The ‘Legend’ of Frank McComb

AboutAnything  | Greg McComb

     Joseph "Frank' McComb was my grandfather. Although Joseph was his first name, he always went by Frank, perhaps because it better described his character, a little 'Mafia-like.' I say this in jest, but in many of the pictures I have of him from the 1930's and 40's, he really does look a little like a mobster, fitting in to a city with the nickname: "Chicago of the North;" my hometown of Winnipeg (he's the one on the far right). This affectionate nickname is generally thought to be based on the architecture of the Exchange District in downtown Winnipeg, where many period movies depicting Chicago have been filmed. But while growing up I heard different stories about why this name was coined. I'll leave it at that. 

     I never knew Grandpa McComb very well. By the time I was five or six years old in the early 1960's, Frank was a frail-old man, (that's me, bottom right) a shell of his former-robust self;

always in a fine-tailored suit. Frank was severely debilitated by a stroke at about sixty, and lived his later years in an 'old folks' home on Rosyln Road in Winnipeg, where I briefly met him. Although only five at the time, I have a sharp memory of my grandfather asking my father and mother to leave the room so he could talk to me alone. I was scared shitless. I can recall him telling me softly that I would 'make something of myself,' a message my grandma Miller repeated. I really didn't know what to make of that back then.  

     A few years later, my paternal grandfather died, and I only recall snippets of oral history passed down by my mother and father while growing up. I heard that he had a prominent men’s clothing store

in downtown Winnipeg that specialized in fine-tailoring, the modern-day equivalent of a Harry Rosen. I also heard that he had owned a lot of race horses, and ran them at the old Polo Park horse racing track in Winnipeg, the site of a present-day shopping mall. Not much else. A businessman himself, my father Keith wasn’t much of a story teller. 

     Although I didn’t learn a lot about Frank from my parents, his ‘legend’ continued to make the rounds well after his death. When I was teenager, I had the inevitable talk with the father of my first ‘real’

girlfriend. Shaggy-haired and unkempt – the style of the mid-seventies – I was getting grilled pretty badly, but then the connection was made. “Are you related to Frank McComb?” the father asked. I replied, “Well, yeah, he was my grandfather.” And that was that. It was okay to date his daughter. A second time Frank’s name came up was when I started a brief tenure as a reporter with the Winnipeg Free Press in the mid-1980’s. Well before the Internet and Facebook, the resident librarian did a search of my last name through their wooden-card catalogue of newspaper clippings. Once again, Frank’s name came up -- and once again, very impressed. 

    Several decades passed, and - caught up with career and family – I didn’t think much about the ‘legend’ of Frank McComb. That changed in 2008 while visiting my father’s condominium. He had recently died, and I and three siblings were going through all his stuff and divvying it up. This is common practice when a Will doesn’t exist; an amicable splitting of a parent’s non-monetary possessions. If I recall, my brother wanted the stereo and couch, my sisters wanted other furniture, pictures and ornaments; things too heavy for me cart back to eastern Canada, where I currently live. In the midst of discussions, I noticed a tattered-cardboard box on the dining room table, full of mostly old pictures along with a few documents. I perused the contents; and my spider senses began to tingle. So, I laid claim.

     Once home, I discovered this box was the mother-load, a genealogical gold-mine of stuff about my father’s ancestors; things I knew little about while growing up. Most prominent were numerous

leather-bound books of pictures my grandmother Edith took while growing up near Bellville, Ontario in the early 1900’s. They were taken with an old Kodak box camera, back then a revolution in portability comparable to the modern iphone. Also plentiful were pictures of Frank’s thoroughbred race horses; some records of photo finishes from race tracks, and a water-damaged picture of the inside of Frank’s clothing store, (see below) taken in the 1950’s. 

     There were also lots of documents and personal letters Frank received from his daughter - my Aunt Marie - who emigrated to California in the early 1960’s. Sent to him on his death bed,

they provide some insight into the closeness of their relationship and how much his favorite daughter missed him in his waning days. I have since hand-delivered these letters to Aunt Marie’s daughter, still in California -- keeping photocopies for myself.

     So, what I had stumbled upon was the life-long collections of both my paternal grandparents, key pictures and documents that were hoarded and bequeathed to my father, who carefully stored them over the years.   Following my father’s death, I often spent hours sorting through this box, consumed by the people in the pictures; some I knew but most I could not identify. In a way, I was getting to know grandparents I knew very little about while growing up. Staring at these pictures, especially after scanned and viewed on a computer screen, was a little like glimpsing into a time machine. I often wonder what it would be like to be transported back to a day in 1930s Winnipeg, when Frank was at the peak of his game in “Little Chicago.” And to talk to that Frank, not the withered shell I barely knew as a youngster. 

     While sorting through and cataloguing the contents of ‘the box,’ I came across a partially torn and yellowed sheet of paper that looked very ordinary except that it had a seal in the left-bottom corner. At the top of the page, in capitals, it reads: STATE OF NEVADA, COUNTY OF LANDER. I can recall

the day I found it and tried to figure out what it was. It was definitely a birth certificate but it wasn’t obvious who was born or who the mother was. And Nevada...I was never told that I had a connection to this state, where family members often travelled to vacation during winter months, the bright lights of Las Vegas.  

     After a little research, I was able to validate that this was, in fact, my grandfather Frank’s birth certificate; not the original but something sworn in by the county recorder at a later date. I found the birth notice in a local newspaper - the Eureka Weekly Sentinal (Oct.08, 1887) - with the exact same birthdate as on the yellowed sheet of paper,

(see newspaper screenshot). Born in 1887, Frank was fifty-four when his birthdate was certified in 1941. A best guess is that after making his way to Canada from Nevada, (where he was a U.S. citizen by birth), his status came into question. He had to fetch a copy of his birth certificate as proof for Canadian citizenship, perhaps related to the war effort but I cannot know for sure. So, the “box” had spoken: my grandfather was born in the state of Nevada, Lander County in the late 1880’s, a place-in-time of American history known as the Old or Wild West.  

     I NEEDED TO KNOW MORE!

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