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Note: Joseph Anthony Seiler was my father.
What can I say about this man? There are the obvious biographical notes:
Joseph was a child of the Great Depression, only eleven years of age when it began in 1929. He grew up in a dangerous, tough, blue-collar neighborhood known as Mohawk, in the 'Over-the-Rhine' section in old Cincinnati, and his options were limited in many ways. His family was poor. Early pictures show a dreamy sort of boy, one who played the violin and loved baseball, but lived in a tenement apartment. He attended Bloom Junior High School and Hughes High School in Clifton, from which he graduated in 1935. His relations during those years with his younger brother, Frank (born 1924), seem from all accounts to have been amiable. I have a number of photographs of those times and places.
His parents divorced, and both later remarried others. For a considerable time, his mother had to support her family by herself. There was no welfare system in place in those days, no Social Security, no safety net, and times must have been very hard indeed. Blanche's father, Frank Guetermann, was already deceased, so there was no help to be had from that quarter. And her step-father, Frank Hartwig, was in no position to lend much assistance. With a very limited education, she no doubt struggled to make ends meet. After Blanche married Fred Rottmueller in 1929, finances improved to some extent although she ran a candy-store to help earn a living for a period of time.
Joseph by all accounts was an average student who had high aspirations for himself. He certainly wanted to get out of Mohawk, to find a place where his chances for success might be better. He seems to have had ambitions. He was very proud of his musical abilities, which he pursued throughout life until an unfortunate accident damaged the fingers of his left hand in about 1952. I still have the violin shown in those early photographs. Apparently he was the target of some very rough neighborhood boys as a child, a situation which continued until he finally determined to learn to defend himself. He claimed that any number of his boyhood acquaintances ended up dead or in prison as a result of the course of their early lives. Eventually he seems to have earned a bit of a reputation himself, and finally could live without fear of attack from the neighborhood toughs. He loved baseball, and played it as long as he could. He was a pitcher. In later years he played slow-pitch softball in league play, first on local teams, then on teams he sponsored and, finally, in 1974, on one of mine. He was a very proficient hitter, lacking only the leg speed he'd once had. And even at age 56, he could throw an underhand, slow-pitch knuckleball which was almost unhittable.
I know that he had always desired an education, and saw it as a way out and, perhaps, up. He attended the University of Cincinnati for a short time, probably only a quarter. This was still the height of the Depression, and money was very tight for almost everyone. It seems he wanted to become an architect, but had a problem with mathematics which doomed that scenario. For awhile he worked in the UC Library. For another period of time he worked unloading freight cars for a very meager wage.
In about 1939 Joseph applied to both the Cincinnati Police Department and the Cincinnati Fire Department to take their employment exams. As he later said, he heard first from the Police Department, and so he pursued that career. In September of 1942 he enlisted in the United States Navy in the midst of the Second World War, spending much of his 38 months of active duty in Pensacola, Florida. He worked, after a time, and very successfully, in the area of Military Intelligence, a fact attested to by the many papers, commendations, and reports he brought home with him after the War. He claimed, at the end of his life, to have been a saboteur on three different occasions during the War, serving German submarines in the sub-pens in Argentina. He was recommended highly for a position as an officer in the post-War Navy, but chose to return to Cincinnati instead and resume his life. I still have those documents, which tell a compelling story.
Prior to the war he married for the first time, on February 25, 1941. Although he wrote beautiful poetry all his life, he never named his first wife in any of his writing. I once saw a 1940s-era photograph of this woman, whose name, he claimed, was Nita. Their actual wedding marriage license, however, gives her true name as Bertha Hoff, of 2946 West McMicken Avenue in Cincinnati. She was a striking woman. They shared a house off-base on Pensacola Beach during part of the war, a house which he later attempted to re-visit in his only return there, in 1970. The house was gone. So he wrote a poem about that, too.
After the war, his marriage was apparently gone, as well, although he dropped numerous hints over the years to indicate that he kept an eye out for news of his first wife as their lives progressed in other directions. In 1946 he met and began courting Helen Surenok, who became his second wife and my mother. They were married April 27, 1947, in a big wedding of which I have many, many photographs. Helen joined the Police Department, and the two of them were quite an item, female police officers being a very new concept in those days. They bought their first house, a solid brick two-family at 229 Kinsey Street in Mt. Auburn, for $5000 in 1947.
By this time Joseph had become a Sergeant, and he later earned promotion to Lieutenant. But in his aggressive and outspoken quest for success and advancement he made numerous powerful enemies, at least one of whom, Stanley Schrotel, later Cincinnati's long-time Chief of Police, was instrumental in bringing about his 1953 problems which led to his leaving the Police Department. It was a disgraceful spectacle played out in the newspapers at the time. To the end of his days he harbored a murderous rage against this man. To make the situation even more uncomfortable, Helen's career was in full flower, and she worked in close contact with Schrotel. In later years, old cops I met always made it a point to tell me that my father had been set up, as indeed he had, but it was all too late. It must have been humiliating for so proud a man to continue living the rest of his life in Cincinnati under those conditions.
Joseph seemed to go from one end of the spectrum to the other after that. He and a partner opened a bar, 'The Two-J's Club', in Northside, one of the roughest sections of Cincinnati. The place prospered. Eventually he sold his interest in this place and opened his own bar, a much larger and classier place he christened the 'Chez Joy'. It was in the basement of a building on Hamilton Avenue in Mt. Healthy, and was a success from the beginning. Hoping to make the most of his growing following, in 1961 he added another club, the 'Touchez Club', at the intersection of Colerain and Springdale Roads in what is now the Northgate area of suburban Hamilton County, Ohio. This place seated 360 patrons at the 90 tables we assembled, as well as considerably more at the long bar. It was a smashing success, and wealth beyond our family's wildest dreams began to flow in.
