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Nick Reitter, Jr. and Ruth Wesemann

Nick Reitter, Jr. spent his first years on Mervine Street before the family moved to Bucks County. About 1920, Nick, then about fifteen, and his sister Anna, twelve, went to Philadelphia to live with their mother’s brother, Nicholaus Krauser, on N. 11th Street. Both were still in their father’s Nockamixon household at the census of January 1920, so the move came later that year or after. The Krausers then had three daughters, Anna, Katherine and Elizabeth. The family remembers that Nick learned stamp and coin collecting from his uncle, a Mason who kept flower gardens, that he went on visiting him with his father, and that Nick and Anna left the Catholic church for the Lutheran.

Nick became a truck mechanic, first for Fox Trucks and then, over a career of thirty-seven years, for International Harvester Trucks, retiring as a service supervisor. Neither he nor Ruth Esther Wesemann finished high school. They most likely met through a young people’s group at St. James Methodist Church in Olney. Ruth’s birth and family, their wedding at Zion Lutheran Church on 27 July 1929, and their homes on Elston Street, at Ottsville and on Napfle Street are told in the George and Fredericka's Family, 1860 to 1907 section. It is in describing the wedding reception, held at Nicholas Sr.’s farm, that the memoir introduces his second wife, Margaret.

In April 1930 Nick, 25, and Ruth, 21, owned their house at 1971 Elston Street, valued at $5,900, and had a radio. He was a mechanic in the automobile trade, born in Pennsylvania to Hungarian-born parents. In 1939 he earned $2,600. When he registered for the draft on 16 October 1940 he was 35, worked for International Harvester at 660 E. Erie Avenue, and stood 5 feet 10 inches and weighed 190 pounds, with blue eyes and brown hair. His telephone was Hanover 6729, and he named his wife, Ruth, as the person who would always know his address.

Nick and Ruth had four children, who wrote a memoir of their parents in 2018 and 2019.

Living family members are not shown.

The family belonged to St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, at 74th and Briar Streets in West Oak Lane, where all four children were confirmed. Two of the daughters had been baptized at Zion Lutheran Church by Pastor Bela Shetlock, and their son at St. Peter’s by Pastor Edward Knapp. He rose to Life Scout and Senior Patrol Leader in the church’s Scout troop. Nick’s sister Betty lived with them in the early 1930s, and so for a time did one of the elder Ruth’s nieces. In 1950 the census entered a Ruth of the household as a secretary at an instrument company.

The children remembered the war years well. Daughter Ruth heard the news of Pearl Harbor on the radio on Sunday, 7 December 1941, and went outside to a street that had gone strangely quiet. The house had blackout curtains and a divider in the living room, Nick served as an air raid warden, and the family kept a victory garden near Tookany Creek. With gasoline rationed, visits to Grandmom and Grandpop Wesemann’s rented houses in Upper Bucks County meant bus trips, sometimes with a walk down a dirt road at the end.

The small house on Route 611 at Ottsville, bought in 1947, had no indoor plumbing at first. Water came from a hand pump, and their son’s weekly job was emptying the two-hole outhouse. Nick later modernized the house himself, adding a basement, heating, a garage, a drilled well and a septic system.

In the early 1970s, when Nick and Ruth moved to Napfle Street in Northeast Philadelphia, they joined Immanuel Lutheran Church in Burholme. Ruth was active in the Order of the Eastern Star, and Nick was a Freemason who marched in the Shriners’ band. Nick died in Philadelphia in November 1982 and Ruth in 1997. They are buried together at Forest Hills Cemetery (see George and Fredericka's Family, 1860 to 1907).

Nick and Ruth’s Descendants

The memoir counts thirty-two direct descendants of Nick and Ruth in 2019. The family met for a third Reitter–Wesemann reunion, after those of 2001 and 2003, at Hibernia Park, Chester County, on 21 June 2014. The photograph’s caption names the four Reitter siblings, their spouses and children, and a Wesemann cousin, and Ray Reese was there too.

Ruth Esther Reitter, the eldest, married John David (“Jack”) Bohm, Sr. (1927 to 1994), the son of Alice Bohm. Her obituary of 2023 names her grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

Gladys May Reitter married Raymond Reese (1930 to 2016), who came to the 2014 reunion. She was a long-time member and employee of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Malvern, Pennsylvania, and a member of the Order of the Eastern Star. She later lived at Aberdeen, New Jersey, and died in 2022, after Raymond and before her sister Ruth. They had been married sixty-one years.

The third daughter married Roy Ecklund, who was born in Philadelphia on 9 September 1934, the son of Roy A. Ecklund, Sr. and Elsie L. Artuz Ecklund. Roy was a master underwriter with the Home Insurance Company and Cigna, an Army veteran, and a member of the Masons and the Order of the Eastern Star. He died at Hershey Medical Center on 26 January 2004. They had a daughter.