♀Bessie Wheaton Curtis

Bessie Wheaton Curtis (17 July 1901 – 20 March 1980) was a Chicago-born businesswoman who spent sixty-one years in Fairfield, Connecticut, where her obituary names her as co-founder and former president of the Bonney Electric Co. She was the aunt of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her younger brother Frederic Arthur Curtis (1903–1990).

Early life

Bessie Wheaton Curtis was born in Chicago, Illinois, the elder of the two children of Hubert Orestes Curtis (1868–1922) and Emily Josephine Phipps (1868–1919). The 1910 census found the family of four in Chicago’s 32nd Ward, and her mother’s entry in it records two children born and both living - Bessie and her brother Frederic were the only children of the marriage.

Fairfield and the Bonney family

Her mother died in 1919, and that same year Bessie, aged eighteen, settled in Fairfield, Connecticut. On 4 September 1919 she married John Henry Bonney (1897–1952) there, a Fairfield native who had trained with the navy as an aviation machinist’s mate in 1918, without going overseas. The couple had five children, born between 1920 and 1928, and censuses place the household in Fairfield in every count from 1920 to 1950. When her father died in Chicago in 1922, his death notice named her as “Mrs. J. H. Bonney”.

Her obituary describes her as a co-founder and former president of the Bonney Electric Co. No record found so far gives the company’s founding date; the 1950 census, taken two years before her husband’s death, lists her occupation as sales clerk. Whether her husband’s navy training as a mechanic led to the electrical business is a plausible idea but not a proven one.

Later life

John Henry Bonney died in 1952, and she was a widow for twenty-eight years. She was a member of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Fairfield and of its Ladies Guild, of the Council of Catholic Women and of the Fairfield chapter of the AARP. She died at Bridgeport Hospital on 20 March 1980, aged 78, living at the time at 110 Judson Road, Fairfield, and was buried in St. Thomas Cemetery, Fairfield. Her obituary in the Connecticut Post named a son, four daughters, her brother Frederic in Barrington, Illinois, twenty-two grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.