By then, my family had finally sold their old house in Mt. Auburn, and moved from our 'country home' at 6671 Blue Rock Road to a much nicer home in an affluent community called Groesbeck. My mother's health began to decline, beginning with a heart attack she suffered in 1961. Medical bills took their toll, as did time, and the family's finances began to suffer. Business in the bars began to drop off as other, newer places opened, and things became serious in a hurry.
Eventually Joseph sold the night clubs and began casting about for some sort of other work. In this, he had some difficulty owing to his age (about 47 at the time) and his lack of experience in any fields other than police work or night clubs. He landed a job which piqued his interest, selling hearing aids for a company whose store was in Richmond, Indiana, a good hour's drive from home under the best of conditions. After a time he began doing the same sort of work in downtown Cincinnati, in a major department store then known as Shillitoe's. He was a one-man hearing-aide department, and relished the task. The space was actually rented from the department store, but beyond that he did as he pleased. He set his own hours and policy. He remained at this post to the end of his working days.
This sort of work no doubt suited him very well. He answered to no one, and his time was his own. The work required ingenuity and imagination, both of which he possessed in large quantitites. His customers loved him. He enjoyed solving problems, and welcomed challenges. It was a perfect match for him, and when he retired in about 1985, he took his customer list with him. From this he still received the occasional all-cash transaction as well as a regular, profitable mail-order battery business. Retirement gave him day after day entirely to himself at home, plenty of time to engage in the reading of the arcane works he savored, and to write his various theses in elegantly reasoned, if difficult to follow, arguments which generally tended to confirm the opinions he was so anxious to share. He was an incredibly involved person, with an opinion on anything one might ask about. Even on some things they didn't ask about.
By this time Joseph was responding to a higher calling, as well. His life-long search for truth and meaning had often led him into other fields of interest. He was widely read in many subjects, and gravitated toward the metaphysical. His writings and teachings at the church he attended began to consume him, while at the same time leaving the rest of the family at a loss. He recorded many of the talks he gave, as well as his theories. I still have them, hours' worth of my father's voice. I think he planned for that. He was pulling away, pursuing his goal of finally understanding just how this world works, and how to make it better, but he didn't want to be forgotten. I think he saw himself as seeking to find the answers to the eternal questions. It's a noble ambition.
I don't know if anyone has ever read all the work he left behind him, but I have yet to get through all of it in the eleven years since his death. I have what must be the only library of my father's writings. He was a deep thinker. Maybe what he sought was recognition for his admittedly brilliant and convoluted original thinking. He had the sort of intellect that can conjure up its own worst-case scenario, then invent a reasoned approach to dealing with it, all the while laying it out on paper.
To him, knowledge was the great equalizer among men. Perhaps he still felt as though he might have been, perhaps should have been, a highly regarded career police officer. He could have handled any job they might have thrown at him, I believe. He possessed a focused intensity on whatever subject caught his fancy and saw all problems as needing a solution. Nothing was too small a detail for his notice.
No one knew quite how to deal with these changes, least of all my mother. Although he moved on in life and perhaps in understanding after her untimely death in 1974, he never got over the sense of loss and, I suspect, blame, he felt at her death. Much of the writing he did in his later years reflected his abject sorrow over his loss and the part he may have played in it. He never fully recovered, in my estimation. I do not approve of the way he did some of the things he did, but I was also never in his position. I don't suspect he ever required my approval of the things we all knew he was doing, but I believe he would have been thankful if I had understood. But he never asked. And I never understood.
Late in his life, in about 1982, his marriage to his third wife finally began to fall apart. In 1986 or1987 they were divorced, and Joseph found himself alone in the rambling old ranch house they'd bought together on Ebenezer Road, in the hills of western Hamilton County. I think that my sister Joann may have lived there a time or two with them, as well, prior to that point. He still had his favorite dog, a German Shepard named Wolf, and he envisioned a future of relaxation and independence. At one point he entertained the idea of buying the properties Yvonne's Uncle Walter Vilvens had left behind in Holiday, Florida at his death. In the end, he sold the house he had put so much time and money in, and bought himself a boat, his first ever. Joseph Seiler had decided to become a boat-owner, living with Wolf year-round in the 1972, 32' Gibson Houseboat he impulsively bought in the winter of 1987-88. 'The Promise' was the name of the boat, and I suspect his romantic side saw it as such. But before he was able to move onto the boat, and after he had sold the house, he found that he was seriously ill.
Joann and Yvonne and I got him into the hospital, then undertook to hire a moving company to empty his house while he remained there. In addition to his monstrous dog, we also had all his belongings, and a weary lifetime's worth of furniture, clothing, tools, books, bric-a-brac and mementoes was now residing in our basement. I began an emergency effort to complete and finish off our basement so that my father would have a place to stay when he got out of the hospital. But he worsened, and was sent to Hillenbrand Nursing Home in Cheviot, the same institution his mother had been sent to less than ten years before. Like her, he died there.
Early on the morning of February 15, 1988, my father died of cancer. Only the day before his death, we brought Kristen, then an exuberant 19-month-old, to visit him in the Nursing Home. He smiled what may have been his last smile when he saw her.
In summary, then, my father was a driven man, highly intelligent and widely read, who never quite seemed able to convey his excitement and wonder about the myriad things of interest to him to his listeners. He wrote and spoke broadly and well on any number of subjects right up until his final days. His lifelong interest in baseball and fishing were, perhaps, the only personal luxuries he permitted himself. He was an accomplished 'shade-tree mechanic', capable of repairing almost any and all things mechanical, as well as an energetic and capable handyman. He was a caring and attentive father even when, for various reasons, those affections were not returned. I believe he tried to make a difference in the world he lived in.
Dale Seiler
February, 1999
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