Henry "Sonny" Schloss, president of a Southwest Baltimore manufacturing plant who was prominent in Baltimore Zionist circles and assisted in the refitting of the ship that became the doomed Exodus in 1947, died July 1 of complications from Alzheimer's disease at the Arden Courts assisted-living facility in Pikesville.
The longtime Pikesville resident was 86.
Mr. Schloss, who was born in Baltimore and raised in the 2200 block of E. Baltimore St. near Patterson Park, attended city public schools.
FOR THE RECORD
An obituary published for Henry "Sonny" Schloss misnamed the vessel that became the Exodus in 1947. It was the Old Bay Line steamer President Warfield.
The Baltimore Sun regrets the error.
In 1939, he went to work for his father, Moses M. "Captain Mo" Schloss, who founded Industrial Sales Co., a marine salvage business located on Chase's Wharf, in 1908.
In the early days of the business, the elder Mr. Schloss would row out to sailing ships anchored in the harbor to buy their old equipment, mainly rope.
By the 1930s, the business had become one of the largest of its kind in the nation, as Moses Schloss filled his Thames Street warehouse with "tons of rope of various kinds and qualities, lifeboats, life preservers, oars, mattresses and the like," reported The Sun at the time of his death in 1971. "He sold the material to stevedores and shipyards, and much of the old rope to paper mills."
"When my father joined the business in 1937, there were only four or five employees and it was the Depression. He was also very impressed by his father's work ethic in keeping the business solvent," said Henry Schloss' son, Howard M. Schloss of Stevenson, who joined the company in 1974 and has been president and CEO since his father stepped down in 1996.
With the outbreak of World War II, Mr. Schloss enlisted in the Army in 1942 and was assigned to the Signal Corps.
After the Dachau concentration camp was liberated by the U.S. 5th Army in April 1945, Mr. Schloss, who had become fluent in French and German while in the service, was sent to the camp to interrogate survivors and photograph what he found there.
"He had copies of those photos and could never look at them without crying," his son said. "He finally destroyed them."
After being discharged from the Army in 1946, Mr. Schloss returned to Baltimore and his old job at the company's plant at Patapsco and Barney streets.
He joined his father, who was an ardent Zionist, in the movement that led to the conversion of the Old Bay Line steamer, Governor Warfield, into the Exodus in 1947. Loaded with 4,554 Holocaust survivors from Europe, the ship tried unsuccessfully to run the British blockade and land in what was then called Palestine.
