Father’s Day: Lessons from a Quiet Man

Curmudg’s note: Father’s Day is this Sunday. Happy Day to all you Dads. I posted this column last year on Father’s Day, thinking about my own Dad. Wanted to share it again.

He was 8 when his mother died. He must have decided then: This is going to be the worst thing that will ever happen to me.

His father, Sam, had a business to run and three kids to feed. So my father was raised by his older sisters—aunts to me—Aunt Ethel and Aunt Hannah. Two of the most outstanding women I’ve ever met.

He was a Rutgers University graduate who later enlisted in the Army at the start of World War II. He was sent to the University of Michigan to study meteorology. His stories about the war were few but always light, often very funny. He joked he was the one who told Patton the weather would be sunny, mild, and calm on D-Day. (The weather was overcast, cool, and rainy, endangering conditions for allied landing craft. The movie, Pressure, was released recently, and it made me think of Dad.)

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He was a dreamer who gave up his dream of studying law to fulfill the promise he made to his father’s business creditors, after Sam suffered a stroke and was not able to maintain the business, leaving it on very shaky ground. Dad promised the creditors they would receive 100% of the money owed to them if they waited until he served his time in the army. They did, and he did. He continued to run Boston Hardware until his retirement many years later.

He knew little nor really cared for the “hardware” part of the business, and constantly innovated outside the realm of hammers and nails. He developed a “Trim a Tree” business, converting the entire first floor of the store into a wonderland of trees, lights, garland, and tree decorations from around the world. To this day, I see comments on Facebook about it.

He was kind, considerate, and graceful. Literally graceful. He was a champion fencer at Rutgers in the late 1930s. He later taught fencing at the local Penn State campus through his 60s. From an early age, we kids had the fundamental fencing moves—en garde, thrust, lunge—drilled into our heads. Minus the swords, of course.

He was the Grand Marshall of a parade. His own. A march of kids from the block, whom he’d round up on occasional Sundays in the summer to strut around the neighborhood. Any kid could join in, as long as they wore a hat. Any hat. We’d march, certainly not in step, and say: “Hut, hut, hut two three four. (Insert one kid’s name) is a friend of mine, he resembles Frankenstein, when he does the Irish jig, he resembles Porky Pig…hut, hut…”

How about that….

He was unflappable. Nothing could rile him. Sometimes, much to my chagrin.

He was a magnet to women of all ages. Women would surround and dote on him wherever he went—restaurants, hotels, airplanes, even when his wife (my mother) was present. This wasn’t flirting on his part—he just loved and respected women. He gave them space and agency, at a time when few other men did. It wasn’t part of the culture, but then again, neither was he.

He was a drinker. Not a nasty drunk, just a very quiet one. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I realized martinis were made one at a time, not in pitchers.

He was a smoker. From age 17 to 94. When I asked him, after smoking for 77 years, why he stopped, he said, “Because I’ve been meaning to.”

He drank, he smoked, he never worked out, and never worried about calories or cholesterol. And he lived until 98 ½. Maybe the key to a long life is the “never worried” part of that sentence.

He was my father. And more than anything, his legacy was one of choice. He knew his life was defined by the choices he couldn’t make. He made sure his children knew their lives could and needed to be the opposite. Lives defined by the potential to do and be anything, anywhere.

I always had a sense of his gentle and kind nature—but it’s only now, many years after his passing, that I’ve come to revere, not resent it.

Hold your loved ones close, not because life is uncertain, but because we often understand and appreciate them too late.

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