Chuck

 EULOGY ROAST

I have the honor and privilege of delivering Chuck’s roast tonight, and I hope that maybe you’ll have a chance to get to know him a bit better today even though he’s no longer here to defend himself.  

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking hard about what I can talk about today that will summarize my dad, and I’ve come to the most logical conclusion. I can’t. There’s no eulogy that’ll encompass all that is Chuck. No words or laments or stories or phrases will capture all that is and all that was Chuck Frawley. What we can do instead is remember him for what he was; a devoted husband, a loving dad, grandfather, brother, cousin, and uncle; a smartass; a storyteller; a sportsman; a cowboy; a helpful neighbor… We can continue to tell his stories and share his values and count his blessings as he would have wished us to do. 

THELMA AND LOUISE
Over the past couple of years, I took a few Thelma and Louise style road trips with Dad down to the Mayo clinic, and on those drives we had some great talks about his childhood, his work, his friends, and his shenanigans. If you’ve seen my post on social media, you know that he and I also had a chance to talk about what he wanted me to say to you today. 

Well, this is Chuck we’re talking about, so I’m afraid I had to censor nearly all of it. 

Some of this I did share on social media already, but I absolutely saved a few nuggets just to share with you today.

It was important to him that people remember that he was once a great golfer, an exceptional storyteller, and he had a knack for practical jokes. He was an outstanding grandpa, friend, dad, husband, cousin, and neighbor. He loved tinkering and polishing and keeping things tidy, and his shop was at one point categorized better than a Dewey Decimal System in the county library.  

It wasn’t until I was an adult with my own place and my own stuff that I realized that my dad must have lived with a steady disconnect between the frugality he learned in his childhood and the nearly obsessive need for tidiness and order that he somehow manifested in his own life. If someone who didn’t know him well were to walk into his shop, they’d have no idea that he had a hoard of nuts and bolts and screws and tools squirreled away.  Hiding in his cabinets or inside the hundreds of his little tchotchke drawers you might find the perfect sized screw for your project or the exact nut and bolt combo needed for that furniture set you’re fixing up, that he saved from one he broke down nearly twenty years before. 

Did your 10mm socket ever go missing? Chuck’s didn’t. He probably had twelve. 

The cool thing about my dad is that he was always really excited to fetch something from his treasure trove to lend it to you if you needed it. He saved things not just because he was going to eventually need them, but rather because you might. 

If you ever borrowed one of his tools or one of his toys though… he wanted me to let you know that he still wants it back.

HIS KIDS
I’m Chuck Frawley’s youngest daughter. I emphasize the youngest because that’s probably the most interesting thing about me in this family. Mandi has educated and changed the lives of literally thousands of New Richmond’s finest. Gavin lives in a different country and he just showed up, soap-opera-style, in the late 90’s like he’s been here this whole time. Dad was immensely proud of all of us.

If you don’t know Chuck and Jan’s kids, let me explain. 

We’re extraordinary. We’re remarkable, mostly, because we gave Mom and Dad the best gifts in the world: their grandchildren. Gavin has three beautiful girls and two great bonus kids who love animals, especially horses, and passing down a love of animals is such a gift to Mom. Mandi and Larry have Mason and Tucker, two absolutely brilliant young men who are passionate about hunting and fishing and beer and the outdoors, and that is probably the most marvelous gift Chuck could have ever asked for. As for Nate and I?  Well, we have two impressive kids of our own who are hilarious, which is a gift… to everybody… So you’re welcome.

HE SHOWED US WHAT HE KNEW
Dad never knew what to do with little kids, so instead of regular play, he just showed us what he knew. 

He knew sales. And business. And how to work his ass off. From him, I learned the value of a good handshake before I was in kindergarten, and he taught me that the person behind the desk was no more important than the one working in the field or in the warehouse. He showed me how to get calluses on my hands by throwing hay bales, how to fix things instead of throwing them away, and how to drive a stick shift – not a newer model but the old tricky kind that’s anchored on the floor of a rusty Dodge pickup with a Ford tailgate. He wouldn’t let me drive a car until I knew how to rotate the tires, give it a jump, check all the fluids, and change the oil.  He taught me how to throw an effective punch, and he taught us how to lie to strangers. Oftentimes the phone would ring and he would look me dead in the eye and say “I’m not home.”  He showed Mandi and I how to answer the phone like we were his secretaries because he worked from home, although I’m pretty sure his customers weren’t buying it because we were just kids and phone etiquette wasn’t exactly in our skill-set yet.

