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.

by Paul Burka

Zeke Burka

This is a Father’s Day story. It is not a story about the good times my father and I shared while I was growing up in Galveston, or the times that we went fishing together, or attended ball games, or the lessons that he taught me. None of these things ever happened. They might have, but two months before my fifth birthday, in March 1947, Zeke Burka suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 46. He lived for about a week. I remember the strange interlude, because my infant sister and I were sent to stay with my mother’s closest friend, but I was unaware of the tragedy that had enveloped us. My mother’s wish was that her children not attend the funeral. After it was over and we had returned home, she summoned me into the playroom at the top of the stairs. I recall that I was lying facedown on a sofa, kicking my legs in the air, when she told me that my father had died. For the first time in my life, I felt the unwelcome press of male responsibility descend on my shoulders. I told myself, “I mustn’t cry.”

I have but a few wispy memories of Zeke. Standing in front of a building on the Strand while he pointed to a grimy waterline, high above my head, left by the 1900 hurricane. Relaxing in the living room in front of a radio-phonograph console while he listened to classical music. Getting a major talking-to after going into the bathroom with the six-year-old girl who lived down the street. My mother—her name was Natalie, but he called her Nats—told me that Zeke took me out on Sunday mornings, down to the wharves, where his company made burlap for wrapping cotton bales, and then to the vast warehouses where strings of boxcars waited to be loaded. At age two, supposedly, I could identify every railroad logo. I still have a vague recollection of the musty smell of compressed cotton. And a weird flash of déjà vu: After I was old enough to drive, I was exploring a recently reopened road that ran along the wharves. As I approached a railroad track that emerged from behind a long pier and crossed the road, I thought, I’ve been here before. Zeke was driving, and a steam locomotive had come puffing out from behind the sheds, unannounced by a whistle, and almost hit us.

At this point, the reader may be wondering whether the story of a man he never knew or heard of has relevance for anyone not named Burka. I have only this rationale to offer: Every family has its myths. Some myths are intended to reveal, and some myths are intended to conceal, and sometimes the intentions can get confused. The problem with myth is that it can overpower history, the story of what was real. That is what happened in my family, and, I suspect, it happens in many families who become vested in their myths and use them to bury their secrets. But it is often the case, and it was certainly the case with me, that the secrets were the very things that I needed to know, because when I finally learned about them, I could integrate them with the myth and come to appreciate my father as a real person.

Because I was so young when Zeke died, almost everything that I learned about him was transmitted through myth—by my mother, by his relatives in New Orleans, by his friends in Galveston. In death, he became a figure that was larger than life, a paragon of everything that was upstanding and decent. My mother saved a condolence letter from Zeke’s sister, Augusta, which I did not know existed until I was cleaning out her desk after her death, in 1995. There was the myth, spelled out: “I do find great consolation in the thought that he lived the life of a great man,” wrote Gussie (as she was known), “for he was noble and good and always true to himself. Better to have lived a short life thus and to leave to you and his children and to us a memory untarnished by anything untrue and unkind. Were that all men were as fine as he!” These were not just feel-good words; even today, the earnestness leaps off the page. Zeke’s nephew, Morris Burka Jr., now 88, has told me on more than one occasion, “Your father could have been president of the United States.”

I should have appreciated the respect and admiration and love people showed for my father, but the truth is, I didn’t—at least, not for a very long time. The praise had the opposite effect: The more I heard about the myth, the more elusive and inaccessible a figure he became and the less I wanted to know about him. Implicit in the myth was the message that his was a legacy that I was expected to live up to, but at some fairly young age, I knew I wanted no part of that competition.

Zeke was born in 1900 to Jacob and Pauline Burka in Union Springs, Alabama, a county-seat town in the red-dirt country east of Montgomery. There were four siblings: Morris Senior, Louis, Gussie, and Israel Ernest, who came to be called Zeke. A few years ago, my family went to Alabama for a niece’s marriage in a town about an hour’s drive from Union Springs. On the morning of the wedding, I enticed my daughter to join me, and we set out to see the ancestral hometown. A sign on the outskirts said, “Welcome to Union Springs, the Field Trial Capital of the World.” Field trial? What’s a field trial? The answer was revealed by the next sign, which consisted of an arrow pointing to the right and the words “Bird Dog Statue.” Except for the statue—a life-size bronze of a pointing canine situated on an eight-foot granite pillar at the main intersection—Union Springs was an unremarkable town with little evidence of economic prosperity.

So it was in Jacob’s day, evidently, because the story is that he had a store that failed, and he suffered what was then known as a nervous breakdown. He had to be institutionalized, and the only option was in Montgomery, the state capital. Pauline made the move, but she couldn’t work and take care of four children. In 1902 she decided to relocate to New Orleans, where she could put them in a home for Jewish children during the week while she scraped out a living, then bring them to her house for weekends. On her way to the depot, she stopped to tell Jacob goodbye. Distraught over her departure, he ran after her carriage, fell, and was trampled to death. Almost a century later, when Gussie’s daughter died, I went to Montgomery for the funeral. Her husband, who had found a clipping about the carriage accident in the Montgomery paper, took me to the Jewish cemetery to show me Jacob’s grave. It was in the pauper’s section. Jacob was 32 years old when he died. Failed businesses, premature deaths: History would repeat itself in the next generation.

The Burka siblings grew up in New Orleans. Pauline kept Zeke, the youngest, with her, while the older children resided at the Jewish Widows and Orphans Home. As soon as the brothers finished school, they went to work—Zeke after one year of college at Tulane. The Burkas had a connection with a family named Feitel, who operated several businesses, and all three of the brothers went to work for the family. Zeke and Morris Senior went into the Feitel’s burlap bag business, which was part of the cotton industry, the mainstay of the economy of the South.

In 1927 representatives of the Sealy family in Galveston, who along with the Moodys and the Kempners were the influential clans who dominated the local economy, contacted Morris Senior and Zeke about opening a similar plant in Galveston, and they moved to the port city. The arrangement was that the brothers would provide about $60,000 in capital and own the majority of the stock in Burka Bag. The Sealys would invest another $30,000. The Sealys’ private bank agreed to lend money as needed to buy machinery and raw materials, and their cotton warehouse operation would buy the burlap that would be used to bale cotton. Morris Senior was president of the corporation and Zeke was the vice president.

I know these details because my mother kept the files of Burka Bag in the attic of the home where I grew up. I discovered them when I prepared the house for sale after her death. I got rid of a lot of old stuff, but I kept the files. I just couldn’t bring myself to throw away such a trove. Nor, apparently, could she. I put the files in a mover’s box, brought them to Austin, and stored them in another attic. When I finally opened the box before beginning to write this story, no human eye had seen the contents since Burka Bag shut down 63 years earlier.

The bagging business was a tough line of work, “one of the lousiest businesses a fellow can be in,” an associate of Zeke’s would write to him in 1944. It was totally dependent on a single crop, which, of course, was cotton. The bagging company took all the risk. It estimated the amount of business it expected to do in the next year, determined how much bagging it would need to wrap the five-hundred-pound bales, and borrowed large sums of money, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, to acquire the jute from India that was the raw material for burlap. Any number of things could go wrong: weather conditions or government interference in the marketplace or shipping problems. Seven months a year, the company manufactured the bagging, waiting for the crop (and the money) to come in. Another source of income was used bags, which Burka Bag provided to firms that produced animal feed from cottonseed cake and soybean meal. Cotton truly was king. It determined whether the company prospered or failed.

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