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          William Archer (Archie) Hess was a Franklintown Borough businessman and integral part of the community for forty years. 

           He was born in 1912 into a farming family in Belair, MD. He made his way to New Oxford, PA where he also farmed. There he and his first wife had seven children. After the death of two children and a divorce from his wife he came to Franklintown Borough to open a Sinclair gas station. 

           It wasn’t long before he was looking for some companionship and found it through an ad in a lonely-hearts column in a Baltimore paper.  It was there that he met his second wife Margaret. She moved to Franklintown Borough with three of her six children and they made a life together until his death 30 years later.   

          His youngest step-daughter, Debbie Stuck, isn’t sure who placed the ad, put she said she doubted it was her mother, “Sometimes she seemed embarrassed by how they met,” said Stuck, but she’s glad they did meet. “Archie was the only father I ever knew,” and she remembers him as being a kind and generous man.  

          He extended credit to everyone,” she said. In fact, when he died in 1995, the family was quite surprised how much he was still owed.

           Stuck’s older brother, Ben Wasielevski, also remembers his step-dad as a generous, gentle and religious man. He was in his late teens when the family moved up to Franklintown Borough and he didn’t stay too long. He returned to visit and help out with the garage when Archie got cancer. He’s now living in the family home on Stoney Run Road since the death of his mother just a year ago  

          Stuck also remembers helping out at the gas station. When she was small, she and her mother would walk to clean the station once a week. When she was older, she would take care of the entire operation if Archie was away.   

          “I hated that,” she said, “Especially checking someone’s oil.”   

          But she has fond memories of mornings at the station where the older men of the community would gather over the coffee Archie provided and eat sandwiches from the hot sandwich machine he had.  

           “That’s where they’d go to get all the gossip,” she remembered. 

          The station sold bread, juice, milk, cigarettes, and candy. And after Shives, the borough’s grocery store closed, Hess’s was the only place to go for groceries without going into Dillsburg.  

          Stuck said her father always loved the carnival at the fire hall and gave generously to it. She thinks it just fine that there’s now a carnival in the park named after her father. 

           “It touches my heart that the borough named the park after him,” said Stuck. Even thought she now lives in Perry County. She plans to attend at least one night.  

           Archie's Gas station was a destination, not only for automotive work, but for snacks and sodas.   

           Archie was so beloved by the Franklintown Community that he was actually elected as a Borough official despite not being a resident of the Borough.  He never took office as he was not eligible.  

          Franklintown Borough purchased the garage and land from Mrs. Hess and agreed to name the park in his honor.