My Father’s Son 
Bum Steers: Video 
The Man Who Wasn’t There
I never really knew my father, who died when I was four, but I’d always heard he was a prominent businessman and a loyal and loving husband—the kind of person, my cousin often told me, who could have been president. When I finally found out the truth about him, I came to love him for who he really was.
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In the beginning, Burka Bag prospered. “For the first six years of our business in Galveston it thrived and grew substantially,” Zeke wrote in a history of the company he prepared for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1940, in an application for a government-backed loan, “until at the end of our fiscal year March 31st, 1934 we had a surplus account of about $60,000, in addition to our capital stock of $75,000, totaling $135,000, and at the same time we had declared dividends on an average of 10% of our capital stock for six years, or a total of $45,000.” But the good times did not last. “In the year ending March 31st, 1935, we suffered our first loss,” Zeke continued, “and again in the year ending March 31st, 1936, while prices were still cheap we restocked heavily, hoping for another crop of cotton to wrap in good volume, but again suffered another loss due to the lack of spread between buying and selling prices.”
Two developments that were beyond the brothers’ control had wrecked their hopes. One was the passage of a major New Deal initiative, the Agricultural Adjustment Act. So much cotton was going to be produced in 1933 that prices threatened to “sink out of sight,” in the words of historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The only way to prevent this was to take acreage out of production. The government paid farmers to plow up their cotton. Schlesinger wrote approvingly of the diminution of the cotton crop: “In mid-November the President remarked that conditions were much improved in the West. By winter, the atmosphere was clearing, and AAA was coming into its own.” But far away, in Galveston, a certain company was, so to speak, left holding the bags.
The second unfavorable development was that the Sealys changed their private bank to a national bank. As private bankers, the Sealys could determine their own lending policies; as owners of a national bank subject to federal regulations, they could not. “In the spring of 1937,” Zeke related, “we were told by the banking interests that unless fresh capital was put into the business, they, as a national bank, could not continue to carry our account.” But they had no capital. The business was busted. The bank demanded that they give up their stock and control of the company.
At this point, Zeke could have walked away and left the business, with its debts, to the Sealys. Morris Senior had been in poor health for some time and would not live out the year. Louis had predeceased him. Zeke had no ties to Galveston. Home was a suite in the Hotel Galvez. He loved New Orleans but felt no special affinity for Texas; he once told my mother, who did, “We had Mardi Gras in New Orleans when you were still shooting bears in Texas.” But he stayed because he felt obligated to pay off the bank loans. Corrupt business leaders today run their companies into the ground and leave with golden parachutes, but in that era, to walk away from debt was considered a blot on one’s name. And so he continued to run Burka Bag for the benefit of the bank until he had repaid the loans. After three years, he could write in the RFC letter, “We started the fiscal year beginning March 31st, 1939 with a capital and surplus deficit of approximately $108,000, and are at last happy to be able to say that with inventories taken at conservative figures we have overcome this deficit in the eleven months period ending February 29, 1940.”
When the debts were paid in full, the story is that he went to New Orleans, to Morris Senior’s grave, and he said, “You can rest easy now. There is no shame to the name.” The myth was born.
On January 28, 2002, I received an e-mail from a woman named Dianne Sattinger, of Madison, Wisconsin, who was completely unknown to me. “Are you the son of Ernest ‘Zeke’ Burka?” she asked. “Just wondering, since Zeke looms large in our family history as the tall, handsome young man from Galveston who was engaged to my mother, Marian Diamond, in Syracuse, New York in approx. 1934. Engagement was broken off—by Zeke, we think.” She had done a Web search for “Burka” and “Galveston” and come up with my name. “I thought I’d pursue this,” she continued, “no reason, except ‘for the record’—and to give an update to my 82-year-old aunt, who was the kid sister at the time, and was telling me on the phone just yesterday how frightened she was when her older sister was about to marry Zeke and move to Galveston.” I remember my reaction vividly. It was as if the dam holding back all my avoidance of the past had collapsed, and I was swept along by a current of curiosity. I responded with an immediate acknowledgement that I was Zeke’s son and promised to write more that evening. It turned out to be a lot more. I sat down and banged out a seven-page, single-spaced e-mail of the family history. When I got to the trip to Union Springs, I wrote, “We all have our pretensions, and the Burkas have always felt that they are, if not rich and not famous, at least quite civilized folk. Well, we come from the bird dog capital of the world.”
