Jack Hess Family (Grandma’s Second Husband)

Jack’s first marriage:

John Millard Hess

b. 25 Aug 1916

Married 27 Jan 1951

Widowed 19 Nov 1961

Esther Josephine O’Riordan

b. 29 Jan 1929

d. 19 Nov 1961, London, England

Jack’s first wife, Jo, was born in the Bronx. Her son Greg shared a story of how, as an infant, her family took a trip to California, the place the O’Riordans call home. They put baby Jo in a little hammock in the back of the car in the days long before car seats.

Greg and Steve’s Aunt Mary told Greg that Jo, being very Catholic, would stop and pray at an altar for a good dance partner. She loved to dance as did Grandpa Jack. They met dancing and enjoyed it together. Elaine and Grandpa Jack also danced for years. And it continues on. Greg met Collette dancing and loves to dance to this day.

Jack was widowed the same year that Fran died, leaving him a single parent for two young sons, Steve, age 7, and Greg, age 4. Jo was killed in a hit and run accident when Jack was stationed in England.

Steve remembers these things about his dad:

Sometimes I feel like I could write a book and sometimes the engineer in me comes out and I get to the facts. We will do a little of both here.

Dad’s father died when he was young, around 2 years old. He died of the flu in 1918 during the flu epidemic. Grandma (Florence) went to live with her parents.

Dad would tell of the cold nights when he and his brother, Dick, were sleeping on the porch and the water bottle, if it fell out of bed, was ice in the morning. Both Greg and I think that is a stretch. Dad liked to stretch a little. There was the one war story where I got the opinion Dad was in a foxhole when he really had an office job.

Dad always referred to his Grandpa Underwood, (Bah), in those days growing up during the Depression as a man who always had money in his pocket. Dad started out helping Bah paint. That did not last long. As soon as Dad could drive, he bought a model T and became a courier. He was excited at his entrepreneurial prowess when he described that not only did he get a fee for bringing people one way he got a fee for bringing other people back on his round trip. There are several pictures of Dad and his cars. He remembers that more car companies have gone out of business than there are in business today.

As soon as Dad was old enough, he joined the army. I can remember him saying later that he wanted to see the world and that’s why he joined. He did see the world, to New York then to France and back to San Francisco where he met and married my mother, Esther Josephine O’Riordan (Jo), an Irish Catholic girl who liked to dance with Dad. A couple of years later, I was born in Tokyo, Japan. My Grandpa O’Riordan is from Ireland. He was there during the Black and Tans reign and had to come to the U.S. during a busy time in his life. He met my Grandma, Margaret Devereaux, in the states and sent her back to Ireland where my Aunt Eileen was born. Grandpa drove a taxi in New York City and had to ask for Grandma to come back to the states, as things were still not right in Ireland.

Back from Tokyo to Fort Washington for new orders and to see cousins and family one of the snowiest pictures I have ever seen is in our photo collection of me in my snow suit and us driving a big green rambler through snow laden bows of ever greens. Funny how pictures can help you actually believe you remember something.

Orders came in to go to Germany, where Greg was born in Munich. We lived in Bad Tolz. Mom had quite a little business going there, with the cigarettes from the PX.

Dad had broken his arm and had a cast. Mom took him to Lourdes where he ran his arm under the Holy water running out of the mountain. I think his arm got better then, at least Mom felt better. By the time we got back to Fort Sheridan we had a grandfather clock, a grandmother clock, beer steins, Dresden figurines and Hummels; enough to supply a gift shop. I was speaking half the few words I knew in German when I went to kindergarten in Ft. Sheridan, Illinois.

Dad liked Ft. Sheridan where he learned to be a drill sergeant. Those days made a big impression on his life. ”Ten HUT! Shoulders back, stomach in.” he would always say as he smiled at us, you might say Greg and I became his little drill team. That was the year Dad went to the hospital for his psoriasis. They did not know quite what to do with it back then, they still really don’t. But after a few weeks of steady light therapy he healed up enough to come home. Now you have to be there the day Dad came home: Mom had gotten it in her mind that we needed a new TV. She got one with a remote control. Dad was sitting on the couch and Mom was in the kitchen, which had no wall between them.