I learned how to always look people in the eye when I’m talking to them, not just when they’re talking to me, and how to swap out a gasket on a toilet. I learned how to mud and sand drywall from him, how to bluff in poker, (I never bluff though – my hands are always clean), and how to use most of the power tools in his shop. 

He never really taught me how to fish, though.

FISHING
The Willow River used to be dammed up close to County Roads E and A near Burkardt, and Dad took us girls ice fishing there a couple of times when we were in elementary school. I didn’t know it then, and probably Dad didn’t either, but at that time in his life he wasn’t really the best angler. I’ll never forget the bone chill, sitting for hours, cold sweaty bread bags on my feet under my shitty cheap 80’s moon boots, perched on an upside down five-gallon bucket, just begging him to take us home. He’d call himself determined (I’d say stubborn), but he didn’t want to leave until he’d gotten a bite.
Thankfully, a couple of decades later, Dad acquired some significant fishing skills from one very special person who, God knows how, managed to teach Dad things without him even knowing he was being taught. Larry, thank you for being our Chuck-whisperer. You were always his favorite kid. I’m not even mad about it either, because you grew to become his very best friend.

HAMMOND
Mom and Dad bought their very first home in Hammond when I was only three years old. It was a humble property with about 9 acres about five miles north of town, and even though dad commuted nearly an hour every day to Saint Paul for work, it was completely worth it to him because it had just the right space to fence in a pasture and just the right barn to build some stalls so that our little mom could begin her own dream of having horses again. He’d work long hours and come home exhausted, but he would never complain about the post holes that needed digging, the gates that needed hanging, or the wire that needed stringing. 

We eventually had horses and chickens and dogs and cats, and Dad’s happy little wife generally meant a happy little life. Hammond really was the start of their Happily Ever After. 

Dad wasn’t much for words of affirmation, he showed us how he loved us by providing for us. He worked so hard to make sure we had everything that we needed. Before he started working from home, he’d leave the house before we were up for school, and he wouldn’t get home until long after the sun went down. He fixed things and provided for us and made sure we were want for nothing, and in this way Dad was always saying “I love you” without always saying it.  He could have had an easier job that paid less, he could have kept our family living closer to his work in the city; he could have made a lot of choices that would have made his own life easier, but he made the tougher ones because they were better for us. 

GUNS
Dad was a sportsman. He joined Ducks Unlimited and started collecting firearms. I almost forgot about the little hidden gun cave he built into the wall of his woodshop in the basement that you’d never know was there unless someone showed you the seam in the paneling. Mom leaned in on him pretty hard about his ‘hobby’ until one day he eventually promised her that he wouldn’t get any more firearms.

Several months after that though, DU had a banquet at the Coachmen Supperclub in Baldwin and Dad rolled home pretty chuffed with not one but two new shotguns. Mom wasn’t happy. “I thought you said you weren’t going to get any more guns, Chuck??” “I didn’t! This one is Mandi’s. And this one is for Linsey!”  Well, I’m not sure about Mandi, but I still don’t know which of those guns ever belonged to me.

SPEEDING TICKETS
In our home growing up, most of the parental duties fell to mom, as dad was either on the road for work or hiding, baffled by the three women in his house. His primary duties were breadwinner, napper, mower, fixer, and disciplinarian; he took all of those responsibilities very seriously. Most people here know that Chuck had a remarkable way of expressing his discontent, and as one of his kids, there was no place worse to be than on the receiving end of one of his tongue lashings. Mandi, for the most part, was a rule follower. I, for the most part, was a rule bender. Rarely did the wrath of Chuck surface, but when it did, it was enough to strike fear in anyone within hearing distance.

Thankfully, if we were ever caught, it was usually by mom. Depending on the severity of the crime, she’d either run interference (bless her heart) “Don’t tell your father” or she’d be so pissed off she’d run the consequences right up the chain. 

