NOTE: John Rossiter Hess, Clara Maud Lovrien Hess, John R. Hess, Jr., and Dorothy O’Leary Hess are also memorialized on the same stone and are mentioned in this biography.

Clara L. Hess was born in 1889, in Providence (although her gravestone says 1890). She was the first child of John Rossiter Hess and Clara Maud Lovrien; her parents were from Pennsylvania but had settled in Providence before her birth. Around 1893, they moved into their brand new Late Victorian house at 21 Oriole Avenue, a little more than a block from the Seekonk River. Clara’s only sibling, John, Jr., was born there in 1894.

John Hess, Sr. had taken a job at the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin at about the time of Clara’s birth. He enjoyed a long career there as a reporter, editor, and editorial writer, until his death in 1926.

21 Oriole Avenue, Providence

Clara graduated from Hope High School where she was a classmate of the “weird fiction” writer H.P. Lovecraft, whom she had known since childhood. Clara’s mother and Howard’s mother were both “Blue Book” society ladies in Providence, and must have known each other. Mrs. Hess had earned her DAR membership as a descendant of Samuel Lovrien of New Hampshire, who fought in the American Revolution. And Clara describes Howard’s mother’s family as “old­fashioned gentlefolk, which meant considerable in the old aristocratic Providence East Side neighborhood prior to World War I.”

Clara herself was sufficiently a socialite that her presence, along with her mother, at a Philharmonic concert in February 1910 garnered a mention in the newspaper’s society column. Clara’s interest in music was more than just a function of her role in society since she listed her profession that same year as piano teacher.

By 1920, however, she was no longer working. Her brother, John, had gone into the family business and taken a job as a photographer and later a reporter at the Journal. (He would go on to become the sports editor for the newspaper and have an illustrious career there that rivaled his father’s.) The family appeared to be quite close. In addition to John Sr. and his son sharing a profession and a workplace, John, Jr. would move into a new Colonial Revival home at 29 Oriole Avenue, next door to his parents and sister, in about 1925. The 1925 state census shows him living there with his wife, Dorothy O’Leary.

In 1926, John Sr. died, and in the year following Clara and her mother sold the family home and moved to Warwick. They lived on a one­acre property on Warwick Neck Road, where the two planned on living a self­sustaining lifestyle, including reviving “the old New England art of making bayberry candles for the Christmas season.”

By 1935, John Jr., Dorothy, and their three children had followed John’s mother and sister to Warwick Neck Road, where they moved in a few doors away.

Clara’s mother died in 1938, and in 1940 Clara was still living on the same street, possibly in the same house, as a lodger at the home of George L. Nichols and his wife and children. George was part of the Providence Journal family—he was working as a “desk man” at the paper, and Clara had also become a Journal “space writer” (a “space writer” is a freelancer paid by the column inch, as opposed to a salaried reporter) Clara reported that she worked 42 weeks in 1939 and earned $450 that year, so she must have been fairly successful in getting her articles published (in 2015 dollars she would have earned about $180 a week). One of the pieces she wrote for the Journal was a September, 1948 memoir about H.P. Lovecraft and his mother, Susan Phillips Lovecraft.

Clara died in 1950 at the age of 61; her brother John, Jr. died in 1954.

Postscript

There is now a street off Warwick Neck Road near Sand Point called Hess Avenue; this must have been where the Hesses made their homes.

John Rossiter Hess, III, John Jr.’s oldest child, would go on in 1969 to found J. R. Hess & Co., a leading distributor and marketer of specialty chemicals and raw materials located in Cranston, RI. He died in January, 2015 at the age of 93.

Catherine Beyer Hurst, MBA, Writer and Community Historian

Further Reading

Derleth, August. “Lovecraft’s Sensitivity.” Lovecraft Remembered. Ed. Peter Cannon. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House Publishers, 1998.

Joshi, S.T. H.P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1996.

Perridas, Chris. “Clara Hess.” H.P. Lovecraft and His Legacy. 14 September 2010.

Perridas, Chris. “In Search of . . . Clara Hess.” H.P. Lovecraft and His Legacy. 18 February 2010.