Doc Searls Weblog

Today is the 100th birthday of Gail Jesswein, my father-in-law.

Gail was the father of eight, the first of whom was my wife. Gail was a merchant mariner during World War II, when the casualty rate was one in twenty-six, higher than any U.S. military branch. On shore after the end of the war, he met Bernadette, an attractive young woman on vacation from Chicago, on the Santa Monica pier. Gail and Bernie married shortly thereafter and raised their family in Los Angeles, where all their kids attended local Catholic schools and churches, while Gail ran a thriving electrical contracting business.

After Bernie passed of cancer (at just 46), Gail married Marilyn, a teacher and former nun from Grand Mound, Iowa. After the kids were all grown, Gail and Marilyn moved first to San Francisco and later to Sacramento, while he worked as a California state official under the administrations of Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian. On the recreational side, Gail was, among other things, a commodore of the Delta Yacht Club, located on an island in California’s Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, where the family enjoyed many summers camping and water skiing.

The first Jesswein families in the U.S. (as I understand it, anyway) were those raised by two brothers who emigrated to Kentucky from Kiev, where both were court translators, in the 1800s.* A generation or few later, Gail and his brother Donald grew up on a farm in the crossroads town of Lydick, Indiana, just west of South Bend. His favorite song was A Boy Named Sue. You can understand why. Not that it seemed to bother him. Far as I could tell, not much did. He was tough, but not in a mean way. He was of a type John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or Robert Mitchum might play: a man of few words and strong character.

And he loved a good laugh. We all got plenty at Gail’s 90th birthday party at our house in Santa Barbara, where various members of his large extended family made a theater production, acting out episodes from his long life. Though he was fighting late-stage cancer at the time, he enjoyed every second of it.

Gail passed later that year. A few years after that, my wife and I took gigs at Indiana University in Bloomington. We are sure Gail would be amused to learn that his firstborn is now a second-generation Hoosier, and enjoying life in the home state he was so eager to leave that he headed straight for an ocean.

I’m hoping other family members can give me corrections and expansions of what I’ve written here so far. (Being a blog, I can do that.)

What matters is that Gail Jesswein was a good man (with enviable hair!). It was a great privilege to know him, and I wish he were here to help us celebrate.

*I got the brothers-from-Kiev story from a file folder that Dorothy shared with me a few years before she passed, and which is now in Marilyn’s possession. I know some number of Jessweins are buried in the Ottenheim Lutheran Cemetery (beside the modest little Immanuel Lutheran Church) in Lincoln County, in the center of Kentucky.