No. Not that guy. Hiney.

People think everything is on the Internet. It isn’t. The guy above isn’t. But he was a big guy, meaning a big man, in the best sense of the word. Big heart above all.

Got started on this line of thought because I was sparring with a friend whose daughter is close to a Yalie, and Harvard lost to Yale at basketball last night, which I couldn’t care less about. I made a dumb joke about Harvard yelling “safety school” at Yale in the closing seconds the way Princeton actually does when it loses to Penn.

You have to understand I’m not too fond of either Harvard or Yale these days, what with Bill and Hillary, the Bushes, Obama, Al Gore, and all the minions who support them and sport degrees from these two schools.

But my friend had reminded me that her daughter was friendly with a Yalie, and I had to ask myself if I had ever liked a Yalie. Hmmm. Him? No. Him? No, definitely not. Him? Are you kidding? Bunch of pseudo-intellectual second-raters who never had a thought worth thinking unless it involved money.

And then, like a shaft of sunlight I felt the warm glow of Francis Lyman Hine, whom I knew as Uncle Hine.

Let’s get the White Privilege charge out of the way forthwith. He had it. He was it. And never was it better bestowed. His friends called him Hiney, with all the connotations you think you invented implicit, and he upped them by naming his rural estate “Hine Quarters.”

If Gatsby had lived to be 50, he might have become Hiney. He had a funny and magnetic wife everyone called “Sis,” five children, two daughters, one son, and two daughters in that order. He had a 400 acre spread which included a rambling 1750s house, an Olympic pool, a brick bathhouse the size of a suburban home, a tournament quality tennis court, and a standing invitation to everyone in the neighborhood to use all of the above with a simple call ahead.

One of the places I grew up. The other was the woods in the back of my parents’ house, where I hunted Indians all alone and later drove my truck at the age of 13 more than 40 mph or faster when I knew I was observable. But when Uncle Hine threw a party, we went as a family. We weren’t rich. But riches didn’t matter at Hine Quarters. He liked everybody.

And he liked my sister and me in particular. Because we and his own children went to the school my grandfather founded and he — basically, er, essentially, er, completely — funded. So my sis and I were close to Helen, Louise, Lyman, Marion, and Priscilla. We didn’t know about money. Funny, huh? They were just our nearest neighbors and the kids we went to school with. My sister and Marion became best friends before there was such a thing as cell phones.

A man with five children doesn’t spend a lot of time with each one. He was the same way with my sister and me. He was loudly pleased when we showed up, wanted to know how we were doing, and then invariably got distracted by the hordes of guests who wanted something more from him than how we were doing.

He was a rich man, you see. His fortune came from something that rhymes with Boca Bola, and he was really truly trying to live his life away from New York’s “400” society families. He was living in the backwoods of southern New Jersey, for God’s sake. But the socialites showed up anyway.

Our elementary school wasn’t the only thing he dreamed up out of thin air. He made up a whole company out of the same gossamer element. Why my sister and I had the unique privilege of growing up in a backward, semi-literate backwater of south Jersey underneath a subset of 1960s jet set society.

Uncle Hine had not served in the armed forces during World War II. He had played four years as an academic freshman on the Yale football line, but something broke in that time which prevented him from joining the military. So he turned his fortune to his St. Paul’s classmates who had served as pilots. Their company reconditioned aircraft motors at the Millville airport, where P-47 pilots had been trained in the war. My dad was a P-47 pilot. Uncle Hine called him Lord Laird. But my dad wasn’t the only pilot in the bunch. There was even a bomber pilot from Princeton who drove a 1956 Thunderbird.

They were all friends. They maybe all drank too much, which is what PTSD was then, but I was there and I never saw any hanky panky. Although there was the time that Uncle Hine was in the pool with the reigning Miss Sweden and Sis got pretty mad.

The thing I always thought was the most exotic was Uncle Hine’s mother, Mrs. Clark, who had a Mark IX Jaguar. I met her once. She looked like Vanessa Redgrave the way she looks now.

You know they don’t actually work, don’t you?

I was a motorhead even then. But it was always breaking down. Uncle Hine was constantly having to rescue her from strange places, but she refused to give up the Jag. I could understand that.

And then we — and all the Hine kids — went away to school — and by the time we returned, there was no more Gatsby time. No more lobster-glutted clambakes at the private lake, no more tennis showdowns between local queens and Smith grads, no more silvery children swimming in the grand pool. All done. I saw Priscilla just two times after eighth grade. Once at a dance between our two boarding schools, where I almost kissed her, and once at her wedding. She is dead now. Note that we didn’t get to go to high school together or to a pep rally or a prom like all the subjugated ones.

White privilege. I won’t apologize. Don’t care who you are or were. If you’d been in the vicinity of Hine Quarters in the 1960s, you’d have been welcome. Just call first.

He didn’t die like Gatsby because he was never a fake. I miss him. And all those of you who never met him or anyone like him should miss him too.

Actually, he probably helped us get there.

P.S. Only telling this part because my wife insisted on an ending. Heard at some point that he was in the hospital having a leg amputated on account of Diabetes. So I called a florist and sent him flowers. He called me from his hospital room to thank me. Mine were the only flowers. Not easy being a rich man with a million friends. Didn’t want to end on this note. But sometimes that’s the note things end on. He died months later.