The House that Jack Built
And so The Luminary is charged with the unenviable task of informing the community that one of their friends is gone. Jack Friedman, a student of Park and true community volunteer, has passed away, after bravely battling an incurable disease that struck too suddenly.
I can’t proclaim to be the closest friend of the family, but I’ve worked with his lovely wife Char for the better part of two years now at the Specialized Publications offices and I often saw Jack around town.
Jack and I certainly never saw eye to eye when it came to politics…or many other things I suppose, but we liked one another. The first time I really ever hung out with him was at a community picnic on the west side of town. There, I played badminton with his son Nate and then tossed the baseball around with him for about a half an hour. We talked baseball – Jack was a huge fan of the game – but mainly we talked about his favorite subject, namely, the future development of Parkville. To put it mildly, Jack was opposed to the developments you see around town. He wanted to preserve the historic parts of the town, and he wanted to save the trees, and he was willing to fight for what he believed in. And when he argued, he argued with gusto. Naturally, I enjoyed needling him whenever I could.
Jack was famously non-religious. When Pope John Paul II passed away, he was the first person I called for an interview. “Jack, everyone thinks you’d be the perfect person to interview for my story,” I said. I could just see his perplexed look.
“They told you to call ME? About the POPE?” he asked incredulously.
Jack also had a real chip on his shoulder about geodesic domes. Whenever the subject came up, he never failed to disparage Park’s sports facility for just that reason. When he was fighting for a uniform design code and a historic designation for the original platted neighborhood, he often brought that up. Even though Parkville’s architecture is a mish-mosh of styles, Jack knew what he didn’t want – and geodesic domes ranked right up there.
“Right now, with the codes the way they are, if someone wanted to build a geodesic dome in one of the neighborhoods, they could.”
Whenever we broke any development news, I made sure to contact Jack. “Jack, I’m just calling to get your reaction to the new building they’re proposing to put downtown.”
“What building?” he’d ask. “There’s no new building.”
“You know, the geodesic dome with the cell tower on top? It’s going to be built out of a thousand trees.”
He never thought that was a funny joke.
I remember sharing a story with him at a Sluggers game about my college roommate, a guy who is now a multi-millionaire sports clothing magnate, and he shouted at me, “So what? Money isn’t everything!” I just laughed. When I started the newspaper’s baseball team, I asked him to play first base. He agreed – but only if both teams agreed not to keep score of the games. He didn’t want to foster competition, he just wanted to play ball. That was Jack.
When he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, I called him right away. He played it off like it was nothing, saying that he’d be out of the hospital in a day or two. When he didn’t return right away, Bill Grigsby and I went to go visit him. Jack’s face lit up when we entered into the room. He was so happy to hear Grigsby’s jokes. Jack said he was on steroids and wondered if that would help his baseball career. He showed me a bunch of notebooks that were filled with his writing. All he had been doing in the hospital, he told me, was writing.
“You’ve got to get your head straight,” he admonished me, saying the paper was too politically conservative. He offered to write for us and I encouraged him to do so. Unfortunately, when he went down to Arkansas for treatment, he became too weak to write so I stopped asking, not wanting to upset him. I sent him a few papers and in a letter tried to cheer him up. “Did you ever think as a kid from Long Island that you would ever get to see Little Rock, Arkansas?”
Jack fought to the end, and he never stopped representing Parkville, calling in to the city’s aldermen meetings and checking in with the clerk on a daily basis. We had recently heard he was taking a turn for the worse, but nobody really expected to lose him this fast.
A lot of people had their disagreements with Jack, but it was always about business and politics. Health, family, community and friends – that’s what’s most important in life and Jack was all about those things. Parkville is the better for having known him and we’ll all certainly miss him a great deal.