His story
Ralph “Don” Jessee (September 13, 1921 – April 3, 2016) was born in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. During the Great Depression his family moved to Kentucky. After two years at Lincoln Memorial University, he earned his engineering degree at the University of Kentucky. He was hired by Westinghouse and, after a stint in the army, returned to the Aviation Division at Lima, Ohio. He enjoyed designing control and protective devices and methods for aircraft electric power systems, and was granted 30 U.S. patents during his 49-year career. Meanwhile he took a wife and reared a family of four children. Late in life he moved to Louisiana to live with his daughter Catherine and her family. He enrolled in a life-writing class at Catherine’s insistence. Don wrote prodigiously for 10 years in spite of worsening macular degeneration, leaving a surprising legacy of stories, poems, and letters. They are archived here for your perusal and enjoyment.
From the collection
A soft breath of warm air under a crystal clear sky told of a late summer afternoon. It was indeed a mellow, lazy day with little activity in the neighborhood, and nearly suppertime. The roar and moan of lawn mowers had ceased for a time and traffic on the roa…
Going to Granny’s was always a special treat for my children so long as they could play outdoors. There were so many things they could get into. They all liked to play near or in the little creek. Bess lived just outside of Lima, Ohio on a 5-acre plot, bisecte…
Upon arriving home one evening I noticed a cardboard box on the floor, near the kitchen door. “What’s this?” I inquired of Mardelle, my second wife. I answered my own question by looking inside the box. It was a very small, black pup, no longer than four or fi…
The family arrived at a campground in Acadia National Park late in the afternoon. Rain was still falling, as it had all day. We carefully unloaded our tents from the Volkswagen minibus, erected them and set up the tent fly over the camp table. The rain slacked…
On occasions I have noticed things that I thought could be done a better way, perhaps improved with a slight change, maybe to simplify it. I never considered that advice, but maybe it was. In a previous writing I did give what I considered real advice, and I s…
Momma was getting me ready for a special day at school. My second grade class was to have an Easter party before class was dismissed for the day but class would be over at the regular time. Momma combed my hair, as if it would stay combed for more than a few m…
“He’s tall.” “Yeah, he is tall.” I looked around as best a nearly blind guy who’s still asleep could. I couldn’t see anyone fitting the tall description; just a couple of short women very close to me. Then I noticed that they had their arms about me, and in no…
A tiny bird about the size of one’s little finger spent the morning looking at flowers. He wasn’t admiring their beauty, or even their fragrance. He was most interested in the taste treat he could find hidden inside the bloom. He was perfectly designed for his…
The trip had been longer than we had expected. Sarwar and Catherine had done all the driving. I was just along for the ride to visit my other daughter Susanna and her husband, Dick. We had arrived the previous day and had rested overnight. Yet the little pain …
Assignment (as I understand it): Your alma mater has invited you to speak to them. What would you say? Answer: No, thank you. The following, however, is the essence of what I might tell them. Thank you for inviting me here to make a few remarks for the benefit…
My name is Dinah. Mercy, was I cold! I was chilled to the bone. I couldn’t stop shivering. It was so dark that I thought my eyes had sealed shut again. My brothers were on both sides of me. They were so quiet. After a long time I heard voices and then I saw li…
In talking with Bill Rosenberg, a draftsman at Westinghouse, I mentioned my long trips to see Mardelle and wished she could come to see me sometime. He told me of a certain lake nearby in Indiana, where he went occasionally. “My wife and I will be going there …
An item in the news a few days ago informed us that a bunch of people such a PETA, or some similar outfit, had demanded that a mayor of a small town change its name. As if it were any of their business, they went so far as to suggest a new name for the town. T…
I was an insider for about forty weeks but that was a long time ago, and I’d have to stretch my brain to find myself an insider since I was born. Wait, maybe I was an insider when I was a Boy Scout leader. A watermelon seed is an insider, I guess, but it must …
After six months on the Westinghouse student course in Pittsburgh, I made my way to Lima, Ohio for my next assignment. With help, I got settled into living quarters and reported for work. My assignment was simple, assisting an engineer in the design of relays …
