John T. Parrett

John Thomas Parrett, an 80-year resident of St. Joseph, died Sunday, September 14, at 85 of natural causes. John was born in Chicago in 1922. His father, Dent Parrett, was an inventor and manufacturer of farm tractors and designer of many products for Ausco Manufacturing of Benton Harbor. John’s mother, Clara Thomas Parrett, had been a school teacher. Both Dent and Clara came from central Illinois. In the mid twenties they moved to south Ridgeway when Dent was hired to do engineering for Ausco. John graduated from St. Joseph High School and lettered several times, notably on the basketball and football squads. On the latter he acquired the nickname “Paddlefoot” for having intercepted a pass and, yards from the goal line, tripped over his own two feet. He won several trophies for sailboat racing in the region in Star-class boats. Later he sailed at the Larchmont Yacht Club in the winter “frostbite” dinghy races. John raced in many big-boat events, including several Bermuda races aboard Jacob Isbrandtsten’s boats, numerous races in and around Long Island Sound, and at least half a dozen Chicago-to-Mackinac and other Lake Michigan races. In these freshwater races his wife, Polly, usually provided her famous pot roast wrapped in tin foal for easy heating. John attended Cornell University starting in 1941 in the engineering department and when war was declared he joined the Navy R.O.T.C. When he graduated he was assigned to the Navy’s Pacific fleet as a lieutenant aboard the Hindsdale, an attack transport that was the flagship of the transport fleet. and participated in the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa as head of the first wave of landing craft from his ship. Preparing for Okinawa, his ship was struck by a kamikazi plane in dense fog, which destroyed much of the engine room, killed nearly two dozen sailors and disabled the ship. John spent the rest of the war nursing his ship home to the Pacific coast for repairs then back to Japan in anticipation of an invasion, which the two atom bombs dropped on Japan precluded. He helped bring the Hinsdale back to New York and stayed aboard her in Red Hook, New Jersey until he was discharged in 1946. Thereafter he lived in New York City and was hired by the Raymond Concrete Pile Company, one of the first international construction firms, and supervised work in Grand Rapids, the University of Illinois, and on the 23-mile causeway over Lake Pontchartrain north of New Orleans. After he married Mary Adeline Preston in 1950 and had his first child in 1952, he returned to St. Joseph, Michigan as a consulting engineer for local companies including Clark Equipment and Whirlpool. He founded the Parrett Manufacturing Company in 1955 to make golf carts. A decade later he sold the company to John Palmer, an investor. He then joined Benton Harbor Engineering Works, a builder of large-scale hydraulic cylinders, as chief engineer. He stayed with the company in this capacity until he retired in 1992. John has eight patents to his name. His abiding interests were sailing, his passion for which he passed to his children; inventing things, of which his house is delightfully plentiful, including an electric dumb waiter and many other contrivances; land conservancy – upon retirement he devoted many days surveying property donated to the Michigan Nature Conservancy – and the teaching the skill of sailing to young people as a lifelong board member of the St. Joseph Junior Foundation. He was devoted to the Sarett Nature Center, on which board he avidly served for many years. John also served on the board of the Maud Preston Palenske Library and on St. Joseph’s Port Authority. He was a founding and enduring board member of the area’s Economic Club. John is survived by his son Thomas Preston Parrett of Millerton, New York and New York City and daughter-in-law Carol Elizabeth Coffin; James Dent Parrett of Novato, California; and Elizabeth Glendening of St. Joseph and son-in-law Brent Glendening and his grandson Christopher John Glendening of Ithaca College, New York. John’s wife of 56 years, Mary (Polly), died last year at 84. John will be deeply missed by his family, friends and neighbors as an extraordinarily thoughtful, gentle, creative, cheerful, hard-working and open-minded man. He was a man apart. Friends are invited to join the family to remember John this Thursday, September 18, between 4 and 7 P.M., at the St. Joseph River Yacht Club. Memorials may be made to Sarett Nature Center , 2300 N. Benton Center Road, Benton Harbor, MI 49022 or to the donor choice