Hank Ketcham - Family

Family

Ketcham's first wife Alice Louise Mahar died in 1959 of a drug overdose. Hank and Alice were separated at the time of her death. Ketcham married for a second time to Jo Anne Stevens and moved with her and Dennis to Geneva, Switzerland, where he lived from 1960 to 1977, while still producing Dennis the Menace. This marriage ended in divorce. In 1977, he moved back to the United States and settled in Monterey, California with his third wife the former Rolande Praepost, whom he had married in 1969, and had two children, Scott and Dania. Ketcham and his son Dennis drifted apart, and were estranged for much of Dennis's adult life, as described by Lawrence Van Gelder in The New York Times:

The real-life Dennis was 12 in 1959 when his mother died of a drug overdose. Mr. Ketcham took the boy to live with him in Geneva, where he spent some 20 years before moving back to California in 1977. But Dennis had difficulty with his schooling and was sent to boarding school in Connecticut while Mr. Ketcham remained in Switzerland with his second wife, the former Jo Anne Stevens. The marriage ended in divorce. Dennis Ketcham served in Vietnam, suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and had little contact with his father. "He's living in the East somewhere doing his own thing," Mr. Ketcham said in March. "That's just a chapter that was a short one that closed, which unfortunately happens in some families."