Joe Bogage, 97: father, grandfather, all-around decent man
My grandfather, Joe Bogage, died March 2, 2024, after a long illness. He was 97, and lived a very full life. The Bogages are, of course, sad, but so grateful. Here is our family’s obituary for him, which I was touched to write.
Joe Bogage, a father, grandfather, U.S. Navy veteran, clothier, community volunteer, and all-around decent man, died March 2 at his home in Columbia, Md., at age 97. The cause was complications due to prostate cancer.
Mr. Bogage was the patriarch of the sprawling Bogage family, a tightly-knit clan of aunts, uncles and cousins clustered in the Baltimore and Washington suburbs. At the time of his death, he was the oldest living Bogage, a family known for longevity. His older siblings, Ben and Caroline, each lived to their late 90s.
Mr. Bogage lived and worked in Maryland for more than 60 years in assorted positions at clothing and textile concerns, and volunteered extensively with the Montgomery County Police Department. He was also closely associated with Tikvat Israel Congregation in Rockville; he and his wife of 74 years — Mr. Bogage died four days short of their 75th wedding anniversary — were original members of the synagogue.
In retirement, his condo in Olney was a family beachhead and played host to innumerable birthdays, passover seders, Hanukkah parties and regular gatherings. From an office and guest bedroom down the hall, Mr. Bogage experimented with new technologies, staging a robust presence on Facebook and Twitter until moving from that residence to assisted living in 2020.
In late February, his health faced an insurmountable setback. He died peacefully while surrounded by family.
Joseph Solomon Bogage was born Aug. 3, 1926, in Trenton, N.J., to Lazer “Louis” Bogage, a clothing salesman and tailor, and Rebecca “Becky” Fishman Bogage, a factory worker. He was the youngest of three children. A younger sister, Marion Theresa, was born in 1929, and died three days later.
The young Mr. Bogage by many accounts was a mischievous child. As a toddler, he wandered away from his mother during a family beach vacation on the Jersey Shore and was found and returned to his family by a police officer. Never again, his mother declared, would the young family return to such a crowded and dangerous location.
The incident led to the start of the Bogage family’s oldest tradition: Gathering at Surf City, N.J., for reunions each summer.
His parents, though, lived of modest means in Trenton until after World War II. Mr. Bogage longed for a pet, but a companion was not in the family’s budget, his parents told him. Instead, he boarded stray cats and dogs in sheds and alleyways throughout the city, feeding them with scraps from the family kitchen.
At Trenton Central High School, Mr. Bogage, or Yussel to his classmates, was the manager of the hall patrols, secretary of the school band, an active member of the philology club and manager of the junior varsity tennis team.
He graduated in 1944 as war raged in Europe and the Pacific and convinced his mother to allow him to enlist in the Navy. He could draw a more preferable assignment, he said, that would keep him from being sent to the front lines. He served as a radioman aboard the USS William P. Biddle, a destroyer with 159 souls, that sailors dubbed the “Willie P.” The ship assisted in the allied liberation of the Philippines, and Mr. Bogage was discharged in 1946 as a radioman third-class. He was awarded the American Theater Medal, Victory Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Medal and the Philippine Liberation Ribbon.
But the war, Mr. Bogage said, deprived him of his dreams of attending college. After his discharge, he threw his naval uniform into a nearby body of water, keeping only his sailor’s cap. He told his commanding officers he wished to become an optometrist, like his first cousin, Eugene. He briefly attended New York University, but did not graduate, instead returning to Trenton to help support his family.
In 1946, at a new year’s eve party, he met Shirley Berk, a student at Trenton High four years his junior. They were engaged on new year’s eve two years later, and married March 6, 1949 in Trenton. Mr. Bogage was 22 years old. The new Mrs. Bogage was only 18.
He is survived by his wife, their three children, Nancy (Steve), Alan and Barry, and thirteen grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his parents, siblings, granddaughter Jody Adleman and family dog Inkie.
Shortly after his marriage, Mr. Bogage went to work for his father at a family department store, Bogage & Sons, in Bristol, Pa., a business that helped solidify the family’s middle-class lifestyle. In 1961, he moved his young family to Baltimore for a job as buyer at the Hecht Company.
The role only increased his knack for style. Quick with a smirk and a fashion tip, Mr. Bogage epitomized the mid-century looks that found their way to the store’s clothing racks. He was a connoisseur of suits and ties — he often sidled up to strangers to gently test the fabric on their outerwear for its suppleness and durability.
In that position, Mr. Bogage often traveled the country — and later the world. During a business trip to Hong Kong, he purchased a gold ring emblazoned with a dragon that he wore as a conversation piece until his death. Shirley purchased a new mah jong set complete with extra jokers.
Recreationally, Mr. Bogage was perhaps most well-known for his daily swimming habit. He detested nothing more than a ruckus in the lap-lanes at the local pool. He continued the fitness routine into his 80s, though switched from freestyle to a paddle board after being struck by car while traversing a crosswalk in his late 70s.
In retirement, he took up a volunteer position doing clerical work at a satellite office for the Montgomery County Police Department. During one shift in the early 2000s, a perpetrator turned himself in at the office after a home invasion. There were no officers present, so Mr. Bogage locked the door and called for backup. It was his lone collar.
Later, he was the member of a lively political discussion group at the Olney McDonalds. He attended his grandchildren’s sports games and academic activities with a religious devotion, holding hands with his wife while seated in folding chairs or on the benches of a school gymnasium.
He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in his late 80s, a condition doctors told Mr. Bogage he would “die with, not from.” Instead, Mr. Bogage kept living. As his health failed in later years, his mind remained sharp. He sometimes removed his hearing aids when he tired of a conversation — the devices inevitably got lost on numerous occasions. Presented months before his death with the list of military honors he received, he quipped, “Well, I never saw any of them.”
Infections sent him to the emergency room on multiple occasions in his final years. A brief course of antibiotics, followed by a cup of hot black coffee, the swipe of a comb — omnipresent in his breast pocket, even during hospital stays — across his full head of white hair and the front page of the nearest newspaper had him back to full health.
He lived, his wife said shortly before he passed, a full life. “We were comfortable,” she said. “That was what we wanted.”
Funeral services will be held at noon on March 5 at Tikvat Israel Congregation, followed by a graveside service at Judean Memorial Gardens in Olney.
