NameFrancis “Steve” Lewis Stephenson Jr.
Birth22 Mar 1891, Pittsburgh, PA
Death24 Jul 1953, Bethlehem, PA
FatherFrancis Lewis Stephenson (1847-1909)
MotherClara Anderson Friend (1858-1900)
Misc. Notes
Bio from LDS
Francis Lewis Stephenson, the grandson of an immigrant Irish family and son of a self-made Pittsburgh banker had been orphaned at 15 years old. While pursuing a graduate degree in Bethlehem Pa. at Lehigh University following a Yale University technical degree, F.L. met a bewitching debutante named Helen Thomas Wilbur. She had attended boarding school at the famous Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. Her mother had been Katherine Victoria Thomas, the descendant of an iron manufacturing family dynasty in Pennsylvania. Helen Thomas Wilbur’s father had been the son of a railroad magnate in the Lehigh valley. They met at a Lehigh related party in Bethlehem (home of Lehigh U and of the Stephenson family) and began dating.
"Steve" as Helen Thomas quickly nicknamed him was introduced to a world he had never known. The Wilbur families traveled by private railcar or chauffeured car whenever they went anywhere, and had private cooks, maids and drivers. All the Wilburs and Thomases were involved with various businesses all over the eastern seaboard. All the events and gatherings were formal and always included chaperones for the young ladies. Francis (Steve) must have enjoyed the very large extended Wilbur families all of whom were in the area and all were involved in high society. It must have seemed as if everyone he met at the parties was a relative of Miss Wilbur. It was quite a marked difference from his family which consisted of only his one brother. He loved it.
Helen Thomas Wilbur and Francis Lewis Stephenson Jr. were believed to have been married in June of 1916 although a thorough search of that time period in the local paper had no mention of it. Francis was 25 and Helen (Hennie) was 22. Steve had a very good friend he had met at Yale whose family offered him a job after his graduation from Lehigh. His name was Don Markle. Don's family had donated money for the Lafayette College Administration Building known as Markle Hall. Steve began to work at the Markle mines in Scranton where the couple moved after the wedding.
Steve and Helen enjoyed traveling and taking vacations at the St. Lawrence River where they would go on shore parties and golf and fish. They also enjoyed bridge, canasta, target shooting, sledding, and badminton. Hennie would always beat Steve at skeet shooting and golf to her great delight. Hennie’s mother had been excellent as well in both sports. Hennie won her first of five golf championships at the Saucon Valley Country Club in 1924 (she was 30) and her last in 1946 (she was 52). The first and last title spanned 22 years and the time between titles still holds the club record. Steve was a cheerful, amusing, life of the party type who adored Hennie. Hennie was a quiet sort who did not like parties and soon became an avid Christian Science devotee who abstained from all alcohol products. While it was not uncommon for women to avoid alcohol during this period, the religious conversion was surprising to Steve whose sales related jobs required a great deal of wining and dining at all hours of the night. While Hennie understood this, she did not like it. Hennie’s conversion to Christian Science is thought to have been influenced by a poor appendix operation when she was younger that left her with painful internal lesions for which there was no effective medication.
It was on March 16, 1917 that Katherine Wilbur Stephenson was born in Bethlehem. Steve was devoted to his little girl and never tired of playing with her.
The coal mining boom began to diminish due to the popularity and availability of oil and gasoline products. F.L quit his job with Markle and moved to Center Street in Bethlehem and worked for the Hutchinson Company. The owner of the Company was an old friend of the Wilbur family.
After a few years, F.L. resigned and became a sales manager for the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. It was while the family lived in the Center Street house that Helen Thomas Stephenson was born in March 1921. Helen (nicknamed “Rosie” for her rosy cheeks) was named after her mother while her big sister had been named after her grandmother, Katherine Victoria Thomas (Wilbur). She was called “Polly.”
