G. Alfred Hess Jr. died Friday of pancreatic cancer, one day after his 68th birthday. The obituaries in both The Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune note that he was a scholar, activist, Methodist minister, educator and champion of Chicago's public schools.
Here is the Sun-Times:
Mr. Hess was a respected researcher and author, a school budget watchdog, an anthropologist and an ordained Methodist minister who marched for social justice with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
And here is the Tribune:
A social activist, devoted family man and skilled researcher, Mr. Hess directed the Chicago Panel on School Policy for 13 years and was one of the architects of the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988. Much of his research was used to champion the cause of the city's poorest children — students who, he showed, were not being properly served.
These reports provide a good picture of my namesake but they can't, of course, tell you everything. They don't mention, for instance, his big, infectious, toothy smile, or the way he would glow almost to bursting when he talked about his children. And neither mentions that he also taught his youngest nephew how to water ski and how to hold a tennis racket.
The last time I saw Uncle Fred was at his sister's memorial service in Vermont. We wound up, somehow, the bunch of us still in our good funeral clothes, hiking through the woods on a quest for the great-grandfather of maples, the ancient behemoth that yielded 16 taps at once.
I knew my uncle mainly through my mother's many stories of her baby brother, stories that were often and fondly told, and I realized that this was the first such story that I could tell her. She wasn't there to hear it, of course, but I think she would have loved the sight of that inappropriately dressed expedition heading north into the woods.
We never did find that tree.
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