John Siebenthaler

Lifelong Mentor, Industry Leader John R. “Jack” Siebenthaler
October 11, 1924 – August 29, 2012

John R. “Jack” Siebenthaler, 87, of Clearwater, FL died peacefully on Wednesday evening, August 29, 2012.
Jack saw incredible changes in society and mankind’s creations during his long and eventful life, but his love of trees and horticulture gave him a constant foundation throughout it all.

Living at Dayton, Ohio’s The Siebenthaler Company nursery’s homestead, Jack and his older brother, Jimmy, and sister, Betty, grew up in an atmosphere that featured the outdoors and the natural rhythms of all life. Their maternal grandparents lived with them for a time, and their maternal aunt lived there for much of her adult life. Close relatives lived nearby, and cousins were in and out all the time. The women were always busy with cooking and laundry and housekeeping and childcare, while the men worked and hunted and fished and then met over cigars, and the children learned much.
The Great Depression didn’t seem like such a big deal to young Jack, who would go out into the garden early in the morning and pick fresh asparagus for his mother to cream and serve on toast points for “a delicious meal”.
Jack learned to drive when he was 12 years old, earning one of the first driver’s licenses so he could drive a 1928 Model A Ford pickup truck on Dayton’s city streets. By the time he was 15, he was working full-time on landscape and nursery crews during the summer, learning about plant life and business management at the same time.

His routine life was about to get unusually interesting. When Jack was 16, he was allowed to skip high school for weeks at a time to help build a special runway extension at Wright Field that would accommodate the experimental B-19 bomber prototype. Although no other B-19s were made, Jack was already participating in preparations for World War II.
After graduating from Fairview High School in 1942 in the top 5% of his class of 300, Jack attended Cornell University. He started in the School of Architecture, switching as a sophomore to the School of Agriculture.

As a member of the Volunteer Marine Corps Reserve, he was assigned to active duty in 1943 and ordered to continue his education at Cornell until reporting to Boot Camp. He stayed active until 1946, when he was released to inactive duty and returned to Cornell for his senior year. But he was still short 12 hours because of the transfer after his freshman year, so he came back once more in the summer of 1948 – this time as husband to Ann Louise Kurtz (Annie) and father to their infant son, John – to finish his degree. Times weren’t easy for returning veterans; the G.I. Bill provided only $100 per month for school, with a delay of four months for the first check, so he picked up whatever side landscape work he could find.

Degree finally in hand, he returned to the family company’s nursery division, where he assisted in the development of the first patented tree (Moraine Locust) and worked extensively in the company’s huge production of Oriental Poppies, several varieties of which were named after family members.

Soon, however, the Korean War resulted in his being recalled to 17 months of active duty. He led his infantry platoon to the Chosin Reservoir in November, 1950; the horrors of those days were rarely spoken of for the rest of his life. After being shot in 1951, he was sent home on leave and then on to Quantico, finally returning to inactive duty status as a Marine Reservist from January, 1952 until his final retirement as Lt. Col., USMC Reserves, in 1984 – a total of 41 years and 10 months that he served his country.

In February, 1952, he began his career in landscape sales at The Siebenthaler Company. By the end of the year he was leading salesman; he never relinquished that title until he left the company in July, 1960. During his tenure there, he developed several marketing techniques that increased business significantly. Shortly before leaving, he and his wife served as chairs of the American Association of Nurserymen’s annual convention in Cincinnati.

Many companies, from Delaware to California, wanted him. He chose an offer that presented huge challenges, especially for a couple who now had five children: Merritt Island, Florida. On top of everything else that a 60% drop in income would cause, he had to learn the whole subtropical plant world and its taxonomy in a big hurry – which he did, using 3×5 cards for the kids to quiz him with at the end of a tiring workday.

Within two years he had purchased the company, renaming it Siebenthaler’s and moving it across the river to an oak filled lot in Cocoa. After three months in the new location, he began a consulting relationship with Brevard County’s extension office that continued with many other county offices for the rest of his career.