Moments together
Voices preserved
When I was a boy, my family went away on occasions and left me in the care of my grand parents. At that time two aunts and two uncles lived at home with my grannies. I didn’t mind staying with them for a while. I had fun with my aunts and uncles. They all pamp…
The mile walk from school seemed a lot shorter than the mile walk to school early in the morning. There were things to see along the road that were not seen by morning light. Could it have been the rush to beat the final toll of school bell that made things in…
Upon leaving the highway it is a short drive following the creek up the hollow to Camp Campbell, the Boy Scout camp. It is a pretty drive through forest and clearings with the creek sometimes roaring, sometimes rippling over rocks, and sometimes running quietl…
Daddy had his dreams in the mid-1920’s of making the little house in Virginia a place of his own liking. He had a wife and two little kids to occupy the house. Before I was old enough to start school I noticed things such as grape vines and fruit trees he plan…
“Momma, I’m gonna take a little hike up the mountain if you don’t mind. OK?” “Are goin’ by yourself?” “Yes maam. I’m only goin’ where I’ve been before.” “All right, but be careful.” “I’ll be back by supper time.” I go straight up the mountainside. I wish there…
"We’re late, everybody's leaving,” she said as they parked in the Church parking lot. In fact the service had been a little short with an early benediction. "But we can’t be this late. I set the clock back an hour slower before we went to bed, not two hours." …
After more than seventy years of absence from her, it is hard to recall in any detail things about Momma and me that would make a story that anyone would be interested in reading. In the beginning Momma was the proud parent of an extremely handsome and well-be…
Granddaddy Wells set his first grandson on his knee and sang to him when he was but a little tyke, not yet in school. I was the little tyke. I have no recollection of what song he sang. He may have made it up on the spot. I remember hearing it said that Grandd…
We’d had an especially pleasant trip back home from Zion, Illinois where we’d spent a week for Dorothy’s monthly series of treatments for her cancer. After a week at the hospital it was a pleasure to go home. The four-hour trip was usually somewhat of an ordea…
Among my vast audience of readers I count you, Mary, as one whether or not you are. Although you left us half my life ago I still sometimes think of you with a warm heart. Now I wish you could have been with me at my last birthday party. Actually it was the on…
“Come on in,” was the response to my knock on the door of Ruth and Bob Taylor, my wife Mary’s sister and brother in law. “Haven’t seen you for a while. How’ve you been?” asked Mary. “Fairly well,” Ruth said, and the conversation continued on into the afternoon…
“Mom it looks like Dad is cutting down a tree in the back yard,” chimed the voice of one of Dad’s children. The speaker was peering out the window over the back yard of her home. The tree Dad was cutting down was a mulberry tree. Mulberry comes in two genders …
Isaac Welch Jessee was the last of thirteen children born to my grandparents, James Abel Jessee and Margaret Bailey. Thus, it will come as no surprise that I tell you that I had many cousins born in the mountains of Virginia. Most of them were a lot older than…
A soft breath of warm air under a crystal clear sky told of a late summer afternoon. It was indeed a mellow, lazy day with little activity in the neighborhood, and nearly suppertime. The roar and moan of lawn mowers had ceased for a time and traffic on the roa…
“Looks like a letter from Ike,” Billy said as he sat down and opened the letter. A bit of sawdust fell from the cuff of his pants. He was a carpenter and sometimes he brought a little of his work home with him. “Billy, you didn’t brush off very well before you…
The June night was clear with a bright starry sky above. We sat around a little campfire that was not for the heat but for the effect. We always thought a campout was incomplete without a fire to gaze into. It had been a daunting, sometimes frustrating task to…
I believe in freedom. Freedom is the right to be one’s self, to act in one’s own behalf without interference. Freedom provides wide latitude of action, but freedom is not free. It must respect the rights of all other people. Martin Luther said it well, “Love G…
Our esteemed leader admitted that she comes from a goofy family. Well, ‘goofy’ was not her word for it but it’s close enough it seems to me. At any rate I wondered if she thought that she expected her students to admit to being goofier than her family. It’s qu…
It was a giant magnet that sucked me in as though I were a tiny iron filing. It was a day late in August of my freshman year in high school. Boys were gathered at the school where I joined them. That giant magnet was football practice and I wanted to be one of…
