Frank Roggebusch was born in a piano.
Okay, not really. But if you were to tell him that, he'd probably believe it. He started taking piano lessons at six courtesy of his mother who, along with his father, was a terrific violinist. Once Frank got his driver's license at sixteen, he formed a band with some high school pals and actually scored paying gigs. While his band mates changed now and again, Frank continued making piano his passion while everything else (dating, college, getting a doctorate at Johns Hopkins, getting married) happened in the meantime. By the time he was an undeclared student at George Washington, the tall dark Frank was raking it in. He could play classical, rock and, eventually, after a ton of practice and dogged effort, jazz. By his graduate school years, Frank was Da Man in music circles. He was no longer with a band but was scoring solo gigs left and right courtesy of word of mouth and references from professional musicians, even from the likes of jazz pianist and arranger Bill Potts.
By the spring of 1986, when 48 Broad takes place, Frank was an economics professor at Temple University. He was in his third marriage, with three kids of his own (two from the first, one from the second), two adopted kids who originally belonged to his second wife and her first husband, as well as two stepkids from his third wife. He was no longer in Washington, D.C., where he lived from birth until his early forties, but was now living at the titular three-story Queen Anne in New Jersey. As a second stream of income, he worked as a consultant for the Department of Energy in Washington, where he'd worked in the seventies. The beloved ivories had gone from being the sun of his solar system to one of those distant bodies just past Pluto about which astronomers can't agree on a designation. Is it a stand-alone dwarf planet? A Plutonian satellite? An asteroid?
That didn't stop him from belting out the occasional tune at least once or twice a week, usually late at night, when the kids had hit the sack or at least had calmed down enough that they didn't require his philosophical wisdom. Upon moving into 48 Broad in January of '83, the first decision he and his wife Faith made was where the music room would be. Faith was a classically trained pianist. Like Frank, she had her own piano. Frank himself not only had a piano, but a xylophone from his jazz days. Where would they put all that? Luckily 48 Broad was a massive enough house that they could actually set aside one room specifically for playing music. They ended up picking the first room on the left just inside the front door. In time one of Frank's stepkids, Alexander, used this room to practice bass. Stephen used it to practice his trumpet. And our hero, Barry Roggebusch, used it to practice piano for the five or so minutes that he took lessons, until he finally decided life would be so much simpler if he could collect Garbage Pail Kids and eat pizza.
The only musician who didn't use the music room was thirteen-year-old Bunny Stringfellow. As an aspiring violinist, she had quite the dilemma in trying to pick which concerto to play at her recital. 'Problem was, she'd missed the recital by a good hundred years or so. Just as she started gearing up for the grand finale, she'd come down with pneumonia and died. You think that stopped her? Obviously you're not a music lover if you're surprised that after a century, Bunny was up in that room which had become Barry's room, trying to decide on her recital piece. The fact that 48 Broad had ceased being a music school ages ago, and that she was a worm buffet, were immaterial to her.
But enough about Bunny. She had nothing to do with Frank. Or anyone else for that matter, besides Barry. Let's talk about how Frank went from being a car-loving cross-genre pianist to an economist and thrice-married father of seven.
Franklin Monroe Roggebusch was born on September 1, 1939, not only the same day but the same hour the Nazis invaded Poland, goose-stepping WWII into motion. Much later in life, and because of that weird connection, Frank made WWII scholarship one of his most passionate hobbies. But not as passionate as playing the ivories.
Like I said above, his mother started making him take lessons at age six. His teacher was a woman named Adeline. During the thirties, Adeline had been a nationally renowned classical pianist. Mind you, we're talking an era when women rarely got equal recognition for anything. She lived only a couple blocks away from Frank's big white column-fronted house and, as you can imagine, now that she was retired and had some free time on her hands, was quite in demand amongst all the parents in the neighborhood.
The piano in Frank's house originally belonged to his grandparents. Back when his folks were still student violinists, they would all have little concerts together in the living room. Just to show you that life moves in circles, the tradition was shaping up to continue, assuming Frank stuck with it long enough to hold his own against his folks. And boy, did he ever.
