My father was not a doting parent; we did not do a lot of things together. He didn’t teach me how to play baseball or how to build a campfire, but he did something more important: he provided a good example on how to live and treat people. I never heard him or saw him show prejudice towards anyone because of their race, color, ancestry, religion, or station in life; he took people as they came. You had his respect until you showed, by word or by deed, that you did not deserve it.
Everyone liked my Dad. He was, above all else, a nice guy. He was very intelligent and talented, a Life Master at bridge, an avid reader and reciter of poetry, a good amateur actor, respectable bowler, and he could do math problems in his head at an amazing speed. My Dad was as unassuming as I am boisterous and as slight as I am rotund, but he is inside me somewhere.
He had to quit school during the Great Depression and go to work; he never complained about it, but never went back to school. Had that not been the case he might have ended up as a professor of English Literature somewhere, but he eventually managed a series of manufacturing plants instead. He worked for the same company from the time I was 12 until he retired, about 30 years.
Before that, he did a little of everything; delivering milk from a horse drawn wagon, selling ices at Coney Island beach, mixing malteds in Times Square, rigging ships in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a stint in the Army during WWII, and tending bar in midtown Manhattan.
My father put up ivy-decorated wallpaper in our tenement flat in Brooklyn and ended up with the ivy pattern growing the wrong way; it became a standing family joke and he took it in good humor. His defense was that he was a city boy, how did he know that ivy usually grows upwards?
There are no public memorials to my father; like the vast majority of people he just lived a decent life and left us when it was time, but he left his indelible imprint on his family and friends and they were all better for it.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad.