Jack Emery was born in New York City on January 28, 1898. He was the son of John Josiah Emery Sr. and Lela Emery. Among his siblings was Audrey Emery, who married the impecunious Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia; Lela Emery, who married first Capt. Alastair Mackintosh and secondly Hély, the Marquis de Talleyrand; and Alexandra, who married Benjamin Moore and Robert Gordon McKay. His paternal grandfather was Thomas Emery, who was born in Bedford, England and settled in Cincinnati in 1832. His maternal grandparents were General Charles Tripler Alexander and Julia Alexander of St. Paul, Minnesota and Bar Harbor, Maine. He was raised on the East Coast and in Europe, after his mother married, as her second husband, the Hon. Alfred Anson, a British stockbroker living in New York City, in 1912. Anson was the seventh son of Thomas Anson, 2nd Earl of Lichfield and Lady Harriett Georgiana Hamilton. As a child and young man, his family moved each year between their houses in New York City, Bar Harbor, Maine, Palm Beach and Paris and Biarritz, France. Emery prepared at Groton for Harvard, where his education was interrupted by World War I when he served as an ensign in Naval Aviation. After he returned from War, he received his BA degree, cum laude, in 1920. He spent one year at Harvard Law School and then went to Trinity College, Oxford, where received a diploma in Economics in 1922.
Career
His grandfather founded a lard oil and candle business in 1840, known as Emery Candle Company, that his father developed into the Emery Chemical Company, later known as Emery Industries. His grandfather had also assembled sizable real estate holdings in the center of Cincinnati, which was enlarged by Emery's father. In 1924, Emery, who was planning on going into the publishing business with Cass Canfield, returned to Cincinnati on a visit and stayed to manage what he perceived to be the faltering family business. He proceeded to consolidate the family's real estate holdings into several blocks in downtown Cincinnati. The real estate company, Thomas Emery's Sons, built the first substantial apartment houses in Cincinnati as well as numerous other buildings downtown and in the immediately adjacent hills. After World War II, Thomas Emery's Sons built the Terrace Plaza Hotel, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, placing the hotel lobby on the eighth floor, reached by elevators that by-passed the commercial floors. For the hotel he commissioned three works of art that passed to the Cincinnati Art Museum when he sold the Terrace Plaza: a mural by Joan Miró and a cartoon mural by Saul Steinberg and a giant mobile by Alexander Calder. He was a founder of the Cincinnati Country Day School, a leading trustee and important benefactor of the Cincinnati Art Museum. He served as vice-president of the Boy Scouts of America in the Cincinnati area, and was an original member of the Cincinnati Public Recreation Commission. He was a trustee of the Children's Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Summer Opera, the Conservatory of Music and the Taft Museum of Art, as well as a trustee of the National Cultural Center in Washington, D.C.
Personal life
In 1926, he married Irene Langhorne Post. Irene was the daughter of the celebrated illustrator Charles Dana Gibson and the niece of Lady Astor, the first woman elected to the British Parliament. Irene was the mother of George B. Post IV and Nancy Langhorne Post from her first marriage to George B. Post III. Together, John and Irene were the parents of four children, all born in Cincinnati:
Irene Emery, who married painter Robert Perkins Goodale at the Académie Julian art school in Paris, in 1946.
Lela Emery, who married John F. Steele in 1967.
Melissa Emery, who married Lloyd Addison Lanier in 1953.
Ethan Emery, a 1959 graduate of Harvard who married Liliane Solmsen in 1962.
Emery and his family spent summers in Dark Harbor, Maine on Seven Hundred Acre Island, where his father-in-law, Charles Dana Gibson, had built a house beginning in 1904. During those summers, the children were tutored in preparation for school, including daughter Lela who prior to leaving home for the Foxcroft School in 1944 was tutored by Connie Frazer at their homes at Peterloon and on Seven Hundred Acre Island. In 1929, he began constructing his estate, Peterloon immediately north of Indian Hill, then a rural outer suburb of Cincinnati to which some affluent citizens of Cincinnati, Ohio were moving in search of a country life-style. Indian Hill of the 1930s revolved around the Camargo Club and the Camargo Hunt. Since his death, much of Peterloon has been divided into housing lots, leaving the neo-Georgian brick house on as an event destination owned by The Peterloon Foundation. The house was designed by Delano and Aldrich of New York, who also designed a five-bedroom stucco cottage nearby, in which the Emery family could live while the Peterloon house was being built.
