Millie Hensch has a 64-year-old newspaper clipping of her dad and uncles, "Three Brothers Are Casualties of Battle.''

That's not as bad as it sounds. The Flajnik boys of Lawrenceville all returned home. Two of them raised families and none of them talked about World War II with the kids -- not for decades anyway.

They're all gone now. But Father's Day has Mrs. Hensch remembering her dad, Louis, and her Uncle Albert and Uncle Charles, and the family get-togethers in the last few years of her dad's life, after her mom died in May 2001.

"Our ritual wasn't glamorous or exciting," she wrote in a letter to me. "I would walk in on Dad looking at the TV. (It wasn't on.) So when my sister-in-law [Jackie] started working at a little bar in Lawrenceville called Cigna's, and told us they were starting up a Tuesday 25-cent wing night, we decided to meet every Tuesday.''

It was an easy walk for her father. He lived across from Allegheny Cemetery, in a house with a front-yard vegetable garden near the corner of 49th and Butler, only a block from the little restaurant and a few blocks from where he grew up, near his first home as a young newlywed. He worked in Lawrenceville, too, before and after The War at Union Steel Castings. And for the younger generations, these nights of spicy chicken and camaraderie provided a connection to, and a glimpse of, another world.

Call them Tuesdays with Louie.

Louis N. Flajnik (pronounced FLY-nik) was the fifth of seven children, six of them boys. His mother, Catherine, had three of those children, including her only daughter, by her first husband, Mr. Stayduhar. After he died, she married one of her boarders, John Flajnik, and the couple added four more boys. Lou was the second of that brood. By the time these get-togethers at Cigna's began, he was the only one of his generation left.

It started out with Mrs. Hensch, her dad, her younger brother, Lou Jr., his son Nicholas, and her twin grandsons, Brian and Brandon Hensch. She'd pick up the three boys at Sunnyside Elementary School in Stanton Heights, take them to the restaurant, and try to control them until reinforcements came. Her brother usually arrived about 5:30 p.m.

As time went on, more relatives made it a point to get to Cigna's for wing night: cousins from the North Hills and Verona, and sometimes cousins from Texas and Georgia. When the big family with the rambunctious boys came through that back door, Mrs. Hensch joked, "We struck fear into the eyes of the other diners. I'm sure some diners changed their night out because of us.''

They took to reserving the back room as the ritual grew. For all her cousins and second cousins, "my Dad became 'The Man.' He was everyone's father, uncle, grandfather and friend."

The ancient clipping tells the story of just how far Lou Flajnik had to go to touch the noisy joys of the 21st century. He was married to Anne and father to an infant daughter, Patsy, when he entered the Army a few weeks after D-Day in June 1944. He was overseas by December, a private in Lt. Gen. George Patton's Third Army.

As the clipping said, his unit was "the very same outfit that chased the uniformed Wehrmacht ... to the Rhine and the first unit to set foot on the un-holy soil of Germany. Grinding up the Nazi hordes in their spectacular dash across Northern France and Belgium,'' they became a legendary fighting force. Pvt. Flajnik, who carried a machine-gun tripod through Europe, was awarded the Purple Heart when shrapnel passed through his neck in February 1945. He was still finding metal pieces there when she was a child, Mrs. Hensch said.

His youngest brother, "Uncle Al," went overseas as a teenager, was captured by the Germans and escaped "not once, but twice.'' The oldest Flajnik brother, Uncle Charley, assistant manager at the main Isaly's store on the Boulevard of the Allies in Oakland, was an artillery sergeant who took part in three major engagements before being hospitalized in England and returned to the States.

The fourth Flajnik, Bill, had spinal meningitis that kept him out of the Army, to his long regret. A cousin once put it this way to Mrs. Hensch: "How would you feel being the only brother not good enough?''

It was a different time but these were reticent men, and "my Dad never talked about the war until the last year of his life,'' she said.

When they finally did get him talking about it with a hidden tape recorder running, the battery died and the stories were lost. One half-expects that's how Lou Flajnik would have preferred it.

When he died at 84 in June 2004 and was buried with his wife's ashes in Allegheny Cemetery, the family gathered one last time in Cigna's. It would be the last time the Texan cousins -- the children of her Uncle Al, who had married a Texan after the war -- would be there. The restaurant -- known for its "Codfather" fish sandwich and friendly owner, Tony (son of former KDKA morning man John Cigna) -- changed hands not long after.

In that old wartime clipping, his young family was mentioned last but Lou Flajnik put them first. I, too, was blessed with such a father. The next time you see an old guy eating wings, think of how rich the man's back story might be.