Everyone claims they have the greatest dad today – but did your dad get a Ukranian prosecutor fired so you could continue making 50k a month in an industry that you have no experience in while hooked on crack – AND get the Secret Service involved to ignore your federal gun crime?
And I left some hookers and blow around here too….did you find them?
hardscrabble farmer
June 19, 2022 8:55 am
Every summer my father would take a week or two off from work and we’d head out on some new adventure; backpacking the Adirondacks and climbing the five highest peaks, rubber rafting down the Susquehanna, canoeing the entire length of the Delaware River, knocking off a chunk of the Appalachian Trail. The great conversations, the long silences, setting up camp, enduring the blackflies, hunkering down through thunderstorms, building fires, fishing, making our meals over the campfire, listening to him read Twain, Blackwood, Lovecraft until I fell asleep.
There were so many other things he did to set me up for a successful adulthood, but nothing had the impact of him devoting that time, challenging me from a very young age to endure hardships and stick with something until the end no matter how hard it was and to appreciate the value of the smallest things along the way.
More than anything he made me want to be a good father.
Many good memories of my dad. One super cool memory was when I was a teenager and missing my best friend who moved away. Being a private pilot (hobby), he surprised me one morning by flying us to the city my friend moved to. We surprised her and flew her back to my house to stay with us for a week. (He pre-arranged with her family) She thought that was the coolest thing ever and talked about it for many years afterwards.
Being the oldest in the family and not having capable parents, he supported his 6 siblings…feed, clothed, gave them shelter, and ensured they had an education. He rescued my mom from a bad family life, sent her to college, and gave her a great life. He took excellent care of his kids, and continues to do so. Family is the most important thing to my dad.
In 1966 I caddied for my Dad in the club championship at a semi-private club in Farmington, CT. He was 3 down with 3 holes to play. He went birdie, birdie, par to even up the match. In the sudden death holes that followed, both birdied the 1st 2 holes. On the 4th hole, a par 5 Dad hooked his drive that landed against the trunk of a tree. It was a dead stymie. His only shot was to back-hand his putter back on the fairway. Then he crushed a 4 wood that stopped 4′ from the hole. Both birdied and they went to the 5th tee. His opponent got in trouble with his drive and Dad coasted to a win. I had the chance to caddie in the pro circuit held in Wethersfield; the Insurance City Open, later The Sammy Davis, Jr Open. Caddying inside the ropes was a thrill but nothing comes close to that day with my Dad. I still have his trophy.
He was a WW2 Jap killing bad-ass and we had our bouts. In my early 30’s we didn’t speak for 3 years. But I never stopped loving him and, as important, I never stopped respecting him. When I see these feral young black boys running wild I think of the amazing impact my Dad had on me and I feel great sorrow. I am the man I am because of him and I try hard to convince myself there is a heaven so I might hug him once more.
My dad was an only child, and a hard man from the depression with an alcoholic father.
He put himself through medical school and raised 5 kids. I was the oldest only boy.
For a year in high school I refused to speak to him because of an inexcusably ugly incident
he misconstrued between me and my then girlfriend. My mother saved our relationship by forcing him to apologize to me a few months later. I didn’t accept for almost a year. We were very close after my teens, up until until his death. We both learned from that.
TN Patriot
June 19, 2022 10:24 am
Favorite memories of my Dad are that he was always there. There were 4 kids and Dad and Mom attended almost every event we ever had. He took time to spend one-on-one with each of us. I never knew that he did this with my sisters until we were talking with the pastor before his funeral and we all related stories of how he would take each of us with him to run an errand and it always ended up at the coffee shop for breakfast or soda.
Most favorite were the trips to the lake. Whether it was just a day of skiing or primitive camping for a week. We did things as a family, because family was the most important thing in his life.
22 years later and I still miss him.
rhs jr
June 19, 2022 11:13 am
Every day when he came home, mom would assail him with a list of reasons he needed to spank me (because she couldn’t catch me). He’d take me into the shed and make his belt make a lot of noise and I’d scream like it hurt. When I was in the first grade, he caught me having sex with a girl and said I can’t tell your mom about this; you volunteer to do the dishes tonight. He took me on bootleg distribution jobs. He taught me how to make firebombs and use them for the mob. He taught me how to paint houses and case them for the mob. Dad had to run from the law and I hadn’t seen him for years but just before high school graduation he showed up and asked if I needed anything and I needed a white coat or they wouldn’t let me participate. He only had $5 and I had $5 but he knew the owner of a men’s store (Jim Tatum) who sold us a seconds coat for $10. My Dad really cared about me and was a good man to me. Nobody but Jesus and my dog ever loved me as much as my Dad and I always cry when I think about him.
