Karl Frost died in the summer of 1972. He had been walking to the neighbor's house at dusk to tell them about his new car. While walking on the road he was struck by two young men in a car. He died from rib fractures from the car accident. His absence at daily mass the next day made his death evident to the community. Tom lived in South Bend and David in Indianapolis and both came immediately. "What to say about my dad. He was a very quiet, smiling, gentle, kind man. He had quite a hard life working in the mine all day and walking home a mile or so every night. It did not seem hard to me when I was young since most men in town did the same thing but as I look back I remember he often had "powder" headaches -- from the blasting in the mine way down, deep in the bowels of the earth. Quite a dangerous job and he was injured a couple of times and lost a finger in an ore train accident. He had two passions: reading western novellas and playing solitaire. He would sit at the dining room table and play late into the night till we were all asleep, and he would continue to yell at us as teen agers to get to bed and go to sleep. My mother hated both of his habits. He bought pulp books which sold for about a dime and kept them in boxes in the basement or somewhere and when he ran out he would go back and reread them. He liked Lamour and some other well known western writers. He also loved to shovel dirt and he completely reshaped the yard at our house, creating a flat area and a driveway entirely by hand; he must have moved two tons of dirt over the time he worked on that. He spoke little at the table or in the evenings but sometimes he would get talkative and tell stories. In his youth he had memorized long ballads that he would recite in an off key singsong -- some of those are the ones I have also learned and still recite pieces of. Many of them are Kipling and all are classics that I have looked up and will show you sometime. He sang these poems while we would be riding in the car and it mesmerized us all. Now I know it was his way to keep us quiet." Previous Table of Contents Next