William Jefferson Blythe Jr., father of Bill Clinton, died before the future U.S. president was born.
William Jefferson Blythe Jr. (February 27, 1918–May 17, 1946) was the father of U.S. President Bill Clinton, Sharon Lee Blythe , and Leon Ritzenthaler.
Born in Sherman, Texas, he married Adele Gash shortly before his eighteenth birthday, in December 1935. They had one son, Leon, who took the surname of his stepfather Charles Ritzenthaler after Gash and Blythe divorced.
Blythe married his first wife's sister, Faye Gash, in 1940. This marriage produced Sharon Lee Blythe, later Pettijohn.
He married for a third time on 3 September 1943, to Virginia Dell Cassidy . He served in the US Army during the Second World War, and was posted in Italy. After the war he worked as a traveling salesman, and his son William Jefferson Blythe III was born in August 1946.
Three months before his son's birth, however, Blythe lost control of his Buick on U.S. Highway 60 outside of Sikeston, Missouri while traveling from Chicago to Hope, Arkansas. He drowned in 3 feet of water in a drainage ditch and died. Virginia Blythe remarried to Roger Clinton in 1950, and the future President later took his stepfather's surname.
He is buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Hope, Arkansas, USA.
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