Irving Frank Blinco resided in East Chicago Indiana my birthplace. He was a: World War Two veteran of the Navy, Steel Worker, New York Yankee fan, Grandfather, and devoted family man. To me he was Papa.

During the holiday season he would set up a train around the Christmas tree for his two grandsons “Jonafon, and Drake”. He would make claims that without a doubt his tree was so much bigger than ours.

My papa had a great since of humor. He ended every visit with “See ya later alligator!!” which my brother and I would come back with in unison “After a while Crocodile!” He was short and thin, and generally pretty quiet, but when he had something to say he said it nice and loud. I inherited a few things from him; we were both thin, and when we speak our voices fill the room.         

He had short statue on his desk of a peanut with a baseball hat near the bottom of it read “baseball nut”. It was truly his favorite past time. He would listen to the Yankee games on his long distance radio, we lived near Chicago, and even on a clear day you would hear ninety percent static, and ten percent baseball game.

Papa was a mild tempered man but in 1960 my father at a young age learned how important Yankee baseball was to him. My father told me a story about Papa after game seven of the World Series versus the Pittsburg Pirates he was at the play ground with some of his friends, and when he came home he discovered the TV set had a hole in the screen. The first walk off homerun in a World Series was hit that day by Bill Mazeroski a Pittsburg Pirate. This was a terrible day for the New York Yankees, its fans, and an innocent television set, but for Mazeroski who oddly enough was from my Papa’s home town it was the best day of his life. My Papa never forgave him for what he did that day.     

 Oh Boy did he hate Chicago teams, especially the White Sox. The White Sox in his mind were no good; if they could have even put the Yankees in a good position by beating a rival team he would not even cheer one single cheer for them bums.  

My father did favor the Yankees, but did not have the same animosity towards the White Sox as my Papa did. He apparently was in some sort of dispute with my Papa he decided to take me and my brother outside dressed in white sox hats and shirts, and took pictures of us, and promptly had them developed and sent it to my Papa. My Father must have been really upset for him to do something like that. Drake and I were in the process of being brain washed to be Yankee fans and this was not going to sit well with my Papa. Apparently the brain washing did not take Drake and I both turned out to be Cubs fans; my father blames Bozo the Clown, and WGN, for that miscalculation.

When I got older and our relationship changed he was someone I was able to talk to and confide in. I think I learned to admire him more when I would visit him. We often would meet up for breakfast and talk. I found out what he went though as a child, and how he ended up in Northwest Indiana. I found his life had some similarities to mine he moved far away from his home with no family no friends just the possibility of a better life for his family.

I had the very fortunate opportunity to drive from Northwest Indiana to Phoenix Arizona with him. We would have breakfast in the morning, drive for about four or five hours, stop rest have a snack, and drive for another few more hours eat dinner find lodging and get up and do it again. We talked about that trip every time I saw him. I learned so much about him on that journey. It was a lot of little things like he would talk about himself in the third person sometime like he would say “Papa is getting tired”, he would read any interesting billboard he saw “Hotel ten miles sleep cheap and eat”, give a specific set of instructions to the waitress when ordering his breakfast “Just a small portion of potatoes, and some coffee please”, and that he still called me Jonafon.

He accomplished a lot he had a good family he retired with a good pension from the steel mill, and everyone who knew him says he was a wonderful person to be around.