In 1967 Jack was elected president of the Florida Nurserymen & Growers Assn. (FNGA, now FNGLA with the addition of Landscapers) – just seven short years after moving from the Midwest to the South and starting over, literally from scratch. That gave him the opportunity to begin instituting many procedures that would greatly improve the organization and educational effectiveness of the association and resulted in membership growth in record numbers. This was the groundwork for his future affiliations with such organizations as the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA), the American Society of Consulting Arborists (ASCA), the Garden Writers of America (GWA) and the Golf Landscape Operations (GLO) Industry Advisory Committee of then Lake City Community College (now Florida Gateway College) among many others. And of course there were more than 33 years of close work with the Pinellas County Extension Service.

Unfortunately, the economy of the entire Cape Canaveral region, from the beaches all the way into Orlando, was devastated by the transfer of the NASA headquarters to Houston, and the Siebenthalers had to start over once more, this time on Florida’s west coast in 1968. Jack did his usual thing – building an existing business from normal to outstanding, then setting up a brand new operation – before realizing he had become his best employer. From then on, he was self-employed.

By the time he retired without any fanfare or notice in 2003, Jack Siebenthaler had become not only an expert witness and prolific contributor of horticulture articles (complete with outstanding photographs he took), but was one of the country’s leading horticultural consultants, with a specialization in arboriculture – the study of trees. Two of the world’s most famous trees, the Treaty Oak in Austin, TX and the 3,500-year-old Tree of Santa Maria del Tule in Oaxaca, Mexico are among those he was asked to study for solutions to their problems.

He was never stingy with his skills and ideas, either. Thousands of people now practice one type of professional horticulture or another because Jack Siebenthaler taught organizations and individuals new ways of looking at the future and new methods for exceptional training and certification in the industry. The awards and recognitions he received over his career could easily cover all the walls of his large office and then some.

He traveled a lot for his career, and he loved seeing new places and revisiting favorites. Always, the trips included studies and photography related to horticulture. Before leaving Ohio for Florida in 1960, he took three weeks to explore Peru’s high Andes and famous temples of its interior as well as parts of the upper Amazon tributaries. Sometimes he and Annie worked together as tour organizers to places like Jamaica (twice) and the European countries of England, Holland, West Germany, France and Switzerland. After her death in 1995, he kept traveling and added the Panama Canal, a walking tour of gardens in Japan, two tours of New Zealand, a paddleboat cruise up the Mississippi and six more trips (for a total of seven) up the inside passage to Alaska before his health forced him to stop in 2004.

Never one to shy away from leadership and mentoring, Jack Siebenthaler chose one last unusual journey and a special group of beneficiaries who might be able to use whatever was left of his physical body after death: the teaching institutions who use human remains to provide real situations for their students under the watchful eye of the Anatomical Board of the State of Florida.

Thanks to the ministrations of the Suncoast Hospice (Pinellas County), Jack Siebenthaler was able to fulfill his desire: to die in his beloved home, with a peaceful view of his xeriscaped back patio rimmed with Lady Palms, azaleas, tabebuia, schefflera and a huge podocarpus tree – and listening to Glenn Miller.

He was preceded in death by his wife, Ann Kurtz Siebenthaler. He is survived by his children and their partners: John K. Siebenthaler (Sue) of Seminole, FL; Becky Siebenthaler (Reed Myles) of Clearwater, FL; Cathy Heaton (Keith) of Paso Robles, CA; and Sally Simonelli (Dominick) and Jenny Siebenthaler (Ralph Lawless) of Templeton, CA. He is also survived by grandsons John Siebenthaler and Christopher Siebenthaler of Austin, TX and Jesse Williams of Capitola, CA.
Arrangements are by Veterans Funeral Care; please visit their website www.veteransfuneralcare.com to sign the guest book and leave condolences online.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to either Suncoast Hospice, http://thehospice.org, or another hospice organization of the donor’s choice. A private memorial gathering will be held at a later date.

A graveside service with military honors will be presented at on Monday, November 3, 2014 at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, VA.

Veterans Funeral Care

727-524-9202