Jon Michael Sheeser

1941 - 2023

Jon Michael Sheeser

August 24, 1941 - January 18, 2023

WILLEMSTAD, Curacao --- Jon Sheeser died on the morning of January 18, 2023 at the Golden Oldies Nursing Home in Willemstad, Curacao, at age 81. His wife of 56 years, Margaret (Maggie) Preston Hale Sheeser and daughter Trilby were by his side. Michael, his son, arrived several hours later. He died peacefully and painlessly after a difficult year of declining health and then an acute Covid-19 infection.

A gifted and lifelong golfer, Jon was born in Olean, New York, in 1941 to A.L. (Pete) Sheeser and wife Cora Lee (Billie) Sheeser. Pete, a CPA and golfer, introduced Jon to the game as an early teenager, and his facility showed almost immediately. He was first man all four years on his high school team and lost just one match. Considered the lead junior golfer in Western New York, he won the New York State Junior Amateur at age 17.

Jon's intellectual acuity matched his golf. At academically rigorous Hamilton College he captained the golf team every year, majored in French, spent junior year at the Sorbonne, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, the only member in the history of his fraternity to do so. As in high school, he lost just one golf match.

While bacheloring with fellow alumni in Washington, DC, selling Encyclopedia Britannica door to door, Jon reconnected with Maggie Hale, a woman he had met briefly when she was undergraduate at Wells College, not far from Hamilton. They lit out for Europe together. Jon found work as a bilingual translator for a Paris magazine and Maggie as a bilingual secretary at IBM despite speaking no French! They decided after a year to marry; they slipped back into the US and stood up for each other at a family wedding in Westport, NY. And then shipped off to Istanbul.

They made a home at Robert College, among other expats in picturesque Rumeli Hisar up the Bosphorus. Jon taught French, learned Turkish and added grass-court tennis to his skills. By and by, adulthood beckoned. Jon soon started as an executive trainee at Bankers Trust in Manhattan.

Maggie and Jon settled into suburban life in New Jersey, now with children Trilby and Michael anchoring their world. But within three years they packed up and lit out again. Jon seized an offer to set up a Bankers Trust office in Lagos, Nigeria. Juggling the complexities of international banking, still he continued golfing.

In 1978, Jon went to work for Perrier as head of their Western Hemisphere Division in Curacao, Netherlands Antilles, a position he took as a professional challenge and also for the year-round golf. He remained in the Caribbean for the rest of his career. He established the Wagoneer Management Corporation and eventually served as chief financial liaison for multiple offshore corporations in need of his management skills, facility with language, and local knowledge.

Jon was a gifted student of languages; he spoke, wrote and worked in French, German, Turkish, Papiamentu, Dutch, Italian and Spanish. He taught English and multilingual business writing to international enrollees at University of Curacao and InterContinental University throughout his later years. Teaching and translating were the things he loved most.

Always a golfing force in the islands, he played to a plus 4 handicap, contended in regional amateur events and won the Curacao Amateur Championship. He got in a full round of golf, often with two balls, every morning before work, logging 325 rounds one year. He kept numerical track of everything, happily reporting that he won enough yearly to defray the entire cost of his play. His younger brother Scott remembers that even as a boy, Jon was a compulsive numbers guy; he would take his allowance each week and return it doubled within a few days from his winnings at The Hole, the local pool hall.

Jon continued to golf at a high level into his late 60's, when he decided to lay down his clubs. He continued to teach business English into his late 70's and, until his end, maintained many friendships in multiple languages. His triple-threat identity--standout golfer, gifted linguist, corporate financial facilitator-- will not soon be forgotten. He was an individual of extraordinary abilities, and together with Maggie at his side, he led a life of adventure, travel, financial success, hilarious jokes, and excellent friendships.

Jon is survived by his beloved wife Maggie, herself a university teacher and 20-year elementary art teacher in Curacao; two children (sources of never-ending pride), Trilby, the practice manager at a veterinary clinic in Hawaii, and Michael, emergency medicine physician at UVM Medical Center in Burlington, Vt., Michael's wife Jessica Nordhaus, and their three children, Katherine, Henry and Lydia; brother Scott Sheeser of West Clarksville, NY, and sister Pamela Sheeser Chance of Greeley, Colorado, and her daughters Kimberly (Deines) and Susan (Gufstafson).

Jon chose to be cremated. Trilby and Michael eulogized their father at a gathering of friends in Curacao a few days after his death. Many of his large group of friends and business colleagues came to pay their final respects at a subsequent service. Siblings Pam and Scott are planning a memorial in Olean this summer, and Maggie's family will do the same in Westport, NY.

Written by lifelong friend and former Olean resident, Dewey Gram.