Glock-N-Load
June 19, 2022 11:21 am
When I was about 5 years old my mom got mad at dad for waiting too long to get a Christmas tree. At the time, dad was a logger and we lived on the corner of BFE and a dirt road. So, he grabbed his chain saw and took me with him in the middle of a snowstorm to look for a tree on our vast acreage. After awhile, he was pissed about not finding a tree and me having difficulty keeping up with him. So, what did he do? He cut down, what looked like to me anyway, a 100 foot tall pine tree and lopped off the top 6 feet and we drug it back on our toboggan. Perfect.
My dad was a bigwig in the finance world when it still had some legitimacy,i.e. he was rich.I grew up in a great at time semi rural area which was on a river and thus a great place to grow up as a kid.He saw the value of the area before others and got the place at time for short money.
My best memories are me dad was huge into classical music and a very good pianist.That said,he understood me love of rock and roll and would constantly buy me tix to shows I wanted to see.He also realized some of me friends came from much lower income families and thus would always get 4 or 6 tix for each show so my friends could go along(usually best seats in house,he had connections).
Thses shows as a kid are some of me best memories/times growing up and wou;ld not have happened except for me dads love and generosity/knowing what was special to me as a kid/teen.
RIP dad,see ya’s on the other side(hopefully not too soon!).
Winchester
June 19, 2022 12:42 pm
I could make a never ending list of memories with my father. I think lessons learned would be more appropriate with the way things are going. My father taught me a lot of what I know when it comes to preparedness. From every seed I put in the ground to every 45-70 casing I reload, I do it because my father instilled preparedness into me. He predicted everything that is happening years ago at a time when people laughed at him for putting away food and taking up homesteading. He ignored the ignorant, but made sure his children were taught everything he knew. That is a memory that will never be forgotten.
Allen in Apopka
June 19, 2022 12:49 pm
Him teaching me. Every great moment involved me learning at his side. Thanks pops.
Anonymous
June 19, 2022 1:53 pm
My dad blaring Black Sabbath doing burnouts with me riding shotgun in his Roadrunner making me cry. Good times.
Mustang
June 19, 2022 3:41 pm
I have few fond memories of my Father because he emotionally abused and rejected me. Screw Fathers Day!!!
Dad was the first one ever in our famiky to graduate college. He went on to become a physcian. Dad was also an officer in the Air Force, taught sunday school and had perfect attendance in the local Rotary club for 30 years. Dad taught me to work hard and play hard. He despised quitters and scolded me if I ever displayed weakness. On his deathbed he told me that he was not afraid to die. God, I miss him.
I want to express my love and appreciation for my Dad (Daddy to us in the immediate family). Dad could not help being a family man…he was one of 13 children. Dad married a family woman, one of nine. I remember his instruction on how to grow a vegetable garden, criticism at mediocre school grades, motivation to get off my ass, involvement in anything that included extended family, and excitement at my little league games.
Daddy was a hugger and a kisser, a church-going Catholic who worked like a horse at the annual parish picnic, who educated us kids how to try to become self-sufficient with the family milk cow, the pigs raised and butchered for the family freezer, the laying hens.
Daddy had his strengths and faults, as we all do. Today, I remember you Daddy, as the man who tried until your early demise to love, cherish, defend, and appreciate your family.