I’ve written about my mother’s family to some extent, but my children may be interested in more, at least their names. Granddaddy was Francis Marion Wells. The name sounded to me like a woman’s name, but not so. Grandma was Octavia Watkins Cousins Wells, calle…
The people in Industrial Relations at Westinghouse gave me the usual policy blurb for new hires, no doubt as a reminder, for I had heard the blurb on my first trip here. They were very good in helping a young single guy to find a place to live. Getting off the…
It would be a century before anyone would make a call on his cellular telephone or play a video game. Nobody watched television, sent an E-mail message or used an I-pod. Nobody had to line up to be searched before boarding an airplane; there were no airplanes.…
Once upon a time in Baum Hollow (pronounced by the natives as “BUM Holler”), there lived a tiny lad, name of ”Bulldog”. Well, his momma and pappy didn’t name him “Bulldog” when first they laid eyes on him. No, that name came on him later… Bum Holler was not a …
My family moved from a country place in Virginia to a Kentucky town when I was in third grade. It was not Momma’s choice. She had been reared in the country and would always remain a country gal. She dreaded the challenge of raising kids in town. There they wo…
A summons came to report to the corner office. The corner office was that of the Division Manager at Westinghouse Aviation Division. In addition to Dan Yorksie, Engineering Manager, Don Baker, Mark Rosswurm and I were among the guests. The gathering turned out…
The summer term of 1943 at the University of Kentucky was almost over. It had been a tough term. Courses had been compressed so that course material had to be covered in half the normal time. My main course met at 7:00 am, for two hours daily. That was particu…
The mail had been delivered. I wondered what was here besides junk. Now and then some interesting junk would appear among the mass of stuff. I would like to know what part if it was worth looking at. Items with large, bold print on the cover were manageable an…
A person or more are traveling by automobile on Interstate 75 and in no particular hurry. Should they be in a hurry why didn’t they take to the air? Maybe it was just to avoid the hassle of boarding an airplane. There are many detours one can take between Miam…
Remembering Don
Ralph Donald Jessee, 94, joined our Lord and Savior on April 3, 2016. He was taken down by old age and cancer.
Ralph Donald was born to I.W. “Ike” and Ivo Jessee on September 13, 1921, in Appalachia, Virginia. His grandparents were subsistence farmers, his father was a clerk with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, and his mother was a schoolteacher. In the third grade his family moved with the Railroad to Pineville, Kentucky, where he played football with, and graduated from, Pineville High School. He attended Lincoln Memorial University, in Harrogate, Tennessee, for two years and then transferred to the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He graduated in 1943 with a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering.
Setting aside a job offer from the Manhattan Project because the recruiters wouldn’t tell him what he would be doing, he accepted a position from Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which took him to what later became the Aero Space Division in Lima, Ohio. However, he was soon drafted into the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Shortly after boot camp he had surgery on his thyroid, was honorably discharged, and returned to his job in Lima. Young Engineer Jessee thrived in his work environment. He enjoyed the camaraderie and the technical challenges and quickly became a top engineer in the critical work of building innovative and reliable electrical systems for the nation’s military aircraft.
Although he led innovation on a wide variety of projects, one core and persistent focus of his career was improving systems that used converters to make alternating electric current (AC) from direct current (DC) sources by switching the output terminal to the source in a unique way. His job was to develop elegant control schemes to prevent the degradation of the output quality. A tale he wrote after he retired describes the help he received from a master. After several days of trying to understand why a model of one of his elegant control scheme designs was not working as planned, he arrived home with the intention of relaxing and putting the problem out of mind. He sat back and listened to a sublime piano concerto by Mozart and was carried away. When he came back to earth, he found himself at work on the problem, but the tension was gone. He knew what caused the anomaly and modified the design.
