“People don’t plan to be 99,” Bob Hartman says. “It crept up on me.”
The nonagenarian will turn 100 on Sept. 11, 2025. He was 11 during the 1937 Ohio River flood, served in Germany with the U.S. Army during World War II, and invented the crushed ice dispenser found in today’s refrigerators as an engineer at Whirlpool. An artist at heart, Bob has published a children’s book and his drawings of Evansville landmarks were featured in Evansville Living in 2018.
An East Side resident for the past 60 years, Bob was born and raised alongside brother Dan and sister Mary Adelaide by their parents, Eleanor and Adolf, on the West Side. The F.J. Reitz High School graduate was close with his brother and often reminisces about family and friends.
During the 1937 flood, “water never got into the house, but it was all around us,” he says. “Pigeon Creek backed up, and my brother … built a raft at George Schultz Lumber Co. They had good wood that floated if we built a raft. … It would hold five of us.”
He earned income by cutting grass and hauling wood before taking over a paper route until he went to high school. After his military service, Bob worked in accounting at International Harvester before joining Whirlpool. The latter’s engineering department wanted someone who could draw and use an airbrush — skills Bob had picked up at Reitz. “I got into engineering, and I loved it. I was working with someone different every day,” he says.
He met his wife, Jacqueline, a Benjamin Bosse High School graduate, at a dance Downtown. Married in 1952, they often played golf together — Bob was involved in a golf league formed at Whirlpool, while Jacqueline played with the Hamilton Ladies League — and went on trips across the country. They had four children — Thomas, Christine, Nancy, and Julie — and were married 39 years until she died of cancer in 1991.
Bob retired from Whirlpool in 1986 and keeps busy by drawing, reading, and watching television, including golf and basketball — “It’s a good thing TV came along. Old people wouldn’t have anything to do,” he says. He also enjoys spending time on his screened-in porch, listening to the birds. His home is a testament to his engineering heyday. Pale pink Morton metal cabinets topped with crisp white enamel gleam alongside — what else? — Whirlpool appliances and large, glass- fronted overhead shelves.
Sidestepping a request to offer life advice, he does share this: “I just took it a day at a time and didn’t have any big plans or anything like that. I tried to find some recreation now and then with my brother. We did a lot together.”