Since there was a piano in the house, Frank had no excuse not to put in the one hour a day of practice. But he didn't need an excuse. Frank was one of those weird kids who actually liked practicing. And he actually looked forward to those end-of-year recitals. The day before the big event, while his peers would be shitting bricks, Frank would be all giddy about the prospect of showing off what his little fingers could do.
Here's how those recitals worked. Adeline would have her least experienced players go first, and then save the best players for last. For several consecutive years, her nephew would always be the last player. That's not nepotism. The young man really was the most superior player out of all her students. Frank, of course, was the very first player to take the bench when he was six. Over the ten years he studied with Adeline, though, he steadily made his way up the roster. By his ninth year, he was second to last (the last being Adeline's nephew of course). That's the way it was looking to go the following year as well.
As luck would have it, the nephew moved to Florida to start college. This helped Frank in two ways. First, he could audition to take the nephew's place as the pianist for this band called the Serenaders. The nephew, in fact, recommended Frank try out. He did and, sure enough, scored the job. Secondly, he was now Adeline's top pupil and so, at least theoretically and unless some new upstart came along, he'd be able to play last in what would be his final recital.
The Serenaders were an eight-piece band. You had Frank on piano, three on sax (two altos and a tenor), a trumpet, trombone, base, and drum. Despite their only being teenagers, these kats landed a good three or four paying gigs a month. They'd each collect $15 to $20 per gig. We're talking 1956 dollars here, folks, so this wasn't anything to sniff at. They used formal band scores, from which Frank always held onto the piano parts. Now and then they'd have a second tenor sax and a second trumpet, which made a huge difference to the sound. Frank was only with the band for his junior and senior years of high school, but they played a lot in that time. Toward the end they were each pulling in a cool $100 a month.
Parallel with this, Frank had to bust his butt to make sure he really would be Adeline's star pupil. For his final recital, he chose to play the piano concerto in A minor by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. Considered kitschy nowadays, back then Grieg's A minor concerto was one of the most popular in the repertoire. Frank worked on this thing for millions of hours. At one point he threw up his hands and quit altogether. Things picked up with the Serenaders, his confidence came back, and so did his determination to tackle Grieg.
But wait! As luck, or the lack thereof, would have it, Adeline decided to have Frank play next to last. The top spot went to this gal who was the daughter of the Secretary of Agriculture and had just moved into Frank's neighborhood. It was pure politics. She couldn't touch Frank, but apparently Adeline thought protocol mandated she have the honored spot. Frank remained bitter about this to his dying day.
Also swallowing up a lot of Frank's free time during his last couple years of high school was his undying love of the automobile. He was part of a neighborhood hot rod club called the Crestwood Gear Grinders. Their main preoccupation was sitting around, sipping the soda pop, shooting the shit, talking a lotta car talk while wearing their special jackets that featured their special logo and club name. Some of da boyz actually worked on cars, but not Frank. He just liked to learn about them and look at them. Mainly look at them. Eventually, as a father of seven, he'd get his ya-yas off talking about them ad nauseam.
Don't get me wrong, though. Frank and his pals did drag race now and then. Usually it would be on a Sunday at the runway of some local airport or other. All drag races would be a quarter mile. Frank, when it was his turn to race, would almost always lose. This might be because, while the vast majority of the cars would be Chevys and Fords, he would always bring one of his dad's Caddys.
The one time he achieved drag racing glory came during his junior year. This is how it happened. One day in the spring, in the locker room after baseball practice, a senior named John who, for reasons Frank eventually forgot, was his hated enemy, was bragging about the 1956 Ford Coupe his dad had just given him. It had Ford's most powerful V8 engine and, as spiffy extras, three carburetors, each with its own gorgeous chrome air filter cover, as well as other refinements. Frank would've bragged too had his dad gotten him one. Still, John was his hated enemy.
