My Uncle Roger, my mom’s little brother by six years, was, when I was growing up, one of the few sane adults in our family of extroverts and drunks.
Born during the year of the first big Wall Street crash in 1929, Roger’s main goal in life was safety. He wanted no surprises. He needed everything running smoothly. If order needed restoring, he would do everything in his power to restore it.
He was all about keeping control, probably because he grew up without a dad, around a pack of women and no shortage of loud chaos. When I was a kid in the car with him, I knew it was my job to buckle my seatbelt and keep quiet. He wasn’t a hardass, he just made it clear he hated anything loud. And loud to him was about the same decibel level of kids yakking at each other.
While I didn’t get his need for quiet, his steady, controlled world was a welcome comfort to my two older sisters and myself. My dad, while loving and emotionally available when sober, was an alcoholic and an unreliable provider. As a kid, I always thought if anything ever happened to my mom, there was always Uncle Roger. I had no doubt he would take care of us if we needed a place to go.
But then, one of my sisters or me had a dream that he died. That possibility shook me up. Without him, I couldn’t see any safety net for we three. We’d be orphans for sure. The good thing was, it was only a bad dream. He was always there for many years, well into our adulthoods. In fact, he was around until a few weeks ago, when he died at 82. He finally lost a nearly three-year battle with ALS.
I always liked being around Uncle Roger because he was always good for a few colorful stories.
One was of Gus, my dad’s older brother. Roger was fond of Gus and my dad, Henry. My dad married Lois, his sister and my mom. They all grew up together in the same neighborhood in Chicago near Wrigley Field. But Gus, as well as my dad and their sisters, were no strangers to high alcohol intake. And one time, Roger reported, Gus spent the night at his house, getting up at one point to pee. It wasn’t until some time later that Roger, still a kid at the time, discovered that Gus had filled up his Boy Scout’s canteen with some personal yellow liquid.
“Threw that in the garbage can,” said Roger, still wincing at the thought.
Roger always admired my dad. My dad served in the Navy in World War II, doing his tour in the South Pacific. And Roger, 12 years younger, followed in his footsteps. He served in the Navy in the early 50s, in Guam. He liked my dad’s humor and admired his creative abilities as a cabinetmaker and professional bass player.
“He can do anything with his hands,” he’d say about my dad, with no small bit of envy.
He told of a job he had as a bricklayer once. It didn’t last long.
“I couldn’t lay bricks in a straight line,” he said. “My wall would have veered into the next lot.”
Roger was always thin, athletic, medium height, auburn hair. He was a clean-cut man with beady brown eyes and a sharp featured, handsome face. He had the deep, resonant voice of a broadcaster, and did some radio announcing while in the Navy. He told one Navy story of reading copy over the air off a piece of paper that a prank-happy buddy decided to light on fire while he read. Roger was a focused guy, and became very determined whenever challenged. He was proud to report that he read through the whole message while the page burned, finishing before it was fully engulfed in flames.
Roger was a picky eater, and coming from a family that liked to cook and eat, he spent a lot of his time refusing repeated offers of food. I remember him more than a few times putting both palms out while saying, “No thanks.” His palms-out “halt” sign was an automatic response for him, his way of keeping a safe distance from things he didn’t like. He wanted nothing to do with cooking and eating fancy meals like those whipped up by my mom or others. His idea of a great dinner was soup and popcorn.
He and his big sister were polar opposites. She believed in home ownership, Roger believed in living in an apartment. She had kids. He never wanted kids. She loved to travel overseas. He wasn’t too wild about leaving the state. She liked Porsches, Audis, Volkswagens, Saabs. He liked Chevys, Fords and Oldsmobiles.
She loved the beach. He hated the beach. The beach at the ocean, he told me once, “Smells like a fish’s armpit.” My mom liked to party. He liked quiet and working crosswords. In fact, once at the beach when we yelled out, goofing around as kids, he told us to keep it down. Which annoyed me. I couldn’t understand it.
Still, he called me Tiger and paid me a buck to clean the sod and mud out of the cleats in his golf shoes.
He and my mom did have some things in common. They both liked nature and loved animals. And they both felt it very important to drive well-maintained, clean cars.
In the late 1940s Uncle Roger moved from Chicago to Burbank to live near his mom and step-dad, Bill Burns. He enrolled in business courses at UCLA and got himself a white and copper two-toned 1955 Chevy. In 1960 he married his first wife, Dottie, a pretty platinum blonde he met at a bus stop.
