News

The Last Kraus: One family, 10 HHS grads over 22 years

Meredith Kraus, right, shown at sister Judith's wedding, graduates from Hendersonville High School on June 9.

By Bill Moss, Published: June 9, 2017

Part 2: Ken: ‘Built-in friends’

Although his career has been in quality control management, Ken Kraus has always played the trombone.If Kathleen daydreamed about a family completely opposite of hers — religious, led by unwavering parental authority, openly loving — she might have come up with the family of Frances and Gordon Kraus.

Frances and Gordon had been high school sweethearts at Freehold High School in New Jersey (Bruce Springsteen’s alma mater). Gordon went on to earn a civil engineering degree from Cornell and Frances earned a nursing degree from Baptist Hospital in Boston. They had five children, including Ken and his fraternal twin, Mark, born on Jan. 12, 1960.

“I started school in Philadelphia at Overbrook Elementary, where I was one of three or four white kids in a mostly African-American population,” Ken said. “The first five years of my schooling was a different school every year because Dad went back into the Army to be a chaplain.”

The Kraus kids knew there was one constant they could count on: one another.
“We clung to each other,” he said. “I had built-in friends when I went to school — a brother a year older than me and a brother in the same class with me. My younger brother was three years behind us. The three of us (older boys) — that was our support group. And even to this day we don’t meet new people well. We’re always a little bit slow, and we don’t want to move. Once I set up house in Hendersonville I stayed as long as I could.”

Gordon Kraus served in Vietnam and after his discharge took a church in Schenectady, N.Y. The family lived there for six years, then moved to Hendersonville in 1975.

Ken spent his junior and senior years at Hendersonville High School, the first Kraus Bearcat. He graduated in 1977, with a trumpet player named Fran Shelton, who would go on to become HHS band director. A gifted trombone player, Ken dreamed of a professional career in music.

He enrolled at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, graduating with a degree in music education. As a student teacher in a high school, he found classroom management a challenge and decided teaching was not for him. After graduation, he came home to Hendersonville and discovered that his parents had taken in an unwed mother from church.