Finally Frank couldn't take it anymore and, right there in the locker room in front of everybody, said that John's new Ford didn't hold a candle to Frank's dad's '52 Cadillac. What's more, Frank could prove it. Specifically, Frank's dad was the owner of a 1952 Cadillac series 62 four-door sedan. It had a 190hp V8, up 30hp from the '51. Significantly, this engine had a lot of low rpm torque, making it especially powerful and therefore ideal for drag racing. John said he was full o' shit and wouldn't even bother taking him up on such an absurd challenge. What a waste of time, right? But just to show you that class struggles aren't confined to our former colonial masters, soon enough Frank's challenge against John became the junior class challenge against the seniors. A whole bunch of juniors, people Frank didn't even know, got all down John's throat about him being a piece of chicken shit in the rain. After weeks of provocation, John finally relented. The drag race was on.
But then suddenly Frank was like, "Aw shit. What am I gonna do? His Ford's gonna kick my big ol' sedan's ass!" He went to the Gear Grinder brain trust and pleaded for sage wisdom. They recommended Frank do a few things. First, remove the air filter from the carburetor so the engine could get air more easily. Second, make sure the tank's only a quarter full so the car's lighter. And finally, in lieu of standard gasoline, pump in some nitrogen-based fuel, maybe some nitro-methane. Frank followed their advice to the T.
The race took place on a fine Thursday dusk. Instead of the usual airfield, this race followed a quarter-mile stretch along the eastern border of their school, Sidwell Friends. Over 100 students showed up out of a total student population of 200. Sure enough, the modifications to Frank's sedan made it faster than John's awesome new Ford. Without the air filter, the engine produced a deep roar whenever Frank stepped on the gas. He won two out of three heats, but that's not even the best part. Check it out. Whenever he changed gears, two giant balls of blue flame shot out of the exhaust louvers. The reason for this was because, during a fraction of a second while the engine was spinning gas, it was disconnected from one gear and put in the other. While the engine spun, an uncombusted air-fuel mixture was dumped into the exhaust system. When the transmission clicked into the new gear, this mixture was ignited and blown out the car's rear. Recall this took place at dusk. While Frank didn't see it, his pals said it made his Caddy look like a freakin' jet plane. And since John spent two of the races swallowing this flame, he got a good view of it too. That, combined with the deep roar, let John know that Frank had done something.
John didn't waste a minute leveling accusations of cheating as soon as it was all over. Frank denied all knowledge. Ultimately John's indignation was in vain. Even if he knew what Frank had done, no one ever said there was a rule against modifying your vehicle. Anyway, hundreds of dollars exchanged hands between the two classes as the juniors collected on their bets. What's more, this event made it into the class yearbook when Frank graduated the following year.
Frank's dad came out the next morning to discover that his Caddy's exhaust valves were melted and deformed. Having a car's valves replaced was a bigger to-do in those days than it would be today. It cost the old man hundreds of 1956 dollars. He never could figure out what in tarnation had happened. He was no fool, though. Obviously Frank had done something, but what? Frank denied all knowledge. To his father's dying day, he never admitted what he did.
A few other times Frank would use his dad's car, although that '52 was the only one he ever damaged. His dad eventually got the 1953 Coupe De Ville, real snazzy with those fake-spoked-wheel hub caps and the spare tire hung out on the rear bumper in an enclosed casing (it looked almost identical to the '52 Coupe except it was a two-door). Shit, Frank would've happily driven that thing in 1986, let alone '56. As with the Serenaders, the Gear Grinders broke up after high school.
The music didn't stop for Frank, though. Far from it. While an undergrad at George Washington University, he hooked up with a jazz and dance band called the Rhythm Rockers. The front man was a genius sax player whom Frank, by a complete coincidence, had known in grade school.