In around 1927, Steve and Hennie transferred to Ambler Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia) to a new sales district with Bethlehem Steel. Their house was called “Little Linden Farm.” Polly went to Springside School (a private school) from the 4th to the 9th grade and Rosie went to Shady Hill (also a private elementary school) which was located in near-by Chestnut Hill. The late Grace Kelly (the Princess of Monaco) also attended at a later date. Both girls were chauffeured each day to school and back all the way through high school. Both Polly and Rosie went to dancing class at the Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill and “white glove dances” at the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia. Polly “came out” as a debutante at a hunting club in Philadelphia. Polly went to Chatham Hall in southern Virginia from 1932 to 1935. Rosie also went to Chatham from 1935 to 1938 although the sisters were never there at the same time. Each June, Hennie and the girls took the railroad to Redwood, NY, and then transferred to a motor coach for the trip to Alexandria Bay where they were yachted over to Sport Island on the St. Lawrence River. They would stay the entire summer fishing, boating, sailing and adventuring with their local pals including their cousin, Dick MacSherry, who lived with his mother across the bridge on Little Lehigh Island. There was very little supervision of the children by the parents and they all adored the man who took care of the boats and took them fishing-Alfred Root. Father Steve would join the family each summer for however many weeks of vacation he had. Later when the Wilbur family had much of its money embezzled, Hennie and Tessie continued to take the kids to the Island but traveled by car spending one night at a motel on the way. When Steve and Hennie would travel during the winter and fall, Polly and Rosie would stay with grandmother “Kit” Wilbur at her house in Bethlehem and later at the Hotel Bethlehem where E.P. and Kit lived after the money was gone. The girls would sneak around the hotel balconies and private areas getting into a great deal of mischief. The Stephensons lived in Ambler for 10 years until Polly was 20 and Rosie was 16. Rosie loved to ride and jump horses at a near-by stable. Her interest further increased when she got to Chatham Hall which is in the middle of horse country in Virginia not far from Duke University. The school had their own horses. Polly never developed the same interest.
In 1937 the family moved back to Bethlehem and moved into a house on Prospect Avenue for about five years. Steve had been named the Sales Manager of Structural Shapes and was doing very well financially. A good friend from the Steel Company named Mr. Buck, volunteered to finance the purchase and renovation of a beautiful old farm house on Landis Mill Road if Hennie would personally supervise (and design) the renovation and then move in and pay him rent. The house had chickens living on the first floor and was a mess. The deal was agreed to and the family moved in after the renovation was complete. There was a small lake on the property, a stream, and an old mill race which turned a paddle wheel. The third floor of the house always housed a live-in cook. This arrangement lasted until Steve’s death in 1953.
After graduation from Chatham, Polly wanted to attend College at nearby University of Pennsylvania but her parents did not think college was a good idea for young ladies. Hennie had gone to Miss Porter’s School (a finishing school in Farmington Connecticut) for 3 years and her sister Tessie had gone to Westover but they were high school equivalents and neither had gone to College. College was not considered appropriate for young ladies at the time and Hennie must have thought that it was not necessary for Polly. It was four years later that Rosie graduated and badgered her parents into letting her attend college. She had on her own initiative taken all College Preparatory courses at Chatham and had the school on her side. Prep courses were not the norm of the day nor did her college prep curriculum have the blessing of her parents. Rosie was accepted at Vassar and was allowed to attend from 1938 to 1942 when she graduated. It is alleged she played a mean game of field hockey.
When the family moved back to Bethlehem, Polly was heavily into the Bethlehem social scene for the next 4 years. It was at a party that she met and began to date a dashing young Lehigh student named Robert Henry Duenner II. It was not long before they were married and Steve Randolph Duenner was born on February 5, 1939. He would be the first of the eventual seven grandchildren (The infamous Gang of Seven). Bob Duenner, Polly and baby Steve moved into an apartment on Saucon Valley road (now Rte 309) in Bethlehem. Big Steve (F.L) helped Bob get a job in the sales department at Bethlehem Steel. The Duenners later transferred to Pittsburgh with Bethlehem Steel and then to Tulsa, Oklahoma where Katherine Wilbur, Jane Lyon and Robert Henry III were born in 1948, 1952, and 1958 respectively. Polly loved singing to her children and enjoyed motherhood.
Rosie had a good friend and roommate from Vassar named Jo Large who was from Atlanta. Jo (future mother of “the peanut”-Strobe Talbott) was dating Henry Colton from Yale. One day in her senior year after she came back to her room with her leg in a cast (a result of a soccer game collision), she was introduced to Henry who asked if she knew Jack Magee who was also from the Lehigh Valley (Easton). Henry and Jack Magee were members of the same Yale fraternity. Rosie replied she had met him once. The next time Henry came to Vassar, he brought Jack Magee with him and introduced them. Both had been to dances sponsored by the Northhampton, Allentown, and Saucon Country Clubs and had met once at a dance (Magee would later claim she snubbed him). Polly had also remembered running into him when Magee and his Easton buddies used to play ice hockey, football, and baseball at various places all over the Lehigh Valley.
Jack Magee invited Rosie to Yale for a big weekend in 1941. When she and Jo taxied to New Haven, Henry Colton and a man named Charlie Stetson met the cab. When Rosie asked where Jack Magee was, Charlie responded that Jack had asked him to escort her to the football game. Thinking this was odd, Rosie finally dug out of Charlie that Jack was a football player and had been the starting tackle for three years. Of course Jack (Pop) later explained that “she didn’t have a need to know” that information at the time and that sending someone to take her to the game was sufficient communication. They later met up at the fraternity party after the game. After complaining to Jo that Magee was not a very good conversationalist and he was very quiet and shy, Jo advised her not to give up on him because he was a very good guy.
