My uncle, Frank James "Bud" Streff Sr., was born July 1, 1925, in Chicago, the fourth of six children and third son of Harold Peter Streff (1892-1936) and Monica Ruth McCaughy (1895-1966). His family lived at
6428 N. Francisco Avenue on the 1930 Census and at
6222 Wayne Avenue on the 1940 Census, which are both on the far north side of Chicago where my dad and his siblings also grew up.
Bud's friend Robert Hack said, "Not sure how well this is known, but Bud was an Air Corps veteran. During the proposed invasion of Japan, he was assigned to a mission (skip bombing the Japanese coast) where his life expectancy would have likely been about 5-10 minutes. But thankfully that never occurred. And then there was the time his plane caught fire during a training mission and they were going down, but somehow the plane was righted and he survived.
Even though he never fired a shot, or dropped a bomb in anger, he was a hero in every sense of the word. Although of course he denied it."
Bud married my dad's older sister, Elizabeth Mary "Betty" Pape, on September 11, 1948. They had seven children. For a while, they lived in the Chicago area. Dad recalls working as a stock clerk for a while at an
A&P store that Bud managed in the late 1940s or early 1950s.
Sometime between August 1957 and October 1959, Bud and his family moved to the Rochester, New York, area. In 1960, according to the Rochester city directory, he was a district sales manager for the
Continental Coffee Company, and the family lived at
61 Irving Road. I remember traveling to Rochester as a family to the
wedding of his oldest daughter in 1971. By this time, I think they were living on Winterset Drive in the Penfield area.
After retirement, Uncle Bud and Aunt Betty lived for a while in the Fort Myers, Florida, area, but in recent years they moved back to the Rochester area to be closer to more of their family, which (at last count) grew to include 22 grandchildren (plus spouses for many of those) and 10 great-grandchildren (so far).
Uncle Bud passed away on April 4, 2014, with much of that family by his side. During the week prior to his death, with his last illness and hospitalization, many of his children and grandchildren (and oldest great-granddaughter) posted pictures of themselves with Bud as a profile picture or cover photo on Facebook. I gathered most (but not all) of those and created the collage at the beginning of this post.
© Amanda Pape - 2014 -
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