The Rhythm Rockers marked a sea change in Frank's musical trajectory. It was the end of classical and the beginning of a new world. His learning curve here, especially when it came to jazz, was steep. You have to keep in mind that with the Serenaders, all Frank had to do was play the music as it was written on the sheet music provided. Jazz, in stark contrast, relies on improvisation. Although there would be notes written down, you weren't supposed to rely on that. Even worse, a lot of that written stuff was hard to do. Since no real jazz player would use written scores, maybe that's why a jazz score is called a fake book. Indeed, Frank actually got his hands on Fake Book Number One, which has famous pre-WWII show tunes by Cole Porter and all those guys. But fake books are different than sheet music. You take the Grieg concerto for instance. Every single note was written down. The whole problem is mastering what Grieg wrote. With a fake book, though, all that's written down is the melody, plus the chords. It really is up to the player to improvise all of the notes beyond the simple melody.
Frank knew nothing about any of that. He had quite the hangover from his classical days. He felt like he had to learn music from scratch all over again. In a sense, of course, he was. The rest of the fellas in the Rhythm Rockers dubbed him Grace Note Roggebusch because of his adherence to formality, making the music harder than need be. He had to bust his tail if he was going to learn this stuff.
And he did. It took a couple years, but eventually he caught up with the jazz idiom. That same tenacity he'd used to make it to the top of Adeline's class--second to the top anyway--served him well here. He practiced at home all the time (and drove his dad bonkers doing it). He also went to watch the pros do it. This was the perfect time to be a student of jazz. Remember, we're talking the late fifties and early sixties, when jazz was reaching its zenith as a vital art form. Plus, the innovators, the legends who grew out of this art form, were in their prime. Many of them lived and performed in Frank's hometown. Washington, D.C., then as now, had a substantial African-American population. Jazz was born out of African-American culture. Accordingly, many of the best practitioners were right there for him to study and marvel at.
The Rhythm Rockers scored a ton of gigs. And they raked in a ton o' dough relative to that time. We're talking $400 a month or so for each of them, 'bout five grand a year. Perhaps the plummest gig came right after freshman year at GW, during the summer of '58. Thanks to this travel agent who lived in Frank's neighborhood, the Rhythm Rockers were invited to be the nightly entertainment on this cruise ship bound for Europe. It meant free passage for Pete's sake! On a cruise to Europe! They'd get off at Bremerhaven, Germany, and then take the boat back from Southampton, England, about four weeks total. When they got to Bremerhaven, their guitarist, Tony, came down with appendicitis. While the rest of the gang traveled around the continent, Frank stayed with Tony at a hospital in Bremen. Tony's dad, as a side note, was the Attorney General under Ike, and then the Secretary of State under Nixon. In 1986 he chaired the committee that investigated the Challenger disaster. Frank ended up being grateful he could stay in one place and get the full Bremen experience instead of zipping all around with the rest of the fellas. And wouldn't you know, Bremen just happens to be the birthplace of two of the greatest beers mankind's ever quaffed: Beck's and St. Pauli Girl. Awesome, I know.
The band broke up soon after getting back. For the time being Frank scored gigs on his own name and from word of mouth. Depending on how many musicians he could get at any given time, his group would simply be called the Roggebusch Trio or the Roggebusch Quartet. By far the sweetest gig of this time period, which far outshines the European cruise, was a Caribbean cruise the Quartet scored in the summer of '60, just before Frank's senior year at GW. The gig lasted ten solid weeks on a ship that went back and forth to freakin' Bermuda: Out Friday night, back the following Friday morning. Repeat.
After getting his bachelor's in econ from GW, Frank stayed at the school to get his masters. By this time he and one of his quartet from the Bermuda trip had formed a full-blast nineteen-piece jazz ensemble. We're talkin' five saxophones, five trumpets, five trombones, piano, base, drums, and guitar. They played new and totally professional arrangements. Frank talked his parents into letting this huge group rehearse in their living room. Whenever they did cram in there, Frank's folks would take refuge down the block at Frank's grandparents' place....where they could still hear the music just fine. This band played a bunch of concerts, most notably at the Watergate. The (in)famous Watergate hotel and apartment complex wasn't there yet, but the site was still called the Watergate because of how it was right on the Potomac. In those days it featured a floating orchestra shell situated near Memorial Bridge. They also had a steady gig every Friday night for over a year at a bar in Indian Head, Maryland. This bar was frequented by Navy Frogmen who spent all day learning to disarm torpedoes by hand. The smallest one of them was about nine or so feet tall and weighed five hundred pounds. The bar had two rules: Don’t fuck with the Frogmen. Or, more importantly, their women. Frank had no problem admitting he was by far the worst player of the group, but that meant he could use this experience to learn oodles about jazz.
