Want to Know Your Dad Better? Ask Him Questions.

Final resting place for my father's ashes.

A FATHER'S DAY REFLECTION
 
My father's passing 20 years ago is still very fresh in my mind. A Father's Day NYTimes article brought these memories to mind.

The call came at three in the morning. Calls at three a.m. are seldom packed with good news. My mom wanted each of us, the four sons, to know that dad was in the Bradenton Hospital and was dying. Miraculously, three of us arrived at the Tampa Airport within a half hour of one another, having flown in from three different airports.

As I remember it (memory is always subject to being a little unreliable) Dad's heart had gone into a-fib, quivering at 300 beats per minute. Though we'd been told he was unconscious, when we arrived, he was actually awake, though intubated and couldn't talk initially. 

Robert, my youngest brother, was there for the first few days but had to leave on Friday. On Saturday my brother Ron had a cold, and because Dad was vulnerable, Ron didn't come to the hospital that day. So it was Mom and I, taking turns being with Dad who at this point was quite exhausted. 

I'd bought a Mad magazine that morning, in part because of a very early connection with my father. Mapletown, a suburb of Cleveland, was having a sidewalk sale and we'd all gone together to see what bargans we could find. Dad bought me my first bike, for $20, and we also got a whole box of back issues of Mad magazines for a dollar. 

That Saturday in Bradenton Dad was weary, sometimes awake and sometimes sleeping, my mind grappling with things to say when he was half alert. At one point he initiated a conversation about the time he and Mom visited Susie and I in Mexico.

In the early summer of 1981 my parents visited us when we were working at an orphanage south of Monterrey. On one occasion the four of us took an afternoon to visit Horsetail Falls nearby. Dad and I went for a walk to explore a trail that ran along a creek below the falls. I was a little ahead him. I jumped off a wall of rocks down to the creek bed and continued along the path when I heard a loud thump and a groan. Where Dad jumped down, the path was slippery below. His feet slid forward out from under him and he slammed to the ground, knocking the wind out of him. As I leaned over him, he regained his breath and I helped him to his feet. He was in pain, rubbing his lower back, but no broken bones. He mentioned that a rock must have been sticking out of the ground which struck his lower back muscles, producing a deep muscle bruise.

25 years later, at the Bradenton Hospital, Dad said that the place where that rock bruised him still hurt.

I loved my dad, but in retrospect I wish I'd seen the following article from the New York Times before that day. There are a lot of questions I wish I'd asked. I'm sharing this with the hope that you'll take advantage of the opportunity to get to know your own dad better while you can. When he's on the "other side" it's too late. This goes for your mom, too. 

Want to Know Your Dad Better? Ask Him These 25 Questions.
This Father’s Day, open up a new channel of communication.

Follow this link and copy all the questions that may be useful for you:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/18/well/family/fathers-day-questions.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20260622&instance_id=177573&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=123953394&segment_id=221885&user_id=c5de7e4b28d36066d31878b87617b3c2

My Dad Called Me Stupid In Front of My Friends and I Wasn't Scarred for Life

The event took place in the evening of a lovely summer day. Mr. McAvoy was driving a carload of boys home from a Little League game in his gold convertible with the top down. This was the 60's and no one had seatbelts. Some of us were seated across the top of the back seat with our team T-shirts and hats. I was one of these, on the driver's side, the lazy breeze whooshing across our faces. 

I can still picture my dad in the middle of the Christianson's front lawn, arms folded, feet planted shoulder width as he chatted with the neighbors. Off to the right of the driveway Robin Christianson, a girl I liked, looking our way with a couple of friends. 

As the car slowed to make a right hand turn onto Cambridge Lane, I noticed the speedometer slow to about ten miles per hour. Somehow I got it into my head that if I leapt from the car and started moving my legs I could actually hit the ground running and run right up to Robin and her friends. 

Wrong.

I will mention here that though the road was paved with asphalt there was also a lot of large limestone gravel scattered in the gutter area of the road bed. As my body slammed into the pavement, the limestone tore my finger and gouged my forearm. Stunned, it seemed that everything was silent for a second. Time had stopped, as did Mr. McAvoy's car. 

It was then that I heard my dad's voice thunder through the air as he came running across the yard: "You stupid!"

I didn't feel any pain in my body at that moment as he lifted me up and began walking me across the street to our house. We went into the family room bathroom and he cleaned my wounds, but the humiliation was harder to clean. 

He was right, of course. Eventually, years later, I recognized that I needed to forgive him for making me feel small in front of my friends. And I did. 

For the record, if you ever feel tempted to leap from a moving car, don't. Generally it only works in the movies. I got lucky. Some people get killed.

