|
a.
|
Note: Joe graduated in architecture at the U. of Michigan after paying his own way over ten years. It took hard work and sacrifice with little time for favorite interest in amateur acting and singing, such as the HS senior play as Koko in the Mikado. He traveled with the Michigan U. Glee Club and was a soloist in one record album. His stubbornness was not always an asset in business. In trying to sell clients away from Spanish Colonial style, they sometimes vanished. Though a lifelong atheist, he designed several churches that duly pointed to the heavens.
We lived next door to our grandparents in Deming, Hamilton, IN at his birth. Dad had given up the romance of a road surveyor's life to become a topographer at state offices in Indianapolis and settled in Plainfield after a year's commute from Carmel. As a sibling, Joe often tested my alpha/eldest assumptions. Truth sometimes escaped him, as at age four when a neighbor reported his tricycle in their driveway, he said a dog came along and sniffed it there, and demonstrated. He was divorced from the first wife in 1976.
He was a heavy smoker and loved whole milk. After deteriorating, smoking-related health issues, he succombed while wearing an implanted heart stimulator after his 2nd wife had taken their two young daughters to the park. An autopsy as required in that situation was never performed and he was cremated as wished. A will was not found. He left a confident, aspiring son by his first marriage to a talented fellow student at Michigan, and two charming daughters by his second wife.
.
|
