Joseph Franklin Hickey, II – in Memory

Joe Hickey passed away from a heart attack on September 16^th, 1997.  He was vacationing at his home in Charlevoix, Michigan, with his wife Kitty.  

Susan and I, along with Hugh and Muffy McPheeters, spent ten days with Joe and Kitty weeks before his death at their cottage in Charlevoix.  His home overlooked pretty Lake Charlevoix. 

Even though we were friends since grade school, Joe always surprised me with the breadth of his knowledge.  His passion was computers.  Joe received his bachelor degree from Yale University and studied Cinematography at Boston University.  He then served in the United States Army for four years as an officer.  He began his career in 1069 with the Hickey Mitchell Company, a family business. He was a business executive and management consultant.  For many years he was active on the Board of the Forsyth School, which named a building after him in appreciation of his efforts on behalf of the school’s development.   

But of course Joe's obsession was film.  Name a film, any film, and he could tell you everyone in it, its director, cinematographer, and the history of how it was made.  So many hours at dinner were spent listening to the world's expert talking about some new film.  But his specialty was film noir.  Funny how we're not surprised at this, given Joe's sometime macabre sense of humor.  He would be describing some particularly grisly and ghastly scene from one of those black and white movies made after the war, and he would have a grin that looked for all the world like something out of Charles Addams.  We would be in tears with laughter. 

 Literature was Joe's third love (after Kitty, of course).  He never stopped reading, and during the last several years had written several crime novels.  They did not get published, but Harry Weber read one and said that it was amazingly good.  One morning in Joe's cottage we were having coffee after breakfast and I noticed he had a copy of Robert Fagel's new translation of The Odyssey.  It looked liked it had not been cracked yet, but I asked Joe whether Professor Fagel's translation lived up to all the critical acclaim.  Typical of Joe, he didn't answer directly, but picked up the volume, thumbed through it for half a minute to around page 600 and said "decide for yourself".  What I read was a two page description of Odysseus and his buddies sailing at morning into some absolutely gorgeous harbor described as if it were nothing other than the dawn of creation.

We miss him terribly.  Joe gave us a lot of laughs, and an insight into things that we would not otherwise have had.

Respectfully submitted, (I encourage other classmates to add on comments and memories)

Denny Wedemeyer, September 29, 2009