They lived in a Burbank apartment. Dottie had been a battered wife in a previous marriage. Her ex-husband was an alleged murderer, and she’d lost her kids, don’t know how many, to foster care. She looked at her marriage to Roger as her safe haven from the hellish life she’d lived.
She didn’t have a job, and preferred to sit on the end of their gold silk couch, chain smoke Herbert Tareyton filtered cigarettes, knit, drink tea with cream and sugar in it and watch soap operas – all day long, every day.
I know this because as a kid, when I was 7 or 8, a couple of times in the summer, my sisters and I took a Greyhound down from Tahoe to visit Roger and Dottie as our great adventure vacation away from home. I’d be bored in the apartment as she knitted and smoked and watched TV. So she took me along when she got her hair done, and when she went to the doctor. I waited for seemingly hours on end at the hair salon. Then I waited at the doctor’s office, then waited while she shoe shopped, where she flirted with a fawning shoe salesman. He couldn’t help fondling her bare foot with the delicate gold anklet on it. By then I was nearly comatose from the agonizing hours of stone cold boredom.
She must have felt guilty, because after this string of errands finally ended, she took me to a toy store and said I could get anything I wanted.
I was overwhelmed by the possibilities. It took me a long time to make a choice. But she waited for me. I got a mini plastic girder set to make little office buildings, bridges and streets, little metal cars and a small shiny palomino horse with a plastic Western saddle that snapped on under the horse’s belly.
After the thrill of playing with those distractions wore off, I again found myself watching her smoke, knit, and drink her creamed and sugared tea while watching TV. I was so bored I asked her if she would teach me to knit, so I could knit a saddle blanket for my plastic horse. She didn’t bat an eye, and taught me the machinations of needles, yarn, knitting and purling. When my sisters heard of my knitting foray, they looked at me oddly. Apparently they thought my learning to knit wasn’t what normal boys did. I really didn’t care. I was bored, needed something to do. I knitted a miniature orange saddle blanket, and it turned out pretty nice. But that was enough for me. I hung up the knitting needles and yarn for good.
Roger took us to Pacific Ocean Park, a carnival with rides built on a pier at an LA beach. And he took me to Bat Night at a Dodger game. Every kid was given a bat, which they’ve long since stopped doing for understandable reasons. And of course, the bats were mercilessly pounded into the stadium concrete all game long by the sugar-riddled hyper kids, each dying to get enough room to really swing their new bats like the big leaguers do. Poor Uncle Roger probably considered the ceaseless pinging of bats banging down on concrete during Bat Night to be one of the worst experiences of his life.
He took us to the zoo in his brand new 1963 Chevy Impala, his company car that was replaced by a new model every two years. Dottie or Roger would take photos of us on these outings and Dottie would write witty captions on the backs of the photos in her neat penmanship. She’d make merry with comments when one of our heads were cut off by the edge of the shot. On the back of one unflattering photo of herself she wrote: “Mae West still trying.”
Coming home tired from his sales job, Roger bristled when he found out Dottie hadn’t bothered to make the bed. He needed order, and an unmade bed was a vexing sign of chaos to him. So, still in his shirt and tie, he’d fume and make the bed himself.
Once he and Dottie visited us in Tahoe for Christmas, and rented a vintage cabin with a large stone fireplace. They joined my parents, sisters and me on a road trip to a mountain top ski area that for some reason had some caged zoo animals on display: A loudly whooping chimpanzee and a disinterested lion.
It was sunny but cool with some snow still on the ground, and my fashion conscious mom wore a snug fitting lavender après ski outfit. Even though she didn’t ski much, with her long legs, bouffant hairdo and Jackie Kennedy sunglasses, she looked like she could pose for a magazine shot. Instead, as she walked past the lion’s cage, the lion turned around and shot a rocket-propelled stream of hot piss out of the cage. It arched about 20 feet, and landed with a direct splash on my mom and her outfit.
This sent her younger brother, Uncle Roger, into howling, catatonic laughter. He saw the surprised look on my mom’s face -- the post lion pee shot reaction -- and lost it. We kids weren’t sure if we should laugh or not. My mom was a tough customer and we didn’t want to incur her well known wrath. She didn’t seem to know what to do. It was one of the few times I can recall when my mom, who usually had something to say about everything, was speechless.
Roger howled mercilessly, and when he finally got his breath back, he blurted, “What are you going to tell the cleaners???!!!” then continued with his hyena-like laugh-jag.
