Jesse “Joseph” Preston Bender’s WWII Draft Registration

After his youngest two children died in a house fire in November of 1942, Joseph (the name which he was going by at the time) sent his two youngest surviving sons Charles and Harold to a farm where they would be taken care of as payment for working on the farm. His son Jack remained with his mother Elizabeth Jenkins and his father.

According to Jack the couple argued a lot, and eventually divorced. It seems that by the time that Joseph gave information for the WWII draft in 1942 he and Elizabeth had possibly parted ways, but they also tended to move around a bit and it is unlikely that mail or news was reaching them as well as it could. “Jess Preston Bender” was still living in Wayne County, Michigan but listed his nearest relative as “Mr. L. Fast”. I know that Jesse was close with his maternal uncle Clemons “Clem” Fast, but had no uncles with “L” names.

I found a Mr. Lloyd Raymond Fast living in Grosse Point, Wayne, Michigan at the time of the draft. His place of business matched Jesse’s address for “Mr. L. Fast” even more interesting was that this Lloyd Raymond Fast gave his place of birth as Neptune, Ohio which is located in Jesse’s native Mercer County, OH very near Jesse’s birthplace of Dublin Twp.

Looking further into Lloyd, I found that he is the son of George Branaman Fast (1846-1920) and Martha Cecilia Nelson (1861-1954). George B. Fast was the younger brother of Jacob Ginter Fast (1840-1912), Jesse’s paternal grandfather.

The Continuing Story of Richard and Helen

Following accidentally stumbling upon the records of Helen Bender (aged 3), and Richard Bender (4) just after the 71st anniversary of the house fire that took their lives, I called their oldest and only surviving brother, Jack, at his home in Arkansas. I told him that I’d found the information on the fire and that it was reported in newspapers on the opposite side of the state.

Then I got to the big question I had for him this time, why was his mother absent at the time of the fire? Shocked, he asked where I gotten that from, and I told him that it was included in the newspapers. He explained to me what happened that day. Jack was around twelve years old at the time, he said that Helen and Richard were sleeping in a bedroom – part of a new addition being put on the house to better accommodate the family of seven. Jack, who was twelve that year was helping his father’s uncle Clemons Fast work on the addition while his mother Elizabeth looked on. My grandfather and his brother Harold were at the neighbor’s house.

The homes electric had been shut off while they were doing structural work, and a line was being ran from the neighbor’s to provide the Bender’s with electric. Fast had a pot of tar heating on the stove in the kitchen – just outside the door where little Richard and Helen were asleep. The tar, being unattended, got too hot and started the fire. By the time the family outside had noticed, the whole kitchen and bedroom were aflame. There was no way to save the children. They died on November 6th, 1942 and were laid to rest in nearby cemetery Cadillac Memorial Gardens West on November 9th, 1942.

Just when I thought the chapter on my father’s late aunt and uncle would soon be closed, a Find a Grave member named Nancy sent me an email telling me of how she scoured Cadillac Memorial Gardens – West for the graves of the brother and sister to no avail. She didn’t stop there though! She asked the office if they were in fact buried in the singles section – to which she was given a definite “yes” and two groundskeepers later came to help, sadly the search was in vain. I called the cemetery next day and was informed by an employee named Rich that the Bender children were never given headstones.

Finding Richard and Helen, 70 Years Later

Elizabeth Jenkins, my great grandmother on my dad’s paternal side, grew up with big dreams according to family stories. A devout Catholic, she wanted to be a nun. Instead, she became the mother of 5 children fathered by a man almost twenty years her senior, her mother and sister moved to California, and she lost two of her children in a tragic fire.

“Four year-old Richard Bender and his sister, Helen, 3, died in a fire in their Nankin township cottage last night while their mother was absent and their father was at work on a night shift.” – 7 November 1942, THE DAILY TELEGRAM, ADRIAN MI.

On the morning of November 7th 1942, The Daily Telegram of Adrian, Michigan contained a blurb of the incident above. Adrian is about 55 miles from Nankin Twp., a historic suburb of Detroit. I was even more surprised when I found that the same morning, the Ludington Daily News, 240 miles from Nankin had made mention of the tragic deaths of my young great aunt and uncle.

I had heard talk about the fire from my grandfather’s brother, Jack. But I couldn’t find anything on a fire in Chicago in the early 1940’s, turns out that was because Uncle Jack left out that the family moved from Chicago to Detroit between 1940 and 1942. I actually found the records of death because I neglected to enter the location into my search by accident. I haven’t yet found where these little ones were laid to rest, but that will come after I find the death certificates. What I may never know is why Elizabeth wasn’t home when it happened, or if the other three boys were home at the time.