James Richard “Dick” Kelble

1920s

Born 8 March 1922 in the Grandview area of Columbus, Ohio, and christened at Holy Name Church. As a small boy he made frequent trips with his family to his Kelble grandparents in Xenia. In July 1927 the family moved to the Philadelphia area.

1930s

Grew up in Abington Township and Glenside, north of Philadelphia, one of eight children, and went to St. Luke's School.

1940s

Graduated from Northeast Catholic High School in June 1942 and apprenticed as a plumber while working for his father. Served in the Army from 1942 to 1945 as a tank driver with the 11th Armored Division; wounded in Belgium in January 1945 and awarded the Purple Heart. Married Mary Dolores Bedesem on 23 April 1949.

1950s–1980s

Lived at the Keswick Apartments in Glenside, then from 1955 in the prefabricated house on Charles Street that he and Dolores planned together, where they raised their five children. Worked as a construction plumber.

1990s–2010s

Still plumbing in 1991. Visited his daughter's family in Vermont and moved in later life to The Meadows at Shannondell in Audubon, Pennsylvania, where he died on 8 January 2012.

Columbus to Philadelphia

James Richard "Dick" Kelble was born on March 8, 1922, in the Grandview section of Columbus, Ohio, the fourth child of Francis Rowan Kelble and Margaret Mary AmRhein, and was christened at Holy Name Church. The family lived on Haines Avenue in Grandview, and the Xenia newspaper recorded their visits south to his Kelble grandparents again and again: at Easter, on Labor Day, at Christmas, often with his uncle John Kelble's family there as well. In late June 1927 Dick and his brothers spent a week at their grandparents' house, and when the whole family left Xenia on July 22, 1927, they were on their way to a new life in the Philadelphia area, where Dick would spend the rest of his life.

He grew up in Abington Township and then Glenside, north of the city, in a household that eventually held eight children: John, Bud, Paul, Dick, Margaret, Barbara, Mary, and Donald. He finished at St. Luke's School in 1938 and graduated on June 5, 1942, from Northeast Catholic High School for Boys, where he played sectional sports. That summer he went to work for his father at the Huffman-Wolfe Company in Philadelphia, spending six months as a plumber's apprentice cutting, bending, and threading pipe for factory heating and water systems.

War in Europe

Dick registered for the draft in June 1942 and was inducted that November. In December, a private in training with the 42nd Armored Regiment of the 11th Armored Division at Camp Polk, Louisiana, he sent a postcard to a Philadelphia girl named Dolores Bedesem. He was five foot seven, 135 pounds, with a ruddy complexion, and his record shows expert qualifications with the .50-caliber machine gun and the submachine gun.

His division shipped from New York to Liverpool in the fall of 1944 and landed at Cherbourg. It was thrown into the Battle of the Bulge near Bastogne, and Dick came under fire for the first time on December 30, 1944, when his tank hit a minefield that tore off a track and damaged three road wheels. On January 12, 1945, about three thousand yards from Longchamps, Belgium, artillery shell fragments tore into his left shoulder. He spent nearly two months in Army hospitals, while an officer sent his father regular reports on his recovery, and returned to duty on March 6. In April he was promoted to technician fourth grade, and he finished the war as a medium-tank driver with Company A of the 42nd Tank Battalion, his job, in the Army's words, to drive "to secure maximum fire effort without exposing to undue enemy fire."

He earned the Purple Heart, the Good Conduct Medal, the American Campaign Medal, the World War II Victory Medal, and the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with three bronze stars, for the Rhineland, Ardennes, and Central Europe campaigns. He sailed home in December 1945, landed at Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, on December 22, and was discharged at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, on December 30, with a final paycheck of $192.64.

A Plumber's Life and a House of His Own

After the war Dick attended the Lincoln Preparatory School and made his career as a plumber, much of it in construction. On April 23, 1949, he married Dolores Bedesem, the girl he had written to from Camp Polk, at Holy Angels Church in Philadelphia. They started out at the Keswick Apartments in Glenside and raised five children there and in the house that followed, among them Virginia (Ginny), who is Ben's mother.

That house was a family project. In early 1953 Dick and Dolores settled on a prefabricated Golden Key home and planned it down to the inch, lengthening the kitchen for an eating area, turning a closet into a doorway, and making a 1:48 scale layout of the living room with balsa-wood furniture to see what would fit. They moved the front door so the kitchen would miss the hot afternoon sun. Dick weighed plaster against cheaper drywall, thinking plaster would stand up better to children. His father was sure drywall wouldn't last, urged ceramic tile for the bathroom, and offered the heating and plumbing at cost from Huffman-Wolfe. By 1955 the family was living at 2183 Charles Street in Glenside, their home for more than thirty years. In 1987 Dick added a garage.

Plumbing had its lean times. In February 1962 he was out of work for lack of construction jobs, and in June 1972 he joined a union picket in Chester. He was still working as a construction plumber in 1991, at sixty-nine.

Family and Later Years

Family life centered on St. Luke's parish, where Dolores sang in the choir and the children went to school. In the summer of 1972 he and Dolores took the family to see the musical 1776 at the Valley Forge Music Fair. In 1988 he went back to a fiftieth reunion of his St. Luke's School class. In the 1990s he and Dolores made regular trips to Vermont for their grandson Ben's birthdays, and in 1994 the family gathered in Glenside to celebrate Dolores's seventieth birthday.

In later life they moved to The Meadows at Shannondell, a retirement community in Audubon, Pennsylvania. Dick died there on January 8, 2012, at eighty-nine, and was buried at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Cheltenham. Dolores died four months later.