John Hughes, Jr.

MADISON - John P. Hughes, Jr., 69, of Madison, passed away peacefully on January 1, 2021 at Agrace Hospice - Janesville. He was born on August 3, 1951 in Paducah, KY to J. Peter and Nancy (Schwenk) Hughes. He is survived by his mother, Nancy; sister, Anne (Stanley Livingston) Hughes; and niece and nephew, Kelsey and Sam Livingston.

John grew up in Glenview and Highland Park, Illinois.  Being the first born can be daunting, but John was up to the challenge.  His childhood was spent tinkering with engines, driving his extensive Dinky car collection around on dirt roads in the back yard, building with blocks, then Lincoln Logs, then an Erector Set (oh and occasionally shoving of his little sister -me- when she got too close to his stuff!)  As he grew, he excelled at fixing things (the toilet that even our Uncle couldn’t fix), disassembling machines and appliances to see how they worked, making art, sculptures, and ceramics, and learning about cars.  As a boy he’d identify adults by the make, model, color and year car they drove as well as reciting all their former cars.  He was nostalgic from a young age.  He enjoyed setting up his heirloom Lionel train around the Christmas tree.  He gleefully reenacted his own holiday tradition of annually ramming the double engine at full speed into a plastic model of a ranch house (much like our own Glenview home), laughing uncontrollably as pieces flew.  Then he’d snap the poor house back together and do it again.  Listen, if something was good once, it was even better with each repetition in John’s mind! He always loved attention, family tradition, any kind of explosion, and laughter.  So many people I have talked to in the week since he died have mentioned laughter and his smile.  Making others laugh was just naturally in his blood.

Our annual family vacation in Michigan was our happiest time as a family, better than Christmas!  Good at a deal, and marching to his own drummer, John had to be offered a Sears outboard and a Jon Boat to mount it on as motivation enough to swim the quarter mile across Stony Lake, something all the rest of us kids did at a younger age, receiving only a Hershey bar as a reward. That boy could close a deal, work a system!  The first thing any of the Stony Lake “kids” brings up when you mention John is the time he went speeding by in that Jon Boat, wearing a yellow toy helmet with purple exhaust pipes, and smashed bow first into the diving raft he hadn’t seen because he was mugging for us kids on shore. Always the comedian, always on stage!

Dad and John built a 3 girl-powered go-cart from 2x4s with a snazzy curved masonite hood and a clothes line harness to steer… It was 3 girl-powered in that our cousins and I were seldom allowed to drive but often seen pushing the darn thing down Woodlawn road, with John grinning in the driver’s seat.  John usually picked the TV shows.  He sprawled out across two couch cushions while I sat upright on the third.  On Saturday morning while our parents slept in, he became the chef and I, the sous chef, as we whipped up a batter in one of Mom’s pans: sweetened cereal, white bread, cookies, chocolate milk, noodles, sugar, cinnamon sugar, powdered sugar (never skimp on the sugar), peanut butter… anything that struck our fancy!  Then we “cooked” it on the floor heat register, stirring patiently, while keeping an eye on some quality TV, like Flash Gordon, Mighty Mouse, Looney Tunes, or his favorite, perhaps to his dying day, The Three Stooges.

He was the oldest, he was the comedian, the ring leader, and anyway, he had the BB gun and a holster with twin cap pistols — what was my defense, with toys like Pooh bear, Barbie & Ken, and a china tea set?  The extrovert in him led the introvert in me in a lot of fun and gave me much to think about, watching him tear through the elementary school years in his own unique way.

John devoured Mad magazine and Popular Mechanics.  Around age 13, Mom and Dad bought him a big, old, black, greasy automobile engine, which was shoved across the kitchen floor on corrugated cardboard skids, with significant huffing and puffing.  He and our dad rigged up a block and tackle system to lower the behemoth into our creepy, damp basement, so he could take it apart.

The basement was also the scene of chemistry experiments. Liquids changed color, and beakers over flowed, but he never succeeded in creating an actual explosion.  He would persist, as he tends to do.  This foreshadowed an incident on the roof of Mom and Dad’s LA condominium on The Fourth of July 1978, in which he fired off so many impressive, illegal fireworks he’d brought across state lines, that a neighbor appeared angrily chastising him, a 26 year old man, “Do your parents know where you are and what you’re doing?”

John’s favorite time in school was his years at Highland Park High School, where he had several quirky side kicks as pals. One night, after working stage crew for the school musical, Camelot, trying to help everyone get a ride to the cast party, he crammed ten or twelve of us into our mom’s 1967 Mustang.  The shock absorbers were never the same.  That’s John, helpful, but not averse to a hair-brain scheme.  Another time he was seen by Mom and me, speeding in her Mustang along Linden Avenue, top down, as his side kick stood clutching the edge of the windshield, crowing raucously, the crowned shape of the cross street pavement nearly launching them airborne —  undoubtedly the objective of the whole exercise! Then there was the time he and the side kicks liberated a realtor’s “For Sale" sign and erected it in front of the Highland Park High School’s main entrance.  A photograph of the prank appeared in the Highland Park News, making John proud and Mom and Dad a little put out.

