In November 2020, we were deeply saddened to lose a wonderful friend of the Framingham History Center, Libby Franck. As one of our most beloved and talented presenters, Libby put her heart and soul into each performance. This eulogy was written by Libby’s son, Tom Franck, and he has graciously allowed us to share it.
Not too long ago, I read an intellectually rigorous book – well, at least intellectually rigorous for me – called “Thinking Fast and Slow” written by the esteemed psychologist and Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman. The book describes in great detail, the shortcomings of the human brain and how easily these shortcomings can be predicted through bias. One chapter that captured my attention focused on a phenomenon called “Peak – End,” When humans evaluate an experience – either one of their own or someone else’s – their judgment is heavily based on the peak of that experience and the end of that experience. And the peak-end phenomenon even extrapolates to the way in which we evaluate entire lives.
While I don’t believe that the sum of the life of my mother, Mary Elisabeth Franck, is diminished when examined moment to moment, beginning to end, I don’t want to try and ask anyone to overcome human nature. I would therefore like to talk about Mom through the prism of Peak-End, since that is simply the way that posterity works. And I’d like to begin with the end and discuss the context and details of the finale of Libby Franck’s life.
Libby was treated for cancer in 2017 but it came back in 2020, and when it did, it couldn’t be treated and was terminal. It was very black and white but it was also unclear where Libby would be taken care of for the end of her life. There were a good number of facilities but Covid restrictions were going to cause a lot of limitations. Moreover, Libby wanted to be around her stuff. Alison and I (mostly Alison) made the decision to have mom returned back to her apartment and Alison moved in with her. Libby got great care from visiting nurses and caretakers and was immersed in love from her daughter round the clock.
Libby’s mother, Elizabeth Hamilton Friermood was a respected author. She had 18 young adult novels published by Doubleday. Her last book was an autobiography about her life and family. Shortly after my mother’s prognosis, I pulled my copy of “Frier And Elizabeth” from my bookshelf and began to re-read it so I could examine my mother’s life again through the eyes of her own mother. I would call my mom and talk to her about different events in her life and gain perspective and joy.
Despite the health risks, I had to fly out for my mother’s birthday in October, knowing it would be her last. I surprised her by walking into her room holding a cake with 78 lit candles on it and almost burned her apartment down. I then read to her the words her mother had written about the day she was born.
“I climbed into our car beside Frier and off we went, both of us scared, but welcoming this big adventure. How well I remember that beautiful October day, the trees along Philadelphia Drive arched above us making a spectacular canopy of flaming crimson and flashing gold. What a lovely day for a birthday, I thought.”
Libby’s final birthday was just as lovely. And it’s worth noting how overwhelmingly vast a majority of her birthdays were beautiful, autumn, Massachusetts birthdays.
Another segment about Libby in my grandmother’s book read “When Libby was six or seven, the owner of the Pelham Book Shop presented our daughter with Rise Stevens’s recording of Carmen. For months, Libby was Carmen, dressed in gypsy costume, tossing her head, stamping her foot as she danced and sang with the record.”
It was pretty easy to find that exact recording on Youtube, so we all enjoyed listening to it together although with decidedly less foot stomping.
We all wanted more time with Libby, badly. But in the end, we’re all going to go. In this instance, there was a lot of closure. It is not lost on Alison nor I how much love our mother was on the business end of from her friends as her days dwindled. More importantly, it was not lost on Libby. For that, I thank you all. It was a great end.
Now, unfortunately, discussing the peak of my mother’s life is going to be a far less pleasant conversation. Since I brought up this concept of “peak-end” to you, I’m sure you are all formulating arguments on which of the many summits of Libby Franck’s life was in fact the highest And I’d like to be clear, right now, that I am not going to step in and break up the fistfights over this topic. So please, just take it outside and beat the snot out of each other on your own time until one of you either cries “uncle” or until you are both so bloodied and bruised that you can simply agree to disagree on Libby’s greatest hit. And yes, I”m looking at you Jackie Casey and Carol Murane.
So what I’d like to do is just touch upon several indisputable highlights and leave the measuring to the elevation scientists. And again, I’d like to go in reverse order.
A big thrust of the last phase of Libby’s storytelling journey involved her work for the Framingham History Center which commissioned her to create historical stories of local heroines. In my mom’s writings, I came across the following passage: “With my sophisticated research skills and my mother as a role model, I tell of courageous women many with the same names as my mother’s teenage heroines – Ellen, Josephine, Julia – wearing appropriate period dress. So I am the same Libby I always was with her books, her costumes and her pretending.”
Another high point worth mentioning is the fact that my mother found love again after my father died. My mom spent 11 years with David Ingle who had been an Associate professor of Psychology at Harvard and met my mom through storytelling. David and my mom traveled a lot together and told a lot of stories together. My father was a smart, educated guy but he wasn’t an academic and, I don’t know. Variety is the spice of life and I’m glad my mom got to go down that intellectual rabbit hole with David before he too unfortunately died.
