Kenneth Boyd Tanner, sugar plantation manager and entrepreneur based in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and Eastland, Texas, was born July 20, 1883 in Kaukauna, Wisconsin, to Herbert Battles Tanner and Mary (Boyd) Tanner. The elder Tanner was a respected Kaukauna physician and druggist and active in the civic and political affairs of the town, serving as its mayor from 1894 to 1896.[1] Kenneth Boyd Tanner was educated in Kaukauna's public schools, graduating from Kaukauna High School with the class of 1900. In the fall of that year he entered the University of Wisconsin at Madison and affiliated with the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. Tanner retained many of his Kaukauna and fraternal friendships throughout his long lifetime. After graduation in 1904 he briefly studied medicine at the Wisconsin College of Physicians and Surgeons. In 1906, however, he left medical school to manage a Mexican sugar plantation owned by the Rio Tamasopo Sugar Company, of which his father was president and in which his family had invested heavily. On May 6, 1909 Tanner married Maria de los Dolores Asencion Sanchez at Hacienda Agua Buena, San Luis Potosi, Mexico. They had two children born in San Luis Potosi; Karl, born May 15, 1910, and Maria de los Dolores (Dolores), born March 6, 1912. Maria Tanner died a few weeks after the birth of Dolores. On March 25, 1913 at Chicago, Tanner married Bertha Marie Alter of Waterloo, Iowa. They had one child, Kenneth Boyd Tanner, Jr. (Boyd), born July 27, 1917 at San Antonio, Texas.
In 1915, the Herbert Tanner family closed the house in Kaukauna and moved to California, and then to Amarillo, Texas, for one year. The Kenneth Tanners followed them to Amarillo and later to San Antonio and in 1919 to Eastland, Texas, where both families moved hoping to profit in the Ranger oil boom. In 1918 Kenneth Tanner enlisted in the army, training with the Officers' Reserve Corps at Camp Zachary Taylor, Kentucky. He was a member of the United States Army Intelligence in Mexico. He was also one of the many servicemen stricken with influenza during and immediately after World War I. In 1919, shortly after his return, the Tanner family, having been forced out of Mexico several times because of Mexican revolutions and the political upheavals that followed, sold its interest in the Rio Tamasopo Company at a considerable financial loss. At about the same time they “...dropped what [they] had salvaged of their Mexican holdings in trying to become oil barons.” [2] The family remained in Eastland; Kenneth took a position with the Freyschlag Insurance Company and he, his father, and his brother Herbert were active in the civic and political concerns of Eastland. Kenneth Tanner was a member of the Eastland school board from 1941 to circa 1958 and was its president for seventeen of those years. He was city manager of Eastland from 1943 to 1947 and again in 1962, an elder in the Presbyterian Church, a scout master, and in later years he taught Spanish in informal classes in his home.
During World War II Tanner again sought to serve the war effort. Rejected for service with the armed forces because of his age, he was, in due course, appointed to the local Selective Service Board, a position he continued to hold, with one interruption, until his death in 1965. The war brought tragedy to the family. The youngest son, Boyd, a flight sergeant in the Royal Canadian Air Force, was shot down while piloting a Wellington bomber in a raid over Germany on September 16, 1942. Karl Tanner, first lieutenant, United States Marine Corps, and a recipient of the Navy Cross, was killed by a mortar shell on Iwo Jima on March 9, 1945. In their honor the Eastland American Legion Post was named the Karl and Boyd Tanner Post. Neither son had married.
After the death of his wife Bertha in 1954, Tanner retired from business but continued his community activities. He was also deeply involved in politics as a member of the Republican Party in Texas. During the 1950s he was chairman of the Eastland County Eisenhower Club, Republican Chairman of Eastland County, and an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1952. Tanner continued to live in Eastland with occasional trips to Mexico and Wisconsin until his death in 1965. He was survived by his daughter, Dolores Tanner Vachliotis, an associate professor of drama at Texas Christian University. There are no descendants of Kenneth Boyd Tanner's three children.
