Owner of lumber firm had sense of adventure

12/10/2002

MARBLEHEAD, Ohio - Jack W. Hoffman, a pilot in World War II who later was a carpenter and owned a lumber company, died of emphysema Sunday in Firelands Regional Medical Center in Sandusky. He was 82.

Mr. Hoffman of Marblehead was born in Fremont but spent most of his childhood in Toledo, where he graduated from Central Catholic High School.

He worked briefly at a military facility that made dynamite before joining the Navy. He was an F4F Wildcat fighter pilot in the Pacific during WWII, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal with three Gold Stars.

“He had a real sense of adventure,” his daughter, Judy Indorf, said. “He loved the idea of flying.”

Mr. Hoffman returned after the war and received a degree in business administration at the University of Toledo. He attended law school at the university, but decided not to complete his studies.

Instead, he took an accounting job with Scholz Homes, Inc., a Toledo company that designed and built an estimated 50,000 homes. He bought a home that the firm developed in the Lincolnshire neighborhood of West Toledo.

In the late 1950s, Mr. Hoffman started the Marblehead Lumber Co. in an old schoolhouse that now has an art gallery. The firm built model homes for several years before closing.

After another accounting job, Mr. Hoffman became a union carpenter until he retired in 1982. He enjoyed the building craft, having built many of the homes he and his family lived in over the years, his daughter said. He was a past president of the Toledo Lumbermen's Association.

He enjoyed cooking, especially baked goods, and was an avid reader.

He married Dorothy Koogan in 1950. She died last year.

Surviving are his son, Robert Hoffman; daughters, Judy Indorf and Susan Niswander; sister, Betty Rack, and four grandchildren.

Services will be at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow in St. Joseph Catholic Church, Marblehead. Visitation will be in Neidecker-LeVeck & Crosser Funeral Home, Peninsula Chapel, Lakeside-Marblehead, after 2 p.m. today and for an hour before services tomorrow.

The family requests tributes to Stein Hospice or the American Lung Association.