In the fall of 1963 Frank began the PhD program in economics at Johns Hopkins. Not surprisingly, he had less time to jam. In '65 he landed his first day job, poor soul. He was 26, and all of his income up to this point in his life had come from tickling the proverbial ivories. Soon after becoming Dr. Roggebusch in the spring of 1967, Frank landed a teaching gig at Rice University in Houston. And that, ladies in gents, marked the very end of his playing for money. He was married at this point, and his first child would be arriving in the spring of '68. It was time for Frank to become a working stiff like the rest of us.
Those eleven years of playing, from his junior year at Sidwell Friends to getting his doctorate, provided more than their fair share of great memories. Those years, of course, were preceded by Adeline's making him a terrific classical player, but Frank viewed his "education" in jazz to be the equal of what Adeline taught him. By the end of it all, he'd learned to speak fluently in two vastly different languages of the piano.
His third wife Faith, to whom he was married during the 48 Broad days, had a degree in music and accordingly a far broader experience with classical. It should be noted, though, that she never did play anything the equal of Grieg's concerto. So Frank could gloat at least some. Even better in terms of Frank's gloating, she couldn't touch jazz. In principle she was a better musician than her hubby. He knew it, she knew it, they all knew it. But she had no idea about jazz, nor did she have the patience or energy or doggedness that Frank had needed when he began playing it. At the time, though, Frank didn't have kids to raise. Are you kidding? He was still a kid himself. Faith, on the other hand, had seven kids to help raise by the time he brought jazz into her life. Just listening to him play could be exhausting when it wasn't maddening.
Now let's go back a bit. I mentioned in passing that Frank scored his doctorate in economics. While he did eventually excel in academics, it didn't start out that way. Indeed, Frank was your prototypical late bloomer. When he started his freshman year at GW in the fall of '57, he was still getting his feet wet in the world of jazz. The last thing on his mind was what his major should be. Since both his father and grandfather were dentists, he decided he'd declare himself pre-dental and take stuff like chemistry and what have you. 'Problem was, he got a D in Chem 101 his first semester. So much for the whole dentist thing.
His first two years at GW saw him bounce around from major to major. Not that it bothered him much. He was having a ball playing in those bands. Finally, at the start of his junior year, his advisor sat him down and was like, "Come on, Frank! You've gotta pick a major if you want to get out of here in four years!" So they went over everything Frank had taken during his first two years. As it turned out, without even meaning to, he'd racked up enough credits in economics that if he declared a major in it, he'd be able to graduate in the spring of '61. So that's what he did. 'Turned out Frank was pretty good at the whole math thing. He got his bachelor's, then stayed at GW to get his masters. And then it was off to Hopkins for the ol' doctorate. It's hard to overstate what a big deal it was to get into Hopkins, not to speak of how hard it was to survive a doctoral program once you were in. Frank did it, though. He finished his dissertation in the spring of '67 and immediately scored a teaching gig at Rice.
By this time he was married to wife number one: Mary. He'd met Mary several years earlier at a GW frat party. At the time she was a secretary at FBI headquarters. Two years into Hopkins, he married her. That's when he landed his first day job and finally had to move out of his parents' place.
He didn't last long at Rice, not that he minded Houston. In fact, he loved taking in some baseball at the then-brand-spanking-new air-conditioned Astrodome. What bummed him out was that he wasn't getting an opportunity to apply what he'd learned. He'd gone straight from being a student to a teacher. So in the summer of '68, he and the missus and baby Stephen, born that spring, moved back to Washington, D.C., where Frank landed a job at a consultancy. That's when he bought his first house courtesy of the cash his dad gave him for the down payment.