During his career, Ralph Donald’s work garnered thirty patents. At least four times he received an award for submitting the most meritorious patent disclosure of the year. Along with colleagues he received the George Westinghouse Signature Award of Excellence. Of all the awards received, he regarded the Engineering Achievement Award the most significant. That award recognized the importance and ingenuity of his invention of a system still called the "Jessee Circuit"; that controls the operation of an electric power converter that converted direct current to alternating current for use in airplanes. In its basic form the converter output voltage was subject to distortion by load changes and by variations in switching devices. Ralph Donald’s task was to take into account these corrupting variations and eliminate their influence. The ”Jessee Circuit” did the job. He loved his work, and his very productive career with Westinghouse and its successor firms lasted fifty-three years.
A young local lass named Mary Elizabeth Werff, a clerk, caught the eye of Ralph Donald after he reported for work in Lima. He married her in 1947, initially found very modest housing (which they referred to as a shack), and soon started a family that quickly grew to four offspring: David Lawrence, Stephen Ross, Catherine Ann, and Susanna Marie. He provided well for, and guided well, his family, supporting their involvement in good schools, Market Street Presbyterian Church, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the wider family, adventurous annual camping vacations, and eventually the colleges of their choice. He and Mary formed a strong team of wonderful parents, he with stern advice and wise counsel and she with a good ear, good advice, and compassion. That loving partnership came to an untimely end when Mary died of cancer in 1973. Ralph Donald stayed actively and lovingly involved with his children and his grandchildren, but the support of Mary was sorely missed.
Finding that his college sweetheart, Mardelle Jones, had been divorced, he convinced her to consider marriage. They tied a knot that came untied ten years later. A few years later he found himself in an improbable match with Dorothy Phillips, at the time 60 years old, which turned into a delightful marriage. Dorothy, never having been married, was quick to adopt Ralph Donald’s brood and they in turn were happy to welcome her into the family. She became the de facto communications and reunions director for the family, a role that was much appreciated. Ralph Donald was heartbroken when he lost her to cancer in 2005.
His macular degeneration worsened and he found it very difficult to live on his own. His daughter Catherine and her husband Ghulam Sarwar invited him to live with them in Lafayette, Louisiana. He found new friends and found a writing teacher/encourager, Kim Graham, with the Life Writing Classes sponsored by the University of Louisiana and Lafayette General Hospital, who encouraged and guided the production of 200 stories based on experience in his life. The collection of these stories portrays in rich detail a rich life. They will be available on the web at RalphDonaldJessee.com.
Ralph Donald was preceded in death by his parents; his sister Margaret Givens; his brother James Marion Jessee; his wives Mary Elizabeth Jessee, Mardelle Jessee, and Dorothy Jessee; and his daughter Susanna Jessee Murbach. He is survived by his daughter Catherine Jessee Sarwar; his sons David Lawrence Jessee and Stephen Ross Jessee; his grandchildren Alica Jessee, Benjamin Jessee, Matthew Jessee, Beau Jessee, Shawn Sarwar, Rachel Setliff, Emily Duncan, Andre Jessee, Ursula Jessee; his grandchildren Aidan Jessee, Keegin Jessee, Logan Jessee, Ava Setliffe, Jane Setliffe, Isaac Duncan, and Adalyn Duncan; niece Jayna Strunk; and nephews Richard Givens and Mike Jessee.
A memorial service will be held at Grace Presbyterian Church in Lafayette on Saturday, April 23, 2016 at 2:00. In lieu of flowers, friends and family might consider a contribution in his name to one of the following organizations:
The ashes of Ralph Donald will be interred next his wife Dorothy at Memorial Gardens in Lima, Ohio at a later date.
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