My Little Brother
Charlie asked to know some more about Greg and I have felt inclined to write something
about him. Greg is married to Martha, two years his senior. They have been married 33
years as of June 8th. They both graduated from William and Mary. Martha is from
Bedford Virginia, That’s Nathan Bedford Forest I believe. Civil War general and founder
of the Klan. Also Forest Gump’s namesake. Sorry.
Greg and Martha lived in Newport News for awhile when Greg taught at Warwick HS (I
think that is the place). He taught history and was an assistant football coach and head
wrestling coach. He had a long row to hoe in that the mostly black school was forbidden
to go out for wrestling as Greg was white. After a couple of years of teaching, Greg left
and went to work for Allstate Insurance. That is where I worked (in NJ) and for while my
mom did, my dad did for 20 years and my first wife Margaret did. Greg bought a house in
the Malibu section of Virginia Beach where he resided until 1984.
Martha’s mom lived in Bedford and Martha longed for home so they moved to Roanoke
in 1984. Greg transferred in his job.
Greg has two kids. Will who is really William Francis (named for his two grand fathers
both deceased) was born in 1976. He is a graduate of Marshall. His daughter is Kathryn.
She is 25 and lives at home. Will lives in Phoenix, AZ and is a mortgage counselor.
As an adult Greg has been a wrestling official and a long time Little League volunteer.
He is the past President of the Cave Spring LL. Tiki and Rhonde Barber played in his
league.. Of course he has been in MDTL for a couple of decades.
I am going to sleep now but will continue tomorrow. Greg is my best friend in the world.
I may not be his but he is mine. Find out why. And who do you think the Book, the Tank
and the Moose was? And why?
MY LITTLE BROTHER:
I lived in Greg’s shadow for most of my early years. I cannot say how it was to live in the
shadow below him like Ray did. But it wasn’t great above him either.
I am the oldest of five boys. Greg is my junior by 20 months. He is older than Ray by 19
months. In school, I was two years ahead and Ray was one year behind. We both were
compared to Greg throughout our schoolboy years.
Here are the cliff notes: Greg was the scholar-athlete at New Providence High School
AND at William and Mary. Greg was 4 time Virginia Collegiate, 4 time Southern
Conference heavy weight wrestling champion. Greg was an all-state football player in NJ
and he was twice an all-state baseball player at two different positions. First base as a
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junior and a catcher as a senior. Greg twice finished second in the state as a heavy weight
wrestler.
To top it off, Greg went to school, went to practice, came home did his homework, did
his chores without complaint, and was in bed by 8. He was too much to live with for his
smoking, drinking, carousing brothers.
As a little leaguer in Rochester, NY I remember the field was in front of the famed Erie
Canal. Using a wood bat, Greg would pound a HR a game. In high school, I remember a
450 footer using a wood bat. In the pre-free agency days of the early 70’s Greg could
easily have played professional baseball. But my dad took stock in an education. So after
looking at 75 or so college scholarship offers, Greg decided on William and Mary. Post
graduation, Greg was drafted by the Chicago Fire of the short-lived World Football
League. But he didn’t play. Camp started the day Greg and Martha got married. They
wouldn’t wait and he didn’t go.
Jeff tells a story of a time he and Greg and Greg’s son will went to Cincinnati for opening
day. There they ran into Billy Ard and Gordon King. For those that can’t remember,
don’t know or weren’t born yet, Ard was an offensive lineman for the NY Giants during
the Super Bowl year in the mid 1980’s. King was an offensive lineman for the Jets. They
were friends of Mikes. Greg went to make a purchase and both professional football
players were astonished at Greg’s physique commenting on how long in the weight room
they’d have to work to get the back that Greg had.
Yet Greg is a gentle man and a gentleman. He is not someone to brag about his
accomplishments. I do that for him. What you see is what you get with Greg: honesty,
integrity, character. Greg never played flag football or men’s softball trying to recapture
something, or attain something. He had already lived it. He had closed those chapters and
moved on. He has had more successes as a husband, a father, a brother, and a friend
As a child he was called the Tank when we played street football and he was his own
team against 11. In later years he was Moose to everyone. The local papers reveled in the
Moose and his skills. As a freshman running back he was described as a bear running
through mice. To me, he is Greg. I think of him as my best friend. He is still the Go To
guy when I need advice or assistance.