My Mother’s work at the Natick School System is certainly up for discussion as a peak a in both depth and breadth. For 24 years she was in charge of elementary school libraries, selecting books, bringing in guest authors, and of course, telling stories.
Within 13 years of that run, she also had a TV show on Natick Cable called “Tales from Cricket Corner” that she produced and hosted. In 1994 and 1995 it won Massachusetts Community Television awards.
So during this big stretch of time, my mom was telling lots and lots of stories to lots and lots of kids. As the years went by, a pattern emerged. Whenever we would be out in public, people would invariably come up to her and say “You used to tell me stories when I was a little kid.”
And I feel the need to clarify that it wasn’t just girls doing this. And I don’t know, there was just something about seeing high school boys – some wearing letterman’s jackets – willing to risk the social stigma of thanking my mom in front of their friends for her storytelling. I mean, it takes a fair amount of courage to go up to my mom, with your crew in tow and say “Yeah! Elsie Piddock! “
It’s very clear that her storytelling had an impact on many people. And it’s worth trying to figure out why. When people talk about old time radio shows, what they invariably say is what made them so great was the amount you had to imagine while listening. The same thing holds true with storytelling. Storytelling is often thought of as a performance. But it’s really a dialogue. A dialogue of imagination. It forces the listener to fill in the blanks and meet the storyteller halfway. And, in thinking about that, geometrically, that halfway point is triangulated from the abilities of the storyteller. The listener’s imagination can only match what the storyteller brings to the table. How tall, how magnificent, how glorious that halfway point is, how rich those fill in the blanks details are, is predicated on the strength, on the might of the storyteller. And when the storytelling is mighty enough, boys in letterman’s jackets become immune to embarrassment.
In nominating peaks for Libby’s life, it would be a massive error not to include the time she spent with my father, Herbert Henry Franck. From the time they were married in September of 1964 to the time he died in 1992. Marriage is a difficult thing but they really pulled it off not only with the strong love they had for each other, but with the thousands and thousands of little considerate things that they did for each other and as well as all the people around them. They really were both good people and they were perfect for each other.
So lastly, I would like to add my own, probably self-serving, consideration for the peak of Mary Elisabeth Friermood Franck’s life. And in doing so, unfortunately, I am going to ask something of you. And what I am going to ask of you is hard. In fact, it is so hard, that you are not going to be able to do it. But I am going to ask it of you nonetheless. With all that I’ve said about my mother’s passion for storytelling, how she was able to not only find her calling but make it her life’s work, I want you to try, as hard as you can, to imagine…what bedtime was like for my sister and I when we were growing up. What it was like when we had this storytelling freak of nature, not merely homozygous for the storytelling chromosome, but groomed since birth to tell stories to children, all to ourselves – and didn’t have to share her with anyone else. You cannot. And I can not convey that magic to you since I am not as great a storyteller as she.
And I invite you to be cynical about this. I’d like you to say “Oh, she was telling stories all the time. After a long hard day, I’m sure the last thing she wanted to do was crank out a few more for Thomas and Alison.” Go ahead and try that. How’s that working out for you? If you knew my mother at all, you know that wasn’t the case.
Ruthy Viguers was a longtime editor of The Horn Book magazine and a storytelling mentor to my mother when she was getting her Masters at Simmons. When she found out that Libby Franck was having twins, she wrote “Few such appropriate things happen in this world as that so wonderful a storyteller as Libby should acquire an audience of two all at once.”
But even she had no idea the extent to which her words were true.
What I can tell you is that all of the other storytelling Libby Franck did…was practice, it was a dress rehearsal. It was a warm-up. It was Babe Ruth taking a few swings in the on-deck circle. It was Nadia Comaneci putting chalk on her hands before she approached the uneven bars, all of the other storytelling Libby did was Mozart tapping his baton on the music stand and calling the orchestra to attention. The real show began when Libby was alone with her twins. You simply have no idea.
And I’d like to explain that when you treat imagination as a muscle and you give it Olympic-level workouts with relentless regularity.. the world changes. The world changes. It changes inside yourself and it changes outside of yourself. When you are all alone with your thoughts – a place most of the people of the world have been forced into for much of the past year -your mind is never a dark and scary place to be. It’s a place filled with joy, magic and boundless adventure and excitement. And when you are in the real world, dealing with whatever life is throwing at you — good or bad – you are blessed with this incredible gift of always being able to say “All that I see before me is not all there is. What I see now is just a snapshot – a page – of a story. A story that can go in any number of directions.” And those directions based on our imagination. On our ability to fill in the blanks. Being able to fill in the blanks is simply a good way to be. And we are all – all of us here – able to fill in the blanks because Libby gave that to us. Even now, as we fill in the blanks of her story.
I am not convinced I am right in saying that the peak of my mother’s life was telling stories to my sister and I. The many, many close friends she had and the countless people she touched all have such strong cases of their own. I’m not going to argue with you. You may very well be right.
The point I will not concede is in telling you, it is the peak of mine.