Hector Family
John Hector left Odessa in 1906. The year before, Odessa Jews had experienced one of the bloodiest pogroms in Russian history, along with the brutally-crushed workers’ revolt and sailors’ mutiny of 1905. (Events of that tumultuous year in Odessa are told in film-maker Sergei Eisenstein’s classic docudrama the Battleship Potemkin.)
When John Hector left, he didn’t know his wife was pregnant, nor that it would take three years to send for her. Imagine his shock when his wife’s sister Ester arrived along with his three-year-old daughter. His wife had died in childbirth.
As was the orthodox custom, Esther and John were married. In the following years they had four children and then she died and John remarried.
He was blessed with “golden” hands and understood machinery and electrical things. For a short time he worked for the recording industry and invented the change which brought about discs instead of cylinders. Having no knowledge of patent laws, all he received was a player and a few records.
He had Hector’s Machine Shop for many years. His three sons – Sam, Max and Morris – became well known in Calgary. Daughters Blanche and Beth married and lived in Chicago. Sam married Pat Bercuson, thereby uniting those two early families.
