Churchill's Brother For an Hour

You learn a lot about Winston Churchill when you're sitting two feet away from him for a few hours.  A few things you learn are that Churchill, although obviously best known as a Prime Minister during WWII, was first and foremost a military man from a young age, following the British battle lines across the globe from India to Africa, – there, once escaping from a prison in Pretoria only to return by train to lead a charge to save other fellow prisoners.

Throughout his life he made money chiefly as a writer, not as a public servant, writing many articles as a war correspondent and political commentator.  Eventually, for his masterpiece volumes on WWII and the Invasion of Britain by Caesar, he won a Nobel Prize in Literature.  His father was a British dignitary (related to the royal Spencer family), and his mother, the vivacious Jennie Jerome,

was a New York socialite and notorious 'traveler' of many kinds.  Although Churchill hardly knew either parent, he was raised by his beloved nanny, a woman he affectionately called 'Old Woom,' and did have a brother who would be very close to Winston

up until middle-age heart disease took him.  It was at this last character, the brother John Strange Spencer-Churchill, that our Churchill impersonator, the extremely talented Randy Otto,

began his anecdote about the fateful months before the great stock market collapse of 1929, when Winston was himself traveling in America, had found a lucrative writing contract with famous publisher Randolph Hearst, and invested it in the stock market that fell only days later.  His brother, a professional financier, thankfully Otto said, as he walked directly over to me seated in a chair only feet away, grabbed both of my hands, looked in my eyes with sad thankful eyes (as if talking to his brother) and spoke with his smoky stiff lip that John was able to turn these family misfortunes around.  After the loss of his brother, Churchill would go on to uncountable different political positions, accepted by some, shunned by many others, until his career was nearly finished, only to quickly rise at the outset of WWII as an unlikely Prime Minister

whose refusal to surrender gained him rankings, generations later, as the greatest Brit that ever lived. I was later able to thank Otto for having me as his brother and that I would never forget it.