The Kankakee Man Who Sent Fords to Vietnam in 1954 - Romy Hammes

Click my post title for more on the great Romy Hammes at Jerry Hammes.com

Thirty (30) 1950 and 1951 vintage Fords (two door hard top) and five Ford trucks went from Kankakee/South Bend to Haiphong, because of Romy and Dorothy Hammes. They were two American Catholics with a great deal of money and resources to do good works. Hammes vowed to the Blessed Virgin to share his worldly goods with those in need to tune of 25% of all that he made in this life. There were many other hands, besides the good priest in charge of Catholic Relief Services who reached out to the Hammes family, who were launching ot theirs as well: Anti-Catholic elites, cynical opportunists and Intelligence operatives. The Hammes family wanted to help suffering people and many other powerful and influential people wanted to make the most out of a good deed.

In 1954, after the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the French capitulation in Indochina, Father Joseph Hartnett a priest from Philadelphia reached out to Kankakee Ford Dealer Romy Hammes to help the thousands of Catholic Vietnamese refugees flooding south. At the time, America had refused to sign the Geneva Accords which created two Vietnams - North of the 17th Parallel Communist and South of the 17th A puppet regime headed by the Roman Catholic Diem.

The CIA and the Roman Catholic Church mounted Operation Virgin Mary, which goaded Catholics north of the 17th Parallel to head south. A million North Vietnamese refugees flooded the port of Haiphong. There was no adequate transportation and so Catholic Relief Services headed by Father Joseph Harnett, who had directed the post WWII refugee efforst in Trieste until 1952 reached out to American Catholics like Romy Hammes.

Hammes, who had made vow to share 25% of everything made with Our Lady made good on that vow.

This was a time when Communism threatened all of Asia and post-McCarthy American elites were trying to regroup and pluck hegemony from the hands of the Catholic clique in America’s foreign policy and intelligence communities. The torch of leadership had passed from Wild Bill Donovan to Allen Dulles at the CIA.

Aboard an American naval AKA ( Attack Cargo Transport) vessel USS Montague in Haiphong Harbor was a handsome and all-too-humanly complex doctor from St. Louis. Ashore in Saigon was career spy. Also, in close contact with this spy were competing aid and relief agencies that cloaked people of wildly dissimilar motives and agendas.

Here is a succinct redaction of those points of view at center of this series of events:

There also was the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and the American Friends of Vietnam (AFV), two organizations described by James Fisher as made up of "leftist entrepreneurs bent on expanding their markets abroad in the immediate post-McCarthy era." Imbued with a "messianic liberalism," the two groups had interlocking memberships, and were made up in many instances of former socialists who had shed their anti-fascist orientation and now turned anti-communist. Harold Oram, for example, was head of the American Friends of Vietnam, an organization that boasted John F. Kennedy and Mike Mansfield, two notable Catholic democrats. Yet Oram did publicity work for Planned Parenthood and hired Peter White, grandson of the renowned New York architect, Stanford White, to work on the Diem account. Peter White and his wife, both Catholics, had a large family and were part of the Catholic intellectual revival of the post war years. Their friends included the writers Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, and Edward Rice, founding editor of Jubilee, a Catholic monthly of high church graphics and literary and theological brightness. http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/Archives/cw_feb98/Dooley.html

I wish to tell the story of the Romy and Dorothy Hammes gift to the people of Vietnam in 1954. This story will bring together the conflicts that seem to have shaped American Foreign Policy in Vietnam and ultimately in American intellectual, political and religious life.



I see this story to be a point of focus for a discussion on the betrayal of American Catholicism and advent of America’s ‘disinterested’ religious soul.

Romy Hammes - 1900-1981: Illinois Business Genius, Philanthropist and Good Guy -The Man from Kankakee

I taught a good many Hammes kids while at Bishop McNamara from 1975 until 1987 and the Hammes legend was very familiar to me.

However, I tripped over a story about Romy Hammes that really put the hook through my gills -it has every thing! well, aside from the Communist onslaught moving south in Vietnam no violence - yet - and no sex - though I am quite postive that procreation and adultery took place circa 1956.

