Special People in Our Lives

 Many of us have an “Uncle Fred” or an “Aunt Freida,” someone to look up to. As a toddler, I followed my Uncle Fred around the house, fascinated with this exuberant, talkative man. 

While I did love my parents, Uncle Fred was special, representing the vigorous outside world that my parents did not. He was a World War II veteran, one of the first soldiers to liberate Paris. Reading his diary is on my bucket list.

 

When I was maybe 10 years old, he took me in his car once on his insurance sales calls, describing the local history of every place we went in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was captivated by his account of the deadly accidental explosion at Port Chicago, Calif., in World War II.

 

When I began my cross-country trip to live in Washington in 1971, he told me, “Don’t go! You’ll be killed.” Well, he wasn’t always right.

 

Uncle Fred had aspired to be a journalist but never got the education. I guess I fulfilled some of his ambition. You could say we idolized each other. He would send me far too many newspaper clippings and write me long letters every few days, in the dot-dot-dot writing style of the ever-famous San Francisco columnist Herb Caen. He was almost as good.

 

Our only breaking point came when he sold my grandfather’s 1880 typewriter at a yard sale. I was devastated. The typewriter was so unique that you couldn’t see what you were writing on it–you had to pull a lever. It had separate keyboards for capital and small letters. It was one of the things that got me interested in writing.

 

Uncle Fred felt bad about selling it and went to the buyer and bought it back at a premium. But living 3,000 miles away, I don’t think I saw it afterward. After Uncle Fred died, my cousin shipped it to me as freight on a Greyhound bus.

 

I fixed it up some, but you could never get another typewriter ribbon like that. I took it to my office at the Kiplinger Letter to show it off in our old-fashioned headquarters, full of history and traditions.  It seemed like it belonged there. But I did risk upstaging the typewriter of the founder, Willard Kiplinger, whose writing device was a centerpiece in the museum below. My typewriter was 40 years older.

 

I was a little worried. My last boss was jealous of my grand piano, which was better than his. “I dreamed last night that I took a chain saw to your piano,” the boss told me once. 

 

So I didn’t really want Austin Kiplinger, Willard’s son, to see it. A colleague told this distinguished heir to the news operation about it, though, and Mr. Kiplinger came to my office. He said he was impressed, but he sure looked uncomfortable.

 

After I retired in 2009, I took it to our bed & breakfast, located in a house even older than the typewriter. It seemed to be a perfect place for it.

 

Thanks, again Uncle Fred, for buying the typewriter back!

 

I wonder if I will be someone’s Uncle Fred.