Jon Nels Olson

 Jon Nels Olson

1958 - 2022

Jon Nels Olson, age 63, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin passed away on May 19th 2022 from complications of Myotonic Dystrophy (MD) following a fall from his bicycle on April 26th.

He was preceded in death by his parents, Nels and Mary Olson, and is survived by wife Julia (always Julie to Jon) Vosper, daughter Ahna, son Ezra, sisters Lydie Raschka (Chris), Siri Olson (Jonathan Strom), Kari Olson (Charles Tien), brother-in-law James Vosper (Mary), and nieces, Maya Raschka, Solveig Olson-Strom, Madeline Tien, Kaia Tien, Sarah Vosper, nephew Jacob Vosper (Brittney) and grandniece and nephew Eloise and Atticus. .



Jon was born on July 7, 1958 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He attended St. Olaf College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in mathematics. Jon and Julia met in college and they married in 1985.



Though he majored in mathematics, in college Jon also discovered a love of writing that led him to a rewarding, varied career as a journalist and author. He began as the editor of the Middleton Times-Tribune, then worked as a reporter and associate editor for The Business Journal, and produced the television show Business of Wisconsin. From 1991 to 1995 he worked as a business reporter for the Milwaukee Journal and then from 1995 to 2009 worked for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as a meticulous copy editor. Jon also wrote freelance feature articles for the Ann Arbor Observer, Discover magazine and other publications. For an article on the Mackinac Bridge, he conquered his fear of heights and rode the capsule elevator in one of the bridge's towers, and then climbed 40 feet up a narrow ladder to emerge through a hatch at the top overlooking the Straits of Mackinac. He also had publications in The Antioch Review, and wrote two novels, The Petoskey Stone and The Ride Home. Jon kept daily journals throughout his life and later wrote a blog, Just a Little Bit Cranky. Jon's best forum for expressing his wry sense of humor was his eagerly anticipated annual Christmas letter.



Jon had a passion for biking. After graduating from Pioneer High School, Jon and two friends rode bikes from Seattle to San Diego, over 1,300 miles. Subsequently Jon took many long-distance rides around the Midwest. His lifelong dream was to bike across the country. Despite having been diagnosed with MD, he trained hard, planned extensively, and decided, in 2019, to ride from Astoria, Oregon to Astoria, Queens, New York, raising funds for The Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). He got as far as Michigan when he was hit by a car and hospitalized, ending his trip. Remarkably, he was back up on his bike within a year. Jon remains one of the largest individual fundraisers for the MDA.



Jon was devoted to his writing group of which he was a member for over twenty years. From the words of one long time member: "I feel so privileged to have known [Jon] for so long and, in a way, so well – in the way that you know someone when you share your roughest rough drafts with them, when you trust them to tell you the truth and be critical and insightful and kind, which Jon was, unfailingly."



Toward the end of his life, Jon expressed deep contentment from simple pleasures such as daily writing, frequent bike rides, long walks, listening to podcasts, and watching the Brewers and the Bucks with his beloved Julie.



April 26th 2022 was Jon's last day outdoors; he was riding his bike.



A funeral service will be held on Saturday June 25th at Immanuel Presbyterian Church 1100 N. Astor Street, Milwaukee WI at 11:00AM and a livestream link for the service will be posted on the Heritage Funeral Homes tribute page. 

In lieu of flowers, donations in Jon's memory may be made to The Muscular Dystrophy AssociationBit.ly/Ride4MDA or to Immanuel Presbyterian Church https://www.immanuelwi.org/contributewhere Jon had been a member since 1988 and was ordained as a Deacon and Elde

MEMORIAL EVENTS

JUN

25

Funeral service

11:00a.m.

Immanuel Presbyterian Church

1100 N. Astor Street, Milwaukee, WI

Heritage Funeral Home – Milwaukee, WI

The final Just a Little Bit Cranky post

  This is Julie, Jon's wife.  I found this draft on Jon's computer.  Over the past few years, Jon had been exploring his family history in Detroit.  Recently, when he was in the hospital and suffering from hospital dementia, he often thought he was in a large car factory in Detroit, rather than in a hospital.  I took some comfort that he was mistaking all of the machinery attached to him for interesting automobile-building contraptions.  I am going to try to attach a link to Jon's obituary to this post as well.  

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/jon-olson-obituary?id=34925031

Olaf and Dorty

I think I may have posted this photo before. Can't get it out of my head. This is my grandfather, a farm boy from up north who came to the big city to seek his fortune, and my grandmother, in 1931, possibly on their wedding day in Detroit, or maybe in Richmond, Michigan, a little town a few miles north of Detroit. He was 29 and she was 23, and, if you can trust the dates, she was a couple months pregnant.

Family documents suggest they met at Ford Hospital, where he worked in the cafeteria and she was a nurse. Years later, Olaf became a line autoworker, which provided him financial stability for maybe the first time in his life. 

And here's another one, same day, maybe leaving on their honeymoon, with what I guess is her father's spiffy roadster: 

And here's Dorothy's father, Bion or "Bennie." Again, this could be the same day:

He has a puckish look, but he was forceful personality, a fan of grand opera and intolerant of incompetence or what he viewed as bad judgment, all of it backed up with an explosive temper. I don't think he went to college, but he got a law degree as a young man, attending night school and working days  in the massive rail yard in Cincinnati, repairing seats and railcar interiors. He met his wife, Charlotte, there, and they moved slowly north, with Bion practicing law half-heartedly in Kentucky and Ohio before finally arriving in Detroit, where, around 1912, the auto business was exploding.

