He'd be 82. I miss him.I wish he was here so that I could call him, although I rarely did (*shame*) when he was alive.
He was born in 1929 - the end of the Roaring Twenties - the same year as Martin Luther King Jr., Dick Clark, Grace Kelly, Imelda Marcos, Audrey Hepburn, Anne Frank, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Yassar Arafat, and countless others.
In the months before his birth Mother Teresa arrived in Calcutta, a revolt (José Gonzalo Escobar and Jesús María Aguirre) failed in Mexico, and Herbert Hoover was inaugurated as the 31st U.S. President.
He was 3 months old when the first public demonstration of color TV was conducted.
He was 4 months old when a secret decree in Russia created the gulags and the Geneva Convention was signed.
He was just 7 months old when the Stock Market crashed.
He was not quite 8 months old when the 7.2 magnitude Grand Banks earthquake occurred, snapping transatlantic telegraph cables and triggering a tsunami.
He was 8 months old when the Museum of Modern Art opened in NYC.
During my father's first year Pablo Picasso painted two cubist works, Woman in a Garden and Nude in an Armchair, the first Academy Awards were given, and Popeye debuted in the comics. Source
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Let me tell you about him...
He was extraordinary in his willingness to examine any topic, any idea, any belief that he held. If you had a good argument or explanation he'd be willing to meet you halfway.
He taught me how to look at a problem as something that had a solution, rather than an insurmountable obstacle to complain about.
He taught me how to use tools, how to fix things, how to be more independent and sure of my self than most young women.
He wasn't all that comfortable with us as babies, but as we became able to "do" stuff with him he enjoyed our interactions. He got better with babies as time went along, and was a pro with his grandkids.
He loved cars, and motorcycles and trucks - loved reading about them, looking at them, shopping for them, having them, fixing them, giving them to us.
He often had pit passes to the Indy 500 and Daytona.
He wanted to live to be 100, but said, as he was dying "I've had a great life, not too many regrets. Take care of your mother for me..."
More about my dad
Source: Wikipedia
Thank you for this. I am on my way to visit my dad today, and was kind of not so excited about it since it is my day off, and I have so many of things I need to be doing too.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the reminder to take advantage of time with our dads while we still can... and know that yours lives on, for as long as you keep your memories of him alive.