Wartime pen pals still friends after 60 years

Wartime pen pals still friends after 60 years

By: Jim Memmott

Frank Fantanza is 89 now, but he is, and always will be, Sister Jackie Reichart’s “Soldier Boy.”

Sister Jackie, who is 71, wrote Frank when he was a soldier in World War II.

She was 11, and he was the second Frank she corresponded with as part of a school project.

The correspondence with the first Frank ended when Jackie got a letter back with the word “deceased” stamped on the envelope.

When she first wrote Frank Fantanza, Jackie told him right up front about the death.

He replied that he would love to be the second Frank, though he didn’t want to follow all the way in his predecessor’s footsteps.

“Oh my God, (her letters) meant a lot to me,” Frank said Tuesday. “She would start off by saying, ‘Dear Frankie, it’s Friday night and mother is getting dinner, and, excuse me, she just called …'”

The letters would then break off so Jackie could eat.

Then their author would return, only to be interrupted again.

Frankie spoke as he sat in the dining room of the Sisters of Mercy Motherhouse in Brighton.

Sister Jackie was there with her sister, Sister Jeanne Reichart, also a Sister of Mercy. They and several other members of the religious order were having one of their regular breakfasts with Frank.

The breakfasts, five or so a year, have gone on for decades.

Frankie calls up, says, “Get the girls together.” They then go to a restaurant. He insists on picking up the tab.

At the Motherhouse, the women treated.

“It’s hard to do something for him,” Sister Jackie said. “He’s always doing something for everybody else.”

Frank, who lives at the Chapel Oaks retirement community in Rochester, was greeted like royalty when he entered the dining room, using a cane, his only concession to aging.

“It’s Frankie,” the women yelled, much as young girls used to yell for those other Franks, Sinatra and Avalon, many years before.

Proudly wearing his “Sister of Mercy Alive” sweatshirt, Frank acknowledged the greetings and took his seat.

The breakfast conversation soon looped back to World War II.

Frank talked about his injuries at the Battle of the Bulge, how his feet were so frostbitten they almost had to be amputated.

He talked about working as a mailman from 1952 to 1975, and how the Motherhouse was on his route. (Jeanne went into the order there in 1949; Jackie followed in 1951.)

There were thoughts of Frank’s late Adeline, whom he married in 1939, and their children, Judith and Richard.

Frank recalled how he would recruit Jackie and her fellow Sisters of Mercy to go to the Veterans Affairs hospital in Canandaigua.

They would sing folk tunes and serve ice cream. At Frank’s insistence, they would dance with the disabled veterans.

Sister Jackie, who works part-time now at the chaplain’s office at the University of Rochester, brought along some of Frank’s letters.

They’re filled with general references to his activities. There are no accounts of battles, of injuries, of death.

“I suppose you heard I am in the hospital, so I won’t go into that,” he writes on Feb. 26, 1945. Enough said.

Frank came home on Dec. 30, 1945, a little shaken, but in one piece.

His life went on, and over the years, it was as if he got to know everyone in Rochester and beyond. (Yes, everyone; he even has a Christmas card from the Pope.)

He seems to remember all these friends, but none are more special than the Sisters of Mercy, especially Sister Jackie.

In a horrible and lonely time, she wrote to him of the ordinary things he had left behind. She reassured him again and again that someone cared.