Everybody should have a big brother like my brother Pete.
He was my parents’ second son, born in ‘46. Over the next fifteen years, they blessed him with three more brothers and four sisters. Why, in God’s name, would two rational people produce nine kids? Let’s be honest: reason had little to do with it. So, there we were: Phil, Pete, Jud, Betsy, Kate, Tony, Margaret, Clem, and Martha. That’s right: I have a brother named Clem.
Large families have two tribes – the big kids and the little kids. Pete was the odd man out among the big kids. The little kids loved him.
Teenage Pete would drive Kate, Margret, Clem, and me to Dairy Queen. He’d buy us nickel cones. Always vanilla-only vanilla-never chocolate-just vanilla. When things got drippy, he’d help us by taking the cone, biting the top off, and handing it back. Since this was the only time anyone took us to DQ, we accepted the help – although, it would have been nice to finish your cone without any help once in a while.
When I was seven, I drove with my three older brothers to a snooty record store in Lake Forest, Illinois, a very snooty suburb. As we walked into the store, Pete said, “Hey, Tony. I tell you what, if you smoke a cigarette in the store, I’ll buy you an ice cream cone.” I looked like a member of the Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath. I was filthy and wore ratty hand-me-down clothes. Pete pictured my disgusting little self smoking among those rich customers and found it hilarious. I smoked a Camel. The staff and customers were traumatized. Pete was over the moon.
Pete showed us how to have fun despite the challenges of living with ten other people in a 2,400-square-foot house with a bath and a half.
After I finished third grade, I got to play Little League baseball. My parents were stretched thin financially, logistically, and emotionally. How they let me play ball is one of the great mysteries of the ’60s. In the first week of my brief career (mayflies live longer), Pete saw me using Phil’s ragged left-handed first baseman’s mitt. I’m right-handed. Pete bought me a glove from the hardware store. Mom probably didn’t know there were left-handed gloves and Pop was always at work trying to feed, house, and clothe the horde he helped create. Pete did what had to be done.
Several years later, Pete took me into the town diner and bought me my first milkshake. This time I got chocolate. The shake came in a fancy glass with whip cream and a cherry – and they left the metal mixer cup on the table, with bonus shake residue and ice cream inside. You never forget your first milkshake.
Another time, Pete took me to a drugstore, and he said I could have any candy bar I wanted. It was my very first, and I chose a Payday bar. Pete rolled his eyes and said, “You have chosen the worst candy bar in the world.” I held my ground. That day I learned the Payday bar is a god-awful piece of shit. Looks like a turd and tastes like one, too. When it came to candy, Pete knew his stuff.
Pete gave Clem a case of Bazooka Joe bubble gum on his fifth birthday. That’s 500 lumps of synthetic rubber infused with sugar and food coloring. Clem had to share, and over the next few days, it was in our hair, on our faces, stuck to pillowcases, stuck to the floor, and stuck to the cat. It was in our pockets as they went through the dryer; we had it between our toes, up our noses, and in our belly buttons. I walked around gnawing on three pieces of gum with four more in my pocket. We all had lockjaw. Mom captured the box and put it on the top shelf of her closet, but with nine of us in the house, all she managed to do was slow the mayhem for a day or two.
He was generous in so many ways.
Margaret remembers an evening at Black’s Cliff, a run-down lakeside resort in northern Wisconsin where we took all our family vacations. Our favorite cabin was called Musky Inn (Musty Inn made more sense). It was the summer of 1970 and Pete had just returned from Vietnam. After dinner, the family did what we did every evening up there: smokin’ and jokin’. Heavy drinking was part of the process. Thirteen-year-old Margaret was in a corner, next to a battered bowling-pin lamp that sat on a garage-sale side table. She was reading one of the dog-eared dime store novels that the resort owners left in their cabins. Pete looked at Margaret through the smoke-filled air and asked, “Do you know how pretty you are?” This family never said anything like this. Compliments were as rare as a snow day in Phoenix. Pete knew his shy adolescent sister needed attention, so he gave it.
We grew up. Pete married Mary, a Minnesota lady. They lived in a Minneapolis suburb with their four children. He had a successful advertising career as a writer, but his true passion was producing essays, poems, and songs. He read his work on Minnesota Public Radio on Tuesday mornings for a few years in the early 2000s. The University of Minnesota Press published two of his books: A Porch Sofa Diary and A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors. But he wrestled every day with depression and alcoholism. Bad genes, marginal parenting, and getting drafted bit him in the butt.
Eventually, he quit drinking and took care of himself as best he could. And he continued to reach out to children. He made memories for a couple of my sons.
When my son, Chris, was eleven, he spent a week with his Uncle Pete and Aunt Mary in Hopkins, MN. This was part of an exchange program. In the summer, they flew a kid or two down to our suburban Chicago home and a couple weeks later we’d ship a kid or two off to Minnesota. One morning after breakfast Pete gave Chris a twenty-dollar bill for no reason. An hour later in the local park, Pete called Chris over and said, “Can I have that twenty back?” Chris thought he was in trouble and gave it back. Pete said, “No nephew of mine is going to walk around with a shitty twenty-dollar bill.” Then he handed my son a crisp fifty. By the end of the day, Chris had both the twenty and the fifty.
My son, John, recalls driving on a Saturday afternoon with Pete and his sons Sam, Joe, and Jack through Barrington, Illinois, on the way to a family wedding. The boys were between seven and fifteen years old. On the way to the wedding, Pete talked about high school football. In the early ’60s, Pete had played on the offensive line for the Libertyville, Illinois, football team. He’d weighed about 225 as a sophomore; the coach saw an immovable object. Barrington had been the main rival. As he drove through that town, grown-up Pete stopped at the high school. Everyone got out of the car and Pete had the boys piss on the Barrington football field.
Pete died on December 31, 2016, at the age of 70, after a brief bout with colon cancer. These quotes appear in his obituary, which he helped write: “Please don’t tell my mother I am in advertising because she thinks I am in prison.” He went on to say: ” I would have done yoga and eaten more Nutter Butters.”
His obituary also included a song he wrote 12 days before he died:
The time has come
It’s time to go
Time to head Down that lonesome road
Just one thing
Before I go
Tell the world I love it so. I love it so