Jay Zeamer, Jr.

Photo of Zeamer in uniform

Jay Zeamer in dress uniform, 1940s
(Barbara Zeamer collection)

Jay Zeamer, Jr.

(July 25, 1918-March 22, 2007)

 

Jay Zeamer, Jr., was born July 25, 1918, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to Jay and Margery Zeamer. He was the descendant of old Cumberland County families through both his mother and father, with roots dating back to the pre-Revolutionary era. His mother came from a line of respected German farmers, the Hermans, who had come originally to the area in 1771; his grand-uncle on her side had been an eminent judge and politician in Carlisle. The Zeamers—who had only recently changed the spelling of their name from Ziemer—came in 1840. His paternal grandfather Jeremiah was a teacher, lawyer, and bank cashier until he bought the American Volunteer newspaper in Carlisle in 1878, which he edited for twenty-two years before moving on to historical writing.

Jay Zeamer Sr. was thirty-eight when Jay was born.  A 1901 graduate of Dickinson College, he had been a stenographer and clerk in Puerto Rico and then Mexico before moving on to Charles A. Schieren Company, a global leather exporter, where by the early 1930s he would rise to vice-president with patents in his name.  He then became a representative for Graton & Knight, a global leather belting company based in Worcester, Massachusetts.  The job would take him to countries around the world for long periods of time, leaving Jay’s mother Margery to raise their three children and Jay a stack of picture postcards of exotic ports-of-call.

Margery had Jay when she was thirty-six.  Also from Carlisle, she too attended Dickinson.  After she graduated there in 1913, she moved to Greenville, N.C., where she taught at East Carolina Teachers Training College for four years.  In 1917, she married Jay Sr. after meeting him on a train, and by 1918 they were both back in Carlisle, where Jay was born.  After the family moved to Orange, New Jersey, when Jay was two, putting Jay Sr. closer to his company’s headquarters near the Brooklyn Bridge, Margery began joining numerous groups and women’s organizations, including a film federation dedicated to creating educational films for adults and children and raising motion picture standards.  She would eventually serve as president and regent of several of these groups.

Photo of Zeamer as child

Jay Zeamer as a child, Orange, N.J.
(Barbara Zeamer collection)

At two, Jay was already displaying his curiosity and adventurousness, wandering away from home to see the town and getting lost, even climbing out the windows onto the porch roof.  A year later a brother was born, Richard Jeremiah, who went by both Dick and Jere (pronounced “Jerry.”)  In short order he had two sisters as well, Isabel and Anne.  By this time he was in grade school, and his engineering side had already begun to blossom.  He had learned to make many of his own toys, especially the mechanical ones.  Like so many boys, he had his own idea of what constituted a “pet”: He had a collection of pet white mice in the basement, until one day he found them gone.  Apparently someone didn’t share his fondness.  And like most children at that time he suffered through a bout of chickenpox, as well as scarlet fever, but otherwise was, and remained, in excellent physical health.

In 1925, the family—minus Jay’s father since he was usually traveling on business—began summering at Boothbay Harbor in Maine.  A friend of Jay’s mother owned a house there and had told her about it, so Margery decided to rent a house there herself.  Jay and his brother would sleep on the screened porch since it was so cool.

To eight-year-old Jay, it was a truly life-changing event. Boothbay was a new world.  The house was nestled in the trees at the top of a hill in the Mt. Pisgah section, down which Jay would ride his bike either to the rocky shore on one side, where he could follow an old Indian trail on Linegan Bay, or to the docks and fishing wharves on the other, where he would make the acquaintance of the longshoremen and fishermen.  They enjoyed the young boy with the tousled hair and sailor outfit, and in time were taking him with them on their fishing expeditions.  It was the beginning of his interest in navigation, and especially sailing.

In no time he was wanting his own boat.  He began collecting the scrap lumber from the shipyards around him and eventually built his own little flat-bottom rowboat.  It wasn’t much, but it let him explore the edges of Boothbay Harbor, and then venture into the harbor itself.  Before long he was crossing the harbor to the tall-masted schooners of the old Merchant Marine from the Great War.  Mother Zeamer wrote that Jay never tired of climbing onto them and up into the rigging to look out to sea.  Then one summer his seafaring, and he, nearly came to an end.  His Aunt Maud, sister of his father, came to visit, and upon arriving told his mother about the sad sight she’d seen, a small boy in his small boat, rowing as fast as he could to make shore before it sank.  Of course it was Jay, and while she was telling the story, he came home, soaking wet and missing his boat.  The next day his mother bought him a brand-new rowboat.

There was one dream, though, that his mother couldn’t help him with, and that was flying.  Back in Orange, his room came to be adorned with numerous model airplanes, “impressive,” writes his brother, “for their quality and complexity.”  It would be a dozen years before he could pursue flying the way he was able with sailing, but it never left his mind.

Photo of Boothbay Harbor

Boothbay Harbor, Maine, 2016. Mt. Pisgah, where Zeamer and his family summered in his youth, is to the left.
(Clint Hayes)

Also back home Zeamer pursued another keen interest: Boy Scouts.  As was becoming typical for him, once he determined what was required of him, he pursued each task in turn with extreme prejudice until it was perfected.  His drive and dedication to excel resulted in his becoming an Eagle Scout in November 1932 at age fourteen, and the youngest patrol leader that Troop 5 had had.  Since a fourteen-year-old leading juniors and seniors could ruffle too many high school egos, Zeamer was put in charge of the younger boys.  It didn’t keep Jay from training them, on weekend afternoons, the way he’d trained himself.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, his young charges not only matched their older cohorts in competition, but often beat them.

His summers in Boothbay showed his increasing confidence.  He had graduated from rowboats to sailboats, and his excursions grew longer and bolder.  In one instance, he and two companions sailed beyond the last lookout station only to find themselves becalmed. Day turned to night as they used their single oar to row home; search parties were even sent out.  Eventually around midnight they made shore at home.  Still another time Jay and some friends had the boat flipped over in a squall and had to be rescued.  Fortunately nothing was hurt but their pride.

It was a remarkably storied life for a boy who had only just left junior high, spending his freshman year at Orange High School.  He spent only a year there, however, before unceremoniously being enrolled by his father in Culver Military Academy in Culver, Illinois.  According to Zeamer’s wife Barbara, the elder Jay, perhaps feeling his son’s lackluster grades were a result of too many extracurricular activities, told his son on a Friday that he would begin at the academy the following Monday. And so it was that Jay Zeamer found himself at fourteen traveling alone by train to Indiana, to a turning point in his life...

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