Stu Bykofsky: Irv Homer's 'forgotten' son just wants his birthright

EVEN a public life has private secrets, and, following Irv Homer's death, one of his wanted to be heard.

"I want to claim my birthright," I was told by Jeff Pergament, the 58-year-old son of long-time talk-show host Homer. Pergament was pained to not be named in obituaries as a survivor, when even Gary, an estranged son, was mentioned.

But Gary is the son of Homer and his second wife, Francine. Jeff is the son of Homer, who died last week at 85, and his first wife, Marilyn.

Who knew? Not the obituary writers, who spoke with Homer's known, and reachable, surviving son, Ronn, who didn't put Homer's "other" family out there and had no obligation to do so. I called Ronn, who referred me to Rich Moore, his attorney.

Jeff "is not a survivor, legally," Moore told me.

"My father is an icon and I am an iconoclast," says Pergament, at once proud, sad and disappointed in his birth father.

Thin as a straw, and an artist and designer by trade, Pergament greets me outside his one-bedroom apartment in Primos, Delaware County, where he lives with a clutter of his own paintings, family photographs, electronics and a moppy 7-year-old Shih Tzu. As we walk up one flight to his apartment, he limps on his right leg, permanently damaged in a 1966 motorcycle accident.

Like his dad, he's a fast talker.

Jeff's surname isn't Homer because it was changed after his mother married Lou Pergament, a major figure - political and otherwise - in Atlantic City from the 1940s through the 1960s. Lou adopted Marilyn's sons (Jeff and his brother, Bruce) and they lived in Atlantic City. Lou had two sons from a previous marriage.

Jeff remembers seeing his birth father only once as a child.

"He gave me a red cowboy hat, two cap pistols, two shiny quarters and walked out the door," Pergament says.

Did his mother bar Homer from seeing him? In fractured families, vengeful women do that.

"Never," Jeff says, although he can't know that for sure. His mother was a "strong woman," but, "I always knew my father was a capon," says Pergament, who has two failed marriages, a short stint in jail and a drug addiction on his resumé. He's been clean for nine years, he says.

I'm withholding some of Jeff's stronger comments and claims against Homer because there's no way to verify them.

He says that he's not angling to glom a share of any inheritance, but has had a lawyer take a look at it. "I want truth," he says. "I want my birthright."

In what form, I ask?

He says that he got me to Primos to talk with him.

"You don't know what I'm going to write," I say.

His response is Zen-like. "I am responsible for the effort. It doesn't matter what you write."

After he got married and divorced, Jeff made an odyssey from A.C. to Key West to rescue his underage daughter from her attraction to gangsters and alcohol, but she found "Cubans and cocaine" in Florida, he says.

I'll not identify Pergament's daughter, nor his granddaughter. He hasn't seen his daughter in 11 years and has never seen his granddaughter.

It's his daughter's choice, he says.

" 'You didn't let me see my grandfather,' " he quotes her as saying. " 'I'm not going to let you see your granddaughter.' "

Jeff says that it wasn't possible for him to make a grandfather visit happen.

"Because of what Irv did in his life, it cost me my granddaughter," Pergament says, sounding harsh and self-excusatory.

Although he says that he's over it, Jeff is filled with the pain of having his father turn his back on him. It's too late now for him to have his birth father in his life.

With luck, and persistence, he may convince his daughter that, someday, she may want a relationship with her father as much as Jeff wanted one with his. *

 
E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. For recent columns:

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