One summer in the early 90’s, shortly after Mandi got her driver’s license, she had a job washing dishes and at the same time I was babysitting for one of her colleagues. From Erin Prairie to New Richmond, we ‘carpooled’, which means the one with the drivers license always drove the other one to her childcare gig. On one specific afternoon we were running a little behind. I can smell the oil burning in the Cutlass as we bombed west on highway 65, sunset in our eyes and hot wind in our hair since of course the air conditioner didn’t work in that old beater. Mandi had it floored. Then… lights. I wasn’t even driving but I still had a panic attack while Mandi got her very first speeding ticket.  We made a pact right there that we were going to keep it a secret. She’d pay the ticket, mom and dad would be none the wiser. None the wiser until the paper came out. Does this still happen here? Yup. Kids these days are outed on social media all the time for doing stupid shit. Back then we just needed to wait until the Wednesday delivery of the Hammond Newspaper to read about who got busted. Mom eventually found out, only because she noticed the newspaper “didn’t come” and she picked one up at the grocery store. Mom played our cards strategically- she waited to tell dad until too much time had passed for a severe consequence to seem relevant. Mandi was still grounded, and I think I got in a bit of trouble for not telling him too, but it was worth it. Snitches get stitches. 

Friends, I’m not even kidding. I’m a grown woman. There’s something completely ingrained in my DNA that puts the fear of God in me whenever I see a speed trap on the highway. I’m a grown-up and we’re here for Chuck’s funeral, but I’m still positive that if I ever get a speeding ticket, Dad will find a way to ground me

STANDING FOR WHAT IS RIGHT
If you know anything about Chuck Frawley, you know he would always stand up for what he believed was right.

For instance, at one point in his life he was on the board for the New Richmond Golf Course, and during that time he served, the annual Father/Son golf tournament was a regular Father’s Day tradition. Not to be left out on a day on the course with his kids and his buddies, especially on a day in his honor, the man with only girls at home raised a fuss, a big one from what I’ve been told, and he managed to change the name and the policy for the tournament permanently. Mandi, myself, and probably a couple of women in this room today were the very first girls to play in the annual Father/Child Father’s Day tournament here in town, and I believe it is a tradition that continues to this day. 

In the form of one single strongly worded letter to the New Richmond newspaper, Dad declared war on a big box store called Pamida in the early 1990s. He refused to set foot in the store for the entire duration of its existence, minus one specific event about twenty years after his letter to the editor in which he was ‘forced’ to go there to purchase something he couldn’t find anywhere else in town. He wore sunglasses, ducked his head, eyeballed the security cameras (which lets be honest, they probably weren’t even on), and he was convinced he would be escorted out by security if somebody recognized him. See, not only did he think their sign was ugly, he was confident that Pamida symbolized the beginning of the demise of the mom and pop establishments here in New Richmond. He wasn’t wrong. The local economy did continue to expand and welcome national and global franchises while more and more of dad’s friend’s little shops were shutting down, dad still argued that he won his campaign against Pamida for the plain and simple fact that he outlived them.

PERFECTLY NORMAL

Here’s a discussion topic for your next social gathering- name something from your childhood that you thought was common practice, only to find out later in adulthood that’s not the case. I’ll go first…

I thought everybody’s dad had a shotgun rack on their riding lawn mower.

We had a gopher problem in the horse pastures at our home on county road T, and anyone who knows horses knows that rodent holes in a horse pasture can be a huge safety hazard. Trapping or smoke bombing them out wasn’t working. Dad eventually discovered a morbidly effective way to eradicate them: it turns out gophers are curious. And stupid. He found that whenever he’d fire up the lawn mower, they’d pop their little heads up out of their holes, caddyshack style, to see what’s happening. Channeling his South Dakota boyhood prairie dog hunting years, he’d ping those little buggers without slowing down or messing up a cut line.

I thought all grownups with brown hair would have white hair by the time they were thirty.

Mandi’s hair is all natural. She’s 51 and looks great!

I thought it was perfectly normal for someone to gleefully save a toilet from their bathroom remodel, just so they could sneak it into Billy Hermanson’s yard in the middle of the night. 

I also thought it was normal for your dad to tell your friends to ask their parents for THEIR toilets when they were remodeling THEIR bathrooms. There was a theme for a while. 

I thought everybody’s dad was as committed as mine was to lounging around the house in his unmentionables.  

Dad would parade around in just his tidy whities until his morning coffee was finished, even before we switched our wood burning furnace to a gas one and the average indoor temperature would reach sub fifty. As we got older, we took specific pains to avoid making eye contact with dad in the morning, and when we started having friends sleep over, the stakes got even higher. Mom had to remind dad over and over to put some clothes on when we had overnight guests, and he was completely baffled that he needed to do this in his own home.

