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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As I talked to relatives, two versions of the Zeke and Marian courtship emerged. My bridge-playing cousin told me that Zeke and Marian were engaged in 1932, but Susan appeared on the scene and broke up the long—distance engagement. But Morris Junior remembered that he and his father went to New York in 1936 for the wedding. The trouble with this version is that, legally, Zeke still would have been married to Susan Gymer until December of that year. When I e-mailed Dianne what I had found out about the dates of Zeke’s marriage and a potential overlap with their courtship, she responded, “My mother was quite prim, innocent, judgmental, and conscious of respectability (in other words—a woman of her class and time)… . I think she would never have agreed to marry him if she had known about [his marriage], and if she had found out sometime during their courtship, she would have broken everything off immediately. Marrying a divorced man was something that wasn’t done.” Substitute “intellectually formidable” for “innocent” and the description would apply equally to my own mother—except, of course, that she did marry a divorced man. Did Zeke put off telling Marian about his failed marriage until the last moment? It’s not consistent with the type of upfront man everyone said he was. Or were conditions in the bagging business so bad that he felt he couldn’t support her or bring her to Galveston under the circumstances? Sometimes the past refuses to yield its secrets.
I never did solve the mystery of Zeke and Marian, except to get the confirmation by Marian’s family that he indeed paid for the wedding that never took place. But the experience enabled me to penetrate the myth and regard him as a real person. I could visualize him in his suite in the Galvez, a lonely man amid the wreckage of a foolish marriage. I could see him on that train to New York, facing up to what he felt he had to do. I had finally begun to know him, not through his achievements, but through his mistakes.
What do I actually know of Zeke Burka’s personality? “He was an elegant gentleman,” Ann Burka, Morris Junior’s wife, told me recently. “He could walk into a room and he just stood apart.” The elegance was one aspect of the myth that was utterly foreign to me. I regard “gentleman” as an ambiguous word. It can mean anything from someone who treats other people with kindness and respect, which from all accounts Zeke did, to the archetypal reader of men’s fashion magazines who relentlessly pursues the finer things of life, which apparently he did as well. There is a memory that confirms Ann’s description. Zeke brought back from a business trip to New York a wooden rocking horse from Georg Jensen when I was young. It is the first toy I can remember. So here is what I wonder: How did Zeke get from the bird dog capital to Georg Jensen in one generation? Somewhere between Zeke and me, that gene got lost. My mother told my sister that Zeke ordered socks from England. I get mine at the outlet mall.
The one piece of tangible evidence of Zeke in our house was his book collection. The smaller of the two sitting rooms downstairs was meant to be a den, but we always called it the library. It was my favorite room. The available wall space was entirely occupied by three floor-to-ceiling bookcases. My mother was an avid reader—a library volunteer, she had her choice of books to check out—but these books were his. Every volume had a bookplate pasted inside the cover—“Ex Libris Zeke Burka”—and on the opposite leaf, he had scrawled his name and the month of purchase. Porgy, the DuBose Heyward novel that was the inspiration for the Gershwin opera, read “November 1928.” Occasionally, my mother’s handwriting appears in a faint pencil mark: “1st edition,” lest her uncultivated son fail to notice that this was an item of value. Almost all of these works had appeared in his coming-of-age years, the twenties. The great authors of the decade were represented there: Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, Fitzgerald, and lesser lights. He must have appreciated irony, and the more bitter the better, because he owned three volumes of Dorothy Parker’s poetry and short stories. These books, and an accompanying record collection, helped flesh out the definition of “gentleman” as it applied to Zeke—that it not only referred to an attitude toward consumer goods but also included an appreciation of literature and music. Even though he had come from a background of poverty and failure and missed educational opportunities, he was determined to become an educated, cultured man of affairs.
I confess to wondering whether he actually read all those books—until I came across a passage in a letter he wrote to Natalie while he was traveling on business in New York in 1942. “This morning’s Times carries the story of the death of Will Percy (Lanterns on the Levee) at Greenville, Miss. I feel like I lost a good friend. That’s what reading his book did to me.” Sorry for doubting you, Zeke. I should have known better.
