Jerome Edwin Dwyer

Jerry to the family, and Grandpa Jed to his grandchildren. Born at Seattle on 25 June 1939, the younger child of Edwin and Winifred Dwyer, and in their household there in 1940 and 1950. He and Patricia Hatten were high-school sweethearts, both in the first graduating class of Blanchet High School, and they married in 1961: a long and happy marriage, which lasted until her death in 2009. Their children were Lynn, Eric and Jennifer.

He spent his working life in the family’s printing-machinery business, the Edwin C. Dwyer Company, which his father founded at Seattle in 1935. Jerome worked in it under his father and took it over soon after Edwin’s death in 1969 (family knowledge); his mother’s 2003 obituary calls her the company’s “retired owner,” so she may have kept a share in it. He passed it to his son Eric sometime after 2000. He died at Seattle on 27 April 2015, survived by his children Lynn (Mrs. John Ellingwood), Eric and Jennifer (record).

In the records the tree attaches (not checked here):

• 1940. Seattle, King, Washington; marital status: Single; relation: Son (record)
• 1950. Seattle, King, Washington; relation: Son; marital status: Never Married (record)

Family memories

As his grandson remembers him (October 2026).

He followed the stock market all his life. He began young, with penny stocks, and built up his portfolio over the years. Every morning he watched the news to follow the tickers as they ran across the screen, and in those days he telephoned his broker to talk over what to buy and sell.

He and Patricia, whom the family called Nana, were well loved in their parish of Christ the King in Seattle. They had a cabin at Lagoon Point on Whidbey Island, where the grandchildren spent many summers, and he kept a Yamaha motorcycle there. On sunny days in town he drove his green Corvette with the top down, playing Alabama’s greatest hits or Irish songs on the tape deck.

He was fond of everything Irish. Every St. Patrick’s Day he dressed in his best, with a tie bearing shamrocks or the Irish flag, and went to T.S. McHugh’s, an Irish pub in Seattle, carrying the Dwyer family shillelagh. It had come down to him from his father and his grandfather, and was said to have come from Ireland itself; his son Eric has it now. (If it did, it most likely came over with John Dwyer, Cornelius’s Irish-born father: Cornelius himself was born in New York.)

He and Pat had a dachshund, Barney, and the best part of his day was perhaps the long walk with Barney, with a cigarette and a chat with the neighbours or anyone else he met. He had a quick wit and a trickster’s way of starting a conversation with anyone. He would point up into a tree and tell a grandchild there was a leprechaun in it, and when they looked: “Oh, it was too fast, you missed it!” He had nicknames for his grandchildren: Jordan was JR, Ross was Red, Jayson was Curly and Lauren was Lulu.

Open questions

• How the company’s ownership passed after 1969 (his mother is its “retired owner” in 2003), and the year he handed it to Eric; Washington corporation records would say.
• Whether he served in the military (his obituary does not say).