Finding Frank: Full Circle in a Life Cut Short

By Buzz Ponce

When he died suddenly, tragically, and much too young, there was no retired jersey celebration held in a sold-out stadium. There were no soaring tributes from dignitaries, no international outpouring of grief, no guaranteed enshrinement in Canton, Ohio.
For number 55 -- the former All-American from the University of Southern California and a Hall of Famer for the San Diego Chargers -- there were only unfulfilled promises. Much too soon, he was forgotten and gone from the collective consciousness.
His name was Frank Buncom.
That the original number 55 shared a lineage two generations after his death with the iconic Junior Seau is a little-known, forgotten footnote. Memories of the man are held only by his family, long-ago teammates, and those who profited from his guidance many years ago in another time.
In a journey lasting 44 years, the Buncom story and exceptionality is documented in Finding Frank: Full Circle in a Life Cut Short.
Today in an age where too many supposed heroes topple from too much excess, Buncom – remaining mostly anonymous and unsung -- stood apart by setting standards and setting goals.
His promises were cut short. But not stilled.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Buzz Ponce
• Release date: Mar 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301317158

Buzz Ponce

"Finding Frank: Full Circle in a Life Cut Short" is the culmination of over four decades in attempts to capture the life and times of Frank Buncom by first time author Buzz Ponce. After teaching high school journalism for eight years, Ponce spent 31 years in school recognition sales. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism as well as a master’s in education, both from Northern Arizona University. Ponce and his wife Susan reside in Fountain Hills, Arizona, with their dog Henry.

Book preview

"I’ve heard nothing but good things about Frank Buncom, but can’t help but think only the most dedicated AFL fans really remember him…"

Those were the first lines I typed to Buzz Ponce in early 2012 in response to an email in which he spoke of his wish to write a book about Frank Buncom.

Please don’t get me wrong.

I would be near the front of the line to purchase a book about Frank Buncom. I just felt that the line would not stretch very far behind me, and wanted to forewarn a future author.

Because I have written a couple of books myself and maintain a blog about the American Football League, people often come to me with ideas for football books. Unfortunately they typically bring along two common misconceptions.

First, that just because they write a book about a former San Diego Charger, every Chargers fan in America will purchase a copy.

Second, that they will make boatloads of money by selling their book.

Sadly, chances are that neither will be true. However it is a difficult thing to relay this information without crushing the writer’s creative spirit.

Buzz Ponce, however, came to me with no ideas of grandiosity:

"Regarding your comment on readership: I agree. However, I’m taking major pains to not make the story a ‘football story’. I’m trying to base it on an exceptional life that could have been even more exceptional. Buncom had a story to tell; I’m trying to tell it, albeit 43 years later."

And so my curiosity was aroused by Lee Buzz Ponce, a former Chargers ball boy and friend of Frank James Buncom II.

While Finding Frank is undeniably laced with stories of professional football in the 1960s, it is not, as Buzz hoped, just a football book. Frank Buncom played football, and played it well, but to label him simply as a football player would be doing a great injustice to Frank Buncom, the man.

I had heard from Buncom’s former teammates that he had been a wonderful person. That, however, is to be expected when recalling a teammate of 40 years ago who had died suddenly and unexpectedly at the far-too-young age of 29.

What those old Chargers had failed to do, was talk about Frank Buncom’s depth of character. In the world of professional football, where athletes can sometimes become churlish and aloof because of the pedestals that fans hoist them upon, Buncom refused to occupy that rarified air. He preferred instead to live life as we all should, by truly caring about others, regardless of their position in life. He embodied The Golden Rule, and in this one particular case, befriended a Chargers ball boy and impacted his life by simply being a friend.

Finding Frank is a special story. The story of Buncom and Ponce’s friendship is wonderful, but the story goes beyond just that. Finding Frank is the story of a vow made by one friend for another; a near lifetime spent recalling that vow, and the magic that came about from its fulfillment. It is 40 years of memory, topped by the wonderful reconnections that can be made in such a project; reuniting with friends from decades past, and in this particular case, seeing the spirit of Frank James Buncom II still alive in his son and grandson.

Buzz Ponce was right when he said that this was not a football book. Frankly, it is better than a football book. I can find all of the statistics, play charts and game summaries that I want, any day of the week. I have to search much harder, however, for a tale such as this.

