SUN CITY – The past year Sun City resident Phillip Cody of Neighborhood 7 has spent cleaning and organizing his father’s estate has been not only an adventure in family history but American history.
After Frank Cody’s passing at 100 years old in November of 2009, his son Phil set to the task, like many adult children, of working his way through the lifetime of memorabilia his mother and father collected during their life on Chicago’s south side. Only for Cody, rather than just unearthing old bank statements, deeds and titles, and various other family records, he discovered that his father had a cache of newspapers and other notable items dating as far back as 1918 and WWI.
“I’m going to the south side on a weekly basis, and I’m discovering things I never knew existed,” Cody said. “He [my father] was a pack rat and collector. It’s taken me four hours to go through one drawer of a desk.”
Included in Cody’s findings are mostly newspapers and magazines whose headlines chronicle some of the major events in United States history, such as V-E Day and Kennedy’s assassination. Other noteworthy items include campaign pins, booklets (one containing information on and instructions for what to do in the event of an atom bomb detonation), a solid brass tabernacle door, black-and-white photos, and more.
The timeline ends with a copy of the Atlanta Georgian dated 1918 (when his father would have been nine years old) with a front page headline that reads “Americans marching to Rhine.”
Cody said that eventually he didn’t know what to expect in every drawer or box he opened. He ultimately decided to “expect the unexpected” as the discoveries continued.
Frank Cody was born in 1909, reached an eighth-grade education, and worked “seventy-plus” years as a sheet metal and roofing contractor with his own company F.C. Cody Company.
The majority of Frank’s work, Cody said, was with the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, building or renovating churches throughout the Chicagoland area.
Cody said, “He [my father] was very proud working for the church. He was a self-made man. He was a craftsman. He was an inventor. He was unusual. He was dedicated. He was smart. And he was a man of his own means. We all loved him and admired him. And, he had a lot of history.”