There is a scene from the original “Brian’s Song” where Gayle Sayers has been given the
George Halas Most Courageous Player Award. Sayers tells the audience that it is Pic that
deserves the award. He asks that when everyone hits their knees at night to pray for Brian
Piccolo. He tells the audience that he loves Brian Piccolo. I love my little brother and I
am asking that you continue to pray for Greg’s recovery.
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My Little Brother 2
Before I get too maudlin here, let me say that tormenting Greg was great sport. Greg is
lazy by nature. He would make it a habit of lying on the sofa and saying, “go get me a
coke” or “go get me some ice cream”. Try and envision Jabba the Hut from Star Wars if
you can. There, that’s Greg. Throughout the next few paragraphs hold that image instead
of the one with a halo I send before.
Of course one didn’t have to get him anything. Not unless you wanted to cross my dad.
See dad was an ex-football player and Greg was dad’s chance to stand tall. He couldn’t
do that with Hippie son 1 and hippier son 3 and 4. Had he lived he could have done that
with Mike or the “second coming” as we referred to him as. Second Coming of Greg that
is.
I had had enough of the “Get me’s” one night. When I was ordered to get the ice cream, I
loaded it up with Tabasco Sauce. I can still hear the howl. Greg sent Mike and Liam out
to get him donuts as this last draft in Virginia Beach. Greg would tell us to bring him
Italian food when we traveled to visit him. Old habits die hard – with a vengeance.
When we played tackle football as kids, the only way to stop Greg was to trip him and
wham down he went face first to the ground. He was always a two- handed ball carrier
and would not let go of the ball to break his fall. Do you know how many football
bladders he would bust?
The last time I hit Greg, I was 3 and he was 18 months or so. He was bigger than I after
that.
Jeff and I cheated him at cards once. Stacked the deck on him. He soon realized it and
became enraged. I finally saw what all those quarterbacks had seen. I was very afraid of
him. My late wife Margaret, all 5 foot of her stepped in between and ordered Greg to step
back. And he did. I think she saved Jeff and I from a sound whopping.
Greg was always good at taking the Sporting News and disappearing into the bathroom
for 2-3 hours and that is not an exaggeration. If you had one bathroom, everyone else was
in a world of hurt. Up to and including a half hour after he came out too.
One night he and Mike and I were playing some games in my house in NJ. Will was 3 at
the time. It was before MDTL. Will kept coming back down stairs and would not go to
bed. Greg threatened a spanking over and over again. We had a long talk about spanking
and discipline. Finally Greg took the Baseball Weekly and went to the bathroom. Will
came down and Mike spanked him. The boy went to bed and never came back. Greg
went on for days about how progressive a parent he was and how spanking was out dated.
We never told him he was wrong.
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There was the awful night of my 21st birthday. Friends threw a huge party (orgy) for me.
Greg who did not smoke or drink was having some beer. Now he didn’t know what beer
tasted like so we spiked it with some rye. Pretty soon he was dazed and said he wanted a
woman. So stunned were we that I told him to find my girlfriend and let her know I said
it was OK. I thought that would be fun to watch. Little did I know he trapped her in the
powder room. She had to be extracted through the window to get away.
The next day, my head pounded. Ray woke me up and told me that dad wanted to see us
in the garage. I was 21, Greg was 19 and Ray was 18 at the time. My mom does not
drive. Oh, she did for a couple of years in the 80’s but she is way too fearful. Dad did all
the driving and we only had one car. That year, we had the Loser Cruiser. A 1968 Dodge
Polaris Wagon. 100 feet long, and aqua in color. Someone drove the car to the birthday
party. It wasn’t me. Ray and I came into the garage and my dad had a used condom at the
end of a stick. Apparently it was on the front seat of the car. The same car that my mom
and dad had driven to the market that morning. Thinking fast, dad removed the offensive
item before mom sat on it. Dad was furious and wanted to know who had left it there.
