Uncle Bill

...every family has one!

Every family has an Uncle Bill. Mine would have been 95 years old today. He died ten years ago and I still miss him.

My Uncle Bill grew up on the south side of Chicago in the 1930’s and 40’s in a rough and tumble Polish Catholic neighborhood. He and his brother Cliff came to Atlanta to train as electricians after a stint as Marines in the Korean War.

He and Aunt Betty (my mother’s sister) met in a bar in Atlanta – likely the Clairmont Lounge on Ponce de Leon Ave. Their wedding was at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in downtown Atlanta in 1954. I was the little flower girl in a yellow dress, dropping rose petals one at a time down the aisle. “Keep moving, Cheryl,” my Aunt Betty whispered as she walked behind me on my father’s arm.

He and Aunt Betty were the same age and they were true Sinatra-era young adults with booze and cigarettes and poker and loud dance parties every weekend on the parquet floor in their basement rec room. He was also a brilliant roller-skater and I rode around our town rink sitting on his foot as we blasted by my terrified mother on the sidelines.

My Uncle Bill was always the first to try new things, from skiing to boating to flying to computers to video production. He bought a little Cessna airplane when we lived in Toccoa and would fly up from Atlanta and buzz the house so our entire family could hop in the car and drive out to the grass airfield there. Once he took us flying; it was my first airplane ride at nine or ten. He worked on the Alaska pipeline for a year. “Not much to do but work, sleep, eat steak and send money home.” A lot of it. They moved to Florida for a year and lived on a boat.

Aunt Betty and Uncle Bill lived in a series of apartments at first but like us, they joined the ranch house boom in 1960 and bought a little house in Gresham Park in southeast Atlanta. We loved going there to visit. Much later when I was a real estate agent, I was down on Belleau Lane and found the house again. Houses there were selling for $25,000 during the Recession which is probably what Uncle Bill paid for it in 1960.

Aunt Betty and Uncle Bill both loved children, but none more so than Uncle Bill. He claimed that he proudly taught me the deck of cards when I was three and reveled in being with me and my brother. Uncle Bill was a jokester and once he talked Mama into allowing Morris and me to ride the train to Atlanta from Toccoa. She put us on the train and the conductor promised to look after us. It was a straight shot south to Atlanta. I was ten and Morris was eight. It was great fun watching the towns go by and being on a grownup trip, just the two of us. When we got to Atlanta to Brookwood Station, Uncle Bill was there to meet us. I saw him on the platform smoking and waiting in his jacket and work pants. He was a union electrician and we knew we were safe with him. We walked to the car and drove to their house in Gresham Park. When we got there and greeted Aunt Betty, Uncle Bill called Mama as he had promised, only when she answered he said, “I thought Cheryl and Morris were coming today but I didn’t see them at the station.” We could hear her through the phone in a panic, shouting for Daddy. Uncle Bill laughed and said “They’re fine, they are right here. Say hi to your Mama, Cheryl.”

The big draw for going to Atlanta (since Daddy hated to drive a long way) was that when we walked in the front door Uncle Bill would call out, “Rex, how about a highball?” To which he would reply “I’d love it.” My brother and my cousins and I would circle the room sipping whatever was on offer and turning up our noses at beer, Scotch and Bourbon. Everybody laughed and consequently liquor had no real allure for us for a long time. Above their basement bar was a revolving Pabst Blue Ribbon bar light and it went with them to their next house in Gwinnett County as part of the 1970’s white flight, and fifty years later when I sold the house, I took the PBR light down and gave it to a friend in Chastain Park with a similar bar in his basement. I can still go and visit it. Sociable does not begin to describe Uncle Bill. He loved to grill on the back deck and nothing pleased him more than cooking steaks and burgers and serving them to his family and friends. “Who wants rare and who wants burnt?” Everyone was welcome at their table and Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners and summertime barbeques were usually raucous events with a dozen people or more around the table as Uncle Bill held court on whatever topic interested him that day.

My father and Uncle Bill disagreed about many things, especially unions. My father was management and Uncle Bill was a union foreman. He often laughed and bragged about sleeping on the job and it irritated my father no end. Uncle Bill and Aunt Betty drank every weekend until Aunt Betty called a halt for herself but both of them chained smoked throughout their lives. Everybody knew that if you went to their house, you had to change clothes when you got home and throw everything in the washing machine to get the smoke smell out.

Uncle Bill was loud and opinionated but he laughed a lot, too, and he loved me and my brother, Morris, like we were his own. Aunt Betty and Uncle Bill tried and tried to have a baby and once they had a little girl who only lived a day or so. She had Hyaline Membrane Disease, like JFK’s baby and like Aunt Betty’s baby brother who died at age two. We never discussed it but once but Aunt Betty said that during his Korean War year, Uncle Bill was a radio man and had to relay an order to wipe out an entire Korean village, including the women and children. He felt guilty about it for the rest of his life, she said, and worried that God was punishing him for that action by not allowing them to have a child of their own.

Uncle Bill was larger than life and ordered his family around constantly including their adopted son, Donnie. Aunt Betty resisted the control because she was strong in her own right. She was a survivor like him and they constantly tussled but stuck together for sixty-two years. Donnie did whatever Uncle Bill said, including joining the Army which was not a success. Uncle Bill set Donnie up in a picture- framing business but that failed, too, during the recession of 2008. Uncle Bill refused to accept that Donnie had learning disabilities, that he was not perfect. Not surprisingly, after Uncle Bill died of cancer, Donnie lasted only two more years before committing suicide so he could be with Uncle Bill again.

By the time they died and Aunt Betty was living in an Assisted Living facility, I listed their house and was there one day in the empty den with the big fireplace, the scene of so much happiness through the years but now a shell that still smelled of smoke and sadness. I had a clear impression of Donnie and Uncle Bill standing there with their hands in their pockets, together but waiting for Aunt Betty to join them. She did, soon enough, during Covid – not of Covid but of old age at 89.

After Uncle Bill died, she called me and asked exactly where in the Bible it said that she would see Uncle Bill again in heaven. I said I’d call her back and looked over the most likely passages like the one where Jesus tells the thief on the cross next to him that he would be with him that day in paradise. I did not think Aunt Betty would be impressed with that one!

I finally told her that the Biblical record while not specific about people being reunited with their loved ones in heaven, was very clear that now we see through a mirror darkly but then face to face. And that other passages point to fellowship with the Lord and all the saints in heaven. Blah blah blah, she said.

After he retired Uncle Bill volunteered at his Catholic church and was always available to help those in need. He was exasperating, funny, angry, helpful, kind, loving, opinionated and arrogant, a father and a faithful husband, a grand uncle. Happy birthday, Uncle Bill!