“Hon, we got a new TV, can you tell?”

“Oh that looks nice, how do you turn it on?”

“Oh that button there, Hon, on the right, up a little.”

No sooner would Dad turn on the TV, by getting up off the couch and leaning in to find the button, go sit back down on the couch, and Mom would turn off the TV with the remote from the kitchen. This went on for some time, even with turning the channels. It was becoming quite clear to me that Mom liked to play practical jokes. Dad took it in stride and they were howling.

I went to kindergarten and then to a Catholic school for first grade. Mom had a job as a phone operator on base. One night I can remember watching The Hunch Back of Notre Dame and getting scared. I called my Mom at the switchboard to get some motherly advice. Her advice: stop watching the show.

Orders to England followed the Ft. Sheridan gig where Mom and Dad found a great big English house. It had French doors and a big garden with a gardener. I can remember he was a kind man and took good care of the radishes, raspberries and roses. Mom could see the garden from the window over the kitchen sink. One Easter, after finding every last egg in the house, I showed her my basket while she was standing gazing out the kitchen window. “Are you done?” Yes, I said proudly holding out my basket to show her. “I don’t think so, look outside.” Sure enough, I could see the brightly colored eggs in the garden.

Greg and I would go to the Queen’s Park and catch minnows in a net. Mom and Dad bought us a little fish bowl that we put the minnows in. One morning I found that there were no fish in the bowl. The story was “Oh dear, the fish must have jumped out.” We never did get the straight story on that, I don’t think.

I will always remember our first Christmas there in that house. All our boxes had not yet arrived and we had no Christmas ornaments. Mom had us color paper and cut them out in the round patterns we made with drinking glasses and glue them to cardboard. We poked holes in the top and hung them on the tree. I think that was the best-decorated tree I ever saw. That Christmas Eve I can remember coming down stairs to a huge decorated tree I thought was bigger than life.  I have to laugh now when I see the picture of that tree which was actually so small it sat on the tabletop. I got Tonka trucks and cap guns and chaps. Greg got a cap gun and became the polite bandit. “Stick um up, please.” Dad always had us say please and thank you. He bought a tandem bike and we had Mitzi the poodle in the basket, Dad on the front seat, me in the middle, then Mom, and Greg on the back seat. Wow, it was a bus!

We did several trips to the Roman baths, Piccadilly Circus and Stonehenge. Dad had been in the army for almost 24 years by then. We got transferred to army housing and I can remember meeting lots of other army families. We got bussed to school. My first teacher was allowed to keep her dog at school and she lay under the teacher’s desk. We were able to take her to mandatory walks in the nearby park. One particularly warm spring day I can remember waking up from our naptime and seeing Mom sitting there at the front of the class. She had a treat for us all; I can still remember those icicle pops, still frozen, from her shopping trip at the PX. The trucks would come around during those days to sell all sorts of things where we lived. There was the general store truck, the potato chip truck (where I learned that the salt was in a package inside the chip bag) and the ice cream truck. When I got a shilling for my birthday I was able to buy my own ice cream.

Dad would come home after work and stand at the door with his over coat still on and we would ask him what he had. We fished into his pocket for a stick of “chew-da-gum”, which he always had on him. He liked to whistle and chew gum. He said he had quit smoking years before, cold turkey. His Mom would always say she could hear him coming up the walk whistling.

Mom died in an accident and I can remember sleeping with her big teddy bear that she and Dad had won at the NCO club in Germany a few years earlier. It was a huge teddy bear about the size of me. Dad stayed in the army a year after and decided to do the same thing his mom had done for him, and take us to live with our grandparents. We lived with Grandma and Grandpa (Florence and Art Koehler) in Peoria, Illinois for a year.

I remember a sing along with Mitch Miller and the Don Ameche Circus. Of course Walt Disney was the show to watch back then and Dad would take us to a small roadhouse that had color TV and he would buy us a Coke and open a bag of potato chips. Dad and Art would go fishing in the man-made lakes there in Peoria. I learned to clean catfish, yech. We moved to an apartment near Grandma’s and went to a new school district. I can remember that was a hot summer. We did not have air conditioning but we had a swamp cooler in the living room. Me, being a budding engineer, filled it with ice one day. I wasn’t sure it helped.