Thank you, Buzz, for sharing with us Frank Buncom the man, and not just the football player.

Todd Tobias

www.TalesfromtheAmericanFootballLeague.com

A photograph remains. Other memories

are stored, some are buried;

possibilities live on.

August, 1965

San Diego Chargers training camp,

Escondido, California

Prologue

A dog-eared piece of memorabilia from nearly 50 years ago rests on a shelf in my home and is treasured. If searched on the internet, the item’s value might fetch all of $5.00. So-called mint pieces may bring more; torn, tattered, less.

But it’s not the price or value of crinkled old cardboard – in this case, a kid’s football card – that holds so much enchantment. It’s the player featured on the card.

The front image is a close-up of a player wearing number 55, smiling widely, hunched over in a running position, clutching a football. The picture has curved corners and is framed in faux wood trim, imitating a television set. In the background is a high fence that kept prying eyes out and encircled the summer training camp where the San Diego Chargers once reigned.

The card is encased in a hard plastic shell now in an attempt to preserve whatever gloss it might still have. It’s the type of treatment usually reserved for sports cards that would command a high price among collectors — cards that feature Hall of Fame players who have cult-like status among legions of devoted, rabid fans.

The player on this card though never had cult status or a legion of rabid fans. The card is number 120 from the Topps Chewing Gum line in 1966 and features a player named Frank Buncom.

At first glance, if there’s anything striking about the image on the front of the card, it may very well be the smile. It shows Buncom with an exuberance for life and an exuberance for his future. And it’s that wonderful openness, that wonderful smile that embodied him so well.

That Buncom reached a certain stature playing college and professional football falls far short if using only that yardstick in measuring and quantifying his life, calculating his contributions. If it were at all possible, if asked today, most probably Frank Buncom would not want to be measured by his football accomplishments, no matter how high they may have been. The guess is, he’d much prefer judging his influence on other people and how that inspiration may have been helpful.

So how does one correctly measure a life and evaluate an existence? What separates typical, normal experiences from, in Buncom’s case, extraordinary hope, extraordinary virtue? What suggests uniqueness in a life, a specialness?

Maybe the process in finding extraordinary does not have to be so complex, so terribly perplexing. Maybe all one has to do is reach back to a childhood, reach back into a previous time and pull out nuggets, pull out charms and snippets that suggest the unexpected and the unusual.

The old, creased keepsake from a long ago youth may be a starting point. Frank Buncom’s football card somehow succinctly illustrates an intricacy and correctly pinpoints a personality conundrum. The flipside reads in part, One of the Chargers’ steadiest performers, Frank doesn’t seem to get publicity...

Buncom was indeed unsung to those casual football fans that randomly followed the game when he played. He was seen as all of that: unrecognized, unacknowledged, anonymous. But dig deeper, past the sing-song clichés on a kid’s card and a discovery is clear: he encompassed much more than just physical skills on a football field and was neither worried nor bothered about the unsung, unrecognized tag as a player. In fact, he preferred it.

That he was mostly viewed as a helmeted, nameless number was nevertheless unfortunate for the usually adoring public that too often fawns over professional athletes, actors and actresses, for all the wrong reasons. For those privileged to have spent time with him, who were mentored by him, he personified a determinedly driven life full of remarkable promise that was punitively cut short.

For those not so privileged, those aforementioned fickle fans who will worship and adore nearly any noted personality, they missed out on understanding a person who bridged the gap between what happens on the gridiron and lessons learned in the real grid – life itself.

When Buncom wore uniform number 55 he was the first of two superlative Chargers linebackers to wear that now famous numeral. Years later the team retired the jersey certainly not because of Buncom’s legacy or on-field exploits, but because it was worn by one Junior Seau.

His life was sandwiched and squeezed between a time in this country’s history that was cramped by enormous violence and strife; a time of breakthrough achievements and breathtaking losses. His realizations were met in a life that overcame extravagant odds; a life that never blinked or shied from unreachable goals or unspeakable wrongs.

Today in college curriculums in such courses as The Sixties in History and Memory, students recoil from the events of 50-plus years ago. Journalist Christopher Sullivan reports that in 1963, George Wallace took the podium to give his inaugural address as governor of Alabama. His words framed a fiery rejoinder to a civil rights movement gathering strength. ‘I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny,’ he thundered, ‘and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!’