* * * 

I have written about this story before in a blog post about the Darwin Awards. If interested, you can read that here.

In passing I mention the story here as well: Seven Quotes About Stupidity

ALTERNATE TITLE: My Dad Called Me Stupid in Front of My Friends and I Lived to Tell About It.

A Father's Day Anecdote About Generosity

Dad in rocker, with my son Micah, 1987

My father was born in a temporary coal mining town in West Virginia the day after Christmas in 1929, two months after the stock market crash that preceded the Great Depression. Four months later the family moved to Cincinnati and eventually to Hamilton 20 minutes north, where many of my kin live to this day. 

Dad grew up skinny, poor, smart. Grandma, who had been a teacher in a one room schoolhouse before she married my grandfather, was religious and grandpa was anti-religious. Grandma attended the legalistic Nazarene church a few blocks up the hill. Because their home was across the street from a Pentecostal church, Grandpa would call the police on the church when it got loud, which was regularly. 

The neighborhood was dirt poor. My grandfather was harsh with his daughters and my dad’s older sister Fonda ran off to marry Oscar, who would become the town drunk. My dad’s sister Carol ran off to marry at 15 because of grandpa. (She hopped the fence when Grandpa said, “If I catch you talking to that boy again you won’t be able to sit down for a week.) 

EdNote: When Grandpa died, my father gave me the leather razor strop that grandpa used to whoop the kids to keep them in line. 

His brother Cecil was mentally ill, brain damage from high fever at age six during a measles epidemic. Cecil would sometimes take his clothes off and run off down the street. Dad would have to catch him and bring him home (if dad was around). One time they couldn’t find him for hours. Then they found him stuck up to his neck in the outhouse sludge.  (They had no running water so they could not hose him down. They had a pump house 20 feet from the back door. You can imagine that this must have been awful for everyone.)

Dad as a high school grad.

Despite all these hardships my father was valedictorian when he graduated high school. The next day he joined the army. After basic training he was sent to the Philippines and Korea. The war had officially ended but there was an 18-month post-war buffer in which you received the benefits of service even if you did not see combat. Upon his return from Korea he went to Hiram College on the G.I. bill. 

Dad got a degree in chemistry. His first job out of college was at Sherwin-Williams in Cleveland. He became involved in the development of latex paints, which he continued to be involved with throughout his career. (Trivia: Arnold Palmer worked as a salesman for Sherwin-Williams out of that Cleveland plant, till he became a full-time golf pro and PGA champion. My dad was also a lifelong golfer and became part of Arnie’s Army throughout his career.)

Before my father passed away in March 2006 he requested that there be no flowers at his funeral. Instead he asked that friends an family give to the Heifer Foundation, the funding arm of Heifer International, an organization now in 21 countries dedicated to ending poverty by empowering, providing training and assistance to individuals and communities. No offense to florists, but in my father's estimation some things are more important things than flowers.

All of this is a lead in to an anecdote I'd like to share, which says something about my father. Through growing up poor he learned frugality. One of his hobbies, if you can call it that, was going to house auctions and looking for bargains. I was aware of this, but never fully aware of the extent to which he took this.

There's a Proverb that says, "If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry and not be answered." (Prov. 21:13) It ties directly to this story, which I only learned about after he passed.

Dad would go to these house auctions to buy up blankets and clothing items which he brought to an Allentown center that distributed such items to those in need, something like our Damiano Center here in Duluth. He had been doing this for quite some time till one day he showed up and was told to stop bringing them stuff. He was bringing it in faster than they could give away. 

Nevertheless, he continued to be generous, and never made a big deal about it. On this Father's Day I have much to be grateful for as a father, but also for having a father who served as a role model in so many ways. Sadly, I took some of this for granted when I was young.

If your dad is still alive, let him know you appreciate him today.  

* * *

Do you have an anecdote you'd like to share about your dad? Feel free to leave it in the comments.

Related Links

Heifer International

Sharing Comfort (Personalized muscial memorial pages for loved ones.)

The Chemistry of Photography: A Father's Day Tribute

Scarlet tanager, photo by John Heino

My first experiences with a camera must have been when I was in Cub Scouts because I remember taking double exposure photos of my brother boxing with himself against the wall of our basement in Maple Heights. After we moved to New Jersey my father helped me set up a darkroom with chemicals and trays, a red light and an exposure lamp. I must have been in seventh grade when I went through this stage, and for a spell it was quite exciting, taking photos and doing all that darkroom magic.

I share all this because although I knew my father had been a chemist, primarily working in the development of latex paints, polymers and adhesives, I was unaware till this spring of his college term paper titled The Chemistry of Photography.

