The Chapin Family Legacy of Love, Letters, Art, Music & Activism.

At the Chapin Family compound in Andover, New Jersey, which is nearing 100 years old, one of Harry Chapin’s younger brothers, Tom Chapin — singer/songwriter/activist & Grammy Award Winner — ponders the photograph of Harry (lower, center) and the painting of his maternal grandfather, the literary giant Kenneth Burke, or K.B. The painting of Kenneth Burke was done by Tom (and Harry’s) paternal grandfather, James Ormsby Chapin. (Photo by Steve Villano).

The Chapin Family Legacy of Love, Letters, Art, Music and Activism.

By Steve Villano, Chpt. 2

(Copyright, 2021)

Harry Chapin’s life was, at it’s core, a love story — a complicated, triangulated, convoluted, undisputed, multi-generational, non-denominational, big-brotherish, earth-motherish, Bohemian-maniacal, Yankee Puritanical, serendipitous, so ridiculous love story that it could just as well have been fiction, or the subject of one of Harry’s own story songs. But, it was a love story as real as life, with roots as deep as roots can reach, and lots of reminders that it happened, and was not just imagined.

It’s a story that dates back decades, into generations and centuries, back in time before there was a country to be part of, or proud of, but not before there were some things that mattered so much, everything would be risked.

It began, as many love stories do, with some headstrong romantic infatuated with the notion that, somewhere, there was a better life than the one he or she was living, and that something — anything — needed to be done to bring it about. That headstrong romantic was not Harry.

Unlike Frank Sinatra, who came from a family of poor immigrants, during a time of virulent anti-Italian and…