User:Paulimhof/Stephan P Wickert

Stephan P. Wickert, born 1911 in Giessen (Germany), was the sixth of the fourteen children of the organist and parish hall director Anton Wickert and Maria Caecilia (née Klein). Hoping that Stephan would become a priest, his parents sent him to the local classical high school; but when he showed early promise as an artist, they allowed him to enroll at the Technical University in Munich to study art and art education. While a student there, Stephan was a frequent house-guest with the family of Max Kellner, a pioneer industrialist in nearby Augsburg. There he met and fell in love with Thilde, the oldest Kellner daughter, then training as a lyric soprano. They married in 1937. After taking his university degree, he held brief teaching positions in Westphalia and on the North Sea. In 1939, he was engaged as a drafting instructor by the Messerschmitt Airplane Works in Augsburg. His first four children were born between 1938 and 1942.

Toward the end of World War II, he was drafted and served as forward observer for the German artillery in Italy. His unit, however, retreated soon after his arrival and surrendered to the American forces upon re-crossing the Alps. After his release from an American POW camp, Stephan rejoined his family, who had meanwhile been evacuated to the country when their Augsburg home was destroyed in a bombing raid. His fifth and last child was born in the following year. Soon after, he was hired as an art instructor in Augsburg's Realgymnasium (later renamed Peutinger Gymnasium) where he became a beloved and respected member of the faculty. All along, he worked privately and occasionally exhibited as a painter, sculptor, illustrator and caricaturist.

In 1952, he emigrated to the USA with his family. (He became a naturalized citizen in 1957). At first he worked at unskilled jobs, supplemented by occasional commissions in commercial art from Rochester's Rumrill and Co. and by a short stint as an adjunct instructor in technical drawing at RIT. Eventually, he was hired as a draftsman by Graflex, Inc., and soon rose to the position of industrial designer. He became well known to Graflex employees for his many amusing posters advertising annual company picnics, clam bakes and Christmas parties. He retired in 1976. During the next decade, aside from occasional consulting work, he devoted himself to exhaustive research in family history and eventually produced a series of astonishingly detailed, hand-calligraphed and hand-illustrated, wall-sized family trees. When his beloved wife Thilde was struck by Alzheimer's disease, he, with heart-rending devotion, patience and endurance, cared for her at home, almost single-handedly, for four years until her death in 1989.

In addition to his professional talents as an artist, Stephan was a passionate lover of music throughout his life. He played four instruments (piano, violin, viola and cello), regularly met with friends to perform chamber music, and was a longtime member of both the Brighton and the Greece Symphony Orchestras, as well as (more briefly) the Brockport Symphony. His contributions to the Catholic parishes where he worshipped--Blessed Sacrament, Saint Thomas More and St. Anne--were frequent and memorable. Over the years, he also issued a series of over a dozen self-published books as gifts to family and friends, anthologizing more than a thousand German and other European folk songs in his own piano arrangements, with his own English verse translations, and accompanied by his own illustrations. At his death he was at work on a new volume, consisting of American folk songs.

He was a gentle, broad-minded, hard-working, multi-talented, disciplined, intellectually curious, cheerful, thoughtful, charming, and utterly unselfish man, beloved by all whose lives he touched.

The above obituary was written by Stephan's son, Max Wickert