Refugees, Persecution, Vietnam in the 1950's, 1950-51 Fords and Trucks, International Law, Catholic Charities, Notre Dame University, South Bend, and . . . more to come.


Romy Hammes

If there was ever one person from Kankakee, Illinois, who had it all and did it all it was a businessman with a seemingly inexhaustible Midas touch.

In September 1946, Kankakeeans who knew Romy Hammes were not surprised to discover he had received nation-wide recognition in a seven page article, "U.S. Success Story 1938-1946," that appeared in Life magazine. (This was Hammes' second appearance in Life, the first had been in a 1938 story on the automobile industry.) In 1974 the photographer that had taken the pictures of Hammes for Life, Bernard Hoffman, published a biography about "The amazing, meteoric like rise of a grass-roots American from small-town Ford salesman to international businessman" and titled it "The Man from Kankakee: The Story of Romy Hammes, Twentieth-Century Pioneer."

Born in 1900 to Anton N. and Mary Hammes, Romy Hammes grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
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At the age of seven, Romy began helping out at his father's shoe store.At sixteen, having completed courses in bookkeeping, shorthand and typing at the University of Wisconsin Business School, he went to work for the local Ford dealer, Harry Dahl.

By 1926, Hammes had married Dorothy Hofweber and had won a nationwide Ford sales contest by selling 107 Model T's . He was then offered a dealership management position by the Ford Company.Given the choice of Atoma, Iowa, or Kankakee, Illinois, Hammes chose Kankakee in partnership with Dahl.
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Hammes soon opened dealerships in Oshkosh, Wisconsin; DeKalb, Illinois; South Bend, Indiana, and Chicago.He also became a distributor for Ford-Ferguson tractors in fifty-two counties.

At the time Hoffman had contacted Hammes for the 1946 Life article, he learned Hammes, besides being a very successful Ford distributor owned an investment trust company, was a director of Kankakee's City National Bank; had opened Marycrest Business College.He also was dealing in real estate and building homes.When Hoffman returned in 1961 to take some pictures for Life's twenty-fifth anniversary issue, he found Hammes and his wife Dorothy, because of their generous philanthropic and charitable activities, had received the highest homage the Catholic Church can give to laymen.Anarticle in the January 1951 Kankakee Journal told the story:

"The honor of Knight of St. Gregory, conferred last week upon Romy Hammes of Kankakee by Pope Pius XII, is greater than many laymen appreciate.Not more than 100 men in the entire world may be accorded this knighthood, established in 1821 by Pope Gregory XVI. . . . "Mrs.Romy Hammes has been accorded the medal, "Pro Esslesia et Pontiface," in recognition of her services to the Roman Catholic church.The awardswere announced by the most Rev. Martin D. McNamara, bishop of Joliet diocese. . . ."

By 1970 The Hammes family had spent over 2 million dollars "in worldwide church and school construction."

Hammes expressed his credo in a 1970 Kankakee Sunday Journal interview:

"'About 20 years ago I decided to take the Blessed Virgin in as a partner,' said Romy, 'I decided to give her 25 percent of whatever I earned.After all, where do you get your good health and good fortune but from the Lord, and you must do something in return.'"Hammes's philanthropic and business projects embraced countries around the world as well several cities in the United States.They ranged from erecting a high school, church and bank building in Las Vegas and a resort hotel in Honolulu, to contributing to the establishment "of schools, orphanages, hospitals, living quarters and missions from Hong Kong to Africa."

In 1955, Hammes bought the Singer manufacturing company property in South Bend and Chicago. He planned a shopping center on the South Bend property and donated the 10-story Singer office building in Chicago to Chicago's First Church of the Nazarene.

On a local level Hammes built Marycrest Shopping Center and St. Teresa's school and church in the Marycrest subdivision of Kankakee; donated an outdoor statue of the Blessed Virgin to St. Joseph's Church in Bradley and opened branches of Peoples Bank of Marycrest in Bradley and Bourbonnais.

Romy Hammes died in December 1981 at the age of 81.

http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Hammes_Romy_258514659.aspx