As it turned out Jack Fackenthal Magee’s great uncle had been the President of the Thomas Iron Company. The Thomas family had been having trouble with the financial and expansion requirements of the Company. There had never been a president who had not been a Thomas. While the Thomases were excellent at making iron, they were not good at running the Company’s finances. They were smart enough to realize their weaknesses however and the Board hired a German named Benjamin Franklin Fackenthal (our great great uncle) as President much to the horror of almost all the Thomas families. Most resented a non-family and non-Welshman let alone a German as the leader of their Company. Nonetheless, B.F. Fackenthal did a great job and restored record profits to the Thomas Iron Company. He later was the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Franklin and Marshall and received several honorary degrees from Lafayette College. Rosie’s grandmother, Kit Thomas (Wilbur) remembered the Fackenthal name but gave her blessing nonetheless to her granddaughter’s new beau.
In December 1941, the U.S. was attacked at Pearl Harbor and the world changed. Jack immediately enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Graduation was accelerated to allow the seniors to enter the service as soon as possible. He went into officer’s training school and graduated as an Ensign. When he was assigned to submarine school (to learn how to sink them not run them) he proposed marriage to the young Helen Thomas Stephenson with the proviso that she not tell anyone including her parents. The plan was to marry in Key West Florida where he was in Submarine School with no witnesses. In what was later described as the “First Act of Betrayal”, Rosie squealed to her parents who quickly told the Magees and both sets of parents traveled to Key West to witness the ceremony. The couple moved several times on Navy bases while his Destroyer was being built. The longest stay was on Tradd Street in Charleston S.C. near the naval base. After Jack shipped off to the Pacific theater (he used to joke) for the “happiest years of his married life”, Rosie lived in Philadelphia with her friend Doffy (Dorothy Greenwood Delano) and worked for the Red Cross which was heavily involved in the war effort. They would assist families with the military paper work, money problems, various emotional issues as well as injuries and deaths, etc.
After the war, Jack got a job in Ansonia, CT with Farrell Birmingham (made rubber manufacturing machines) and lived in an apartment near Ansonia. Rosie was living with her parents at Landis Mill Road until they could buy a suitable place in Connecticut. It was then that Rosie had her first child, John Thomas in Bethlehem. The new Magee family then moved into a house in West Haven in 1946 and had two more handsome, wonderful boys, Robert Fackenthal and Douglas Stephenson in 1948 and 1950 respectively.
One day in July 1953, a call came into the Saucon Valley Country Club from the Bethlehem Steel Company for Helen Stephenson. Hennie was playing golf (of course) and an alert operator called her sister “Tess” with the horrible news that Steve (called Dub Dub by his grandchildren) had died in his sleep (heart failure) in a hotel room in Asheville, North Carolina where he was attending a sales meeting. Tessie told the Club not to mention anything to her and to let her drive home. When Hennie arrived, Tessie was waiting at the Landis Mill Road house for her. At Hennie’s request, Tessie made the difficult calls to Polly and Rosie. Pop Magee immediately took vacation (a very rare event) and took the three Magee kids (ages 3,5,7) to Bay Head so Rosie did not have to cope with the normally angelic three boys. As was family tradition, there were no children at the funeral. F.L. Stephenson was buried in the Wilbur crypt in the Nisky Hill Cemetery in Bethlehem.
The beautiful farm property was sold to the Bethlehem Steel Company and Hennie and sister Tessie, who moved in shortly after Steve’s death, remained in the house for the grand sum of $50 a month rent. All this was pre-arranged by Steve and a lawyer named Norborne Berkeley who had befriended Steve and did the arrangements.
Hennie and Tessie lived in the house for another 30 years. Hennie began to get sick and Tessie took good care of her doing the meals, laundry, shopping etc. Then Tessie was diagnosed with cancer; she died on October 24, 1983 at the age of 87 followed by Hennie exactly two months later on Christmas Eve at age 89. There were no children at the funerals. Hennie and Tessie were cremated and their ashes interred in the Thomas Mausoleum in Catasauqua.
The Magee family lived at the following addresses over the next 59 years: 41 Florence Avenue in West Haven CT from 1946 until 1954, 304 Ridgewood Ave in Hamden CT until 1955, 376 Dorchester Road Akron OH until 1959, 36 Kent Drive in Hamden CT until 1961, RD#4 Bethlehem PA until 1963, 843 Brodhead St Easton PA until present (45 years.)
Spouses
1Helen “Hennie” Thomas Wilbur
Birth24 Jan 1894, Bethlehem, PA
Death24 Dec 1983, Bethlehem, PA
FatherElisha Packer Wilbur Jr. (1870-1948)
MotherCatherine “Kit” Victoria Thomas
MarriageJun 1916, Bethlehem, PA
ChildrenKatherine “Polly” Wilbur (1917-1996)
Helen “Rosie” Thomas (1921-2014)