Pop

Fletcher Ames Hatch,   b.1883 - d.1963

This is my grandfather, Fletcher Ames Hatch. We knew him as "Pop." He was born in Norwell, Massachusetts and graduated from Dartmouth in 1905 as a civil engineer. He was hired by the J.G. White & Company, a railroad enterprise, to work as a surveyor on the U.S. government project to build railroads throughout the Philippine Islands.

Later he was hired by the United Fruit Company and was sent to Santa Marta, Colombia as the company engineer for their banana growing operations there. He married my grandmother, Alva Flye, in 1916. Alva (we knew her as "Nano") was one of 8 children born and raised on a coffee plantation high up in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Colombia. Her father, Orlando Flye, also an engineer, was hired by the Proctor & Gamble Company to establish an electric power plant in Santa Marta, a city on the Atlantic coast of Colombia. Later he started growing coffee up in the mountains nearby, which became a large coffee plantation he named Cincinnati after the city in Ohio that he hailed from. His is quite a story in its own right.

My dad, Buddy Hatch, was born in Santa Marta in 1920, one of three children.

Pop retired from the UFCo. in 1948 at age 65. My memories of him begin around that time when our family would visit their retirement home on the shores of Lake Cochituate in Natick, Mass.

This charcoal portrait of Pop was done by Bettina Steimke, a well-known artist of the time. She had been commissioned by the UFCo. to do portraits of several of their senior executives, for what purpose I do not know. My fondest childhood memories were being at my grandparents' house at 11 Lakewood Road, Natick, MA, where this portrait hung on the wall. I now have it here in my home office. It really is a beautiful piece of art, but more importantly it is what connects me to him and to all of the great memories of my grandparents.