in his prime. Harry won the race with a few steps to spare.
He was trim and brisk and he seemed invincible, right up until the day that he died. A week after his victorious sprint in the Colerain gym, Harry was at work at the Fifth Third—he had been at the bank for close to 40 years by then and at the moment was working as a cashier—when he complained that he suddenly felt ill. Harry knew right away that something serious was at hand. He took a taxi home to Braddock Street, and no one could remember him ever taking a taxi home from work, or leaving work in the middle of the day for that matter. He died on the stairs just inside the front door of the house, collapsed. A heart attack it was believed at first, and then later a blood clot. Out of nowhere it seemed. Harry’s epitaph could have read: NEVER SICK A DAY IN HIS LIFE … AND NOW THIS .
Pete was in the barbershop when the telephone rang and moments later the barber told him his father was dead. Pete couldn’t fathom it. “You mean my mother?” he said at first. He wept “for three days,” he says, and those around him had never seen him so broken. Not before or since. One obituary called Harry—or rather, in the local parlance, “Pete Rose the First”—the most famous semipro athlete in Cincinnati history and added that “The Pete Rose who plays for the Cincinnati Reds is a 100 percent replica of his father.”
And although he would of course regain his wink and his swagger, and although he would keep Harry’s hustle about him all his life, Pete Rose would never again feel the demand for accountability the way he had felt it from Harry. He would never again feel that there was anyone else, not a wife or child, not his mother or siblings, not the agents or the associates serving him, who could see through him or tell him what to do. You haven’t visited your mother , Harry had said, and so Pete did. With Harry gone, Pete did not care who he might disappoint.
“When my father died that’s when the family fell apart, and Pete went his way,” his sister Caryl would say 43 years later. “Not all at once, not immediately, but that is what did it. Pete and I had a special relationship as kids, but it was my dad who kept us all together.” As Caryl spoke, she was at home, in a house in Indiana that Pete bought for her in the 1970s. She said she had not talked with him, however, not even briefly, for more than a dozen years.
What they all believe, Caryl and her brother Dave and the folks who have known him best, is that had Harry still been alive, Pete would not have drifted and fallen as he has, that he would have found it in himself to stop doing what he was doing, to stay away from the trouble he courted, to admit to and rectify his mistakes, to stand up and conduct himself in the way that his father had. Harry would have been 77 in 1989.
When everything went wrong, when Pete got himself banished from the game and then later sentenced to prison; when he was sneering in his lying denials, when he made the women around him feel small, at those times people like Greg Staab from Braddock Street would share a look with Dave and they would ask one another resignedly and rhetorically, “Now what would Harry Francis have to say about that?”
----
JULY 14. That was the date of the 1970 All-Star Game. In the Cincinnati newspapers that season (much as in the seasons just past) the word Reds sometimes referred to the hometown, first-place baseball team and other times referred to the communists in Vietnam. A headline REDS ROUTED or more typically REDS SHOWING RESILIENCE could be (and often was) misread. This was two months after the madness at Kent State, where student protesters had been shot to death on a campus four hours north of Cincinnati; and it was three months before President Nixon announced that he would be bringing 40,000 more troops out of the jungle and home for Christmas. David Rose was still over there in uniform. He’d been there about a
He was trim and brisk and he seemed invincible, right up until the day that he died. A week after his victorious sprint in the Colerain gym, Harry was at work at the Fifth Third—he had been at the bank for close to 40 years by then and at the moment was working as a cashier—when he complained that he suddenly felt ill. Harry knew right away that something serious was at hand. He took a taxi home to Braddock Street, and no one could remember him ever taking a taxi home from work, or leaving work in the middle of the day for that matter. He died on the stairs just inside the front door of the house, collapsed. A heart attack it was believed at first, and then later a blood clot. Out of nowhere it seemed. Harry’s epitaph could have read: NEVER SICK A DAY IN HIS LIFE … AND NOW THIS .
Pete was in the barbershop when the telephone rang and moments later the barber told him his father was dead. Pete couldn’t fathom it. “You mean my mother?” he said at first. He wept “for three days,” he says, and those around him had never seen him so broken. Not before or since. One obituary called Harry—or rather, in the local parlance, “Pete Rose the First”—the most famous semipro athlete in Cincinnati history and added that “The Pete Rose who plays for the Cincinnati Reds is a 100 percent replica of his father.”
And although he would of course regain his wink and his swagger, and although he would keep Harry’s hustle about him all his life, Pete Rose would never again feel the demand for accountability the way he had felt it from Harry. He would never again feel that there was anyone else, not a wife or child, not his mother or siblings, not the agents or the associates serving him, who could see through him or tell him what to do. You haven’t visited your mother , Harry had said, and so Pete did. With Harry gone, Pete did not care who he might disappoint.
“When my father died that’s when the family fell apart, and Pete went his way,” his sister Caryl would say 43 years later. “Not all at once, not immediately, but that is what did it. Pete and I had a special relationship as kids, but it was my dad who kept us all together.” As Caryl spoke, she was at home, in a house in Indiana that Pete bought for her in the 1970s. She said she had not talked with him, however, not even briefly, for more than a dozen years.
What they all believe, Caryl and her brother Dave and the folks who have known him best, is that had Harry still been alive, Pete would not have drifted and fallen as he has, that he would have found it in himself to stop doing what he was doing, to stay away from the trouble he courted, to admit to and rectify his mistakes, to stand up and conduct himself in the way that his father had. Harry would have been 77 in 1989.
When everything went wrong, when Pete got himself banished from the game and then later sentenced to prison; when he was sneering in his lying denials, when he made the women around him feel small, at those times people like Greg Staab from Braddock Street would share a look with Dave and they would ask one another resignedly and rhetorically, “Now what would Harry Francis have to say about that?”
----
JULY 14. That was the date of the 1970 All-Star Game. In the Cincinnati newspapers that season (much as in the seasons just past) the word Reds sometimes referred to the hometown, first-place baseball team and other times referred to the communists in Vietnam. A headline REDS ROUTED or more typically REDS SHOWING RESILIENCE could be (and often was) misread. This was two months after the madness at Kent State, where student protesters had been shot to death on a campus four hours north of Cincinnati; and it was three months before President Nixon announced that he would be bringing 40,000 more troops out of the jungle and home for Christmas. David Rose was still over there in uniform. He’d been there about a
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