As the110th anniversary of his birth approaches, it is remembered that Henry "Hank" Fieg had a brush with death that included a common plot device in what otherwise would have been a melodramatic story: amnesia.
Hank, a passenger in a vehicle in Montclair, Pa. in the late 1930s, was hurt when the automobile crashed. Several others were injured and one was killed. Though he survived the incident with only a concussion and left the scene relatively unscathed, it was just the beginning of his mysterious saga.
Some time after the accident, Hank went missing for three weeks. His siblings, including Doris Holm, then age 10, asked their father Max Fieg where their brother had gone and when he would return.
Max bowed his head in his hands and cried like a baby, not knowing the answer or what had become of his son.
Needless to say his family was very worried and puzzled as to whether he would ever show up again. Had he run off to Mexico, joined the French Foreign Legion, been abducted by aliens?
We make light of it now, but it was a very painful experience at the time for them all.
Ironically, Hank finally turned up 1,800 miles away in Colorado with no explanation as to where he had been, how he got there, or what he had done during that time. Hank had suffered a loss of memory, forgetting even his own name. His whereabouts during his disappearance remains a mystery to this day.
Hank, a smoker, had a heart attack at age 40. He recovered and lived a full life with apparently no repercussions from the bout of amnesia.
He and his wife Carolyn built a house on Dodd St. in Milford where they kept two Siamese cats, and raised Carolyn's niece, Barbara Morgan, as their daughter, after Barbara's parents separated when she was three.
During World War II Hank, storekeeper first class, USN, served aboard a destroyer escort chasing Nazi U-boats in the North Atlantic. Because he was born at the outset of World War I, he was no doubt among the oldest on the ship at the age of 31 -- even older than the captain.
During his lifetime, Hank worked as a comptroller for a hotel in New Jersey. He later was employed as a salesman for The National Cash Register Co. and was transferred to Dayton, Ohio, rising to the rank of vice president.
He traveled the globe in his capacity for NCR and by chance visited Pforzheim, Germany, the original hometown of his family. Henry encountered an elderly woman there who remembered the Fieg family from the turn of the 20th century, and showed him the location of their homestead that had been flattened by allied bombers during the war.
Hank's nephew, the late Victor P. Fieg, and his wife, the former Jean Davie, also visited the site many years later and came away with a stone from the ruins of the building's foundation.
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