Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Happy Birthday, Uncle Jack!


My Uncle Jack was born 102 years ago today. He died in 1987 at the age of 80. He was the third of four children in the family where my mother was the youngest, three years his junior. Born near Philadelphia, he lived his entire life in the state of Pennsylvania. In his later years he also owned a winter home in Tequesta, Florida. He earned an M.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania around 1930 and set up medical practice in the little town of Annville, between Hershey and Lebanon, where I believe he was also the campus doctor at Lebanon Valley College for a time. He ended up marrying his nurse, my Aunt Ruth, who hailed from Pittsburgh.

During my senior year of high school, my mother died at the age of 47 after a long bout with cancer. I was valedictorian of my class that year and received a one-year, tuition-only scholarship from the small school district, but most of the money my parents had tried to save for my college years went to pay for my mother’s hospital bills and funeral expenses. The summer after I graduated, I traveled all the way from Texas to Pennsylvania on a bus to visit various members of my mother’s family I had met four years earlier. While I was there, Uncle Jack presented me with a check for $750.00 (a lot of money in 1958), enough to pay for the dormitory and cafeteria fees and all of my personal expenses for the whole year. He also gave me a plane ticket so that I could stay a little longer and return home on something other than a bus. (“Now I know why they call it Greyhound,” my mother’s sister said after one trip, “it’s because you feel like a dog when you get off.”) It was my first plane ride, and I traveled on a DC-3 from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, where I changed to a DC-6 and flew on to Fort Worth. It was heady stuff for a kid of seventeen who lived in a house without indoor plumbing.

Years passed.

When our children were small and Mrs. RWP and I were living in south Florida, Uncle Jack and Aunt Ruth flew to Fort Lauderdale to go on a Caribbean cruise out of Port Everglades. They invited us to meet them aboard ship before they embarked so that they could meet their great-niece and two great-nephews, and we went. I presented them with a bottle of champagne I had won in a contest on a big jet plane while returning from a business trip for IBM.

More years passed. Each family is different. Some families live close together and gather frequently. Our family never gathered at all and lived hundreds of miles apart. But if we didn’t see each other for ten years, we still loved one another and were glad it hadn’t been twenty.

A couple of years after my Aunt Ruth died, Uncle Jack married for a second time to Aunt Harriet, the widow of a doctor friend of theirs. Although we had never met, I spoke with her on the telephone after his death and told her how much Uncle Jack had meant to me and what he had done to help me through my first year of college. She said that she had received calls of a similar nature from several other people also, and that she hadn’t known he had helped so many because he never spoke of it. He just did what he thought was right and didn't look for applause.

Here’s Uncle Jack and my mother around the time he graduated from medical school.

9 comments:

  1. 1. i worked for univac from 1967 to 1970,,,2...my mom died when she was 57 years old of lung cancer...3....i won a radio{not champayne] in 1964....4 i NEVER went to medical school

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very interesting man. My son is like that, always helping people and never talking about it. People say things to me about how much they appreciate him doing such and such, and I wouldn't have ever known if they hadn't mentioned it. He's also very tall, as it appears your uncle was. Thanks for telling us about him.
    Your mother was very pretty.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Every Family needs an Uncle like him...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Everybody should have an uncle Jack.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks for the kind thoughts, Rosezilla (Tracie), Reamus (Michael), and Dr. John (Dr. John)!

    ReplyDelete
  6. What a wonderful generous man he was. I'm glad you had him in your family.

    ReplyDelete
  7. What a great man, your uncle. That is how to leave an imprint on the world and he did it with such grace and meaning.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Egghead (Vonda) and Ruth, I appreciate your stopping by, and I agree completely with what you wrote.

    ReplyDelete

<b>Always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion</b>

We are bombarded daily by abbreviations in everyday life, abbreviations that are never explained, only assumed to be understood by everyone...