One day after school Dad was in the kitchen. “Are you boys thirsty?” Oh yeah! We each looked glad that Dad was concerned about us being hot and thirsty. “Want some Kool-Aid?”  Sure enough, Dad had two big glasses full of ice cold drinks, and we drank down the saltiest Kool-Aid! I don’t think he could have gotten more salt in there if he tried. I think it was April Fools Day. We got back at him though. We pinned the ends of his pajamas feet. He liked caramels and always had a few on his bed stand. I can still remember the groan when I came in the bedroom (to be sure he had fallen into our trap), and shared caramel together.

Dad got a job in Chicago as a postman. He always enjoyed being outside and never minded the cold. He made me wear a hat that I just detested and managed to lose.

He was always the last one to pick us up at school, at least that’s what I remember. He would give us a few bucks to go the carnival downtown. It’s not there anymore. It had a tunnel of love that I thought was pretty racy; I must have been 8.

Dad would still drive to Peoria on the weekends to see Grandma and Grandpa, and would let me steer; we could sit on the back of the Karmanghia with the top down. Aunt Mary (in San Francisco) offered to help raise me and Dad decided to take her up on that offer. So Dad let me go to California, Greg went to stay with Uncle Dick in Denver and we had a few years away from each other.

Dad met a kind and beautiful woman, Elaine Schryer, through mutual friends and he was lucky enough to get her to marry him. They went to Mexico in the VW Beetle for their honeymoon.

Greg and I came home in the summer of 1968 to a ranch style house in Hillsdale, MI.

Dad liked to have a bowl of nuts handy. He loves green olives. He loves to play chess and thinks it makes you smarter; it keeps your mind sharp. After 27 years in the Army, 6 years in the post office, and 14 years at the Jackson prison as a guard, Dad retired. His friends from the bowling league and his co-workers from the Prison gave him a farewell party.

Dad would love to go downtown Hillsdale and talk to his other retired buddies at the coffee shop. He could have been the honorary mayor since he knew everyone. He liked to sit in the morning at coffee and watch the birds though the big bay window.

He liked to ride his bike and even after breaking his collarbone once, he got right back in the saddle. After years of being a snow bird and living with his brother during the winter in Phoenix in a double wide trailer park, he and Mom moved there to stay. It was a nice place, the only one in the area with a garage. They enjoyed family and Dad loved the weather where he could bike year round. He likes his Cadillac cars, too – no more Karmanghias and Beetles. He likes steak and don’t forget those olives. You can still see him in Ann Arbor where he will tell you “Ten Hut!”

John Millard Hess

b. 25 Aug 1916

Married: 27 November 1967

Elaine Shirley (Jackson) (Schryer) Hess

b. 3 May 1921

d. 4 Jan 2009

Jack is the man I always knew as Grandpa and he never shirked his grandfatherly responsibilities or treated the grandchildren of Elaine and Fran as less than his blood grandchildren – he knew all of us cousins from the day we were born. He is in his last years now, suffering from profound memory loss. I have extremely fond memories of him. He was particularly well-suited to grandfatherhood and retirement.

Grandma was working for the accounting firm Harris, Reams, and Ambrose when a cousin of Jack’s, Homer Bentley, arranged an introduction for the two of them. They began courting and married. The ceremony took place at the First Presbyterian Church in Hillsdale.

In 1996, Jack and Elaine moved to Phoenix, Arizona. Jack’s sister- and brother-in-law lived there and Elaine and Jack had been visiting during the winters for several years. After the relatively isolated town of Hillsdale, the city comforts of Phoenix – from shopping to dining to services – was welcome. Grandma was not always comfortable being so far from her family, however.

The couple enjoyed retirement together, taking many trips including cruises.

In the spring of 2005, after Grandma’s mild stroke and recovery, Grandma and Jack moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan to be closer to Diane. Jack was already suffering from memory loss.

The two boys that Elaine raised with Jack in Hillsdale both grew to be very successful men: Steve is an engineer and Greg is a pilot for American Airlines. See the following segments for more about them.

Attachments:

• Marriage certificate, Jack and Elaine Hess