Jesse Ralph Hoffman, son of Henry and Catherine (Hochrein) Hoffman and grandson of the immigrant Henry Hoffman, graduated from West Commerce High School in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924. He was nineteen then. That September he enrolled in Wittenberg College in the southwestern Ohio city of Springfield. That Lutheran-based school is now Wittenberg University. When Dick notified Jesse's alumni association of his death, we learned that he had been in college later than we expected. It took a while to locate the right source of records, but eventually the school sent Dick his father's college records. One page was the high school transcript in the scrapbook page below.
There is another page listing the courses Jesse took each year in college. It has no record for the 1925-26 school year and the last session listed is the first semester of 1928-29. Although we always thought that he had graduated, it seems that he did not. He took three courses in Business Administration and had the best grades in one of them. The photos above are possibly from high school and later, after college. The later photo was taken in the upstairs of the house where he lived next door to his mother. The photographer was his brother-in-law, Albert Kaltenstein.
After college Jesse had a job as a bookkeeper where he was an office worker among a group of laborers at the C. O. Bartlett & Snow Co., a structural iron works. He told us that they called him the professor. He said it was in part because of the glasses he wore. It seemed to have both pleased and embarrassed him, but he did like to tell the story. Most of his working life was as a painting contractor, first with his step-father, Charles Klich, and later as head of his own business.
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