bigfoot
June 19, 2022 7:29 pm
My dad was a rugged and violent man who sang in a beautiful tenor voice sentimental songs to us while riding in the car with him “Old Shep” was my favorite and when I asked for it he’d always say, “Oh Mike” in a sad, resigned manner. During the song I’d cry every time. He was a lineman who in cleats climbed those poles with his brethren on nights when lightning flashed only on the few who dared to be out in the terrible storms. He beat my mother often and his kids until finally she left him when I was six and my two brothers were twelve and fifteen to work at Newberry’s Five and Dime for fifteen dollars a week and maybe a little prostitution on the side. He was extremely knowledgeable and capable and soon became foreman wherever he went, but he was prone to use his fists on the supervisors who he knew to be wrong about something, like all the other college-educated dimwits he so often encountered, even in bars. He drove a red ’49 International pickup that he would rig up with block and tackle to cross rivers so he could take us farther upstream where the trout fishing was best. He’d weld and fashion an iron trident that he’d carry in case he’d come upon spawning salmon in the shallows where he’d then cut a pole and attach the trident to it. When in the car and seeing some Black Angus in a field, he’d invariably say, stretching out the words, “Black gold, black gold.” Those were resources for him and when it wasn’t beef, it’d be deer gotten at night near the road with a .22 rifle. One brother fled to the Army at seventeen, and at eighteen was in Korea where he made front page national news as the only survivor in his company that had been ambushed and those captured he witnessed with binoculars their torture and death. Several months later he was shot three times in the gut when he went over in the night to comfort another soldier who was crying in his foxhole. The other brother was a charismatic athlete who was highly popular and gifted with preternatural strength and otherwise, but also psychopathic. In and out of prisons his life ended by his own hand along with his girlfriend and her parents. For that he was featured in People Magazine. No one I have ever met had more raw talent, physical beauty, and potential than this brother, but he was most like his father and they hated each other. My mother became an alcoholic and committed suicide at 59. As for me, I was a thief for many years of my youth. Somehow I stopped that and got several degrees in science and I married well, if not permanently the first two times. I owned a nice restaurant on Main Street, Small Town, USA. and a couple of billiard halls. Eventually, I became president of a small Nasdaq-traded manufacturing company. Dad showed me what to do and not to do, as did my brothers and my mother. Does it matter who or what your father did? Now that is a matter that remains unsettled.
YourAverageJoe
June 19, 2022 9:42 pm
My best day with my Dad was taking him to Galveston to look at the Hurricane Ike damage.
He was shut in, always under pain meds because his heart was too frail to handle back surgery and he needed to get out of the house and into the sunshine.
He brightened up when I asked him to go and we went and had just a great day checking out the power of Nature.
He passed away a weekend or two after that.
Unforgettable
June 19, 2022 11:35 pm
My Dad and I would enjoy long, comfortable, silent times together: Working on a project. Playing golf. Fishing in Canada. In our family room reading or watching TV. At the nursing home; or in the back of a wheelchair transport van going somewhere together.
Tapped
June 20, 2022 12:35 am
The Old Man saved my life when I was five. Then life got busy. He screwed up his priorities and wandered off. I held onto the good times.
When my kid was born, I tracked down my Dad to a phone number and called him. Said I named my kid after him, and i remembered his heroics. He was proud and a little shocked at my recall. Told all his buddies at the bar, I heard. I’m glad to have given him something back in the few years he had left.
Iggy
June 20, 2022 11:05 am
My best memory of my dad is him leaving for work everyday because he was a motherfucker when he was around
Dad, have you seen my laptop? I can’t remember where I left it.
And I left some hookers and blow around here too….did you find them?
Every summer my father would take a week or two off from work and we’d head out on some new adventure; backpacking the Adirondacks and climbing the five highest peaks, rubber rafting down the Susquehanna, canoeing the entire length of the Delaware River, knocking off a chunk of the Appalachian Trail. The great conversations, the long silences, setting up camp, enduring the blackflies, hunkering down through thunderstorms, building fires, fishing, making our meals over the campfire, listening to him read Twain, Blackwood, Lovecraft until I fell asleep.
There were so many other things he did to set me up for a successful adulthood, but nothing had the impact of him devoting that time, challenging me from a very young age to endure hardships and stick with something until the end no matter how hard it was and to appreciate the value of the smallest things along the way.
More than anything he made me want to be a good father.
Love you Dad.
The real deep wilderness camping trips, And never missing any of my sports games
no matter how busy the hospital was.
RIP, Dad.
Dick Levine’s kids would argue that point.
Many good memories of my dad. One super cool memory was when I was a teenager and missing my best friend who moved away. Being a private pilot (hobby), he surprised me one morning by flying us to the city my friend moved to. We surprised her and flew her back to my house to stay with us for a week. (He pre-arranged with her family) She thought that was the coolest thing ever and talked about it for many years afterwards.
Being the oldest in the family and not having capable parents, he supported his 6 siblings…feed, clothed, gave them shelter, and ensured they had an education. He rescued my mom from a bad family life, sent her to college, and gave her a great life. He took excellent care of his kids, and continues to do so. Family is the most important thing to my dad.
He’s the epitome of what a man should be.
Wow, AA, he sure does sound like a damn good man.
