I have finally come face to face with Frances Lusco.

For years I had imagined she was some fictional character whose name my dad used in a turn of a phrase, one that I often heard growing up.

Much like my dad, I have a tendency to turn phrases around, swap words or letters in them on the spur of the moment to make them say something nonsensical, but with a backwards rhyme.

The only one that comes to mind at the moment is “Newy Hap Year,” a take on “Happy New Year” that I’m really not sure if he or I came up with. I wish I could come up with a few more. There are several, and I come up with new ones constantly. But they escape me tonight as I am deep in thought about Frances Lusco.

Like my dad, I went to John Carroll High School, a Catholic institution in Birmingham since the 1940s. Unlike my dad, I graduated.

He was merely one of the members of the venerable old school’s first freshman class, something he was quite proud of even though he only lasted that one year. If memory serves, he went to Fairfield a year, too, then off to the Navy and a GED.

I graduated in 1979 and for the past several years have been mailed a magazine that gives details of current happenings, milestones for graduates, alumni passings and the like.

I peruse it for names of former classmates who have might have somehow made their way into it for their accomplishments or, sadly because they had passed away or had family members who died.

Waiting in the drive-through at a chicken tender joint one recent evening, I noticed a copy of the latest one in a side pocket of my car. On the cover was a picture of the homecoming queen from 1952 crowning the smiling queen of 2011.

When I got inside to the story, it said, “Frances Lusco Walker ’52 returned to John Carroll on October 1, 2011 and received a spirited ovation from current students and staff …”

Complete with a picture of lovely Miss Lusco from 1952.

“She’s real!!!!!” I thought and laughed out loud sitting by myself in the car. She was the very first homecoming queen at my old high school, the story said.

From the time I can retain memory, anytime I ever heard my dad sing that Tony Bennett standard, he would transpose some syllables in the town’s name in the song and warble, “I left my heart, in Frances Lusco.”

John Mullen is the news director of The Islander.