A tribute to Pop and the Flat Donkey origin story

William Burns was my grandfather. People called him Bill or Billy or Willy. I called him Pop.

When I was a boy, he lived in the humble second-floor apartment of a three-family house on Halsted Street in the Vailsburg section of Newark, New Jersey. My family—my mom, father, older sister Ellen, and younger brother Ken—lived on the first floor.

My mom recalls that every time her back was turned, she’d hear our back screen door slap shut and my little feet bounding up the back steps to visit Pop. I loved being with Pop. As a child with an active imagination, his apartment was a wonderland. No space was off limits for hide-and-seek. Jumping on the bed was approved. Building forts with couch cushions, bed pillows, and bedsheets was encouraged. Any object was available for crafts or props, such as his floor-standing ashtray, which I would dress up as Count Dracula, complete with a balled-up newspaper head and tablecloth cape.

My favorite thing to do was draw with Pop. We’d sit together at his kitchen table, a classic chrome-edged table with a laminate surface. We’d share toast and corned beef hash, and we’d draw on brown paper bags with broken crayons that he kept in an old cookie tin. His limited repertoire of subjects included a house with a smoking chimney, a boy’s face, and a donkey. Even as a child, I noticed that his drawings were flat and two-dimensional, especially the donkey, which seemed to have all four legs on the same side.

Pop also encouraged me to draw on his kitchen wall. He couldn’t offer pricey art supplies, but he could provide a wall, pencils, and a gallon of white paint to refresh my drawing surface.

He loved me and liked me, and I loved and liked him. He thought I was special, and he made me believe that I could be. At that kitchen table, Pop—poor and weathered as he was—gave me everything he had to give. Everything he had left, that is.

I didn’t realize it as a boy, but he had lived a whole life before he was Pop. He was born in 1895, the second of eight children born to immigrants John and Dora Burns. Bill carved out a happy life. He held a steady job at the Lackawanna Railroad in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was a dutiful son to his parents and a dependable presence for his siblings. He married the love of his life, Helen Kenny, in 1935. Bill and Helen had five children—my uncle Bill, aunt Peggy, uncle Jack, aunt Helen Jane, and their middle child, my mom Cathy.

Life was good until it wasn’t.

Helen passed away after a catastrophic stroke in 1948 at the age of 44, when my mom was nine years old. Devastated, Bill fell apart. He descended into depression and alcoholism. He was fired from his job at the railroad. His children were removed from their home by the state and placed in St. Mary’s Orphanage in Newark. Bill drifted into homelessness and almost oblivion.

It would have been easy for the world to let Bill go, to forget him and move on, but mercy intervened. Bill was rescued from a park bench by the Salvation Army. Sister Superior Mary Loretto gave him a job as a caretaker at St. Mary’s on the condition that he dry out, so he could remain near his children. Later, after years of foster homes and temporary housing, Bill’s children reached adulthood and, miraculously, remained connected. When resentment and anger toward their father might have been justified, they embraced him. They took care of their father and honored him. Mercy allowed Bill to become Pop.

My aunt Peggy purchased the home on Halsted Street and provided Pop with a place to live. He later moved with my family into a cramped three-bedroom ranch house at the Jersey Shore. He was a constant presence throughout my childhood. I spent most days drawing at a coffee table in our living room with Pop sitting in his chair three feet away, praising every animal, superhero, or monster that came out of my No. 2 pencil. As I drew, he’d tell me stories from his youth, about Babe Ruth home runs, his whippet, and—when I was old enough—about stills hidden in the woods during Prohibition. He never talked about his wife, Helen, or his dark times.

Pop and I remained close as I grew older. I’d take him for haircuts at the old-school shop in town, the kind with the spinning barber pole and gray-haired men who liked to talk about boxing back in the day. When his hip became too painful, I’d help him put on his socks and shoes each morning. He was there at my wedding.

Pop never stopped encouraging me. Even when his mind began to deteriorate, he’d beam with excitement as he imagined that someday I might attend the Fawcett Art School in Newark, where his sister had studied. I never had the heart to remind him I had already finished art school and that the Fawcett Art School had been gone for decades. Instead I listened to his stories as if I were hearing them for the first time.

Pop passed away on April 6, 1992, six weeks before his ninety-seventh birthday. Thirty-four years later, I started this newsletter and called it Flat Donkey as a tribute to him and as a reminder of the redemptive power of mercy, the kind that can reclaim a ruined man from a park bench so he could one day be a hero to a young boy who needs one.