Sunday, January 13, 2019

Happy birthday, Uncle Jack!

[Editor's note: This post, first published in 2009, has been updated to be current and includes some additional material. --RWP]

My Uncle Jack was born 112 years ago today in 1907. 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 received an M.D. degree from Hahnemann (now the Drexel University College of Medicine) in Philadelphia 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 our 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. 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 (his sister) around the time he graduated from medical school.


Uncle Jack and Aunt Ruth had one child, Jack Jr., whom I met when I was in high school and he was a student at Gettysburg College. Jack Jr. married Sylvia F., a local girl from Hershey. They had twin daughters, Lisa Anne and Anne Louise, and three years later another daughter, Linda Sue. Today these ladies, Uncle Jack's grandchildren, are all in their fifties. Lisa lives in Seattle, Anne lives in New Mexico, and Linda has spent the past several months traipsing around Europe. Although I have never met any of them, my first cousins once removed, I am grateful that Facebook can give me a few glimpses into their lives.

6 comments:

  1. A lovely family story. You show that the feelings are close even if the bodies aren't.

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    1. Thank you, Emma I hadn't thought of that possibility, but you are right.

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  2. What a good man he was. $750 in 1958 was indeed a lot of money - around $6,500 in today's money!...I think it is pretty sad that so many families are long distance nowadays.

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    1. Yokshire Pudding, my first-ever real job in 1960 paid $140 USD per week, and that seemed like a small fortune at the time.

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  3. It is so nice to have family. You are so blessed to have your children & grandchildren, as well as Uncle Jack's offspring. Being the only child of a single mom, I was not blessed with much family and envy those who were.

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    1. Hilltop (Pam), I never really felt that I "had family" because we were in Texas and everybody else was in either Iowa or Pennsylvania, and in those days nobody traveled much. By the time I was 14 I had met only one aunt an one cousin. All the aunts and uncles and cousins are gone now, and I hadn't seen a cousin in 55 years. The ones left are children of two of my first cousins cousins, whom I know only through their Facebook pages. My four step-siblings, on the other hand, grew up with ten aunts, ten uncles, and 22 first cousins all living within half and hour of each other. I felt cheated somehow.

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

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