John Stephen Hawkes

On the morning of July 18th, 2024, during a predawn summer rain, John Stephen Hawkes of Naples passed away peacefully in his sleep after complications from cancer. He was 76 years old. A private family service will be held at a later date.

On December 8, 1947, in Port Chester, New York, the youngest of three Hawkes children. His father held a career position with Mutual of New York, and in two short years the family had moved several times before settling in the Seattle area circa 1950. Steve often reminisced about the good old days on Clyde Hill in Bellevue where he swam in the neighborhood pool in the summer and life was easy.

Following the untimely death of his beloved older brother, the remaining family embarked on a trip around Central America when Steve was 14. It was a remarkable trip that left lasting impressions. During high school at Bellevue High, Steve was a good student and a football athlete. After high school, Steve attended WSU, where he joined the Acacia Fraternity and earned a BA in English. Steve joined the Peace Corps in 1972 and headed to Paraguay. He became fluent in the Spanish dialect of Paraguayans and for years to come, would speak the language to his family and friends, simply for the sake of its beauty. Steve was asked to return as a Peace Corps volunteer in the year 2000, this time sending him to Honduras for three months.

Back in the states in 1975, Steve attended a Civil Engineering trade school in Western Washington, which earned him a degree and ultimately a job with the USFS. He started out fighting forest fires in the Olympic National Forest, and remained involved in fire suppression throughout his tenure. In 1979 he met Jean Dagman – they lived together in Hoodsport for just a year and married with certainty on April 19, 1980 in Spokane. Their honeymoon was a day-trip to Hope, Idaho, and it wasn’t a year before Steve was granted a position in Bonners Ferry as a civil engineer for the USFS.

For the next 35 years he helped to manage 900 miles of federal roads and bridges across our northern counties. The 80s and 90s were spent building his family and pursuing his hobbies in music and theater. Steve was a brilliant musician. Able to play a piano tune by ear and command virtually any instrument he held in his hands, Jean always said he would be a great one-man band. His greatest love was the piano though, and he built a fun and successful side-business tuning and repairing pianos all over the region out of his blue Volkswagen Bug.

He was a talented thespian – the Boundary County Community Theater was vibrant in those days and Steve was very involved, holding important roles such as in Helen Keller, The Glass Menagerie and most prominently Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff?

His avid interest in science, daily New York Times Crossword puzzles and trivia, mixed with his adoration for wordsmithing, lent him an admirable quirk of teasing the English language, challenging rules and insisting on grammar. You could have asked him on any given day to recite poems from the far reaches of his memory. When asked to recite The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, one could just sit back and listen with awe.

Steve is preceded in death by his parents Kendrick Charles and Yvonne Peirce, and his brother Casey. He is survived by his wife Jean, and their children Maia and Cameron, sister Sally and her children Amy, Anna and Andrew, and his grandchildren Ida and Stephen.

He was an extraordinary man, with an intellect that inspired and amazed, a sense of humor that left us in stitches, and a smile that will live on in our hearts forever.