In the midst of the COVID pandemic, what did you do to fill the seemingly endless hours of being locked up in your home and deprived of family, friends, outdoor activities, and the myriad of everyday events that make life worth living?
I know people who started online courses, got out long-forgotten board games, undertook ambitious home-improvement projects, and turned their garden into a home gym. But certainly, I had not encountered anyone who spent their time constructing a large-scale Lego city with a complementary and fully functional train system until I was privileged to edit Frank’s endearing LifeBook, The Life and Times of Frank and Barbara.
Frank’s lifelong interest in trains had been sparked decades earlier when, as a young boy, his mother took him and his brother down to the basement of their Chicago home one Christmas to present them with a complete Lionel Trains layout that included villages, mountains, and a river. Frank recounts, “To this day, I have no idea how she made it or how she kept it a secret from us, because we were always around the house.”
Let’s get building!
In later life, having made a success of his career, Frank and his beloved wife, Barbara, enjoyed many tailor-made train vacations among spectacular scenery in the United States and Europe. However, soon after their return from a trip to Europe, in early 2020, he found himself shut in his home because of the pandemic. Along with doing puzzles with Barbara, Frank decided the best way to fill the many empty hours was to construct a complete Lego city. It was a project that involved thousands of bricks and filled a large part of a room with tall buildings, roads, a working train system and station, and a host of other intricate features.
Frank traces his love of trains back to a childhood that was frequently spent in his father’s pharmacy, where Frank was happy to help with anything required, including being the soda jerk (a position that was highly valued because of the opportunity it presented to meet girls!).
However, things in the drugstore weren’t exactly plain sailing for his father, who, in the forty years he owned the business, was held at gunpoint nine times and occasionally left tied up in the rear of the store until a customer came to his rescue. Frank notes that his father reported that the gunman was often more nervous than his father, who worried about getting shot by accident.
JFK caught chatting up Barbara
Frank met Barbara while they were still at school, and college sent them both to Milwaukee. However, they were on opposite sides of the city, and Frank had to take two buses to visit Barbara. He still remembers the bitterly cold long walks along Lake Michigan as he hurried to catch the late bus and the horrible wait in freezing temperatures when he missed it. On one occasion when getting off the bus, he spotted Barbara talking to John F. Kennedy, who was there campaigning. Frank approached and asked her, “Is this guy trying to pick you up?” (Editor’s note: In the light of subsequent revelations about JFK, that might well have been a possibility!)
The couple began their married life in a basement apartment in a suburb of Chicago, with Frank obtaining his degree in electrical engineering and going on to complete a master’s in material science. He took a job with Motorola in Chicago, where punctuality was demanded of employees. Anyone arriving even a minute after the 8 a.m. start time had to do the “walk of shame” to receive a lecture on timekeeping. Frank recalls, “Once, I drove through a snowstorm to arrive thirty minutes late and still got the lecture!”
The couple eventually made the move to Phoenix, Arizona, although the change in climate took some adjustment. For their first Christmas in much warmer climes, they purchased a traditional pine tree, as had been their custom. Frank recalls, “In the Midwest, our families always bought ‘real’ trees that were typically frozen and had to be thawed in the basement for a week. In Phoenix, we picked our tree and put it in the garage, only to discover a week later that there were no needles left on it!”
Sheltering under the boardroom table
Frank’s burgeoning career eventually took him to California. He settled with Barbara and their children—David, Michael, Greg, and Cindy—in Saratoga, close to the Santa Cruz Mountains. He was at a meeting at the headquarters of his company, Advanced Micro Devices, when an earthquake shattered the calm. He said, “We all jumped under the boardroom table as the ceiling shook.”
He recalls that “somewhat ironically,” Barbara was in a relaxation class at the YMCA when the ventilation ducts on the ceiling began to rattle and three-foot waves splashed from the outdoor pool into the parking lot. Meanwhile, Cindy, alone at home with the family sheepdog, Athie, stood in a doorframe with the dog between her legs as rows of fine china crashed from cabinets to the floor.
When Frank and Barbara found a four-bedroom vacation house in Aptos, a city just south of Santa Cruz, Frank decided to construct built-in cabinets in the study. “I thought we needed a train table in there too,” he recalls, “but Barbara responded crisply, ‘There will be no train tables in this house’.” The compromise was Frank having a shelf built around the study, above the doorways and over the cabinets (with Barbara’s stipulation that there be no ugly brackets visible), where Frank could mount his large-scale train and run it around the room. It has since been christened “the Train Room.”
The Italian job
Frank’s connection with a Silicon Valley start-up proved rewarding, and he eventually opted to “retire”—for the first time! A chance conversation led to him accepting a small role as a lecturer at Santa Clara University. He told Barbara that “it was only one course, and I would have plenty of time to do other things,” but he was soon appointed the chair of the engineering management program at the graduate school—a position he occupied for ten years until he retired in 2019 for a second time!
In between his work, raising his much-adored family, and his train and other travels, Frank spent time in Italy with Barbara. His wife initially went to Florence to study photography and art history, and when she returned to Italy again two years later to study art and Italian history, Frank joined her in her apartment in the city center. With the World Cup being played during that time, Frank was able to purchase soccer jerseys for all the family with their surname emblazoned across the back.
Of course, both then and later, the couple found time for more thrilling train adventures, including trips to two of the highest mountains in Switzerland—the Matterhorn and Jungfrau.
Filling in the family history
Frank’s motivation for writing his book was so that his grandchildren could be more aware of their family history. He says, “I have questions for my grandparents and parents that I wish I sought answers for.” His love for Barbara and his family shines in a book packed with stories of hard work, love of family, financial success, and, of course, trains. It seems that from the moment Frank got his first train set all those years ago, he was on the right track. As for the future? Surely, it is a case of “full steam ahead,” Frank!
Written by Stephen Pitts, LifeBook Memoirs editor
