Now You See Him, Now You Don't

When informed that both his mother and his brother say that Charles Irsay was his father, Irsay reddens and a bead of sweat appears on his brow. "My father, my stepfather, whatever you want to call him. The truth is, I don't know what was right. I was raised by my grandfather, Alex Nyitroy. I made it the hard way, that's the important thing. I had a very minimal family life."

"We weren't poor by any stretch of the imagination," says Ronald Irsay, Bob's brother, who, at 55, is eight years his junior. "Why would my grandfather raise him and my mom and dad raise me? We lived in a very nice home in West Rogers Park. We weren't wealthy, but my dad owned several buildings in Chicago and at one time was one of the largest tin knockers [sheet metal contractors] in the city. I don't know how else to say this, but my brother tried to run my father out of business. Bob actually worked to try to destroy his own father. Oh, he's a real sweetheart, all right."

The family name, according to Mrs. Irsay and Ron, was originally Israel, which was changed to Irsay in 1931, some eight years after Robert was born on March 5, 1923. (A check of birth records in Cook County from the 1920s uncovered neither a Robert Irsay nor a Robert Israel, an omission that was described as not unusual by county record keepers.) Both parents had emigrated to this country from Hungary. Both were Jewish, and they raised their children as Jews. Bob went to Lane Tech High School in Chicago and in the fall of 1940 enrolled at the University of Illinois.

Art Petacque, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, happened to be Irsay's roommate that year. As freshmen both joined Sigma Alpha Mu, a Jewish fraternity often referred to as Sammy House. "His father used to lecture him on the value of money," Petacque recalls. "He had a European accent, and I remember him telling Bob, 'Remember, son, money doesn't grow on bushes.' But Bob was not poverty-stricken by any means."

Harold Fry, a past president of the Illini Sammy House, recalls that Bob "never fit in with the fraternity. He played nothing in the way of sports." (The Illini athletic department confirms this.)

Yet when you ask Irsay about the fraternity today, he denies having been a member, denies having been a pledge, denies even remembering Art Petacque. "I never belonged to a fraternity," he says. "I had free room and board there because I worked washing dishes and waiting on tables. You had to have money to belong to a fraternity."

"He joined the house as a pledge, which is the first step toward becoming a member," Petacque says. "He definitely was a pledge, and not an employee of the club. They didn't paddle employees, and he got paddled plenty."

Irsay even denies being raised as a Jew. "If I'm Jewish, how come I belong to all the gentile clubs?" he asks, referring to various golf and social clubs he belongs to in the Chicago area and in Florida. "I'm a Catholic. I was married by Father Dolan in the Queen of All Saints Church in Chicago," he continues. "You can look it up."

"You converted?"

"No."