Saturday, 3/3/18
On this day when we look back on
the Prodigal Son, I ask you to forgive me for seeing my older brother as a
prodigal son. Frank was born in 1915, and that made him eighteen in 1928, the
year the Deprssion got underway.
Frank went to work, filling
orders from a warehouse for eighteen dollars a week. It wasn't enough to let him
take a girl to a movie.I feel especially sorry for Frank on Sunday afternoons.
My mother, after getting ten of us fed liked turning to the classical
music station. As much as she liked that music, it made Frank sick to his young
soul.
When the war came along, and
Frank was stationed with men who were heavy drinkers. He went along with that,
so that after the war the heavy drinking had taken over his life.
In 1955 Frank swore that if I
paid his bus fare to California he would stop drinking. I didn't believe him,
but my Dad did. He put Frank on a bus for L.A., and through the last seventeen
years of Frank's life, he never took another drink. When I got word that his
Alcoholic Anonymous group was having a good-bye ceremony for him, I flew out
there.
For over an hour, one man or
woman after another took the platform to tell us his story of how Frank had saved his or her
life.
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