Roger was a big fan of potty humor, which as a kid, I agreed, was incredibly hilarious. He once wrote the following in a neighbor’s joke sign-in book hanging on a string with a pen next to their toilet:
“House Rules: Anything weighing over six pounds must be let down with a rope.”
One Christmas card that Roger passed around showed Santa’s reindeer taking a smoke break on Christmas eve, standing on their hind legs like men, leaning against the big sleigh, sneering. The caption had one of them saying: “Here comes fatty and his big bag of crap.” My uncle laughed and laughed over that one.
Once while on a drive with him I told him how funny Cheech and Chong were. I said a line off one of their albums: “Happyhappyhappyhappy, aint too proud to bitch, onlymymamalovesme -- but she could be jivin’ too -- please welcome, Blind Melon Chitlin!”
He looked over at me, and broke up.
Roger and Dottie hosted Christmas at their rented Tahoe cabin, and Roger bought a Christmas tree so tall and wide it wouldn’t fit through the door of the cabin. This unexpected roadblock rattled Roger. He sprung into action. He got a saw, and with fierce determination, crawled on his belly and frantically sawed off the bigger lower branches, grunting and writhing under the tree in the doorway. We kids just watched, stunned by his intensity. Roger soon freed the tree from the door and once it was set up in the cabin’s living room, he happily turned things over to Dottie. As I remember, he was exhausted from the ordeal.
Dottie bought mountains of presents with Roger’s dough and showed us kids how to string popcorn and cranberries as garlands for the tree. She stuffed all our stockings with myriad little gifts that, to us, were magical. I got an ant farm, and still remember the miniature keychain pipe I got. For some reason, I was oddly fascinated by blowing air through it as I walked through all the debris of opened presents in my PJs, which had silly-ass slippers sewn into the PJ bottoms. My sister Lauren was ecstatic when she got a live white parakeet as a present. She named it Tootie after some goofy TV show screw-up cop.
Uncle Roger was unnerved by the mayhem of ripped open boxes and torn wrapping paper strewn everywhere around the tree on Christmas morning. He wanted none of it, and quickly made it his task to crumple up armfuls of cardboard and wrapping paper and throw them into the fire. It wasn’t long until he had it all feeding flames roaring halfway up the chimney. But because of Uncle Roger, the cabin floor reappeared, free of clutter. And for him, at least for the time being, order had been restored.
One time Uncle Roger came to Tahoe to ski, but on the night before he was to drive back to his LA job, it snowed a couple of feet. His luxury Chevy wasn’t too nimble in snow and icy conditions and it was parked at the top of our steep 100-foot driveway, buried under freshly fallen snow. He would have to back the Chevy down the driveway, then hope its tire chains would provide enough traction to make it up our steep street and over many miles of ice and snow-slicked roads leading out of the Sierra.
He panicked. He couldn’t stand the idea of being late back to work. All he knew was there was a whole lot of snow everywhere. There was only one thing he could think to do: Start shoveling.
He got a snow shovel and attacked the enemy, the snow, a man possessed. Snow flew off his shovel as if he were moving in fast forward. We all watched him from the kitchen window, but didn’t think there was much we could do to help. We weren’t in any hurry to shovel snow. We knew when it snowed this much, you better not plan on being anywhere in a hurry. Plus, we didn’t have to be back at work 500 miles away the next day. But somehow, Uncle Roger willed his path out of the snowbound mountains and drove back to LA. I think he was a day late. Which in itself was impressive. That was the thing about Uncle Roger. He got focused when the going was out of control and on the verge of making him blow a gasket. His focus was tempered in his steel will. It was his go-to weapon to deal with the chaos of life.
He divorced Dottie in 1966 and set about reinventing himself as an eligible bachelor in a Burbank singles apartment. He subscribed to Playboy magazine, equipped his bathroom with a tall can of Right Guard spray deodorant and a hair dryer, and occasionally even smoked cigars in his living room.
One summer afternoon it was family day at his apartment and kids were allowed to use the pool. I was 11 or 12. I told Roger I knew how to swim. He told me to swim across the pool for him and he’d watch. Of course I wanted to impress him. So I swam as fast as I could, wind-milling through the water, splashing and kicking violently. When I made it to the other side, completely winded, he looked down from poolside, laughing. “You just killed two people!” he said.
