“FRED IS DEAD,” read the note my wife left on the small table in our front hall on which we leave each other messages. Fred was Fred Austin, our mailman for the better part of the past fifteen years. Three days before I had put a twenty in his hand, as I do every year, instructing him to have a Christmas lunch on me. It’s a small enough show of gratitude for many services. “The pleasure’s all mine,” he said, and then his attention was distracted by a woman entering the lobby asking if he could take care of her mail over the Christmas holiday, while she was off to visit her son.
This was the last I’d heard from Fred. I saw him one more time: in his coffin at a memorial service at Faith Temple Church of God in Christ on Dewey Avenue in Evanston.
He had missed two days of work without calling in, most uncharacteristic behavior. He was a bachelor. No one answered the phone at his apartment. The local postmaster, worried, found a way to enter his apartment, where Fred was found dead of a heart attack. He was fifty-one.
Fred played high-school and small-college football at Ripon College in Wisconsin. He was perhaps 6’1″, weighed roughly 220. Like a number of black men I know, he had blood-pressure problems, and more than once he dropped 40 or 50 pounds for health reasons.
Late one Sunday I was filling my gas tank at a local station, when a black Ford Expedition–the largest of the SUVs, I believe, next to the thoroughly egregious Hummer–pulled up, a large man with a black Malcolm X hat got out, and, lo, it was Fred, whose great smile drained all the menace out of the car and the hat both. “Can’t you get a bigger car than that, Fred?” I asked. “As soon as they make one,” he replied, “I promise that I will.”
Much of my conversation with Fred was about sports, that lingua franca in which American men of otherwise ostensibly discrepant interests find ways to speak to each other. He knew a lot about sports. At Evanston Township High School he played with Emery Morehead, who went on to play tight end for the Chicago Bears. Through his Morehead connection, Fred would go to Bears training-camp sessions and had no trouble getting tickets for regular-season games.
He was a man of strong, but with me never disruptive, opinions. We agreed that contemporary professional athletes were the physical equivalent of lottery winners; they were, that is, damn lucky: all that money, all that attention. (“Know the toughest thing in the NBA?” Fred once asked me. “Not smiling when you kiss your wife goodbye before going on a road trip.”) With only a few exceptions–Walter Payton, Andre Dawson, Cal Ripken Jr. are three I recall–was Fred willing to admit that professional athletes of recent years were other than loutish and hopelessly selfish.
We didn’t talk much politics. I assumed he voted Democratic, though, such was his naturally critical bent, my guess is that he could not have been easy on politicians of his own party. “A lot of pressure on the kid,” was his one remark about Barack Obama, the new black senator from Illinois. He agreed with me that it would be interesting to see what attempts Jesse Jackson makes to coopt him. I told him that at one time I would have voted for Colin Powell for president on either party ticket. He didn’t respond. He wasn’t crazy about Condoleezza Rice, whom he thought the type of the good student, teacher’s pet division.
Fred would always honk at me when he passed in his mail-truck. One of his favorite bits, when he would find me in a neighborhood restaurant to which he was delivering mail, or when I was walking with a friend, would be to say in a loud voice, “Excuse me, sir, but aren’t you George Steinbrenner [or Jerry Reinsdorf, or the agent Scott Boras]? You look awfully familiar.”
As a mailman, Fred was up on what was happening in the neighborhood. When a new shop or restaurant was going to open, he was the one who first brought the information to the rest of us. His cheerfulness was almost permanent; and it made it difficult to be grumpy in his presence. After his death, a neighbor wrote to the local paper about how good Fred was at his job, adding that even the simplest meeting with him made her happy.
I read the obituary pages of the New York Times, and every week there are two or three people who, if I hadn’t myself known them firsthand, were friends or colleagues or editors or friends of friends of mine. But I found I could not shake off Fred’s death–can’t quite shake it off yet. A replacement for him hasn’t yet been found. Whoever the person is, things won’t be quite the same. Nobody’s ever going to call me Mr. Steinbrenner again.
–Joseph Epstein