Jonathon was born in the spring of '71. It was around this time that his personal life started spiraling downward as fast as his career was rocketing upward. Down the street from the Roggebusches was a couple named Marcus and Joanne Woods. They had three younglings: Peggy, Daniel, and Louis, the latter having just been born in December of '70. While Louis was still in the womb, Marcus, a reporter, started having an affair with a woman at the Defense Department. One time they traipsed to the Caribbean. When he got back, Marcus didn't say a word about it....but he did leave his mistress's worn panties on the bed for Joanne to find.
Frank, meanwhile, had grown unhappy with his marriage. It wasn't anything specific Mary did. Call it irreconcilable differences. He began looking outside the marriage just as Joanne down the street was doing the same.
The affair started out clandestine as could be. 'Member how I mentioned above that the Watergate complex wasn't built yet? Well, by this time it was not only up, but one of Frank's pals owned an apartment there. This guy gave a set of keys to Frank for him and Joanne to enjoy each other's company in private. Here's the thing about Marcus, though, that made this whole plan go to shit. He was a reporter for one of the big three affiliates. He'd been a reporter there for years and so knew a lot of people around town, including cops. After finding out that Joanne was messing around, he hired a detective to follow them and wiretap that apartment at Watergate. Frank then found out about it and was about to blow the lid on Marcus and his cop pal, which would have caused some embarrassment for himself but would no doubt have drowned Marcus and the cop in a tank of hot water. For a second there it looked like it would actually happen, but Frank finally backed off after Marcus agreed to do the same. A few years later Marcus admitted to Frank that he had kept a gun in his trunk specifically for blowing him away.
Frank and Joanne were caught off-guard by Marcus's indignation. After all, he philandered first, and while Joanne was pregnant with their third child, to boot. Nonetheless, Joanne got out of there. Frank divorced Mary. The new couple got hitched in a quickie ceremony in the Dominican Republic.
Mary, meanwhile, moved back to Fort Myers, Florida to be near her family. This is where Stephen and Jonathan lived during the seventies. Frank had to pay her $300 a month in alimony, plus $600 for child support for both kids.
Frank and Joanne bought a house in Kensington, Maryland. Frank adopted Peggy, Daniel, and Louis. Joanne had misgivings about this because, with Marcus no longer the legal parent, he was no longer obligated to provide child support. A good bit of Joanne's ten-year marriage to Frank was spent wrestling with her ex about getting him to help provide for his kids. This struggle soon became akin to whacking a tennis ball against a brick wall. What motivation could Marcus possibly have to help out the wife who left him? What's more, upon the dissolution of their marriage, Marcus threatened to sue Frank and Joanne for alienation of affection. It would've been one more empty threat, but he scared Joanne enough for her to pay him off with $10,000 from the trust fund she inherited after her mother committed suicide in January of '64.
For his part, Frank came close to breaking down now and then because of the giant dollar-sign-shaped anvil making itself comfortable on his back. The ex jazz star had two kids, three more adopted kids and a homemaker wife under his mortgaged roof, an ex-wife to whom he paid a healthy nickel every month, other overhead like, ya know, food and what have you. Remember, the man was only in his mid thirties.
Help arrived with Joanne's thirtieth birthday in April of '75. She could now collect the final $10,000 from her parents' trust fund. That check never touched her hands. It went straight from the mailbox to Frank's checking account so he could send a payment to Mary that would keep her quiet for a while.
Otherwise, Scotch helped immensely when Frank felt stressed. He'd been a big beer drinker during his twenties. In fact, sometimes people wondered if it was the ice-cold sudsy stuff and not the piano that was his life's calling. By the time he turned thirty in the fall of '69, he was quite the Captain Chunk. So he went on a mega diet, shed a whole mess o' pounds....and then became a lover of Scotch. Preferably single malt. Sometimes he loved it a bit too much. After one particularly sincere night of Happy Hour, Frank conked out at the wheel on the Beltway. The walls that line the Beltway today were not there then. While he was out for the count, his station wagon (boy, had he come a long way from his dad's Caddys or what?) went straight off the side of the Beltway, over a small cliff, and flipped over completely before landing right side up. That lucky mustachioed jazz-loving man walked away with nothing more than a sore ass and a new appreciation for the power of Lagavulin.
