I met Alice in 1978 when I was hired as the Advertising and Promotion Director at WOR Radio. I was so young, so excited to have the job, so ready to be a young professional. Alice was the Public Affairs Director. It was “dislike at first sight.” Not sure why, but we just didn’t hit it off. She was all sophistication . . . all Manhattan . . . Alice would hail limos, not cabs. Alice had personal shoppers. Alice had a mink she called Henry. This was Alice. She just couldn’t help it.
It may come as no surprise that the city mouse and the Brooklyn girl started to find that they could be allies. We’d walk the corridors of the radio station arm in arm and people would know that trouble was coming. And we got in a lot of trouble in those days. When Alice announced she was leaving the radio station to take a job in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, it absolutely broke my heart. But, I threw a party at a dance club and charged it to my expense account.
Over the years, Alice lived through all my marital woes, the birth of my girls, my career transitions – and she had a few of her own. She left Florida and came back to New York. Finally, she left broadcasting and entered a whole new career in the New York Courts system. She quickly rose to the top of her area and became the favorite of most of the judges in New York State.
But something was missing. Alice wanted more. When she announced that she was moving to New Jersey, I was not the only one of her friends who was stunned. How could it be? But Alice explained it so that it made sense. Her commuting for two hours each way from her new home in North Brunswick NJ made sense. She had her furry friends – Sasha and Ashley – and continued her busy single involved life with the Links, her church, and other organizations. There was never a moment when Alice wasn’t in charge of something or flying off to some reunion or convention.
I had already gone through two husbands when Alice called me to let me know that she had gotten married – not that she was planning to get married, but she had just gone and done it. I must admit that I was very sad that she didn’t invite me, that I wasn’t there to see her take a step I never thought she’d take. I don’t know why she didn’t invite me. But as I tried to process that decision on her part, my decision was not to be angry at her.
It wasn’t too long before we met her Francis, as she called him, “my Francis.” It was on the floral arrangement at the funeral home yesterday when we saw the incredible man who was her husband, whom we’d come to know as Frank, in his final repose. When I first heard about their marriage, I remember thinking how ironic the whole thing was – Alice, now a married lady – and Italian!
Alice chose this man for his incredible kindness, gentleness, sweetness – and he chose her right back. His entire extended Italian family chose my friend Alice, an African-American woman raised in Harlem, to be part of their family. Frank had been widowed and had four children and grandchildren. He even had a dog, Jenny, that Alice came to adore, this woman who only had cats.
At today’s funeral, I got reacquainted with the many people whom I’d met before in Alice circle – all her sorority sisters (the Links), neighbors, her family, Frank’s family. “Their” great grandchildren (they call her GIGI) sat on her lap at the cemetery. At the repast after the burial, seated with two of her wonderful Links sisters, Maxine and Marge, and two of her dear old friends, Vera and John Smith, I remarked that I thought that my friend Alice had done more for integration than most. The picture of her family, all gathered in support of her and in celebration of “her Francis,” is, in her own words, a “United Nations of families” – black, white, Hispanic, Italian and every other imaginable ethnicity.
Vera and I speculated about how Alice might move forward. She was married to Frank for seventeen years. But, I can tell you that my friend Alice will live another life and continue to spread love and get love wherever she goes.
She just can’t help it.
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