A story of basketball, madness, genius and brotherly love

I urge you to read author Jay Neugeboren’s Whatever happened to Frankie King? for great insight into compassion, mental illness, and perseverance. Below are my brief thoughts:

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I have kept up with my college freshman English teacher, Jay Neugeboren over the nearly 60 years since i was in his class. He is the author of 22 books, and many articles and essays. In 2008, I reviewed for The Forward his novel 1940 , a fictional imagining of the true story of Hitler’s Jewish doctor after he emigrated to the United States.

Jay’s brother Robert became mentally ill at 19, and spent the rest of his life in and out of mental institutions. He was abandoned  by their parents and it fell to Jay to care for him, which he did for five decades, chronicling it in 2003 in Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival, A Memoir, which also became a PBS film. Jay’s brother Robert was immensely talented — not only as an actor, a singer, and a dancer, but among other things, a published poet and excellent chess player, He was in the Erasmus Hal chess club with Bobby Fischer, who refused to play him because Fischer told him, “You play crazy.

Jay went to Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in the Fifties. Their arch rival was Madison High School, whose star player, Frankie King, was a basketball prodigy, recruited by the top college teams in the country. Contemporary players spoke of him in awe, calling him the best player, college or pro, they ever saw. He enrolled at  basketball power the University of North Carolina.

But he never played a game.

He dropped out, and then dropped out of sight, except for a few friends and family. Jay and his cohort wondered for more than fifty years what happened to him.

In a chance encounter with a contemporary in 2015, Jay learned Frankie King recently died. HIs obituary showed he was a prolific author of more than 40 novels, most of his books written under the pseudonym of a woman (Lydia Adamson). The Adamson series sold over a million copies. He also learned King dropped out of UNC, joined the army, was incarcerated at Leavenworth for attacking a guard, and led a troubled, reclusive life.

Frankie’s brother, nephews and cousin helped care for him. Jay sought them out to learn more about his tortured life, and wrote about it in Whatever Happened to Frankie King?, an extraordinary article in The American Scholar.

What moves me most about this story is not just the compassion and love these family members showed toward their deeply troubled relative, but how it was a two-way street; how the relationships immensely enriched and even defined the lives of the non-troubled people who took care of them. King’s nephew said, “I brought lots of my friends to meet Frank—Blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, Haitians, druggies—and they all fell in love with him.”

Jay asks:

Although most of us were not, in our early years, as exceptionally gifted as Frank and Robert, weren’t their lives, nevertheless, mirrors to all lives in which early dreams were partially realized, unrealized, destroyed, abandoned, or lost? Didn’t the stories of their lives make us wonder about the lives any of us might have lived?

There is much more. Please consider reading it.