in 1921. Of Jewish descent, Dr Vise excelled academically, studying accounting and business administration through American extension schools in college, later attaining a DBA from CU. Before Dr Vise began his postgraduate life in earnest, however, the rise of Nazi Germany intervened.

 As the Third Reich dawned, Dr Harry Vise and his family fled Germany. Leaving in 1939 on one of the last departing ships, Dr Vise immigrated to the US, settling in Clarksville, Tennessee. It was there that he applied his knowledge to a new discipline: bootmaking. Dr Vise joined the Acme Boot Company, starting as a production worker and leaving the company as an assistant manager.

 Dr Harry Vise later married Doris Oppenheim, a distinguished woman from New York. Though sadly little information is available on Mrs Vise, what is certain is that the pair’s union was and is a happy one, lasting well into the millennium and engendering three children.

 Soon after marriage, the Vises’ life took a fabled turn. Dr Vise’s entrepreneurial instincts stirred, and in 1952 he founded his own company, Texas Boot Company, in Lebanon, Tennessee. Such was the beginning of a thirty year enterprise, which began with a single production facility and eventually became one of the country’s best boot enterprises, with four plants in Tennessee.

 Philanthropists as well as businesspeople, the Vises participate in a host of charities and institutions, one of which was CU. Harry particularly became a renowned benefactor of the University, and in 1989, CU’s library was dedicated in the family’s honor. Though few CU students today know Doris and Harry Vise personally, their spirit is aptly represented by the library that bears their name.

 The Vise Connection: the Doris & Harry Vise Library Newsletter, Spring 2010, Vol 3, issue 1 Cumberland University, Lebanon Tennessee

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