Later, a drunken, happy go lucky neighbor of Roger's was reeling around poolside and came up to us. Roger introduced me and quickly edged away. A few minutes later the guy saw me again away from the pool and for some reason – maybe he had a thing for little boys -- gave me a dollar. I told Roger about it and he had me hand over the dollar. As we walked away from the pool, Roger went up behind the guy and stuffed the buck in his back pocket. “He’ll find it in a few days and wonder where it came from,” said Roger as we walked out.
Roger was a thoughtful, loyal friend. But he hated public displays of affection. They creeped him out. When I graduated from college, my family threw a party for me and he attended. He was standing off by himself, looking like he would rather be anywhere else. My girlfriend at the time said to me, “Go give him a hug!”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Aw c’mon,” she said. “Show him you love him!”
I knew that was a bad idea, because I knew my Uncle Roger hated that kind of thing.
But I’d had a few beers, so I thought, well hell, I do love my uncle, so I AM gonna give him a hug. As I approached him with my arms out, he stood bolt upright, his arms rigidly at his sides, terrified as I hugged him. His scared face told me he thought I was insane, capable of any number of dangerous acts. I awkwardly pulled away.
He once told me of a party he went to that turned out to be a disaster. As he was coming up the walkway, he said all he heard a desperate shriek: “Someone get the dog!” as he saw a big German Shepard bolting toward him. My uncle instinctively crouched and threw an uppercut which caught the dog right on the nose. The dog was seriously hurt, blood everywhere, they had to call a dog ambulance. The owner, horrified and infuriated by what had taken place, walked up and declared to Roger that he was going to punch him for what he’d done. Roger, adrenaline flowing, said if he did, that would be a bad idea. Because he’d sue. That made the man think again, and he cooled his jets. Roger went home, feeling tortured by the ordeal. He loved animals. But not those he thought were about to tear his face off. He’d felt threatened, and did what he had to do. No doubt about it, when his back was against the wall, Uncle Roger was one wolverine who was perfectly willing to throw down, all out. It was just a bad idea to mess with him.
This was especially true if he was the victim of someone breaking the rules. He had no tolerance for people that assumed rules didn’t apply to them. He told me that once on a flight before smoking was banned in all seats, he asked a guy who lit up next to him to put out his cigarette, since they were in a no smoking section. The guy just kept smoking as if nothing had been said. Roger, getting upset even as he recounted the story, asked the stewardess to please tell the guy to put out the cigarette. She didn’t want to do it and clearly hoped Roger would just drop it. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not with my Uncle Roger.
Then Roger said to the stewardess with a quavering low tone that barely disguised a man on the verge of murdering someone with a spatula: “You really better have him put it out, or else he’s going to eat it!”
His declaration was convincing. The man hurriedly stubbed out the cigarette.
Uncle Roger also told me the story of hiking with buddies out in the wilderness somewhere with heavy backpacks and new fishing poles, when on a cliff side trail, they realized they were lost. This kind of out of control scenario really irked my uncle. He was driven closer to the edge, literally, when the guy hiking in front of him said they needed to turn around and go back. His sudden and awkward attempt to turn around on the narrow, treacherous path caused his fishing pole and backpack to get tangled in the brush on the uphill side of the trail. This meant to Roger that things were rapidly spinning out of control. He was just about to lose it. Then he lost it. He had a sudden solution. He pulled the tangled fishing pole off the guy’s backpack in front of him, gathered it with his own new pole pulled from his own backpack, and in a raging fury, tossed the collected gear into the abyss below.
They eventually found their way back, Roger no doubt fuming the whole way. Don’t know if he made good on the tossed poles.
And Uncle Roger couldn’t stand it if his car didn’t run right. If he detected the smallest irregularity, he’d drive the car straight to the shop. He once took his car to a mechanic in Tahoe. Roger knew the car’s timing was off by how it sounded on the road. He was impressed with the mechanic, who replaced his spark plug wires. His work left his car running “perfect,” sounding to Roger just the way he knew it should.
In Burbank, he told me he once took his car to a mechanic for some unknown problem he’d heard. He took it back several times, each time the mechanic telling him the fix was something different. But he still heard the problem and would take it back. The last time he took the car in, the mechanic said it was the same problem he'd told Roger on the first visit.
“Full circle,” said Uncle Roger, with a pained look. Not sure if the original problem was ever fixed.
When his Ford was stolen out of the garage of his apartment, he bought a new 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass for $7,000. That was the same car he drove more than 30 years. He kept it in top condition, filled it up and ran it through the car wash every week, and put 177,000 miles on it. He re-upholstered it with the original fabric. When he couldn’t drive it anymore because of his ALS, he sold it to a collector for $4,700.