Both Ray and I pleaded ignorance. Which is true as far as I am concerned. So I said,
“maybe it was Greg”. Dad paused a bit and then the three of us broke out in laughter. The
subject was gone but still is not forgotten.
When I was 12 I had major surgery. The doctors told my parents I was going to die and to
take me home and make me comfortable. Part of that was telling my brothers I didn’t
have long and to do things for me when I asked. When I was 15 I was still milking this
con when one day I heard Greg ask “mom, is Pat going to die soon?”
When I got my first job, I was hired as a field adjuster with Allstate. I was given a
company car to use for business. Personal miles cost me 15 cents a mile. I also owned a
1972 Dodge Dart. Nice little car. I had a loan on it and paid $55 a month. I also paid my
insurance on the car. One day I came home from work and the Dodge was gone. I asked
mom where it was. She told me that Greg had driven it back to William and Mary. Times
change but I was still workin’ for Greg.
Greg and Mike and I would always go to Lancaster when the cards came out in February.
There we found the Treadway Motor Inn. The Treadway had Friday night seafood buffets
that were legendary but they also had Sunday morning buffets. All you can eat buffets. It
was 4 hours to drive to Lancaster, but one Sunday morning we set out for breakfast. We
paid the $20 entry fee and set to eating. Greg went right to the NY Strip steaks and that’s
all he ate. After his 8th they cut him off. He whined about false advertising. That he could
eat more. Mike and I were cut off too. They figured we’d give our steak to him.
When I got my driver’s license, my dad told me I had to drive all the brothers to church.
He was no longer going to go. Here I thought he’d known the Pope personally. So instead
of church, we went to Stewarts Root beer and ate. Well, they had a root beer drinking
contest one Sunday. We got Greg to join. So does anyone know how to tell your dad why
your brother is covered in vomit and smells like root beer?
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I’ll wrap up today about how Mom made a rule about wearing pants at the dinner table.
We always ate dinner as a family, around the table. No TV. No stereo. Well we could
come to the table in our tighty whities, even as young men. Greg was always coming
from practice. He used to be heavily taped and he would have Kramer’s Red Hot or
Atomic Balm or some form of high-test heat on under the tape. One night he came to the
table smelling like Ben Gay like he always did. We ate because we were hungry and not
because the food smelled good. Who could smell the food? That night we were having
Swanson’s pot pies. Greg flipped his pie over and instead of landing on the plate; it fell
squarely on top of his thigh, which still had heat balm on it. After that we had to wear
pants while we ate. How unfair was that
MY LITTLE BROTHER
Here is a couple of growing up stories about life with Greg. For those that know him,
Greg is a huge Cleveland Browns fan. Why I have no clue. Its not that he wears those
silly hound dog masks either. I think it stems from being in awe of a single player: Jim
Brown. Greg always accused me of aligning myself with winners, yet his heroes were
Brown and some Alabama kid named Mays. I remember going to the store and getting
football cards. Remember when cards were made of cardboard and they didn’t have
holograms on them. Sorry, I digress. One day Greg got a brand new Jim Brown card.
Pristine. No gum residue at all. He made the mistake of leaving it on his bike seat while
he attended to a nature call in the house. His older brother swapped out that card for a
card from his brothers tire spokes. Greg’s face turned white at first when he thought his
brand new card had been destroyed and then instantly burning red when he realized that
he recognized the older card. Relentless, he hunted me down. I surrendered the card in
exchange for not getting the pounding that I deserved. He may still have that card.
My dad’s first house cost $10,000 up in Greece, NY. His brothers all kidded him about
being rich enough to own a 10k house. It was a little cape with two bedrooms downstairs
and one large room upstairs. Greg was 4 when we moved in there and 8 when we moved
out. As little guys, four of us shared one room and two beds. Greg and I shared a bed for
while, while Ray and Jeff bunked together. Mike was the baby and was in my parent’s
room. Naturally when bedtime came, there was a lot of talking and fooling around and
my dad would holler in to go to sleep of get the belt. Well, there wasn’t a night that we
didn’t push the envelope until at last his silhouette was in the doorway and the belt
slightly swayed. He would weigh in and start to swing. I usually would work my legs
between the bed and the wall so that only my chest and head were above decks. I was
always the loudest too. I would cry that I had been hit enough (when I hadn’t been hit at
all) and complain that Greg wasn’t getting his licks. That caused dad to turn his sole
attention to Greg.
