Jet Wintter Seghers Prendeville 1926-1996

Jet Wintter Seghers was born in New Orleans in 1926.  When she was about 13 years old, the family moved to Orlando, Florida where her father was general manager for a box company.  She attended Orlando High School, graduating in 1942.

After high school, she attended FSCW—Florida State College for Women, later known as Florida State University—for 2 years before transferring to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.  It was while attending Northwestern that she met her future husband, Robert J. Prendeville, a Masters student & WWII veteran from Kansas who was majoring in Speech & Drama. Among their fellow students at Northwestern were some that went on to become famous: actresses Patricia Neal and Cloris Leachman, and comedian Paul Lynde.

She & “Prendy”, as she always called Robert, were married following her graduation in 1946 at St. James Catholic Church in Orlando.  His first teaching position took them to Morgantown and the University of West Virginia.  The following year, her first baby, Mark, was born in Jacksonville.  Later that fall, they moved to Boulder and the University of Colorado.  The following year, they were in Lafayette, Indiana and Purdue University.  The following year, Mark’s little sister, Jet, was born.  After Purdue, they spent a couple of years at the University of Pittsburg.

In 1952, the family moved back to Florida, where Prendy took a job as manager of the veneer mill at National Gardens near Ormand Beach.  Over the course of the next 5 years, Jet & Prendy had 2 more little girls, Christi & Pat.  When she wasn’t raising her children, Jet prepared the weekly payroll for employees at the veneer mill.  Once, when there was an error in the bookkeeping system, Jet suggested that something might be wrong with the adding machine, and the head accountant agreed.  The story goes that they had the adding machine checked out, and sure enough, the error was not Jet’s.  It was a glitch in the mechanics of the adding machine.

In 1959, owing to Prendy’s wanting to get back into teaching, the family moved to Memphis, TN where he became an assistant Professor and Technical Director of the Speech Dept. at Memphis State University. Besides her duties as a wife & mother, Jet became a Life Master Duplicate Bridge player.

Years later, when they retired to Tularosa, New Mexico, Prendy joked that the one requirement for a retirement location was that it had an ACBL chapter, and sure enough, Jet continued her bridge playing in nearby Alamogordo until she passed away in 1996.

In addition to playing bridge, Jet enjoyed reading mysteries—Agatha Christie being her favorite—and to travel.  She accompanied her daughter Jet to Italy in 1972 when the younger Jet went there on a Fulbright Scholarship.  Some years later, she & Prendy did a self-tour of France, Italy, England & Ireland.  She returned to the British Isles on a couple more occasions.  Before Prendy passed away in 1985, they travelled extensively in the Western US, as well as visiting their grown children in Texas, Minnesota, & Tennessee.  Due to their travels in the West, Jet accumulated a collection of Native American pottery and jewelry.  She often wore her heavy silver & turquoise squash blossom necklace and silver belt to play bridge.

She out-lived Prendy by eleven years, and when she passed away she left behind her four children and four grand-daughters, as well as her mother, Jet Seghers (also) and her younger brother, Frank Seghers.

Read about Jet’s best friend in high school Dottie Jones.

Peruse the photos and documents under attachments below.