I was barely two years old in 1939, when I first met Emile Frerard.
Mr. Frerard was then about 71 years of age, slender, with thinning white hair – almost bald. He was retired and lived with his daughter and son-in-law in a rowhouse across the driveway behind our house. He liked to sit in a folding canvas-back chair with his mild-mannered dog Donnie stretched out in the small garden beside him.
I was immediately attracted to the dog. Whenever I saw Mr. Frerard and Donnie across the driveway, I walked over to play with Donnie. When Donnie died of old age, my routine continued with Mr. Frerard’s new puppy Princess, a not-so-well-mannered Chow. During these frequent visits, I got to know Mr. Frerard fairly well.
He liked to talk about Philadelphia and what the city was like when he was a young man. That was long ago, but his memory was clear as a bell. One of his favorite memories was of the intersection of Broad and Girard Streets where Peter A. B. Widener and his business partner, William Elkins, had their mansions. Broad Street runs in a straight line north and south through the center of the city.
When Mr. Frerard stood at the intersection of Broad and Girard, and looked north, there were trees lining both sides of the street as far as the eye could see. Most of the traffic was horse-drawn wagons. When I went to that same intersection, all that I could see was asphalt, exhaust fumes, and a long string of retail stores, to say nothing of heavy motor vehicle traffic. The Widener and Elkins mansions were long gone.
Another of Mr. Frerard’s “favorites” was a creek known as “Gunner’s Run.” It ran through the woodlands near what is now 5th and Clearfield Streets and down to the Delaware River. Mr. Frerard particularly liked a wooden bridge across the creek at the 5th Street location. I knew that part of the city, but it was not a woodland scene. It was a densely populated inner-city site near the tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the location of many textile manufacturing plants and tightly built rowhouses where the textile workers lived.
Could it be that Mr. Frerard was mistaken about the site? Not likely. About two weeks after Mr. Frerard told me about the wooden bridge, Philadelphia newspapers carried a front-page story about a spectacular cave-in of a North Philadelphia street that swallowed up a car and a police officer who went to the scene to investigate. The site of the incident was 5th and Clearfield. The news report said that the cave-in was the result of erosion of the subsurface of the street by an underground creek named Gunner’s Run, and that Gunner’s Run had been buried by the city more than fifty years ago.
Mr. Frerard held up a lot better than both Gunner’s Run and that old wooden bridge. On occasion, I would see him standing with a group of old-timers in front of a shoe store at Cottman and Frankford Avenues, across from the Mayfair Movie Theatre. He walked there every day, about one mile each way. In the meanwhile, his son-in-law George Schunder had trouble walking fifteen feet from his car to the door of his house. My father, 38 years younger than Mr. Frerard, would watch him walk through the neighborhood, and declare that he was “Amazing.”
After I married and moved out of the Mayfair neighborhood, I made it a point to keep in touch with Mr. Frerard whenever I visited my parents’ home. On one of those occasions, he was standing at the end of the driveway, talking to one of his old-timer friends. I did not want to interrupt his conversation, so I waited at a distance until they were finished. It took a while.
When at last, the old-timer walked away, I approached Mr. Frerard. He turned to me and said, “See that young fellow, he’s only 75 years old. I am 97.” “What is keeping me alive?” Looking up, he pointed to the sky and said, “It is the Lord! It is the Lord! The Lord is keeping me alive because he wants to punish me! I must have done something wrong. All my friends are gone.”
Two years later, when I came home from the office, there was a message that Mr. Frerard had passed away and the viewing was to be held that evening in the Fox Chase neighborhood, near the Five Points intersection. It was about a fifteen-mile drive across the city, but I had to get there. I made it with five minutes to spare. As I walked through the door of the funeral parlor, I heard Anne Schunder say, “There he is. He made it on time.” Emile Frerard was 99 years of age, just a month or two short of the magic number of 100.
I often think of Mr. Frerard, but it was not until the COVID pandemic of 2020 that I really understood his complaint about that 75-year-old “young fellow.” It is a contemporary version of the breaking up of that old gang of mine.
I learned a lot from that old man.
Gerry St. John is a retired lawyer who lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He was graduated from St. Joseph’s College and Temple University School of Law. Between these educational endeavors, he spent nearly four years in the United States Marine Corps, most of it in Camp Pendleton, California, and in the Far East during the Cuban Missile Crisis. For more than 45 years was a civil trial lawyer, and for nine years a member of the adjunct faculty at Saint Joseph’s University.