John started college at Drake University, clearly a poor match. After completing freshman year, he broadened his horizons. He found himself, coming into his own at Schiller College in Heidelberg, Germany. Life was good to him there, but these adventures were no longer mine to share.  Last year, I reread his old letters and was reminded again how much he adored every minute living abroad.  He became trilingual.  He embraced a new culture.  He developed his life-long interest in politics, earning his degree in political science.  I asked him at the time, why poli-sci? Simple, “That’s what I have the most credits in!”

I’m sure he was distracted from his studies by all those fancy, well engineered German automobiles that not long after he’d delight in selling. He may have been the autobahn’s biggest fan.  He’d hit the autobahn, doing the same to his accelerator! — finally his dreams from childhood, driving his wooden go cart or those Dinky cars became a rubber-meets-the-road reality. On the autobahn with John, our terrified mother pleaded with him to slow down.  Living in Europe cemented his love of travel and the lure of the road.  He took a couple trips to Moscow, drove 1500 miles across 6 or 7 countries, to Athens for Christmas break.  He had an appetite for novel, worldly experiences, curious about the unfamiliar. “Out of Iowa” and coming into his own in Europe, John could be himself, and come out.  And coming out in the 1970s was no small thing — he and his peers have my respect for coping with what coming out meant for their personal and work life, in a still very intolerant society.

No longer at home, three years older than me, and living in different cities for many decades, the details of his adult life become fuzzier for a sister.  But as far as I can tell, he became more and more of who he had always been.  John would want to be remembered for his unique strengths and eccentric character:

John was the nicest guy. He was kind and warm hearted toward people.  Nobody does nostalgia better than John.  That’s a sign of a good life, one with memories so happy that he dove into them over and over with boyish delight.  He was usually happy and positive, much like our father, and a natural extrovert enjoying center stage like our mother.  During the week since he died, so many people have talked to me with a similar theme; an appreciation of his sense of humor and simply that he was such a nice guy.  He could be cheerful, cringingly irreverent, silly, sometimes adolescent, bitingly sarcastic, computer savvy (and self taught at that),politically astute, but no matter what, always looking to laugh and make you laugh. And nice. And kind.

John liked to help.  He was loyal and if you were loyal back he was your friend to his dying day.  When his road was filled with potholes, he kept going forward weaving this way and that to find a way out; John persevered.  “I’ll figure it out,” “Well, it is what it is,” or “I’ll make it work” were the refrains during most rough spots. Laughter helped.

John was proud of his volunteer work at Howard Brown Health in Chicago, providing one-on-one support to men dying of AIDS.  He was always politically engaged and voted thoughtfully for the candidates that might improve the business climate, gay rights and support those in need.  He also worked many a PBS telethon in Chicago and Los Angeles.

A natural salesman, John first sold insurance and then found his true path, merging his affection for Dinky cars, the autobahn, his mechanical aptitude and design appreciation, into a career selling luxury cars for decades.  He could read customers, guiding them to just what they needed.  His coworkers told me he would willingly do what was needed in the company, and he knew everything about the cars he sold, inside and out, and under the hood.  After all, this guy could talk automobiles endlessly.  He was happy that as a BMW salesman he got to drive company cars, the latest models.  Maybe his second happiest driving days were just this past summer, when after a slow motion avalanche of serious health, mobility, and vision loss, he scored a power chair!  It was like giving him a car again.  He’d tool around town, independent again at last, after three years without a license due to low vision.  I occasionally saw him about town, zooming along so fast that his hair streamed straight back from his full-steam-ahead speed.  Our family is pleased that John seemed extra happy in this, his final year of life.  He’d moved into a great little apartment and was grateful our little family lived in the same city.  We enjoyed many a family picnic during COVID’s social distancing and he was jovial and grateful every time.

There were six challenging weeks between his diagnosis of metastasized cancer and his passing.  Very hard times, throughout which he remained mainly very stoic. I commend him for the brave and accepting way he handled this decline, made harder by COVID restrictions and separation from family.  His positive spirit was simply hard to snuff out.  Our thanks to Agrace Hospice for exceptional care and kindness during his final days.

I am writing this a week after his passing, having heard so many detailed stories from John’s friends and our family.  Their comments and anecdotes give us an idea of what he was like at work and during decades long friendships.  My conversations with his friends, co-workers, and, not surprisingly, co-workers he turned into friends confirm that John’s best qualities live on in the way we all remember him: optimistic, hopeful in the face of adversity, kind, compassionate, funny, keeper of our family history and tradition, emotional, nostalgic, friendly, a lover of travel, welcoming of new experiences, enjoying good design, a funny man with an irreverent sense of humor, heartfelt laugh, a kind heart, and that smile.

A Celebration of Life will be held at a later date. Please let Anne know your contact information so you can be invited. Memorial donations may be made in John’s memory to Howard Brown Health and The American Cancer Society