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Light a Candle
Jack L. Fretz passed away in his home in Palm Coast, Florida on January 30, 2017, his wife of 48 years, Patricia Gail, at his side. He was 86.
Jack was born in Kokomo, Indiana on December 15, 1930 to Hillard Clark and Mary Ruth Fretz. He was the second of three children, an older brother Richard, and younger sister Barbara.
As a lad, he was a bit of a prankster, and always fun to be around, especially when he was belting out “Mississippi Mud” on the piano. As a young man, he embraced life with courage and commitment, putting himself through college by building a small business on campus and paying his way to his college degree. He graduated from DePauw University in 1952.
He was adventurous, independent, and loved to fly. On a shoestring budget, he earned his pilot’s license, and built and ran a successful business buying and selling small airplanes, delivering them from place to place across the country.
After college, Jack served in the United States Army during the Korean War, where he was stationed at Schofield Barracks in the Hawaiian Islands, a fortuitous assignment that would change his life forever. He fell in love with the beauty of the islands, where he set down roots, built successful businesses, and raised his children. He loved the sea and from their earliest years surfing and sailing, the ocean became an integral part of the family. Few days were not spent in her salty waters during those years. Love and appreciation for the sea was his gift to his children.
He enjoyed skiing in the mountains of Lake Tahoe, California and had a second home there for many years. Jack and Gail vacationed there frequently and for years after the children were all grown and moved away, the family would come together at the Lake for Christmas and go skiing together, just like old times.
In retirement, Jack returned to the mainland where he settled in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and Palm Coast, Florida. On the east coast, he lived by the sea and continued to sail his boats with his loving wife in Atlantic waters well into his 70’s, enjoying the quiet inlets and bays of the intra-coastal waterway.
Jack was a kind and caring father and grandfather who guided his children with love and pride. He was an inspiration for his children to succeed and to live with meaning, and he never missed an opportunity to beam with pride as he spoke about them.
Jack lived a long and happy, prosperous life with integrity and honor. He will be remembered by those who knew him for his easy smile and gentle nature, and for his fierce independence, strength, and courage.
Jack L. Fretz, father, husband, brother, uncle, grandfather, great-grandfather. We miss your kind words, sage advice, and loving embrace. You will always be with us in our hearts. Friends and family are welcome to explore this site to celebrate Jack and share remembrances of his life.
Jack had many wonderful stories to tell, and he sometimes wrote them down for us. What follows are some of those stories:
Dad: MEMORIES 2 - The Lake
Prologue
I was born in the second year of the great depression, 1930. By the time I was three or four, I was aware of people walking down the alley behind our house, knocking on back doors, asking for something to eat. I realized that my dad had a job, but I knew that somehow the possibility of him losing his job was always on his mind. I have no idea how I knew that, at such a young age, but I did. He moved in an aura of fear, and I sensed that. My brother, Dick, a year and a half older than me, was introverted, distracted, and oblivious to his surroundings, and my sister was too young to have any grasp of reality. Then, when I was four or five, my mother became very ill. She had a goiter in her neck, and it rapidly grew to the size of an orange. At that time, they were just learning how to operate and remove a goiter and not kill the patient, and so she had that operation, and she survived. And while she recovered, dad was our sole caregiver. Working, worrying about mom getting well, and taking care of three kids. Then, a year or so later, mom was struck down with scarlet fever, a disease that at the time was a serious and prolific killer. Suddenly, mom was in the house with another lady to take care of her, and there was a sign on our front door that said this house was quarantined, and no one could enter or leave. Only the doctor. Groceries were left at the door. And so, for over a month, dad and we kids lived with my Aunt Virgil in the country outside town, while we waited to see if mom lived or died.
Then, a year after we moved back home, Aunt Virgil’s son, my cousin, Wilmer, eight years old at the time, died of a burst appendix. And right after that, my Uncle Carl, my mom’s brother, died of the same thing.
I believe all of this had a profound effect on my dad, and I believe that he reasoned that, depression or not, he still had his job, we were all still together, and we desperately needed an escape valve. We were falling apart.
The Lake
My parent’s friends, Charlotte and Ray Aikmen, whom we called Aunt and Uncle, owned a cottage at Bass Lake, a small lake 60 miles north of Kokomo, on State Road 31. They and their two daughters spent the summers at the lake at their cottage. Next door to their cottage was an old frame cottage, where no one ever stayed, apparently. No heat, no running water, an ice box instead of a refrigerator. And an outhouse. But it did have a cook stove, and electric lights. Somehow, Uncle Ray found the owners, an old couple who lived in Chicago, and made a deal with them for us to stay in their cottage for a month, for $50. $50 for the month. Not a small amount of money at the time. And I think my dad borrowed it from Uncle Ray.
So dad borrowed a trailer from someone, just a cart, really, and we piled bikes, toys, clothes, everything, in that cart, hooked it to the back of our 1934 Chevy, and we headed to the lake. When we got there, we all unloaded the cart, ran around the cottage, raced to the lake’s edge, and marveled at our good fortune. And the next day dad headed back to Kokomo, and his job. And for the next thirty days I was in heaven on earth. It was a lazy, carefree, world of it’s own for me. And I believe that the beginning of my lifelong habit of rising early was spawned at Bass Lake. On the other side of the Aikman cottage was a man who lived in the house there, and took care of it. He was the caretaker. It was bigger than a cottage, and the man, the caretaker, had been wounded in World War I, did not like being around people, and was there all the time. Just him. And he and I became friends. He was handicapped, and seemed wary of everyone all the time. I do not remember his name. He taught me how to catch night crawlers, how to catch minnows and keep them alive overnight, and how to fish. And I transitioned into the little kid who got up at the crack of dawn every day, and sometimes before dawn, and, all alone, went out on the lake in the 8 foot aluminum rowboat he had, and fished in solitary bliss until everyone else was up. I loved fishing, being alone on the lake, just drifting. I caught crappies, blue gills, sunfish, and once in awhile a 10 or 12 inch bass, maybe a pound in weight. That was a big deal. And when I rowed back into shore, and everyone else was up, I became the provider, and we scaled, gutted, cleaned, cooked, and ate every fish I caught.
Bass Lake was really just a big pond, with a mud bottom, and we squished our toes in it, swam in it, laid around the edge of it, rowed the little aluminum boat on it, walked to the little village around the end of it, and loved every minute of every day. The ice man came twice a week, and a small van filled with donuts and bakery goods came once a week, driven by a school teacher earning extra money in the summer. When the thirty days was up, packing to go home was a very sad time. And we vowed to go back next year.
So, for the next four or five years, going to the lake in the summer for a month became the highlight of our lives. We scrimped and saved, all of us, after that first year, and we made absolutely sure we had the $50 by the time school was out for the summer. We kids would earn a nickel here and there, turn in coke bottles for a penny apiece, get a quarter from mom for cleaning the house, anything we could think of to do to help save up the $50. We never met the owners of the cottage, and when Pearl Harbor was attacked, that was the end of our tips to the lake.
Those summers at the lake are among my most precious memories.