Bion worked for Ford, including some time in the early years of the massive Rouge River plant, and as an outside contractor, an "auto trimmer," putting his railroad experience to work by inventing clips, sideboards and other interior items that allowed an autoworker to snap a seat or contour piece into place in a moment rather than having to resort to bolts and screws, a more expensive and time-consuming process. 

He collected dozens of patents, spent a lot of time in court defending them, and did very well for himself, accumulating two homes, a farm, a grain mill powered by a water wheel, a lake home, boats and beautiful cars for himself and Charlotte, including a Marmon (see below) built, not in Detroit, but in Indianapolis -- which maybe was a radical, even in-your-face choice, given his employer. 

Bion and Charlotte had three kids, and, inspite of all their success, the family suffered heartbreak and tragedy in the late 1930s that marked the generations that followed.

So I went to Detroit and stayed at an Airbnb for a few days, visiting the places where they lived and worked. Here's a few pix: 

*

Marmon, like most automakers, made many models of different sizes and features. This is one from 1929:  

                                       

Photo from Wikipedia under "Marmon Motor Car Company."

Here's the Rouge plant in 1927, then one of the largest factories in the world.   

Ford was powerful enough to re-route the River Rouge to allow factory access to its steady flow of ships, bringing in iron ore, wood and other supplies. As the company developed, Henry Ford strove to build an fully integrated operation, supplying everything he needed himself -- cutting trees for wood-paneling, mining the ore, forging the steel, harvesting natural rubber -- rather than relying on outside providers. Today, to a layman's eye, the Rouge plant has a crowded, chaotic look, with towers and smoke filling the sky like something out of "Blade Runner."                                                   

Photo from Wikipedia under "Ford River Rouge Complex."

This is the Rouge interior in 1944:

 I took a tour a few years ago, and the assembly area is all automated today, with the workforce reduced to just a few individuals here and there doing rote tasks.                                                                                               

Photo from Wikipedia under "Ford  River Rouge Complex."

This is the Piquette Avenue plant (now a museum), which Ford operated from 1904 to 1911, and where the Model T was first built. It has three stories, maple floors and lots of natural light, and seems "welcoming" in a way that many modern industrial plants do not. Cars were built here in stations or bays along the sides, before the development of the assembly line, and when finished they were wheeled out to a large elevator to the ground floor, where they were shipped out on trains. Henry Ford had a kind of "security room" here, where he and select personnel would meet to brainstorm, in private, new vehicles they weren't ready to announce. Ford himself is described as open to input in those sessions. 

Ford autos in this early era were in some ways assemblages of parts made by outside companies. For example, the Dodge brothers supplied Ford with drive trains for years, before they began to make their own cars. Visiting the Piquette plant, and reading other sources, one has the feeling that cooperation and curiosity made the early auto pioneers more congenial and less secretive than one might think.

The Piquette plant was later occupied by Olds Motor Works, later Oldsmobile. And, Fisher Body, which made car bodies, also had a large presence in the neighborhood, which today is littered with hulking plants, all of them empty.     

This 14-minute video tells the interesting history of the Piquette plant: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiwcmVlORWQ

Ford's major Detroit-area plants have been -- more or less in order -- Mack Avenue, Piquette, Highland Park (above, being demolished) and the Rouge. Their operations often overlapped. The shed where Henry Ford built his landmark "Quadricycle," in 1896, is now downtown Detroit, where the Michigan Building stands. The company's increasing need for space has driven it farther and farther from the city center with each succeeding plant. (And today, of course, it builds cars all over the world.) 

Henry Ford's Quadricycle, which had a two-cylinder, ethanol-powered motor.

Ford Motor Company image from https://corporate.ford.com/articles/history/henry-fords-greatest-innovation-the-quadricycle.html

Automotive pioneers, such as Ford, the Fisher brothers, Walter Briggs (a car-body maker), not to mention the founders and early investors in General Motors and Chrysler, accumulated astonishing wealth and lived very well. 

Ford and his wife Clara lived most of their lives at Fair Lane in Dearborn, a sprawling, 56-room stone mansion on a 350-acre site beautified with meadows, gardens and forests. (See pictures and maps at https://www.henryfordfairlane.org.)

Many other auto titans and other prominent citizens were residents of the Boston-Edison neighborhood. The Briggs and Fisher mansions are especially notable, and business people and famous cultural figures  -- Berry Gordy Jr. of Motown Records, for example -- also had expansive homes there.

 

 

Julia's mom

 

Obituary

Appleton - Betty Jane Hoffman Vosper, age 96, of Appleton, passed away on January 3, 2022, with her family present. She was born October 25, 1925, in Appleton to Paul and Clara (Kubitz) Hoffman and was a life-long Appleton resident, graduating from Appleton (West) High School in 1943 and Lawrence University in 1947 where she was a member of Alpha Delta Pi Sorority.

On September 26, 1951, Betty and James E. Vosper were married in the First Lutheran Church in Chicago, Illinois, a marriage that lasted 62 years until Jim's passing.

She will be sadly missed by son James (Mary), daughter Julia (Jon), grandchildren Jacob, Sarah, Ahna and Ezra, and great-grandchildren Eloise and Atticus.

She was preceded in death by her parents, her husband, and siblings Ruth, Roland, Gerald, and Carl. Also, she will be missed by her most persistent cribbage partner, Paul J. Hoffman.

Per her wishes, no services will be held.

Betty was a member of Appleton Memorial Presbyterian Church to which the family members request the dedication of any donations.

Posted online on January 05, 2022

Published in The Post Crescent