Years ago, I stayed at his place a week or so while transferring to a Southern California university. I’d gone through a rough patch and he saw I was moping. He didn’t judge me. He just said, “What’s important is what you do from here forward.” That was what my uncle did. He helped out. His gentle words stayed with me and got me to move on.
While I was staying with him, he drove me to the nearby neighborhood where my family lived when I was a baby. I only remembered it mainly through old movies and photos. He seemed to sense beforehand that I would be curious to see the old family place.
During that visit we shot the bull for the first time, man to man. He told me his favorite writer was Ralph Waldo Emerson. When the subject turned to making a living, he said he’d thought about going into journalism, but that it didn’t pay enough.
And he told me the hardest thing about having a job was getting a boss you could get along with. Apparently his boss did something to him that he really didn’t like while he was a salesman at an aerospace firm. He went to the big boss and told him to either get rid of his boss or he was gone.
Don’t know the outcome of that. But he eventually became a self-employed investment adviser. And I’m sure it was because he didn’t want to work for anybody but himself. And over the years, I learned Uncle Roger was right. An A-hole boss makes any job not so great.
When my parents were getting close to a divorce, Roger was my mom’s counselor. She’d phone him and he’d listen, offering his thoughts. His was the steady voice of reason, a calming influence to my mom as she tried to cope with my dad’s alcoholism and threats to kill himself if she divorced him.
She eventually met the local city manager and divorced my dad. After she met John, who became my step-dad, Roger joked, “I didn’t get any calls from her anymore.”
But he was always the go-to guy of the family. He set up Uncle Leonard, his Aunt Esther’s surviving husband, at Leisure World in Seal Beach after Uncle Leonard retired from his job in Chicago. Because of Roger, Uncle Leonard lived out his life in style. He got a girlfriend, and was glad to have the Southern California change from his lonely life in Chicago.
Roger also looked in on his step-dad, Bill Burns, who lived to be 97. The last husband of Roger’s late mom, Bill lived alone in his old age. And Roger also watched over Uncle Walter, his mom’s younger brother, who lived nearby. Uncle Walter lived to 95.
In 1974, while living in a Burbank singles apartment named Oakwood, Uncle Roger met Joan. Little did he know then, when he was 45, that she would be by his side until he died nearly 38 years later. He was at a Sunday night poolside barbecue with a girlfriend and noticed Joan, an attractive strawberry blonde, sitting nearby. He quickly dropped his girlfriend and started taking Joan out on tennis dates. But he didn’t have the patience to teach her how to play.
She told him, “You can teach me to play tennis, or date me, but you can’t do both.” So he chose the latter. They didn’t live together until 1985. Still, not wanting to move too fast, he waited until Valentine’s Day 1999 to marry her.
He came down with symptoms of ALS in November of 2009. The disease slowly takes away control of the body. It forced him down a terrifying path of physical decline. For nearly three years it withered him, a perfectly healthy man his whole life, before taking his last breath. Joan stood by him through the horror and agony of it all, giving him all the comfort she could, while they both awaited the inescapable outcome.
When I asked her how she was doing while caring for him, she was resigned to deal with what fate had delivered.
“What are you going to do?” she’d say. She couldn’t do anything else but care for Roger for as long as he needed it. If ever there was a definition of love, that’s it. He, no doubt, would have done the same for her. But he couldn’t bring himself to say “I love you,” to Joan, after she'd make the declaration to him. Instead, he’d reply, “Thank you.”
“I know you love me Roger,” she’d say. “Aren’t you ever going to tell me?”
“Maybe.”
It wasn't until his hospice care that he declared he didn’t believe in God, which was news to Joan. She asked why he’d insisted they get married in a church, but never got an answer. He was touched by final days visits by my two sisters, emotionally telling Joan afterward that they really cared about him. I wasn’t able to visit.
The last time I saw my Uncle Roger at my sister’s house, he was physically uncomfortable and needed a lot of sleep. But I got a photo of him and Joan hugging, where he gave his patented silly grin. I made a point of telling him how I treasured all the times I had with him as a kid. He looked at me, deadpan and said, “I think you’re trying to tell me I’m a nice guy or something.”
Even compliments seemed to bug him a little.
When the end finally came, Joan posted the news to her Facebook friends:
“My beloved husband and companion of nearly 38 years passed away in his sleep from ALS this morning at 6 a.m. He was the best friend anyone could have and I will miss him forever.”
So will all his family and friends. Uncle Roger was a keeper.
