Brother Al

I heard last night that Brother Al died after a brief fight against pancreatic cancer.  He died at home, leaving two sons and a granddaughter.  He also left ex-wife Jeannie, was still a good friend.

Al was like that.

He was one of the old Brothers at the Fraternity House. I will always think of him that way, though he was only four years older than we were. We were punk kids, and he had been off to Vietnam . He had been to the show, and was not so much a Fraternity brother as an Uncle. I don’t know why he came back to us, a sort of hippy extended family, camped out in the crumbling mansion on Washtenaw Boulevard .

But maybe he found us amusing, going off to protest the war in which he had just served. He didn’t talk much about it, but he also did not mind that we did not want to go.

My pal who still lives up in Ann Arbor remembers him holding court in the “card room” just off the lobby of the old house. Old group photos of by-gone Brothers lined the wall, and the card table was elaborately carved with the initials of the Brothers that hung out there. Al was usually holding a can of beer.  His attitude and upbeat personality were contagious, and I can still see him sitting with the Omicron, and Scrope and Dum-Dum and Catfish, flipping cards in what was the living manifestation of the Animal House.

Brother Al brought the Town beyond the Gown to the house. He had a lot of friends beyond the house. Some of them were gamblers, as I recall, perhaps a bit more than petty criminals. They were exotic. 

My pal remembers betting him a can of beer on the outcome of the first Ali/Frazier fight. Smokin’ Joe beat the Butterfly, and Al won the bet. My pal paid him off with a 16-ounce can of cold lager, because he felt Al deserved more than a measly 12-oz. can, and he did not want to be embarrassed.

I remember the night that Al rolled his 1967 Mustang out on US 27 coming home from someplace. His luck was such that he wound up on four wheels when it was over, and although the Mustang was clearly “sprung,” much flatter in profile and no longer of the same dimensions that it had started the day.

Al was OK. He was too loose to get hurt.

He was not much interested in academics, and he started his own business cutting lawns. We all thought that was a little down-scale, a little blue collar. But Al turned it into a going concern. Everyone needs their lawn cut and Al always had a place for a Brother in the lawn business if he was down and needed a buck.

Al, in his own way, was a hero. 

And as my pal in academia noted, “Damn we had it good back then.”

Brother Al was 59.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra

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