Dyspeptic Dyslexia, or Is He Kidding?

         Phill Lipp died surrounded early last year after a long battle with life. The son of Frenkel and Mrs. Brzwnowcz (nee O’Brien) was born on August 25th, 1939, the last peaceful day in Europe before WWII, in Uzbebekistan, the only Central Asian country not to participate in the Central Asian revolt of 1924 which officially ended in 1933.

         The Brzwnowcz (pronounced Rubin) family was well known in their homeland from Frenkel’s repeated attempts to form an Uzbek Navy, something of a mittyesque  (pronounced Mrcbszcto) ambition, as Uzbekistan is one of only two double landlocked countries in the world. He made his living writing patriotic songs and dirty limericks when he wasn’t proselytizing for the Navy. Mrs. Brzwnowcz was a beloved member of the “Get a First Name Society,” a forerunner of the Women’s Liberation movement in our own country. Her mere appearance at rallies could spark Brownian Motion, the random movement of particles or people.

         Their bohemian life style won few adherents from Stalinists in the Uzbek S.S.R.  After Hitler and Stalin signed the Non-Aggression pact, the Brzwnowcz family, now numbering several, knew they had to leave. They undertook a perilous journey south through Turkmenistan, then southwest through Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, thirteen months on camels. Secretly, Frenkel was overjoyed when he heard that camels were known as the Ships of the Desert, though Mrs. Brzwnowcz was never quite the same.

         Arriving in Beirut, the Paris of the Levant, the entire family had to pass as spies, the only legitimate reason to be jobless. Frenkel’s dirty limericks were thought to be the key to the Enigma code by the Turks, still hoping for a return of the Ottomans. The babbling of the now “camel mad” Mrs. B, as she became to be known, was felt to be the key to nuclear fission or the mass production of penicillin. It was this inscrutability that caught the attention of the Allies.

         The English were over their head with the Blitz, Dunkirk and the Man Who Never Was, though they too were interested in the wild Uzbekians. The Americans, not yet in the war in early 1941, made the contacts through master spy, Moe Berg, the unknown catcher of the Washington Senators.

         Berg, speaking one of his sixteen languages, arranged passage for the beleaguered family, without Mrs. B’s camel, to Portugal, a neutered country at the time, on a tramp freighter. Once in Lisbon, they embarked on a US flag steamer. It was December 5, 1941.

The Brzwnowcz family luck held once again, when after the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor reached the ship, the largely German Somaliland crew panicked and went overboard in mid-Atlantic. Ever resourceful, Frenkel took over steering, and decided to back the drab little vessel all the way to New York, to Ellis Island and freedom in the land of plenty.

Frenkel’s lack of any real naval training did reveal itself when they went aground on Amelia Island, a virtually isolated barrier island near Jacksonville, and the mouth of the St. John River, not the Hudson. News of the war had reached the little island and the Coast Guard seaman apprentice stationed there quickly asserted control, guaranteeing the water logged Uzbeks in a fishing cabin and sending pigeons for assistance.

He interrogated the Brzwnowczs until he realized that Mrs. B was braying, not speaking a foreign language. Frenkel was so proud of avoiding u-boats, that he kept singing his dirty limericks. Only Phill could communicate, and it was here that he got his name.

Seaman Apprentice Thompson couldn’t understand the now almost three year old. Not realizing that the boy was yelling, “Poop,” in Uzbek (pronounced fiell ipp), he wrote what he heard as the youngster’s name, Phill Lipp. And so, a life journey is fore-written.

Young Phill took much ribbing through school, bullied as “Three Ls” or “Two Ps” by the more literate of his island classmates. He wasn’t very big; actually he was quite small for whatever age he was. His only escape was teaching the bigger kids, actually all the kids, the Dirty Limericks that he parroted from his father, the late Frenkel used to write. Sad to say, Frenkel who survived his treacherous trek out of Uzbekistan and a retro crossing of the Atlantic died when he was chasing Mrs. B who had gone grazing during the eye of a hurricane.

In 1957, Phill did graduate from the Amelia County School in a one room cabin, catching a rowboat to the mainland. There his remarkable ear for Dirty Limericks picked up some new ones from the longshoremen in Jacksonville.  After some of his new friends thought he was insulting them, almost totally purple from a little battering and bruising, Phill learned he could turn a phrase, sing a song, rock a roll.

Shortly after his recovery in the Rehab Unit in Mary Esther, Florida, a home for battered Uzbeks, Phill took his Ls and his Ps back out. He never looked back. (He had his neck fused while at The Unit.) His music career took off, and today he is most remembered for “They Call Today Machiah.”

The world was his oyster after that. He named his toy Pomeranian, Machiah, and the two of them toured extensively. That was when it happened. He was in South Beach (the original). One of the denizens of the still moderne hotels came out to the beach on a crisp November morning and yelled, “It’s a Machiah.” His little dog ran across the street to answer the call and Phill Lipp met his maker. He ran to save little Machiah, when a speeding two tone Studebaker couldn’t stop. Parts of Phill were never found. Legend has it that body parts were found in Uzbekistan. An historical marker was placed on the beach side of the street with the following:

Here died Phill Lipp, songwriter and teller of tall tales.
“There once was a man from Nantucket,
who fell on his head in a bucket,
It was a Mechiah,
A purple How Are Ya,
While thinking he was in Pawtucket”


1939-much later.