A life I'd jump at ... (Phil Frank's passing)

"Phil, unlike Picasso, another local artist, was extraordinarily generous with his time and his talent."

I am writing this right after I learned Phil Frank had passed on. The news sucked all the funny out of the day for me.

Phil Frank: the comic cartoonist, the omniscient observer of life, politics, bears and feral cats. Gone is the Master of G: grins, giggles and guffaws. Oh, and yes, gentleness.

I'm not going to write about his Farley cartoon strip because I only caught the last half of that 30+ years act. Nor am I going to write about the Elderberries because that's a strip for old people and I'll maintain until the end that I never read that strip. I especially never read the parts about Dusty and his horse or the Professor, or Evelyn or the General. No, never heard of any of them.

I want to write about Phil, as I knew him. I can sum it up by saying I've attended a lot of town functions where, by the next day, five minutes with Phil would consume most of my memory of the evening.
"Tell me all about last night?"
"It was great. I talked with Phil Frank."

Neighbor, colleague, friend. I used to live next door to him. Phil would be out in his garage most nice days putting the finishing touches on an old MG. I thought he was either a perfectionist or very slow mechanically because those finishing touches seemed to take years. Then I found out he owned a number of cars. Anyway, that's where I first met him, fixing his MG.

I had an MG once. Every time I took it to the garage they ended up replacing a something with a similar part from a Volvo or a Saab. I once mentioned to my mechanic that pretty soon there'd be no MG parts left in my engine. "That's the goal," he said. "Pretty cars but they don't run for s***." I never told Phil this story because it was hearsay. If I've learned one thing in my life, it's never to hearsay on a man's hobby.

We didn't talk about cars. This wasn't Phil's fault. I know less about cars that I do about nuclear fission and what I know about that I got off a bumper sticker. I later realized, I should have talked cars and Phil would have obliged and I would have learned something.

Unlike Picasso, another local artist, Phil was extraordinarily generous with his time and his talent. He always reminded me of Mark Twain and Will Rogers — no politician was safe from his wit. In Phil's case, after he lampooned them in his strip, politicians would come after him with a grin and a handshake instead of a gun or a lawsuit.

He drew so many strips involving San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown that Phil collected them into a book called "Don't Parade on My Reign." Local lore has it that Willie was so pleased, he handed out copies at Christmas

I saw Mayor Brown once at a Conservatory fund-raiser that Phil and his wife, Susan, invited me to attend. It was a funny, satirical production about current issues in San Francisco. Phil narrated it in front of a podium, stage right, dressed as Farley, his intrepid reporter character. We were told Willie might make an appearance during his nightly rounds of city events. He did, decided to stay and laughed throughout the evening along with the rest of us.

Imagine if the State Department used such national resources as Phil and Mark and Will in pursuit of world peace instead of the bozos they often put in charge. God, if you're listening, we need all the Phils you can spare down here.

Phil Frank reminds me of my dad in an unusual way. My father married his college sweetheart and loved her for sixty-plus years. He built a successful business and had a wide circle of friends as well as children and grandchildren who loved him and each other.

My dad couldn't draw worth a lick, was average in the humor department and didn't have a moustache. But when he died, playing tennis until the final three months, I thought the same thing I'm thinking now about Phil: when I was born, if God had offered me that life, I'd have taken it in a heartbeat.

Today I'm going with sad. Tomorrow, I'll start the day reading one of Phil's Farley books and funny will be restored to the universe. I'm pretty sure that's the way he would want it.
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