I referred to him as “Zeke” in my e-mail, as I have in this piece. As I wrote Dianne, “Even now it feels awkward to write the word ‘Daddy.’” He fathered me, but “Daddy” implies a familiarity that I cannot access. As I wrote, I realized that the unexpected e-mail had had unexpected consequences. For the first time, I wanted to delve into the past. Who was Marian? How did she and Zeke meet? What caused the breakup?
I did know something about this episode in my father’s life. But not from my own family. My sister, Jane, had gotten married in 1975, and her husband had run up against the myth on their subsequent trips to Galveston. “I feel as if I am competing against this person I don’t know,” he said to Jane. “The perfect man named Zeke. Let’s find out something about him.” So they posed a question to an older couple in Galveston, part of my mother’s circle, with whom they had forged a friendship: What were Zeke’s faults? It wasn’t easy coming up with any, Jane remembers, but finally one of them said, “Zeke was impulsive about women.” As they told the story, there was somebody in New York whom he was going to marry, but he decided that he couldn’t go through with it, and he got off the train and sent a telegram canceling the wedding. Then he paid all the wedding expenses.
“Somebody in New York” was Marian. The Diamonds of Syracuse were related to the Cop-lands of New Orleans, and according to Dianne, the Diamonds had gone to New Orleans for a “gala social visit,” only to arrive on the day after one of the Coplands had died in an automobile accident. I found the obituary in the files of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The year was 1932. A member of Gussie’s husband’s family had married a Copland, and it is a reasonable assumption that the two women got the couple together.
But Zeke did not get off the train and send a telegram. He went to Syracuse, and he and Marian disappeared into a room for a long time. When they came out, the engagement was off. Zeke did pay all the wedding expenses. The person who told me this was Dianne’s aunt and Marian’s younger sister, Faye, who lived in New York City. I went to the city on magazine business later that year, and Dianne helped arrange a meeting. I have no eye for family resemblances, and I can’t tell whether I favor Zeke, but Faye must have thought so, for she staggered backward when she saw me. As was the case with Dianne, I had an instant rapport with her. It was eerie. My sister had previously met Faye, and Jane had had the same sense of instant familiarity. We all had the feeling that we were practically family; we even talked about having a “nonfamily reunion.” And we did have something that linked us. Except for Faye, none of the Sattingers or Burkas would exist if the wedding had gone through.
Why did the engagement blow up? Perhaps it was because Zeke had previously been married. Did I forget to mention this? Well, so did my mother.
This family secret was the first crack in the facade of the myth. It occurred when I was a freshman at Rice University. I had a girlfriend back in Galveston, whose mother didn’t care for me much. One weekend, I found myself drawn into an unpleasant conversation with her. Suddenly, she blurted out that my father had been married and divorced before he married my mother. I was stunned. Of course, I confronted my mother with this information when I got home. It was true. His first wife’s name was Susan Gymer. Her father and Zeke were business associates and personal friends. George Gymer owned a cottonseed cake mill and bought bags for the animal feed. He had a retreat on Dickinson Bayou where he and his friends would assemble to play poker and go canoeing. Zeke must have met Susan there. I have seen her engagement photograph in the Galveston Daily News. She was a knockout, with dark hair, but her eyes glittered with calculation. He was 33, she just 21 when they married in May 1933. The marriage officially lasted three and a half years, almost all of which spanned the down years at Burka Bag; a separation must have come long before that. No marriage could have been without strains in such circumstances, and this one certainly was not. Susan filed for divorce in January 1935, and the decree became final in December 1936. All my mother ever said about it was that Susan didn’t like living at the Galvez. She wanted to go dancing at night and he wanted to relax. She also felt poorly when he wanted her to go out with his Jewish friends. There were no children, and she went back to her maiden name. A cousin on my mother’s side told me that Susan was a devotee of contract bridge, and on most afternoons, she hosted a foursome at the Galvez that included my cousin and the mother of my future high school girlfriend. No wonder she didn’t like me: She had heard all of Susan’s complaints about my father.
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