BUTTENHEIM, Germany -- Anybody who ever owned a pair of blue jeans should be grateful that this still small and sleepy Bavarian market town didn't have much to offer a poor Jewish boy in the mid-19th century. If it had, Levi Strauss might not have immigrated to America, and the world might have been forever deprived of denim pants.
Strauss's life story is a classic bootstrap tale of a penniless immigrant who through hard work and enterprise found fame and fortune in his adopted country -- in this case, by launching a clothing fashion that would sweep the world.
It's a success story well told at the Levi Strauss Birthplace Museum here, which occupies the 17th-century house where Strauss was born on Feb. 26, 1829. Actually, the man whose first name is now synonymous with blue jeans was originally called Loeb. Not long after arriving in New York, at the age of 18, he changed it to Levi to sound more American.
His father, Hirsch Strauss, whose death caused the family to emigrate, had been a peddler and dealer in cloth and dry goods. This was a common occupation for Buttenheim's Jews, who at the time Levi Strauss was born made up about 20 percent of the town's population. However, by 1893 so many Jews had left town, fleeing poverty and legalized discrimination in Bavaria, that the local Jewish congregation was dissolved and the former synagogue sold to a brewery for use as a storehouse.
A Jewish cemetery remained, but for more than a century no one in Buttenheim connected Loeb Strauss, whose father is buried there, with the famous Levi. Then, in 1983, a woman in Milwaukee working on a documentary about German immigrants in America contacted town authorities, who were surprised to learn that the Levi Strauss of blue jeans fame was a son of Buttenheim.
Eventually, the town acquired the Strauss birthplace, one of Buttenheim's oldest buildings, which was in derelict condition. According to museum director Tanja Roppelt, it cost about $500,000 to restore the 2 1/2-story building and convert it into a museum. "That's a lot of money for a town with only 3,300 people," she says, "but the Levi Strauss company contributed about 20 percent of it."
The museum on Buttenheim's main street opened in 2000 and has since attracted thousands of visitors from around the world -- most of them, according to Roppelt, wearing jeans. The museum has also won several restoration and design awards. "And now there is even a blue jeans boutique in Berlin called Buttenheim," Roppelt says.
You enter the museum building the same way young Loeb Strauss would have entered, by going down a narrow alley and through a door in the side. Today, however, the entrance is marked by a large banner with a huge photograph of a dignified-looking Levi Strauss, taken at the end of the 19th century, when he was one of San Francisco's leading citizens.
The museum doesn't try to replicate the Strauss home. Rather, in each of the small connecting rooms of the house, there are videos, wall panel displays, and exhibits about the Jewish community of Buttenheim, the Strauss family, the history of cloth, and the development of blue jeans.
There is also a gallery exhibiting vintage Levis. In existence for more than 130 years, jeans have changed subtly over time. Belt loops were added in 1922; suspender buttons were retained until 1937; zippers replaced fly buttons in 1955; rivets disappeared from back pockets in 1967; and a style tailored for women was introduced in 1981.
Visitors are guided through the museum by bilingual audio headsets that narrate events supposedly as experienced by Strauss. The commentary is informative, but the English language narrator affects a movie-cowboy accent that it is unlikely Strauss, who spoke only German into early adulthood, would have had.
The museum debunks many of the myths about Strauss and blue jeans. He was never a tailor in a gold rush mining camp who made overalls for ragged miners out of old tents and wagon covers, for one. He didn't arrive in California until 1853, well after the gold rush, and opened a dry goods store in downtown San Francisco, not in the gold fields. And, while was he was responsible for popularizing blue jeans, he didn't invent them.
That distinction goes to a Latvian-born tailor in Reno named Jacob Davis. Davis knew he had a good idea but didn't have the money to patent or market it. So he contacted Strauss, already a well-known cloth merchant and famously canny salesman, and in 1873 the two men filed a joint patent for "riveted waist-overalls."
After the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed the factory, Davis gave up his interest in the firm. The company, then run by Levi's Strauss's nephews, built a larger plant and increased jeans production. Demand grew rapidly in the 20th century, in good part because of the popularity of cowboy movies in which most of the actors wore jeans -- and in effect advertised them to the world. Levi Strauss & Co. still has its headquarters in San Francisco but no longer makes jeans in the United States.
Strauss died in 1902 at the age of 73, a wealthy man noted for his philanthropy and support of civic causes. He funded 28 scholarships to the University of California in Berkeley, and among other charitable bequests in his will were ones to local Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish orphanages.
Buttenheim may have forgotten Strauss, but he never forgot where he came from. His will also included a bequest to maintain the cemetery where his father and other relatives are buried. "The Jewish cemetery in Buttenheim wasn't desecrated during World War II and the Holocaust," Roppelt says. "It's a small cemetery, but it still exists and is still maintained."
William A. Davis can be reached at bill@davistravels.com. 
