Uncle Albert

If there’s one thing I’ve learned living in the South it’s that ancestry matters. No one is prouder than a Southerner with a Civil War general, a former governor or a Miss Virginia on his or her family tree.

I’ve searched my bloodlines for decades and come up with nothing more than an unaccomplished gang of jug-eared Irish peasants. Recently, however, my daughter - a budding genealogist - excitedly phoned to tell me that she’d unearthed a front-page newspaper story about my great uncle on my mother’s side. My grandmother’s youngest brother.

That would be Albert Blonski Jr. of South River, NJ. Son of Albert Blonski Sr. and Maggie May Kerrigan.

At last, I thought, an ancestor who did something! Perhaps there’s a stately portrait of him somewhere I can hang in my dining room.

Here was the A-1 headline on The Daily Home News of New Brunswick, Sept. 15, 1930:

“Bandit In Hold-Up Dies At Hospital: Albert Blonski Tells Mayor Kvist of Misdeed Before Passing Away.”

Yep, one day earlier Uncle Albert, 32, was shot to death by local police after holding up a gas station and fleeing on foot to my widowed grandmother’s walk-up apartment where she lived with her two small daughters. An ambulance transported him to a local hospital.

The lede of the news story was quite flowery and rich in detail:

“Death intervened and robbed the law of the opportunity to pass judgment on Albert Blonski when he died in St. Peter’s Hospital a 11:55 last night after lingering between life and death since three bullets fired by two South Amboy policemen lodged in his left side when he attempted to make his escape from the holdup of the Good Gulf gasoline station at Main Street and Stevens Avenue in South Amboy at 4:20 a.m. Saturday.”

Albert spent his final hours in a hospital bed surrounded by detectives and the mayor, who were trying to get him to give up his accomplices.

“As death crept upon him, he turned to Detective Collins and feebly told him that he was making his escape when shot. He made other statements which the prosecutor’s detectives refused to reveal this morning,” the paper reported.

I’ll bet he did.

“Blonski...had almost continuously since 1918 served time in state’s prison. He was convicted on charges ranging from carrying concealed weapons to highway robbery...he was released from the Trenton prison only two months ago.”

According to this news story my illustrious ancestor had served time for crimes ranging from carrying concealed weapons to highway robbery.

Uncle Albert’s last words, as relayed to the Daily News by Mayor Kvist came about an hour before he passed away when he turned to the politician with a smile and said:

“My life has been ruined by my own misdeeds. No one is to blame for this sad end to a bad life. I had average opportunities to get somewhere in life without going in for holdups, but I chose to go wrong. Life is like a collection of bubbles, they shine beautifully while they last, but they don’t last long.”

Very poetic , but my old newspaper reporter’s instincts call b.s. on this. Does that sound like the dying declaration of a career criminal to you?

Me either.

I’m guessing Hizzoner embellished whatever my uncle mumbled as a lesson to children everywhere. But it’s a nice touch.

What struck me about this lengthy article - besides the fact that I’m descended from a highway robber - was the quality of the writing. Albert died at 11:55 at night and some skilled wordsmith turned out a well-written, detailed piece in time for the next day’s press run. Without the help of the internet. And without a byline.

That sort of colorful, deadline police reporting doesn’t happen anymore. It’s a lost art.

Maybe that’s one of a multitude of reasons newspapers are circling the drain.

Sadly, I don’t have an oil portrait of my outlaw ancestor to hang in my dining room.

Then again, if you don’t have a Confederate general, governor or Miss America on your family tree, you might as well not hang a portrait at all.