MY UNCLE REYNIE - Propriety & a passion for the poor.

Making sense of your relatives is never an easy task. In the case of my uncles it was nearly impossible. But the process was challenging, and often entertaining. Each Thanksgiving during the 1950s and 1960s, for example, my father's five brothers and three sisters, their spouses and gaggle of children would gather for turkey, cranberries, good wine, and bruising intellectual combat. The battles started at the dinner table and continued late into the evening in a vast book-lined living room. It was part sophisticated Trivial Pursuit, part Socratic exercise, part presidential debate. It was very much a Hillenbrand thing. The uncles would subject their nephews and nieces to a steady stream of questions, opinion, and harassment. What did Gregor Mendel's experiments really prove? Was Mailer's The Naked and the Dead a great war novel or a trashy novel with great war scenes? And, by the way, is there really such thing as a just war?

The political debates often turned bitter and the uncles would go at each other, as well as at the nephews and nieces. Deep divisions within the family were exposed. I could never understand how brothers who shared the same genes, the same upbringing, the same sermons on Sunday could end up spread so widely across the political spectrum. Some uncles were devoted New Deal Democrats and others true-blue John Birch Society Republicans. Over the years I came to admire my uncles. Yes, they were often intellectually arrogant and almost always stubborn (an unfortunate family trait), but the eclectic range of their knowledge was impressive and they taught me a lot about clear and vigorous thinking.

The venue for all this intellectual argy-bargy was the rectory of Sacred Heart Church in Hubbard Woods, where my Uncle Reynold was pastor. Of all the uncles, it was Reynie-as we called him-who was my personal favorite and hero. He championed all the causes that I cared passionately about in those days: civil rights, the labor movement, poverty. Yet he was, by common agreement, the most enigmatic and the least approachable of all the Hillenbrands. There was nothing especially warm and cuddly about any of this older generation of Hillenbrand men, and Reynie, even within the family, was peculiarly cerebral, peculiarly aloof, peculiarly reserved.

One of the puzzles about Reynie was: Where did this decorous scholar, seemingly more comfortable with books than with people, pick up the streak of compassion which led him to become the rebellious champion of the poor and underprivileged?

One possibility-and it is nothing more than a hunch-is that some of it rubbed off from his mother, Eleanor Schmidt Hillenbrand. Eleanor was a strong-willed woman brought up in Dane County, Wisconsin, where her German family settled in the 1840s. What land in the area the Schmidts did not own, the Hillenbrands did. The Schmidts were prosperous and civic-minded. The family helped build the church in the town and, over the generations, produced a number of priests who ran parishes in places like Racine. The family also dabbled in Progressive politics and ideas. There has always been a rebellious and anti-establishment strain in the family tradition that goes back several generations. Reynie was, in a sense, the embodiment of that.

And there was also Eleanor's own personal sense of duty. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Eleanor cared for a succession of hoboes, vagabonds, and bums who called at the back door of the large house the family owned on Hamond Street in Chicago. The back fence off the alley, it was said, carried a secret mark used by those forsaken men to identify a house where food, warm clothes, and even some cash were handed out. Stories of "Eleanor's boys" sleeping in the basement, smoking my grandfather's cigar stubs, and wearing his discarded coats during cold winters were part of family lore.

Eleanor and Reynie were especially close and some of her compassion for the poor may have had influence. But only to a degree. It was hard for those in my generation to imagine Reynie working soup kitchens or living in tenements among the poor. I can't recall ever seeing Reynie without his black coat and Roman collar. It's a reach to think of his sitting around eating pizza with YCS staffers. If he ever did, he'd probably have used a knife and fork. Reynie had a strong sense of propriety.

But this is not to say that Reynie was unfamiliar with suffering. He himself was always frail and in ill health. Like many of his brothers, he was plagued by headaches that seemed to leave his brow permanently furrowed. He had troublesome allergies. My mother, who was very fond of Reynie, would make him cookies out of eggwhites, leaving out the nuts because he was allergic to wheat flour and nuts. And he was hospitalized for nearly a year after a serious auto accident in Oklahoma. For the rest of his life he wore a heavy orthopedic shoe on his right foot. His moods, my mother used to say, permanently darkened after the accident because of the pain he endured. Yet he was no complainer.

My last memories of Reynie were of an Easter meal at my parents' house. He was ill and could not finish eating. He had to lie down on a bed in the guest room. I recall coming in to help him. I sat by his bedside. He said something like, "I feel so weak, so tired." I was taken aback. He was admitting weakness and vulnerability, something I never really expect from an uncle. I wish I had taken his hand and held it. Or that I had given him a hug when he left. But we seldom did those things in the family. Too bad. I never did give my hero a proper farewell.

A few months later he died. His funeral attracted a huge crowd of the great and the good from the church in Chicago. I sat off to the side by myself in the church in Hubbard Woods and listened to the eulogists who proclaimed-should I have been surprised?-that Reynie was their hero as well. I was pleased. And Reynie would have been pleased too, although in his stubborn, reserved manner he might never have admitted it.

Barry Hillenbrand, a long-time foreign correspondent for Time, now covers international issues for the magazine from Washington, D.C.