On car trips, we rode as a family in the family sedan 5 boys and 2 adults in a car made for
less. Mike would sit between mom and dad in front. I would sit behind my dad. Ray
would be in the middle over the hump. Greg would sit behind mom. Jeff would have to
ride on the ledge by the back window. We would take 300 – 400 mile trips. In those days
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you couldn’t buy a beer in Pennsylvania on Sunday’s. Coming from NJ and driving to
NY, dad wouldn’t stop for lunch until he could get a beer. That was usually about 15
miles from our destination. Car trips often got rowdy. No air conditioning didn’t help.
The commotion in the back often irritated dad and he would call for absolute quiet – OR
ELSE! So your author would reach around Ray and take a good - sized chunk of Greg’s
belly fat between two of my knuckles and squeeze and twist at the same time. Greg
would let out a howl. Dad would turn in his seat and while he was holding the wheel with
his left knee, start to swat Greg with great vigor. Now Ray is no day at the beach
personality wise and Greg couldn’t get over him to get to me. That is a scrap that no one
wanted. Plus any motion by Greg in dad’s peripheral vision meant another smack. So for
a couple of hundred miles I’d play that game with amusement. Finally, Ray would just
tell dad what I was doing. However, in my strategic location behind him, he couldn’t
reach me. As the Old Redhead would say, I was in the catbird seat. Dad would tell me
that when they stopped I was going to get it. So as we approached the NY line I would
look for roadside taverns and call out when I saw a Schlitz or Miller sign. As soon as that
cold brew was going down, Dad forgot the chaos in the car.
There was the time that I was playing with Harold Miller, the boy across the street. Hal
was a year older than I and 3 years older than Greg. Hal found a big steaming pile of
fresh dog poop. Taking a tree branch, he made the sign of Zorro with poop on the front of
Greg’s T-shirt. It was really funny. It still is to think of it. So Greg ran home and told my
dad that I did it. Dad had a way of spanking you that made you feel as if you were
trapped by a spider. It was a standing figure 4-leg lock. Down would come your pants
and you literally could not move. Bare hands on a bare butt. Now Dad may have been a
lawyer but he put himself through law school working in a foundry. As a young man he
laid track for the railroad. His hands were not tender little girl hands. They were man
hands with ageless calluses. So dad went to work on me like Picasso on canvas.
Discipline was an art form. In mid smack, above my shrieks, dad happened to look up
and saw Greg laughing. Stopping in mid swing, he asked what was so funny, and Greg
made the cardinal mistake of telling dad that I didn’t do it. The leg relaxed and I fell to
the ground. I gathered up my jeans and scurried to the door. There was one thing that Dad
could abide by, and that was lying. If you did something wrong and lied about it, you got
spanked twice. Not twice as long, but twice. He uttered two words to me “get out”. He
didn’t have to say it twice. I was out and the door closed swiftly. In the hall, I heard the
howls of pain and I thought this was so cool, he got pooped on and he is taking a beating
to boot.
I am amazed that Greg still talks to me
Greg Remembered
My brother Jeff has really put me on the spot, now I have to come up with something
sarcastic and cynical to say this morning.
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I want to correct something that the Reverend just stated. There are four of Greg’s
brothers here this morning. It is just that three of us want to share some thoughts with
you. My brother Michael is a very private man and wishes to keep his thoughts that way.
I want to thank my mother Joyce for giving life to the man we celebrate here today. I
want to thank Martha, his wife of 33 years, for making his life complete. I want to thank
his children, Will and Kathryn, for enriching his life.
