For Father's Day... a tribute to my Dad.

So it's Father's Day.

A day to commemorate fathers. A day to reflect back on years spent with them, remembering good times spent together, lessons learned...

This is mine.

As I grew up, I sometimes thought that I had the squarest dad in the world. Of course back then I had all the answers and knew everything and there was a long time when we didn't agree on anything or get along very well at all. But you know, as I got older a funny thing happened. He got a lot smarter.

I'll always remember the special times we spent together. Like when I was eight or nine and he took me on a motor route to deliver newspapers one night. Shame on me, but as he bent over to pick up a bundle of papers, I nipped him on the buttocks with the needle-nosed pliers because it was just the sort of things that eight or nine year old boys did. That was the night that I learned some new words that I can't repost here.

Then there was the time when I was ten, he took me out of school on my birthday to go watch a Tigers game downtown Detroit. Mark "The Bird" Fidrych was pitching back then--and he was hot--but the Tigers still lost that game. I never cared about that though. Going with my dad on that school day was what made it memorable.

I remember other things as well...like the time I badgered him into getting up at 4AM to help me with my paper route. He was more than a little upset, and when the gearshift knob came off in his hand as he went to put that old Toyota into reverse, he lost his temper for a second and slammed the knob down on the dashboard. It bounced up and shattered the windshield and I knew that my very life depended on me keeping any laughter bottled up tight.

But things got better when I learned to drive. I burned the motor out of his Buick Skylark hot-rodding it, (shortly after backing it into the new addition we'd just put on our house and tearing half the wall off) then I smacked up his three-week old Dodge Aries horsing around with my friends. Finally he helped my buy my own car so I'd quit wrecking his. And when I settled on a POS 1964 Volkswagen due buggy, he tried to warn me off of what was to become the second-worst car I've ever bought to date, but I wouldn't listen and I bought it. And throughout all it's problems, he never once said "I told you so" as he helped me either fix it or tow it to one of several shops that came to be quite familiar with it.


Over the years, he tried to do things that I was interested in. We went hunting together. (OK, walking out to a duck blind, seeing no ducks, and walking right back to the car, may not technically be hunting, but it's the thought that counts.) He tried camping with me a couple of times too, including one night when a tornado hit right near the campground.

Of course there were the canoe trips...including the last one where the snake dropped out of the tree practically in his lap. He wasn't exactly fond of snakes. (Translation: screamed like a girl.)

He wasn't an outdoor guy by any means, but he did all those things with me anyway.

He also took me to buy my first motorcycle, and followed me home as I tried to get the hang of riding a motorcycle for the first time in city traffic. And while he wasn't exactly happy to see my bring my first M-1 Garand rifle home one day, ("There will be no guns in this house as long as you live under my roof!") he still spent quite a while showing me how to field-strip it for cleaning, and then he built me a rack to hang it on me wall and laid down some ground rules about when it could come off that rack.

As I went through life, he was a pretty supportive guy. He let me make my own mistakes with crummy jobs and girlfriends that everyone but me knew were trouble. But he was always there when things fell apart to listen and offer advice that I wouldn't have taken beforehand.

We had a hell of a trip to New Orleans one year, even though the 1966 Mustang that we tried to drive back was nothing but a mechanical nightmare for 1200 miles. Still it was worth it to take him into a particular bar I knew of just off Bourbon street to drink beers and watch him check out the girls for a while before I told him that there wasn't a real girl in that she-male bar. Yeah, looking back, that was kind of mean of me...but it sure was funny.

Over the years, we've had our good time, our disagreements, and a few times when we didn't talk for a while. And I've been there as he's gone through some major events in his life as he's been there while I went through some in mine. We haven't always seen eye-to-eye but when I've needed him he's always been there for me.





So Pop, thanks for being a great dad all these years. and Happy Fathers Day. all in all, you did a great job even if I've never said so before.








And for what it's worth, I'm sorry about that incident with the pliers.