Family Album 3

Copyright 2009-All Rights Reserved

Edgar Frank Lennon (March 1, 1888 – 1966)

My mother named me after Uncle Frank who, being the family doctor, helped bring me into the world at Knoxville General Hospital. Uncle Frank was the firstborn of the three Lennon brothers, all born in March.

Uncle Frank was born in Bladenboro, North Carolina. He graduated from Morristown College in Morristown, Tennessee and finished Meharry Medical University in 1917 as a trained doctor. That was quite a feat for the times and the place where he lived. People forget that a college education was not generally available to the everyday person back then and for a Black man to find a way to become a doctor was a significant achievement. I say this not to brag but to pinch myself about what I’ve read about the times, the general lack of opportunities, the hard-ass road that Black people struggled to trudge in those times. The same year he graduated, Uncle Frank opened his office at 1011/2 West Vine Ave. in Knoxville.

Uncle Frank was a man who did good things. Remember that Black people could not go to the same hospitals or clinics as Whites and so, unless Black doctors had the resources to do so, Black people went without hospital medical care. In 1922, Uncle Frank bought a building, remodeled it, and opened, on Clinch Street, The Helen M. Lennon Hospital and nurse training school with twenty-five beds. I’m sure there’s a story in that. Unfortunately, I don’t know it. I have to wonder: Where did he get the money? How did he manage to buy property in Knoxville? White people would not, did not, sell property to Blacks back then. Which means a White man must have bought it for him on the Q.T. (quiet time). Who was he and what was their relationship? Why did he do that for Uncle Frank? After all, it would have been a risk for him to do that for a Black man. His community would have branded him a “nigger-lover” and made his life hell. Anyway.

When Knoxville General Hospital was built, Jim Crow was making the rules in the South about what Blacks could and could not do. One of the rules was that Black doctors were not permitted to treat and operate on their own patients who were admitted there, so Uncle Frank and other Black doctors led the legal fight that ultimately gave Black doctors the right to practice and operate in KGH’s Negro Unit. Finding that out about him shocked me because his demeanor was not that of a boat-rocker or freedom-fighter. He seemed to be a mild-mannered, quiet man. More of a traditionalist. You just never know about your relatives. When you’re a kid, you come up with these half-baked assumptions based on appearances, your feelings, on a bunch of who knows what.

Of the two sisters-in-law, Mama seemed to be his favorite. They appeared to be good friends—at least, she seemed to be his confidante. I remember many Sundays that, after he divorced Aunt Helen, he came to dinner at our house, and he and Mama would have long conversations while I was in the kitchen doing the dishes. Personally, I found Uncle Frank hard to know. Very reserved. Unlike Daddy or Uncle Matt, he didn’t seem approachable though he couldn’t have been more thoughtful of me… always giving me elaborate presents. But I never could really feel him. Even now, as I look at his picture, my impression is of a carefully shielded man. Or a man shut-down and unemotional. In the picture, Uncle Frank is expressionless. And that’s the way I remember his face. Never animated; just sort of flat, or impassive. And always unreadable. He looks perfectly respectable in the picture—middle-aged, wearing rimless spectacles, a white shirt with thin dark lines, a dark tie, and dark pin-striped suit. His skin is lighter than that of his two brothers…more like his mother’s, and he has her lips. It’s his eyes that are arresting. He’s looking away from the camera, seeing something in the distance, and his eyes tell you about sadness and loneliness. Did Aunt Helen’s partying do that? Or their son’s early and untimely death? I wonder.