4— Jean

Jean and Harry DeFrank remember it well…the when and the where of how they first met. The when was October, 1942; the where, if you can believe it, was over a water fountain at the old Steelton High School. What they don’t quite remember is what they first said to each other at the time. “Knowing me, I probably said something like, ‘Hurry the hell up, I’m thirsty,’” Harry quipped, just a light touch of "smart-alec" to his tone. “More likely, it was something like, ‘Hello, how are you.’” Jean is quiet on the subject.


Time, as it will, had faded for Jean and Harry the memory of what it was specifically that prompted them to speak to each other that day more than 60 years ago. "She looked good to me, I guess" Harry supposed in that direct, matter-of-fact way of his, pausing only briefly to try to recall the moment more precisely. For her part, Jean remembered Harry was an athletic sort but he certainly was not a celebrity among his peers…at least, she said, not in her mind. "If he was, I sure didn't know it," she smiled.


Whatever the exchange, this chance encounter made for an enduring connection…one that still was going strong well into the turn of the 21st century. Jean and Harry started keeping company two months after that first meeting. They were married six years later, in 1948, two years after Harry’s return from World War II military service. They began their parenting journey one year after that, in 1949, with the birth of their first child, Peggy Ann. Three sons, 10 grandchildren and two great grandchildren later, through the intervening years, now it was Jean's turn to quip: “I’ll bet there’ve been times when he wished he had never gone to that fountain that day.” This time, Harry was the silent one. But he smiled quietly as he and Jean sat in the family room of their Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, home recounting all this for a visitor. He knew, thanks to his life partner, the DeFrank name lived on.



Jean Updegrove was a 15-year-old sophomore when Harry and she first met. Harry was a 17-year old junior. The Updegrove family--Mother, Margaret (nee Gallagher); Father Tom; Jean and her older brother Jack (by four years)--had just moved to Steelton from Carlisle when her steelworker father took a job at the Bethlehem Steel plant. Tom Updegrove was of German/Dutch ancestry. Mother Margaret was all Irish.


Her parents, Jean remembered, were “typical parents of that era...Dad worked. Mom stayed at home with the children. They were both very quiet. My mother was an angel, the most gentle person I’ve ever known. She was a devout Catholic. My dad was not quite so devout. They were both very protective of their only daughter. I was very close to both of them. They also were very close to my children and enjoyed them immensely.”



Jean admits she was ”not really a sports fan” when she met Harry. “Oh, I went to the football and basketball games in high school because that’s what we did in those days…go to ballgames,” she remembered. But that was basically the extent of her interest at the time.


Today, she classifies herself as a committed fan. “ Absolutely,” she responds when asked. "I like to watch athletic events on TV." What's more, she and Peggy Ann, who began accompanying her father as a fourth-and-fifth-grade school girl to basketball playoff games at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Arena, may have, intentionally or not, become Harry's most severe coaching critics.


Jean remembers the time she and Peggy Ann were beside themselves giving Harry "what-for" at a Trinity game when an elderly gentleman seated in front of them would hear no more of it. "Wait a minute," he told them as he turned from his seat to face them. "How many wins does this man have (more than 400 at the time)?" he demanded. "I think he knows what he's doing."


To which Peggy Ann responded: "Time out! Time out! This is his wife and I'm his daughter. And everything we're saying now he'll hear when he gets home." Harry just sighs at the recollection. "They’re something else," he says. "When I come home, I just have to walk by them."


That Harry enjoyed coaching was never in doubt. Why else would he have done it for so long? But even Jean is surprised that he still was at it…the daily practices and the twice-a-week games…as he pushed toward age 80. “I never thought he’d be doing it this long,” she says in this 2005 conversation. Just how long is best exemplified by the wood-paneled wall full of team plaques, pictures and other mementos of seasons gone by. And they tell only a part of the story. Still more sat in a box on the floor by the bar because there was no room for them on the wall.



There was a time, however, when Jean, and most everyone else, thought Harry’s coaching days were over. That was in October, 1997, when Harry took ill late in the evening in that same downstairs family room where this discussion was held. Jean had to rush him to the hospital. Prior to that, he had missed only a few games toward the end of the 1991-92 season when he had to recover from a bleeding ulcer. But this was serious. Very serious. He was diagnosed with severe blockage of the arteries to his heart--90 per cent in one artery, 100 per cent in the others…Immediate bypass surgery was required. He was hospitalized for two weeks and, when released, he was 22 pounds lighter with a new diet (the traditional no fat, no salt routine) and a new lifestyle in his future. To this day, he lives with only one functioning artery to his heart. It was six weeks into the ‘97-98 season before he was cleared to return to the team.


Most people, Jean included, didn’t think it was good for Harry to go back…In December, a month and a half into the season, Harry was back on the Trinity bench coaching again, and much happier for it. Looking back, Jean says, returning to basketball “was the best thing that ever happened to him. He can’t just sit. If he didn’t have basketball, I don’t know what he would have done at the time.”


When Harry went back to coaching, Jean went back to the stands, watching her husband, trying to do what she could to be sure he wasn’t overdoing it. It wasn't easy at first, she recalls…

Throughout her married life, Jean acknowledges, she’s been a faithful but jittery spectator. She’s been known to walk out of a gym and into the lobby on more than one occasion when a particularly important game played out tight. “I get nervous when it gets close,” she smiles



Ten seasons after her husband's life-threatening episode, Jean Updegrove DeFrank still was sitting in the stands of high school gymnasiums across Central Pennsylvania. Asked how much longer she expected to be doing that and you get a very straightforward answer: “For as long as he wants to continue coaching.”


For Jean DeFrank, Harry’s possible retirement after 21 years at the Trinity helm was still an iffy proposition. And she, frankly, didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it either. She’d been there before. The point is that if Harry was still coaching, Jean expected to be back in the stands, health permitting. Sixty years of a habit would be just too hard to break.


   

                             Copyright (c) 2008 VPC, L.L.C.