In 1966 I caddied for my Dad in the club championship at a semi-private club in Farmington, CT. He was 3 down with 3 holes to play. He went birdie, birdie, par to even up the match. In the sudden death holes that followed, both birdied the 1st 2 holes. On the 4th hole, a par 5 Dad hooked his drive that landed against the trunk of a tree. It was a dead stymie. His only shot was to back-hand his putter back on the fairway. Then he crushed a 4 wood that stopped 4′ from the hole. Both birdied and they went to the 5th tee. His opponent got in trouble with his drive and Dad coasted to a win. I had the chance to caddie in the pro circuit held in Wethersfield; the Insurance City Open, later The Sammy Davis, Jr Open. Caddying inside the ropes was a thrill but nothing comes close to that day with my Dad. I still have his trophy.
He was a WW2 Jap killing bad-ass and we had our bouts. In my early 30’s we didn’t speak for 3 years. But I never stopped loving him and, as important, I never stopped respecting him. When I see these feral young black boys running wild I think of the amazing impact my Dad had on me and I feel great sorrow. I am the man I am because of him and I try hard to convince myself there is a heaven so I might hug him once more.
My dad was an only child, and a hard man from the depression with an alcoholic father.
He put himself through medical school and raised 5 kids. I was the oldest only boy.
For a year in high school I refused to speak to him because of an inexcusably ugly incident
he misconstrued between me and my then girlfriend. My mother saved our relationship by forcing him to apologize to me a few months later. I didn’t accept for almost a year. We were very close after my teens, up until until his death. We both learned from that.
Favorite memories of my Dad are that he was always there. There were 4 kids and Dad and Mom attended almost every event we ever had. He took time to spend one-on-one with each of us. I never knew that he did this with my sisters until we were talking with the pastor before his funeral and we all related stories of how he would take each of us with him to run an errand and it always ended up at the coffee shop for breakfast or soda.
Most favorite were the trips to the lake. Whether it was just a day of skiing or primitive camping for a week. We did things as a family, because family was the most important thing in his life.
22 years later and I still miss him.
Every day when he came home, mom would assail him with a list of reasons he needed to spank me (because she couldn’t catch me). He’d take me into the shed and make his belt make a lot of noise and I’d scream like it hurt. When I was in the first grade, he caught me having sex with a girl and said I can’t tell your mom about this; you volunteer to do the dishes tonight. He took me on bootleg distribution jobs. He taught me how to make firebombs and use them for the mob. He taught me how to paint houses and case them for the mob. Dad had to run from the law and I hadn’t seen him for years but just before high school graduation he showed up and asked if I needed anything and I needed a white coat or they wouldn’t let me participate. He only had $5 and I had $5 but he knew the owner of a men’s store (Jim Tatum) who sold us a seconds coat for $10. My Dad really cared about me and was a good man to me. Nobody but Jesus and my dog ever loved me as much as my Dad and I always cry when I think about him.
When I was about 5 years old my mom got mad at dad for waiting too long to get a Christmas tree. At the time, dad was a logger and we lived on the corner of BFE and a dirt road. So, he grabbed his chain saw and took me with him in the middle of a snowstorm to look for a tree on our vast acreage. After awhile, he was pissed about not finding a tree and me having difficulty keeping up with him. So, what did he do? He cut down, what looked like to me anyway, a 100 foot tall pine tree and lopped off the top 6 feet and we drug it back on our toboggan. Perfect.
This you?
Pretty close. Haha. I don’t remember that scene.
My dad was a bigwig in the finance world when it still had some legitimacy,i.e. he was rich.I grew up in a great at time semi rural area which was on a river and thus a great place to grow up as a kid.He saw the value of the area before others and got the place at time for short money.
My best memories are me dad was huge into classical music and a very good pianist.That said,he understood me love of rock and roll and would constantly buy me tix to shows I wanted to see.He also realized some of me friends came from much lower income families and thus would always get 4 or 6 tix for each show so my friends could go along(usually best seats in house,he had connections).
Thses shows as a kid are some of me best memories/times growing up and wou;ld not have happened except for me dads love and generosity/knowing what was special to me as a kid/teen.
RIP dad,see ya’s on the other side(hopefully not too soon!).
I could make a never ending list of memories with my father. I think lessons learned would be more appropriate with the way things are going. My father taught me a lot of what I know when it comes to preparedness. From every seed I put in the ground to every 45-70 casing I reload, I do it because my father instilled preparedness into me. He predicted everything that is happening years ago at a time when people laughed at him for putting away food and taking up homesteading. He ignored the ignorant, but made sure his children were taught everything he knew. That is a memory that will never be forgotten.
Him teaching me. Every great moment involved me learning at his side. Thanks pops.
My dad blaring Black Sabbath doing burnouts with me riding shotgun in his Roadrunner making me cry. Good times.