Long before I read any of these books, I coveted them. Today, many of his purchases occupy shelf space in a case in my home office that is reserved only for his books, and the dictionary I use is an ancient Webster’s that has a leather cover with his name embossed in gold. I cannot imagine a better legacy than the love of reading.
Another side of his personality was the love of business. I don’t mean his own business. I mean the world of business generally. It influenced his thinking process. My mother said that when he wanted to have a serious conversation with her, he would say, “Let’s have a meeting of the board.” He read the Wall Street Journal every day, along with the Journal of Commerce. I found an old clipping in one of his books, which he had used as a bookmark. It was from the Wall Street Journal of March 2, 1939. The paper had a column called the Inquiring Investor to which readers could write for investment advice. The column began with Thomas M. Foristall, the author, quoting from the investor’s letter: “‘I have read with much interest your several perspectives on diversified lists of investments and would appreciate very much your comments on the one that I have,’ writes an investor from Galveston, Texas.” The portfolio that Zeke listed included 41 stocks. Only 9 had declined in value, none by more than $4 per share. All the rest showed gains, many of them in double digits.
Above all, though, the myth was grounded in his character. He was the man who had paid his debts and met his obligations. In one letter, he described himself with this epithet: “He took what he bought and he shipped what he sold.” When Morris Senior died, in 1937, his son, Morris Junior, was sixteen and without a living parent. Zeke became the de facto head of the family. He sent money to Gussie, whose husband needed constant medical attention, and to Louis’s widow, with whom Morris Junior boarded, and became a surrogate father to Morris. They corresponded several times a week, especially during World War II, when Morris Junior was stationed in San Angelo. After Zeke’s death, he reciprocated by keeping in contact with Natalie, guiding her through the terrible weeks after the funeral with advice on how to deal with lawyers and insurance companies, who were dragging their feet about getting Zeke’s funds released. As Jane and I grew older, he made sure that Zeke’s children remained part of the family, which we have, and indeed, unto the next generation: My children are buddies with Morris’s grandchildren, and since all are in their twenties, I hope this tradition will continue for a long time.
In 1959 Morris sent Natalie copies of two letters Zeke had written to him, for Jane and me to read when we were older. They speak for him. The first was written when Morris was a restless twenty-year-old. It was dated October 17, 1940, about a month after Zeke and Natalie had married. He was writing about “something that has been on my mind since we talked last together in New Orleans, and it is this: Most of the people that we know and know about are composed of two groups, the haves and the have-nots forming one, and contents and the malcontents forming the other. I would classify you as a have-malcontent, and I would like to see you change to a have-content, because in that group lies the most happiness and least heartaches and headaches… I want you to change in disposition, attitude, and perspective from being discontented with your present lot, and which, expressed in another way, would be called over-ambitious, to a contentment and peace of mind, and a decision conclusive to work slowly at advancement… and be happy about doing it… Forget that lean and hungry look (and feeling) and also look to the conservative side of things. Be satisfied that you are a ‘have’ and then you will be a ‘content’ too.”
The second letter was written in 1944, the year that Morris married. He and his fiancée had had an argument by mail, and Morris had written Zeke that he had given Ann hell about something. “Don’t give Ann hell about anything anymore,” Zeke responded, “now or after [marriage]. Cherish and encourage her love for you and help her to make your lives together and separately something she holds dearly and you will be a happy and contented couple. By no means must you want and have your own way about things—the time for that is ended even now. Remember you are a team, pulling together and you must consider her feelings and wants and reactions as well as your own. Be kind, considerate, and thoughtful of Ann, look out for her welfare, and you will see both a mutual feeling of trust, and one of care for each other’s welfare grow into a beautiful spirit that nothing can displace in your lives… Remember, don’t kill something in a sweet, sensitive nature—and now I hope you feel better by writing her a sweet letter to make her feel that way too.”
This part of the story has a happy ending. Morris and Ann Burka have always been, and remain in their eighties, the most inseparable couple I have ever known.
This part does not have a happy ending.
My Library
