Life Begins (Again) at 90

Last fall, after Frank Hruby lost his wife of 62 years, his doctor sat him down to talk about his future.

"This could be the beginning of a whole new life, Frank," the doctor said. "You should think about what you want to do."

Hruby was 89. He appreciated the optimism and decided to follow the doctor's orders.

"It was like pulling up the window shade to see what's out there."

He started composing music.

Really, it was Pollee's idea.

"Pollee always said, 'You ought to do more composing.' She was always my best backer. We were a team in just about everything."

Many Cleveland readers will remember Hruby as the longtime music critic for the Cleveland Press, until it folded in 1982. Some will remember that he was the music director for Cain Park in Cleveland Heights for a decade after World War II ended.

"People were ready for the new stuff," he said, smiling at the memory. "'Oklahoma' had just come out."

I first found out about Hruby after Allan Bellin sent me an e-mail to brag about his old friend. Bellin said he encouraged Hruby to complete a flute trio he'd started composing years ago.

Hruby finished "Flutophiles' Romp," and Bellin arranged for his teenage granddaughter and two friends to perform it in Hruby's living room.

"They loved Frank," Bellin wrote, "and he shocked them with flowers afterward. They wanted to adopt him."

This career move is a natural next step, really, for a man whose life was immersed in music from the day he was born. His father played bass clarinet for the first eight years of the Cleveland Orchestra. He has many childhood memories of a house full of laughter and music whenever his musician uncles showed up.

He was 5 when his father bought him his first clarinet. He learned to play the piano, too, and by the time he went to college, he had decided to major in music composition.

Frank and Pollee met in college and were engaged in 1942, but Pollee called it off out of fear that they were acting too fast because of the war.

"I lost 10 pounds," Hruby said, shaking his head.

Off he went into the Navy, but his heart stayed stuck in Cleveland, where Pollee had taken a job teaching at Hathaway Brown in Shaker Heights.

They corresponded at a furious pace, and by the time Frank came home on leave, Pollee had taken leave of all her reservations. They were engaged again and married straight off the ship in 1945. They had five children, all of whom Hruby said are delighted that he is composing again.

He knows that their happiness is also relief that he has found a way to move beyond his grief.

For much of our interview, we sat in his living room, which brims with books, magazines and family photos. A grand piano dwarfs the room. At one point, he pointed to the sofa where Pollee often lay while he played for her or read aloud.

"That was our habit," he said. "I'd read while she sewed."

One afternoon, not long before she died, Frank was reading from The New York Times Book Review, when Pollee suddenly interrupted him.

"Frank," she said, "I want to go the hospice route."

"I choked up," he said. "I had to stop."

Then he started reading again.

These days, Hruby writes his songs in the basement on an electric keyboard hooked up to a computer. His compositions are used for statewide high-school music competitions. It's nice to be 90 and paid for your work, he said, but he'd write these even if nobody wanted them.

"This is a whole new chapter in my life," he said as he played his latest, "Scaling the Polka Heights." "It's fun, and I enjoy it. If nobody likes it, that's all right by me."

Besides, he knows there is one lady who would celebrate his every new note. "Pollee would be tickled to death because I'm happy," he said, grinning wide. He took a breath, stared down at the keyboard for a moment, then looked up and smiled again.

"I still think of this as a partnership," he said. "It's still 'us.' It's still 'we.'"

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.