https://patch.com/new-jersey/morristown/mbs-hold-events-memory-teacher-coach-eddie-franz
I keep one phone message perpetually on my cell phone. It’s 15 seconds long, and it was recorded on July 23, 2022. It is from a friend named Eddie, who’s returning my call to let me know that he’s headed over to Galloping Hill public golf course to chip and putt a little, and he tells me that he’ll call me in about 45 minutes “if I survive.”
This is the one remnant I have of Eddie’s distinctly Jersey voice, brash, self-deprecating, affectionate. The line about survival was intended to be both humorous and realistic. For Eddie died a few weeks later, on August 11, of lung cancer.
Eddie Franz was a fine athlete; a star high school basketball player and an excellent amateur tennis player. Near the end of his life he picked up golf and played it well. Through his 60s, he included two rounds of strenuous exercise in his daily schedule. He was an educator: an effective, popular history teacher in public schools and at one private school, Morristown Beard School; director of counseling at MBS; and a coach whose teams won over 400 varsity boys’ basketball games. This landed him in the New Jersey high school coaching hall of fame.
He was also a saint. Soon after getting riffed due to declining enrollment at Whippany Park High School, he landed at Morristown Beard, which was the fourth most important break of his life (His wife Kim, and their children Travis and Kate, together represented the top three.) There, he impressed some wealthy New Jersey gentlemen looking for someone to aid them in helping the children of Newark. For over three decades, Eddie ran a program called LifeCamp out in the Jersey horse country. Each year, he and his staff taught hundreds of children skills that would help them to lead fulfilling lives. Professed liberals like me smugly endorse racial equality; Eddie gave 30 summers to that cause and extended it by helping to open access to Morristown Beard for decades of gifted city kids.
https://www.dailyrecord.com/story/sports/high-school/basketball/2022/08/14/morristown-beard-teacher-basketball-coach-eddie-franz-remembered/65402660007/
Children headed for the bus ride home after another day of LifeCamp. The camp served 300 children daily.
We became fast friends in the fall of 1980, his first year at Whippany Park High School, my second. Born only 11 days apart in Jersey in 1956, both history majors in college, Civil War buffs, sports nuts, we were temperamental opposites. Eddie’s boldness, his passion, his profanity, his all-in approach to life amused and impressed and sometimes shocked me, cautious soul that I was. I was his freshman basketball coach for a few years, and we did that relationship well, I think, in part because we weren’t all that much alike.
Eddie taught me a lot about living life. One day after that first season, I idly opined that I’d like to go to England, Scotland, and Ireland some summer. Eddie’s response? “Let’s go.” My thought: you mean you can do that? Just dive in like that? Off we went, two Jersey kids interacting, no doubt comically, with various Londoners, Glaswegians, Highlanders, and sons and daughters of Erin. By the time we came back to school the next September, we had stories about that trip that we were still recalling 40 years later.
And so it went when we were young teachers gifted with two months of summer vacation. We flew to LA, drove down to San Diego to see the Mets play the Padres, then up the Pacific Coast Highway, eventually getting to San Francisco. We flew People Express to see the Mets get knocked around at Wrigley Field in 1985, and again in ’86.
During these years, Eddie organized annual Whippany Park Social Studies Department trips to Shea Stadium. The drill usually involved parking for free outside the stadium lots—by jumping a curb and parking under the Grand Central Parkway. Eddie would soon be squatting to grill burgers and dogs on a hibachi as the traffic pounded away overhead. We always travelled in high style.
Eddie loved people. He held great affection for the longtime, by-the-book Whippany Park athletic director, Derry Michael, and they both enjoyed (most of the time) their sort of adolescent-rebellion-driven relationship. Eddie’s finest Whippany Park player, Brad McClain, who would play in the NCAA Division I tournament for Fairleigh Dickinson, eventually became his longtime assistant and good friend. Eddie held deep esteem for Tom O’Brien, Whippany Park’s first head boys’ basketball coach. And he took joy in being part of a Whippany Park Social Studies department that itself indulged in a sort of Sergeant Bilko approach to the art of teaching.
https://www.dailyrecord.com/story/sports/high-school/basketball/2022/08/14/morristown-beard-teacher-basketball-coach-eddie-franz-remembered/65402660007/
Eddie Franz coaching the Morristown Beard Crimson, aided by assistant coach Brad McClain.
He had few inhibitions. On a day designed to attract eighth-grade players to our program, Eddie got tossed out of a game by a good, respected official who’d had enough from the young coach. At a faculty meeting during his second year at school—that’s non-tenured territory, friends—he told an embattled new principal that he needed to get out of his office more often. When I worked with him, he grew a beard each basketball season, and a wonderful young man named David McCarthy who played for us once swore to me that when Mr. Franz got mad during a time out (this happened occasionally) the bristles on that beard stood up. As headstrong, not especially mature young coaches, we once, at a Saturday morning practice after a Friday night defeat, punished a varsity team whose work ethic didn’t impress us by running them more than was wise.
But we were young men and like many young men, works in progress. Eddie became highly respected and much loved in the career he chose, which was serving kids. That career lasted 43 years.
He touched in generous ways the lives of thousands of Jersey kids; preppies, Newark schoolchildren, urban and suburban basketball players, public schoolers. He left Kim and Travis and Kate and his brother Richie so much of which to be proud. He loved Springsteen, the Jersey shore, Gettysburg, and—faithfully—the perennially trying Mets, Jets and Knicks. Eddie got not quite 66 years on this earth, but he made an awful lot of the time that he had.
In 2017, in March, a few weeks after he’d received a daunting lung cancer diagnosis, (Eddie was not a smoker) I signed up for a small ticket deal with the Mets hoping that we’d have time to get to a game together. By summer, he was feeling better and things were looking up. So we went to see a Mets team in decline after their 2015 World Series season. It felt like old times for us both. We had a lot of laughs even as the visitors added run after run against the home side.
At some point, I said, “Not to get too heavy here, but when I got these tickets, I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to use them, and you’re so much better now than back then.”
“Yeah,” said Eddie. “We didn’t know back then that our biggest problem would be that the Mets stink.” (He may have used a more colorful verb and accompanying modifier.)
Over the five years, a lot of our contact was over the phone, since he went back into basketball coaching as soon as he could, and high school coaches have little free time. And there were lots of trips into Manhattan with Kim for treatment. On the phone, we would bat it around the infield about school, about our families, about politics, about the Mets, about his basketball teams, about the disease and the treatments. And eventually it would come time to end the call. And each of us would say, “I love you.” After the first time that spontaneously happened, we always said it.
Eddie died on Thursday, August 11, 2022. When he left this world, his Mets were in first place, seven games ahead of the Atlanta Braves in the National League’s Eastern Division.
Notes:
Jane Havsy, “‘He’s My Yoda: Morristown Beard teacher, coach Eddie Franz remembered,” Morristown Daily Record, 15 August, 2022.
Steve Patchett, “MBS to Hold Events in Memory of Teacher and Coach Eddie Franz,” Morristown Patch, October 20, 2022.
Scratch that previous, incomplete comment. I remember meeting Eddie at your apartment after your wedding 12/27-? to Trink and thinking he seems like the type of person you would want to travel with to Great Britain. He seemed very gregarious and full of of cheer.
It appears that you and had a deep and powerful relationship that was full of laughs. God bless you both.
BTW - Wheels and I found some turkey in your refrigerator and retreated to a corner to make some sandwiches.
Some things never change !
I remember going back to your apartment after your wedding to Trink (12/27/? Hearing Eddie talkfor a few minutes I remarked to Wheels that with Eddie seems like the kind of person who would