2001-06-16 - 11:59 p.m.

Uncle Frank

I'm going to try a little experiment today. Let's see if it works.

Today I got a call from my stock broker, it was estate-related stuff. There is a transfer of funds that is not running as smoothly as it should.

This broker works for the same firm that my father used to. In fact, he wound up taking over a lot of Dad's accounts when he retired - including mine. He also took over my uncle's account, but that was ten years before Dad retired.

Dad was acting very weird toward Uncle Frank. He'd pretend to be busy or out of the office whenever he called. Finally, Uncle Frank got tired of trying to deal with a broker who wouldn't talk to him, so he switched his account.

This seems like a hell of a way for Dad to treat his own brother, but I don't doubt the story. Lilac happened to be working for Dad at the time, and she cheerfully fed me all the details. Dad was very weird about family things anyway, and his standard procedure for handling things that bothered him was to ignore them.

So my uncle moved his account to this broker.

What was interesting about this is that, apropos of nothing, the broker proposed another theory of why Uncle Frank was the "black sheep" of the family. Apparently as a youngster he was a mischief maker, so he was sent off to school at a military academy.

Okay, that's an interesting fact. How did my broker get a hold of it? I have no idea.

After I hung up the phone a couple of things occurred to me. First, I know for a fact that my father also went to high school at a military academy. Was he a discipline problem, too? I don't think so.

Then I remembered something else: their father (my grandfather) was an assistant superintendent of schools here in Frown Town. It must have looked a little dubious for him to be sending his kids to a private school. But then again back in the 1930s maybe all rich people sent their kids away to school and nobody thought twice about it.

Sad to say there isn't anyone alive now who can answer my questions about this.

I have so many conflicting impressions of my uncle, that instead of trying to draw conclusions, I'm just going to tell what I know, and what I remember. This may wind up sounding a little disjointed.

As a kid I remember Uncle Frank coming up to visit from time to time, and sleeping on the hide-a-bed couch in the back room. My mom was never very happy to see him - she used to complain that he had a "hollow leg" and was constantly emptying out the refrigerator. "Eating us out of house and home" was the phrase I heard a lot.

Even as a child I was able to sense the chill of disapproval whenever Uncle Frank's name came up. He was considered an "odd duck" and the black sheep of the family.

Of course, looking back I can see that our family was no great shakes, and by "black sheep" they meant "not adhering to the soul-deadening American values of the 40s, 50s and early 60s."

Uncle Frank wasn't married, and was what was called a "confirmed bachelor." It took me a while to figure out what that meant.

He lived down in New York City, and was a clerk at Bonwit Teller - a big department store that went out of business some years ago. The fact that he wasn't married and wasn't in some big social-climbing job marked him as unusual in the "keep-up-with-the-Joneses" frenzy 50s and 60s.

There were a couple of explanations for Uncle Frank's oddness.

During World War II he'd actually seen action in Europe. This was quite different to what happened to his older brother, my father. Dad was an instructor in the Army Air Corps and spent two years keeping the Nazis out of Cleveland, Ohio.

Uncle Frank was caught in the Battle of the Bulge - Germany's bloody last-ditch attempt to turn the tide of the war. He never talked about what he experienced there, but all agreed he'd returned from the war "a changed man."

Gee, take a teenager and put him in the middle of a chaotic bloodbath, and it might change him. Psychologists, take note!

Some years later, he was privy to a much more intimate tragedy, and that may have taken its toll, too.

Uncle Frank was driving the car in the accident that killed his mother, my paternal grandmother.

They were struck by a drunk driver while on the Taconic State Parkway. Uncle Frank was unconscious and trapped in the car. My grandmother got out of the car to direct traffic, when she was struck by another car and killed instantly.

Continued, tomorrow