I have few fond memories of my Father because he emotionally abused and rejected me. Screw Fathers Day!!!
Sorry Mustang.
That said,there are a lot of good dads out there.
Dad was the first one ever in our famiky to graduate college. He went on to become a physcian. Dad was also an officer in the Air Force, taught sunday school and had perfect attendance in the local Rotary club for 30 years. Dad taught me to work hard and play hard. He despised quitters and scolded me if I ever displayed weakness. On his deathbed he told me that he was not afraid to die. God, I miss him.
I want to express my love and appreciation for my Dad (Daddy to us in the immediate family). Dad could not help being a family man…he was one of 13 children. Dad married a family woman, one of nine. I remember his instruction on how to grow a vegetable garden, criticism at mediocre school grades, motivation to get off my ass, involvement in anything that included extended family, and excitement at my little league games.
Daddy was a hugger and a kisser, a church-going Catholic who worked like a horse at the annual parish picnic, who educated us kids how to try to become self-sufficient with the family milk cow, the pigs raised and butchered for the family freezer, the laying hens.
Daddy had his strengths and faults, as we all do. Today, I remember you Daddy, as the man who tried until your early demise to love, cherish, defend, and appreciate your family.
My dad was a rugged and violent man who sang in a beautiful tenor voice sentimental songs to us while riding in the car with him “Old Shep” was my favorite and when I asked for it he’d always say, “Oh Mike” in a sad, resigned manner. During the song I’d cry every time. He was a lineman who in cleats climbed those poles with his brethren on nights when lightning flashed only on the few who dared to be out in the terrible storms. He beat my mother often and his kids until finally she left him when I was six and my two brothers were twelve and fifteen to work at Newberry’s Five and Dime for fifteen dollars a week and maybe a little prostitution on the side. He was extremely knowledgeable and capable and soon became foreman wherever he went, but he was prone to use his fists on the supervisors who he knew to be wrong about something, like all the other college-educated dimwits he so often encountered, even in bars. He drove a red ’49 International pickup that he would rig up with block and tackle to cross rivers so he could take us farther upstream where the trout fishing was best. He’d weld and fashion an iron trident that he’d carry in case he’d come upon spawning salmon in the shallows where he’d then cut a pole and attach the trident to it. When in the car and seeing some Black Angus in a field, he’d invariably say, stretching out the words, “Black gold, black gold.” Those were resources for him and when it wasn’t beef, it’d be deer gotten at night near the road with a .22 rifle. One brother fled to the Army at seventeen, and at eighteen was in Korea where he made front page national news as the only survivor in his company that had been ambushed and those captured he witnessed with binoculars their torture and death. Several months later he was shot three times in the gut when he went over in the night to comfort another soldier who was crying in his foxhole. The other brother was a charismatic athlete who was highly popular and gifted with preternatural strength and otherwise, but also psychopathic. In and out of prisons his life ended by his own hand along with his girlfriend and her parents. For that he was featured in People Magazine. No one I have ever met had more raw talent, physical beauty, and potential than this brother, but he was most like his father and they hated each other. My mother became an alcoholic and committed suicide at 59. As for me, I was a thief for many years of my youth. Somehow I stopped that and got several degrees in science and I married well, if not permanently the first two times. I owned a nice restaurant on Main Street, Small Town, USA. and a couple of billiard halls. Eventually, I became president of a small Nasdaq-traded manufacturing company. Dad showed me what to do and not to do, as did my brothers and my mother. Does it matter who or what your father did? Now that is a matter that remains unsettled.
My best day with my Dad was taking him to Galveston to look at the Hurricane Ike damage.
He was shut in, always under pain meds because his heart was too frail to handle back surgery and he needed to get out of the house and into the sunshine.
He brightened up when I asked him to go and we went and had just a great day checking out the power of Nature.
He passed away a weekend or two after that.
My Dad and I would enjoy long, comfortable, silent times together: Working on a project. Playing golf. Fishing in Canada. In our family room reading or watching TV. At the nursing home; or in the back of a wheelchair transport van going somewhere together.
The Old Man saved my life when I was five. Then life got busy. He screwed up his priorities and wandered off. I held onto the good times.
When my kid was born, I tracked down my Dad to a phone number and called him. Said I named my kid after him, and i remembered his heroics. He was proud and a little shocked at my recall. Told all his buddies at the bar, I heard. I’m glad to have given him something back in the few years he had left.
My best memory of my dad is him leaving for work everyday because he was a motherfucker when he was around