I never thought that I would ever need to write anything down when speaking of any of
my brothers. My wife Sue said this morning that everything we are writing is the same as
we have always said about Greg. We are not embellishing anything due to the occasion,
we are speaking the truth. The same as we have said while sitting around a table or on bar
stools. At my age though I tend to go off on tangents. Martha has suggested to me that
you all have to go home tonight and that I can’t take all day. Martha also suggested that I
try to make my remarks humorous. I am not really a funny guy, but I will try to do so.
When I was 5 and Greg was about 3, I remember punching him in the mouth. It deadened
his tooth. It turned black and it fell out. That was the last time I ever struck him. Of
course it was the last time I was ever larger than he was.
One of my early memories was sleeping in the same bed as Greg when we were younger.
We lived in a house with limited bedrooms and four of us slept on two beds in the same
room. Picture a slave ship, below decks for a second. Take another second and think of
Greg. Now take a look at me and imagine the two of us on the same twin bed. Now hold
that smile for a few minutes.
I have a thousand funny moments swirling around in my head. Greg stepped on a nail.
When didn’t Greg step on a nail? This one time though he told the doctor not to cut off
his shoe because “my daddy says he’ll kill me if I ruin another pair of sneakers”. Another
time a neighbor boy made the mark of Zorro on Greg’s t-shirt with dog poop. Then Greg
told my dad that I did it. My backside will never forget that one. I remember the fights on
Christmas mornings over whose toys were whose. Why my parents couldn’t just get 5
gun sets with pearl handles is beyond me. That one that was different always provoked a
fight. I remember Greg being denied service at an all you can eat dinner. They wouldn’t
let him have that 8th strip steak or would they let Mike or I get one for him. I remember
what a great bridge player Greg was. He could count 6 or more decks of cards. So his
devilish brothers took him to Atlantic City so we could cheat at black jack. Greg was a
sweet and unassuming man who did not know that we were cheating. People spend
millions of dollars on sophisticated cheating systems but we had Greg.
When we were little, we had a side lot that we played all sorts of sports on. When we
played football, it was always 8 on 1. Greg being the one. In those days we called him
“Tank” because he rolled over everything in his way. Footballs had bladders in them and
they always got ruined when Greg would fall on them. The only way to stop him was to
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trip him. Nevertheless, he always rolled up the score on us. Bill Belechick had nothing on
Greg when it came to piling up the score.
Before he went to high school, he was nicknamed “Moose” and that name stuck with him
until he left NJ. He excelled at everything that he did, two time all state baseball player
at two positions, all state football defensive lineman, 4 time Virginia Collegiate/Southern
conference heavyweight wrestler. As a 240-pound high school freshman, Greg served as
a running back. On lookers would say it looked like a bear running through a field of
mice. Legendary football icon Lou Holtz recruited Greg at William and Mary. When he
went to college, the local paper chronicled “Moose Goes to College” on the front page
with a photo of Greg holding a football and baseball.
As much as Greg was a consummate athlete, he was the consummate man. Considering
his physical attributes, Greg was a decent moral man. He was gentle of manner and
temperament. Greg was a loving husband and a devoted father. He was a faithful son and
the best brother a man could want.
Greg was a teacher beyond his three years of teaching high school in Newport News.
Greg’s great passion was teaching kids about baseball. 22 years he gave to children as
part of the Cave Spring National Little League. Greg taught us lessons in life as well.
Greg was married to Martha for 33 years. Greg had been drafted to play pro football. The
first day of camp was the day that Greg and Martha were to be married. Greg informed
the team and asked if he could report late. They told him that if they he wasn’t there on
time, he could plan on not coming. Greg told them, not to expect him then. Greg has
taught us all about commitment.
Greg’s dedication to his three decades of service to Allstate Insurance Company taught us
about work ethic. His manager Herb told me that on the day he was stricken ill that Greg
wanted to return to his desk rather than go to the hospital.
Greg was a man who played it straight and followed the rules regardless of the
consequences. He taught us all about character and integrity.
By virtue of the fact that so many people are here today to honor him, he has taught us all
about the value of friendship. Greg was my best friend. I suspect he was your best friend
too.
Like Ray, Jeff and Mike, Greg was my little brother. We are and ever will be the 5
Freaney Boys. We are part of a remarkable family. I miss Greg today. I will love Greg
forever.
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