“As a mom, the way she treated me, I couldn’t imagine anybody else,” Willie says. “I was always her number-one priority. She worked for the governor. She was like, the governor’s healthcare policy person, and she always made time for my dad and myself, regardless of whatever it was. She was always there for us.
“The one thing my mom always told me was, ‘You’ve got to finish high school. You’ve got to go out and get your education. It’s going to be very important.’ There weren’t a lot of people in our family that went to high school, finished high school. Out of the younger generation of kids, the twelve or thirteen of us, there’s probably only three or four that graduated from high school.”
Crystal was a stricter parent than her husband, and the bulk of the discipline fell to her. “Once Dad raised his voice, that was it. I knew whatever I was doing was wrong. My mom was the one that gave me the discipline.”
“That’s right,” agrees George Walter. “I can remember Billy taking Willie down to Lake Fair and just saying, ‘Oh here.’ Give him a twenty-dollar bill, or whatever, and off he went. No question about spending it wisely. ‘Come back if you need more.’ Just very generous and very open with him. But I think that that actually is illustrative not of just Billy’s parenting of Willie, but actually his approach to things, our approach to things. If something doesn’t go right, instead of getting upset about it, figuring out how to take advantage of what’s happened and keep going.”
Billy and Sue’s household was, at times, characterized as a perpetual sleepover, an inviting place that welcomed family and friends, especially displaced friends. “I had friends; most of them didn’t have a good home life, and she took them in and cared for them,” Willie says. “One friend, his mom worked like two or three jobs. He never had a dad. He spent a lot of time with us. My mom really took care of him almost as one of her own. . . . Another friend, his mom pretty much sent him packing right after high school. It was like, literally, the day after high school, she said, ‘You’re out of here. Good luck. I raised you for this long, and now you’re on your own. My mom said, ‘You know, Joe, we’re not going to let you. You can come live with us.’”
One day, when Willie was in junior high school and playing ymca basketball, his mother delivered earth-shattering news: “I want to coach.”
“‘What?!” The news stunned Willie. Mom wasn’t much of an athlete. “She couldn’t dribble a ball; she couldn’t even catch a ball,” Willie says. But he soon realized what the offer was all about; his mom wanted to spend time with him. His teammates agreed, and the wife/ mother/attorney took on a fourth role: coach. “We’d pretty much just scrimmage,” Willie recalls. “There were eight, nine, ten of us. We’d just have enough to practice. It was pretty funny. It wasn’t about her coaching. It was just about being around us.”
By 1986, Norma’s diabetes had worsened. High levels of glucose in the blood can lead to severe medical problems. Despite the grim report from the doctor, Norma kept her spirits up: “Like I told the doctor, she’ll be at the Sonics, the Mariners or up watching our kids—she’s not going to give up until she has to. And she didn’t,” says Georgiana Kautz. “Even when she was sick as hell, she’d make sure she spent time with me,” says Norma and Billy’s son, Tanu.
“When old man Bill died, they came and got me down at the end of the road. When I got down there, it was Norma laying in the road; she’d had a heart attack. And I kept yelling for her to wake up. And then we took her to the hospital. Then, it was deterioration. The kidneys were bad. They would give her blood transfusions. Her kidneys would give out if you operated on her heart, so it was just a matter of time.” Three years later, as Norma neared the end, Kautz began bargaining to keep her sister alive: “If you live, I’m not going to smoke anymore. I’m not going to do this . . .”
Norma Frank passed away on March 22, 1986. Roughly three weeks later, Billy lost his mother, Angeline Frank, at the age of ninety-six. He’d lost three people close to him in as many years. “We had a good life, with Dad and Mom, and all of us together,” Billy says.
Next: The Negotiator
Chapter Thirteen | Resilience added by Trova Heffernan on
View all posts by Trova Heffernan →