OPEN TABLES
Something my dad had growing up that he carried with him and passed along to my sister and myself is the concept of an open table. He loved having visitors and it was important to him that people felt safe and comfortable in his space. His heated ‘shop’ was more like a glorified living room, complete with a full dining set for card playing or tinkering, a sink for washing hands after gutting deer or cleaning fish, reclining chairs and a big screen tv for watching whatever game was on or reruns of bonanza, and not one but two full size refrigerators- one for the beer and one for the kid.
I can’t often speak for Mandi but I think it’s safe to say she’s of a similar mind here. We both want our home to be a safe place for our friends and our kids friends to come to. Dad fostered a sanctuary for his people, and we’ve learned to do the same. What do you need? We’ve got you. If it’s a grownup who wants to unwind with a beer or a kid who just wants a sandwich, our homes will always be a soft place to land and we learned that from our dad.

BEING A FRIEND
One of the most important gifts I ever received from my dad was my love language: acts of service. Looking back, I know that every single one of his friends knew they could absolutely depend on him if they were in a pinch with a last minute full house move, cows that needed milking when they were in a full body cast, trees down all over the yard after a storm, or just a friend to play cards with after a hard day. Dad had one job to do for his friends and he did it well: he showed up. 

ERIN CORNERS
Although gregarious in nature, Dad wasn’t the type to mingle. He was the kind of guy who would hold court. If you asked him, he’d probably blame his knees for not moving around much at a party, but I think he secretly enjoyed his little talent for bringing people in.  Depending on the crowd or the atmosphere, he knew how to connect with a great story and he could find common ground with nearly anybody. He had an incredible sense of humor and he had a way of making people feel comfortable. 

If you’ve never thrown a drink on Chuck Frawley’s tab in a New Richmond bar, that must mean you’re not from here. 

When we were growing up, we didn’t have cell phones or the internet. Heck, we only had like four television stations, and one of those was the MSP Doppler radar station with a robot narrator. Sources of entertainment were slim pickings in the country, especially for me when Mandi grew old enough for extra curricular activities and a social life. I kind of lost my playmate so I ended up just tagging along with dad wherever he went. Including the bar.
Many of my childhood memories are ones of myself perched on a stool next to him while he shuffled cards with his buddies. He used to play in a softball league at Erin Corners, and he coached Mandi’s 4H team there, too. When we moved to Hammond, Dad made fast and lifelong friends there. He’d often let me tag along on card nights or random weekends, roll his ‘shake-a-day’, pull the tabs on all of those fun little cards they pulled out from under the counter after making sure the cops weren’t around, buy cans of soda and bags of chips, and he somehow had an endless supply of quarters in his pockets for my entertainment needs. I once arm wrestled an older and much bigger boy than me, and I won. The poor kid’s dad gave him a really hard time for losing to a girl, and I was really proud of myself although a little offended by that guy’s misogyny. I even apologized to the kid but he didn’t take it well. Dad was never much for words of affirmation, remember, but on the way home he told me that he was so proud of me and before we even started the match he knew I was going to win because I was a country kid and that was a boy from town. He told me to never apologize for being my best, and I’ll never forget that.

It isn’t too far from here and today it might look a little different from when dad was in his card-playing days. Erin Corners was the place where I learned from my dad how to shoot pool, shoot darts, and shoot the shit with most of the Erin Prairie farmers and neighbors. Some of us went back a few weeks ago when we celebrated Tucker’s 21st birthday, and I’d be lying to you if I said I didn’t get a little choked up walking back into that place.

If you’re not from around here, it might be worth your time to make a trip out there to have a Pabst in dad’s honor. 

HITTING THE ROAD
Chuck Frawley hit the road on July 18, 2025. He’ll deliver belly rubs at the Rainbow Bridge before meeting a few of his old and favorite friends for a long overdue glass of whiskey and game of cards. We sent him on his way with a list of who we want to give our love to when he gets to where he’s going, and who we have here that we want him to watch over for us from afar. 

LEGACY

This isn’t the end for Chuck Frawley. We know he will continue to live on in our stories, our hearts… wherever we see a Crown Royal bag, an empty shell casing, or a ridiculously organized toolbox… His legacy will continue with the gifts he’s left for us, and we will especially see it in his grandchildren:  The belly laughs. The love for the outdoors. The quit wit. The skepticism. The charm…

WE’RE IRISH

Years ago and moments after burying grandpa Ed Frawley, I got a great big squeeze from the one and only Nancy Rock in the church parking lot. She told me she loved me, she said was sorry for our family’s pain, and that she’d see us back at the house in just a little bit- John had to stop at the liquor store real quick and they’d right be over.
I must have given her a strange look, so she winked at me and explained: “Oh Linsey. We’re Irish. We know how to do this next part right.”

We sure do, Nancy.