Anticipating all of the college tuition he'd be responsible for--an obligation he couldn't imagine wouldn't kill him, what with everything else--Frank took a teaching job at Temple University in the fall of 1981. His teaching there meant his kids could attend free of charge, assuming they were accepted (not all of them would be). With Temple being in Philly 'n all, though, the commute was a good three hours. He worked around this by teaching Tuesdays and Thursdays. He'd go up first thing Tuesday, stay overnight that night and Wednesday night, and then come home after class on Thursday.
It was soon into this job that Frank met Faith Peterson at a math-related convention at the University of Colorado. Faith held an MA in math and was married to a math PhD. The reason she had a BA in music was because her hubby didn't want her making a living in the same field he did, and so she went back to school and graduated from Colorado as a terrific classical pianist.
Frank and Faith hit it off in no time. It helped that she had an intellect on par with his own, even if it meant she had the ego to go with it (as did he). Despite the fact that Faith had two sons and some emotional baggage courtesy of an abusive father, part of her appeal to Frank was the new beginning she represented. As much as that Scotch became his divine nectar, it still couldn't help with the burden he'd assumed by becoming the legal guardian of Joanne's three kids, not to speak of the fact that he and Joanne had had a child all their own: Bawrence Barney Roggebusch. He pursued his relationship with Faith to its consummation, albeit with less scandal than he had with Joanne.
Frank and Faith bought the three-story Queen Anne at 48 Broad St. in Mount Holly, New Jersey in the autumn of 1982 and moved in the following January. Living in South Jersey cut Frank's commute to Temple from three hours to less than an hour. They chose the Jersey side of the Delaware River because they heard the schools were better. Faith and her first husband, who lived in Los Angeles, agreed to have their kids John and Alexander move to Jersey.
For his part, Frank agreed with Joanne that her three kids from Marcus as well as Bawrence would all go with him. There weren't many options here, for Joanne had absolutely nothing. Frank did give her some of the proceeds from the Kensington house, but her last two trust fund payments had gone to her first husband and Frank's first wife. That bit from the Kensington house was like putting a Band-Aid on an amputation. Even worse, her kid sister had died in May of 1980 at the age of thirty-two from a very aggressive form of cancer. The death of Joanne's only sibling and her best friend was just as devastating as her mother's suicide, maybe even a bit more so. And just as she was getting back on her feet emotionally, Frank, for lack of a better word, dumped her. She was fucked. After rooming with someone in the D.C. area for a year and a half, she moved to North Carolina, became Joan Purvis, and started her new life.
Frank, meanwhile, agreed with Mary that Stephen and Jonathan could live with him at 48 Broad. That made seven--count 'em, seven!--kids converging under that Everest-steep roof.
It helped that Faith was able to land a job at a robotics firm, drawing on all the math she'd learned that her first husband had prohibited her from applying. More funds were needed, though, to keep that three-story ship above water. Frank utilized his connections at the Department of Energy, where he'd worked just before landing the Temple gig, to land contracts as an independent consultant.
And so this is the life Frank settled into. This is where he is in May of 1986, when 48 Broad takes place. He generally handled the responsibilities well. You could probably count on one hand the number of times he blew his top. If any of the kids acted out of line, he never snapped or yelled or said anything he'd regret a second later. Instead, he'd take them into the living room, sit them down, and have a calm, composed man-to-man. He may not have been consciously aware of it, but refusing to condescend was a brilliant move. By always treating his kids as if they were as smart as he was, he ended up, over the years, garnering their respect.
Oh yeah. At this point Frank was driving a Dodge Caravan.
