Maxine Irene Wentzel

Maxine Irene Wentzel

Mar 23, 1922 – Apr 9, 2011

Maxine died in her sleep on 9 April, 2011 at age 89. She leaves behind three children, Kendrick, Eric and John Wentzel, five grandchildren and four great grand children. Maxine was an only child who came of age in the Great Depression. Her father was an engineer and grandfather was an entrepreneur who built most of the early 20th century fire and police stations in Detroit, as well as the Detroit Water Works and Orchard Lake Country Club. Her mother, whom she took after, was one of the first women in Detroit to earn a driver’s license. At 14 Maxine accompanied her family on an ocean liner to Germany. There she visited relatives and attended the 1936 Olympics, where she witnessed Hitler storm out of the Berlin Olympic Stadion after the great African American Jessie Owens won his fourth gold medal.

She attended high school at Eastern High in Detroit. There she met the love of her life, William (Bill) Wentzel. They dated only briefly after graduation. Bill wanted desperately to impress the prettiest girl from high school. So when she suggested they go horseback riding on Belle Isle for their first date, he took his hard earned pay from a summer job and bought johdpurs to impress her, even though he hated horses. Apparently the horse sensed his fear and bucked him into a large mud puddle, much to Maxine’s amusement. After high school, Maxine attended the University of Michigan School of Architecture. A year later when the war broke out, Bill joined the Army Air Corps to fly B26s. Before leaving for pilot training at Kelly Field in Texas, he asked her to marry him. The riding incident must have done something to her heart, because she accepted and left school to join him in Texas, much to her parent’s consternation. What patriotic girl could refuse? She never looked back. They had three children together, all boys, which set the course for the rest of her life.

Bill loved flying more than anything except her, but this was severely tested in 1952 when he put the Altes Brewery Beechcraft Bonanza into the top of an oak tree on her birthday. He came home with bruises and a shattered wooden propeller as her birthday present. Aside from being three hours late for their planned dinner out, a shredded propeller was not what she had in mind for a birthday present. Needless to say, the most determined woman he had ever met had her way. It was a simple proposition: Flying, or me and the kids. That was the end of flying for a living, but Bill figured she couldn’t say no to Uncle Sam, so he joined the Air Force Reserves in the 1960s. Unfortunately, during the Cuban missile crisis he augured an Air Force C119 Flying Boxcar filled with 10,000 lbs. of tanks rounds into the infield of the Atlanta City Airport, wheels up. Maxine was not amused. More bruises, but the propeller that had sliced through the top of the cockpit was long gone. He only had one more crash, in the family’s Republic Sea Bee, which had caught fire near Pontiac, Michigan. Maxine was onboard…. Her contribution was to inform him that the damned airplane was on fire. This time he was not amused.

Her three boys erased any hope of femininity in her life. She willingly went along with all manner of craziness that often got her into a pickle. Bill had come across a sailboat that was “for sale” at a really good price. It was the Tinavere, a 41 foot cutter rig built by Teddy Roosevelt’s Secretary of the State, Elihu Root. The boat was in a terrible state of disrepair when Bill acquired it, and it took the family three hard years to make her sea-worthy. Maxine’s job, because she was the smallest, was to crawl into the tiny chain locker and paint it. All well and good, but she got stuck in the small space because she couldn’t turn around to get back out. The same story was repeated on the Sea Bee’s tail section, after Bill had insisted she was the only one who could possibly get in there. We had many lighter moments at her expense as well. Once in a fierce storm in Lake Huron aboard the Tinavere, the only real sailor, Ken, who was manning the tiller shouted out to his motley crew, “Haul in the ##%^ sheets!” (Lines attached to the sails, for you land lubbers.) Maxine cheerfully went below to strip the bunks of the linens.

But nobody was tougher. Bill died when the house on Dunham Lake was in the middle of construction. She joined John with hammer and nails to finish the job. During the warm weather, she swam across the lake on most days, until she turned 80. A friend from her garden club once remarked that Maxine was the only person she had ever known who had worn out a paddle boat making daily trips around the lake, forcing Maxine to buy a replacement.

She loved her children, encouraged them, fiercely defended them and kept them (mostly) in line. She made many hundreds of trips to high school cross country, track, skiing, tennis, trapping, hunting, after school plays, globe trotters, biology club, etc. etc. But it was the pheasant hunting that tested her maternal reserves. When the boys put a 20 gauge shotgun into her hands and took her pheasant hunting, she reached her limit. Around midday a large pheasant flushed at her feet. She firmly refused to shoot, despite their shouts, ending the boys’ naïve fantasy that they could teach Maxine to hunt.

She lost Bill to a stroke when he was only 51, but she stayed true to him for the rest of her life. She loved him and her children with all of her heart. She guided them, cajoled them, motivated them and made darned sure they were a success. What more could we ask? She will be greatly missed.