Sullivan further remembered that, Under the shadow of the Cold War’s threat of ‘mutually assured destruction,’ 1963 was the year of dawning arms control between the U.S. and the Soviet Union; they signed a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In June, the adversaries agreed to set up a ‘hotline’ communications link between the Kremlin and the White House.

The hotline’s purpose? To help insure against a catastrophic mistake.

Sullivan makes another significant point. Many people had long hoped for relief from the specter of atomic war — what President John Kennedy called the ‘darkening prospect of mass destruction on earth.’¹

So it was a gloomy, dangerous, violent, and tumultuous time to be sure, a time that now may only rarely be thought of or understood by many born after Buncom’s death.

On the flipside though, think through a small sampling of all the events, all of the history that Frank Buncom never saw, never experienced:

The break-up of the Beatles, the Watergate scandal, the end of the Viet Nam conflict, the fall and resignation of Richard Nixon, the Iranian hostage crisis, all of the Wall Street unscrupulousness, the AIDS epidemic, acid rain, the growth of radical religions and beliefs, the continual on-going political misdeeds of corruption and in-fighting in American politics, increased racial profiling, global warming and its consequences, September 11, mega storms Katrina and Sandy, $4.00 per gallon gasoline, random mass shootings: Columbine, Aurora, Tucson, the University of West Virginia, Newtown, and many others.

And all of the good too, all of the progress big, small, or indifferent: eight track tapes, cassette tapes, the first black major league baseball manager, video tape, Roe v. Wade, the first black mayor of a major United States city, the first African American major college head football coach, Blu-Ray DVDs, the first black governor, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first female Supreme Court Justice, Bruce Springsteen, the internet, Bill Clinton’s impeachment and subsequent rebirth, Apple and its magnificent devices, the first black president, stunning leaps and advances in medicine and technology, the broad acceptance of gay rights and gender-free marriage, electric cars, green energy, immigration reform, e-mail, texting, tweets. And, oh my — the legalization of marijuana in some states.

But it’s not about what Buncom has missed. It’s what we have missed by not having him here, not having him with us. What if he had lived, continued to teach his lessons and met his promise? Would he have made a mark, left a larger footprint?

Would he have noticeably impacted lives?

Frank James Buncom II was born on November 2, 1939. And like the wrinkly football card in my home, his legacy is obscure at best, having lost whatever luster, sheen, it may have had all those years ago.

His life, his time, his era, was an epoch before, a world apart from today’s society, today’s pace. Yet his lessons taught and learned those many years ago still can echo, still can enlighten, still are valuable.

In this narrative I’ve tried to capture the essence of a person I once knew, tried to mend a threadbare memory of a man who had a powerful, lasting impact on the people he befriended, people who were ever so fortunate to have crossed his path.

And I’ve tried to exhume the memory of the man behind that wonderful smile on a kid’s football card. Exhume moments that can still connect, can still resonate full circle today in a far different world than Frank Buncom knew, when his promises were left unfulfilled and cut short.

Chapter 1:

The Name Still Holds Promise

"You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

"So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever."

Steve Jobs

The grandson was seen on You Tube reaching high with lithe fingers stabbing the sky. The video showed a fast approaching sphere spiraling in a smooth, soaring arc. The grandson, graceful and deft, jumped and stretched. He snared the ball a step before it squirmed loose and free.

The grandson’s name — also his father’s, his grandfather’s, and his great-grandfather’s – was the title of the video. People watching the clip with crystalline memories and who were of age in the 1950’s and ‘60’s might scratch their heads wondering if or where they have heard the name before. Other old-timers so inclined, those few who can recall events from 50 years before, might rifle deep into their past trying to trigger a memory.

The name, long forgotten by most and abruptly ending in any recognition it may have had two generations before, continues to hold promise, possibilities, and potential.

The name on the You Tube video was Frank Buncom IV.

Chapter 2:

September 14, 1969

"Life is a song, sing it. Life is a game, play it. Life is a challenge, meet it. Life is a dream, realize it. Life is a sacrifice, offer it. Life is love, enjoy it."

Sai Baba

Daybreak was bright and beautiful in Cincinnati, Ohio on September 14, 1969. The forecast called for a high of 72 degrees with unblemished, glistening skies. But overshadowed by glorious weather was