When I was 11, my father engaged a young man to work in his office at the Federal Court in Washington. He was a law student at the Georgetown University Law Center, who had come to Washington from his native Pennsylvania after graduating from Penn State University, and having taught high school for several years. That day proved to be the beginning of an abiding friendship that has lasted through three generations.
The young man’s name was John Hess, and after several years, with his law degree in hand, he moved on to the Corporation Counsel’s Office, now known as The Attorney General’s Office, where he rose to become the chief deputy.
In 1972 he was appointed a judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Eleven years later he assumed senior status, but he continued to hear cases as a senior judge for many years thereafter.
John’s early retirement in part was motivated by the discovery of the Northern Neck. He and his wife, Marilynn, with whom he committed matrimony in 1959, liked the area to the extent that they bought property on a branch of Indian Creek, where they built an A-frame cottage. Being an excellent carpenter, John finished the interior himself. When done, the ambience of the house was that of a Swiss chalet.
Marilynn and John were truly committed to the Northern Neck, which led them to purchase a larger property across the creek from the chalet, where in 1983 they built a spectacular Wakefield Colonial home. Marilynn sanded all the interior woodwork herself, and designed a fountain that Franklin Fisher built for them on the back patio that could be seen from inside the house. Between the two of them, no detail was left unattended, including the cornerstone in the front wall denoting the year 1983.
After they had moved in, John set out to build a dependency that he designed to replicate a colonial-era building in Williamsburg. Again, the design and its execution were flawless. Had he decided to build such buildings commercially, his client list would have been quite long. Each year Marilynn and John produced their own Christmas card, which they branded “Hessmark,” a product worthy of their combined creativity.
One year for John’s birthday, Marilynn arranged with their friend, the late Jerry Hill, our local automotive guru, to get for John a 1934 Ford coupe, for which, not surprisingly, he obtained an antique license plate. His was always the oldest car on any parking lot. His more modern car bore the Latin inscription on the license, “Et Ux”, meaning “And Wife.”
Once here, the Hesses became genuine Northern Neckers. They pursued augmenting their collection of American antiques, and John found time, a lot of it, to develop his already proficient golf game. They made many long trips, both national and international ones, each meticulously documented.
In 2010, they decided to move from their dream home to another at Rappahannock Westminster-Canterbury, where they enjoyed life to the fullest, especially in making the house as impressive as the one they left. One of John’s most interesting legacies is the memoir that he wrote tracing his early life in rural Pennsylvania through his great legal career.
John had a brilliant judicial mind. He was an ideal person to be a judge. He was gifted with an extraordinary memory for names, dates and events. He could preside over a trial, remembering every nuance of what was said or entered in evidence. He worked long and hard hours to be sure that he was distributing justice to all the parties who appeared before him. For John, every human being deserved respect, and all were innocent until proven guilty by a court of law.
His life was a model that we all could do well to emulate.
The Honorable John R. Hess, August 3, 1927 – December 12, 2023. R.I.P.
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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!
