In Memory Of My Father, Jack E. Nager (May 14, 1934-Jan. 30, 2023)

By GARY NAGER Editorial

I would be lying if I said I had a normal father-son relationship growing up with my father, Jack Nager.

My father was born on May 14, 1934, in New York City, and was mostly raised in Middle Village, Queens, with his parents, Sam and Anna Ertel Nager, and his older sister Bernice (who re-named herself Bunny) and younger sister Francine. My dad, who wasn’t given a middle name at birth, took his mother’s maiden name Ertel as his middle name. Many of his friends called him “Jackie,” so he always signed his name “Jack E. Nager.”

My parents were high school sweethearts at Far Rockaway High who married shortly after graduation. They were dirt poor, so my father enlisted in the U.S. Army shortly after the end of the Korean War. He spent the majority of his two-year hitch at Ft. Benning, GA, where my beautiful sister, who they named Bonnie Sue, was born.

Although he liked the discipline in the Army, my father was in the tank corps at Ft. Benning and hated the claustrophobia of it. He was promoted to the Judge Advocate General Corps. and considered a career in the military, as the Army offered to send him to law school if he extended his hitch by two more years.

Instead, my family moved back to Far Rockaway, where I was born. After working mainly as a salesman for his father-in-law in a storefront glass business for a few years, the business burnt to the ground and my mother’s mother and brother ended up becoming partners with him after my dad bought a small motel in Queens from our back-door neighbor in Woodmere, Long Island.

I was only about eight years old when my dad was diagnosed with cancer, only a year or so after buying the motel. He had a large tumor from around his left armpit to above his left lung, but he was lucky that it was only one encapsulated tumor that was able to be fully removed. Before the days of both chemo and radiation, he had a series of what were known as cobalt treatments. He attributed his cancer to the stress of a terrible first year in business but he later learned that the Korean War-era tanks he piloted were filled with asbestos and probably also contributed to his cancer, as did his two-packs-per-day smoking habit. He may, in fact, have had a form of mesothelioma years before that term was even coined.

I never really understood why my dad seemed so disinterested in spending time with me when I was growing up, as I didn’t find out he had cancer until I was in high school.

Even so, he coached my Little League team for three years, despite the fact he actually hated watching baseball and had never played an inning of it himself.

He put up a basketball hoop for me in our driveway and my best childhood memories of my dad were when he took me to the local park to play pick-up two-on-two games — usually against two teenagers or even grown men. They used to make fun of his classic twohand set shot — that is, until he’d make five or six shots in a row from beyond what would today be the three-point line. Once they started double teaming him up high, he’d feed the ball under the basket to me for easy layups. We rarely lost those games.

My dad also taught himself how to play the piano, a talent he passed on to my older son Jared, who also looks very much like him at the same age. He was handsome and charismatic and ultimately became successful in the motel busines and as a distance runner who finished the NYC Marathon 6 or 7 times.

But, he also was stubborn and difficult to get along with if you disagreed with him, which my mom did often, and they drifted apart and ultimately got divorced. It got ugly. My father married his second wife the same year he got divorced from my mom and although I still called him, he really didn’t speak to me or my boys for a number of years.

But, as he aged and started having health issues, he began calling me every day — usually to tell me the weather in Tampa, even though I’m the one who lives here. The last couple of years, he also took more interest in my writing and had me send him the Neighborhood News, so he could discuss my editorials with me.

It’s something of a miracle he ended up living for 55 years after his cancer diagnosis — one of only a handful of 50+-year survivors in the U.S. But, his health deteriorated badly the last few years and, the last few months, he was suffering. He passed away on Jan. 30, and I flew to New York for his funeral a few days before this issue went to press.

Although I had met his second wife Thelma before, I met my halfsisters Stacey and Ashley and the rest of my dad’s second family for the first time that day. My sister and her sons also attended and I gave the primary eulogy before my dad was laid to rest in a VA cemetery on eastern Long Island. My relationship with Jack Nager may not have been perfect, but he still helped me with my career and I do know that he loved me.

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