♂Frederic Roger Curtis

Frederic Roger Curtis (8 September 1928 – 22 February 2007) was a Chicago-born salesman who became vice president for sales of a Chicago candy maker. He married a New Jersey physician’s daughter, raised a family in Barrington, Illinois, and spent his last years in Florida. He was the grandfather of the compiler of this family history.

Early life

Frederic Roger Curtis was born in Chicago on 8 September 1928, the only child of Frederic Arthur Curtis (1903–1990) and Bernice Reinette Schulz (1905–1993); neither parent had another child who survived infancy. His father built a career at a Chicago bank, recorded in the 1940 census as an assistant cashier — at an employer whose name is tentatively read from the record as Continental Bank — and by 1950 as an assistant controller working a fifty-five-hour week. The family lived at 9517 Bell Avenue, in the Beverly neighborhood on Chicago’s far South Side, from at least 1935 into the mid-1940s. Roger registered for the draft on 10 September 1946, two days after his eighteenth birthday, giving his occupation as student; the card describes him as six feet tall and two hundred pounds, with blue eyes and blond hair. He signed the card “Frederic,” although its printed block letters read “Fredrick.” By 1950 he had left school and was working in Chicago as a salesman for a wholesale haberdashery, his first recorded occupation. In the newspaper notices of his engagement and in his wife’s obituary he appears as “F. Roger Curtis.”

Engagement and marriage

The engagement of Frederic Roger Curtis to Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) of South Orange, New Jersey, was announced in the South Orange-Maplewood News-Record on 20 December 1951, naming the groom as Pvt. F. Roger Curtis of the United States Army, and in the Chicago Tribune on 23 December 1951. The Tribune reported that he was “serving in the armed forces far eastern command” and that he had studied at Northwestern University, where his fiancée had graduated. By then his parents had moved from Bell Avenue to Chappel Avenue, on Chicago’s South Side, the address the Tribune gave again in its wedding notice of February 1953.

According to a family account from his daughter, he served with the Army at Thule, Greenland; at Pusan, Korea; and in the Philippines. Pusan and the Philippines both lay within the Far East Command^W. The order and dates of these postings are not known, and no enlistment, unit or separation record for his service has been found.

Frederic Roger Curtis and Nancy Jane Blanchard were married on 14 February 1953 at the Munn Avenue Presbyterian Church in East Orange, New Jersey; the Tribune printed the notice two days later, on 16 February. Nancy and Roger Curtis raised four children together and lived to welcome nine grandchildren.

Later life and death

The couple settled in the Chicago area. According to a family account from their daughter, the family lived in Park Forest, Illinois, where their first two children were born; in Prairie Village, Kansas, from 1956; in Dallas, Texas, from January 1962; and in Tower Lakes, part of Barrington, Illinois, at 411 Roslyn Place, from 1966 until 1993; the house was sold in September 1994. After his mother’s death in 1993 they moved into his parents’ house in Barrington, and in the summer of 2005 to Port Charlotte, Florida. This squares with the obituary heading “formerly of Barrington for 40 years” (1966 to 2005) and with “for one year” in Port Charlotte. He is listed at Barrington in a 1993 public-records index and in telephone and address directories between 1997 and 2002, and his parents were buried there. According to the same family account, he sold medical supplies for Becton, Dickinson and Company in the Park Forest years, and the company transferred him to Kansas City. City directories trace his working life from there. In 1959 and 1960 he was listed in Prairie Village as a zone manager for Investors Diversified Services, a mutual-fund company, working from its Kansas City office. By 1961 he was a salesman for the typewriter maker Smith-Corona Marchant in Kansas City, and the family’s move to Dallas in January 1962 kept him with the company: the Dallas directories list him as a Smith-Corona salesman in 1962 and 1963 and as its sales manager in 1964. A year after the move to Tower Lakes, his daughter recalls, a new job was to take the family to San Francisco, but the house did not sell and he was transferred back. She remembers him next selling computer time-sharing on mainframes, then working for a maker of sugar cookies, then for Bremner Biscuit and for Ovaltine. Business directories from 1983 to 1994 list him as vice president for sales of the Peerless Confection Company, a candy maker at 1250 West Schubert Avenue in Chicago; a 1995 directory no longer names him.

Nancy’s obituary describes her as of Port Charlotte, Florida, “for one year” when she died in September 2006, so the move to Florida came only in his last years. Frederic Roger Curtis died on 22 February 2007 in Sarasota, Florida, having most recently lived in Port Charlotte. According to a family account, his ashes were spread at Clam Lake, Wisconsin, as Nancy’s had been the year before. His mother, Bernice, had bought plots at Evergreen Cemetery in Barrington for the whole family, but as far as the family knows only his parents are buried there.

Notes

No obituary for him has been found. Some published indexes give Port Charlotte, Florida, as his place of death; a family account corrects this to a hospital in Sarasota, with Port Charlotte retained here as his last residence. His postings rest on a family account and on the engagement notices’ report of service with the Far East Command; no service record confirming them has been located. His daughter remembers his parents on Chappel Avenue before Bell Avenue, not after; no record places them there before 1935, and the 1928 street directory lists no household of theirs on Chappel Avenue.