It begins, "The science of photograph is becoming increasingly essential in the modern world of today, yet relatively few people are acquainted with this history of, the chemistry of, or the uses of photographic art."

The paper then details the various discoveries related to how light interacts with certain materials to produce images. Johann Schulze was the first to record the observation that light, and not atmospheric conditions, was what caused silver chloride to darken. The chemists of the day found ways to produce an image but had not discovered a way to "fix" the image so you had something permanent. This would not occur till the 1800s.

My dad when young and in school.

It was Joseph Niepce who found a way to create a permanent image, with one drawback. The exposure time required was six to ten hours. (You can imagine the scene: "O.K., when I count to three say, 'Cheese.' Now hold it, don't move till I get back from Paris later this afternoon.")

Eventually Niepce hooked up with Jacques Daguerre who was also working on the problem of light sensitive materials. In 1939 Daguerre announced his process for making permanent images, which he called Daguerreotypes. That process involved copper sheets plated with silver that were highly polished and exposed to iodine vapors, which turned the surface a golden yellow.

This prep took five to 30 minutes, but had to be exposed immediately for five to 12 minutes. After exposure to light the plate was placed into another closed box where it was now exposed to mercury heated to 167 degrees Fahrenheit. Next it was washed with hypo and then distilled water.

You can see why this didn't catch on as all that popular with the masses.

Two years later paper negatives were developed by Williamd Fox-Talbert. Easier to process but not as sharp of detail in the images, so a step forward and step back at the same time.

In 1850 a process involving glass plates covered with milk and albumen was patented. Albumen is egg white, so you have to wonder how these guys came up with all this  stuff.

At the same time the use of collodion was suggested, and after a year of experimentation this process was perfected. It was known as the wet-collodion process, utilizing iodized or bromized collodion which forms, after the solvents have evaporated, into a thin, easily damaged film. On immersion in a silver nitrate bath, light sensitive iodide and bromide of silver are formed. The plate should be exposed while still moist and developed immediately.

Studio photography was reasonable to accomplish, but if you wanted to capture landscapes, all this gear was somewhat cumbersome. In short, there was great pressure on the chemists of the day to improve all these things.

What followed were Ferrotypes which produced negative images. In 1884 this guy named George Eastman secured a patent for a stripping film which was a temporary paper coated with soluble gelatin that was then coated with gelatin bromide emulsion. After developing and fixing, the image was stripped from the supporting paper and dried, hence the name stripping film.

As film sensitivity increased, exposure times decreased. In 1851 the average exposure time was 2160 times faster than in 1826. And by the 20th century it was 10,000 times as fast as in 1851, something akin to Moore's Law in the digital chip realm in our computer age.

The quest for speed and detail consumed many decades, but there was still the hurdle of color that was sought after. In the early 1900s the Autochrome process was invented, but it wasn't until the 1930s and Kodachrome that color photography and slides took off.

How brief the reign of film photography proved to be. Just over two decades later the first digital image was produced. It would be decades later before digital eclipsed film, and when it happened it happened quickly.

1973, Fairchild Semiconductor produces the first image-capturing chip.
1986, Kodak scientists offer up the world's first megapixel sensor.

The late Lee Newman

None of these latter developments were covered in my father's 1949 paper, nor were the anticipated. Whereas all previous advances had been linear explorations involving chemistry, the digital phenomenon was altogether outside the box. Silver halide, developers, sodium thiosulfates, fixatives, ammonia and emulsions all became a thing of the past.

His term paper concludes with one of the modern applications of photography: advertising. He then cites the Chinese proverb, "A picture is worth ten thousand word." Indeed!

My father became a career chemist. His first-born son eventually grew to pursue a career in advertising, ever in search of the best images to accompany content crafted to connect with readers.

Dad got an A on his paper, with the instructor's comment scribbled beneath it in ballpoint pen. "Very interesting paper." It's my hope that you've also found this abbreviated summary interesting as well.

* * * *

This has been a Father's Day tribute to an important man, Leon E. Newman

Values Formation and Black Urban Culture

How much of who we are is influenced by our fathers and how much do we choose?

I woke this morning thinking about some of the ways our fathers influence us. Education was important to my dad, and it pleased him when we got good grades. I don't know exactly how long it lasted but a dime for each A on my report card led to more diligent efforts in elementary school. My second grade report card had quite a few A's and a series of D's for handwriting. I don't recall ever being rebuked for those D's, with the subsequent result that my penmanship has never been a thing of beauty. And I always expected that I would one day go to college, as sure as it felt inevitable that I would one day grow up and marry.

What's interesting is how our tastes can also be shaped by our dads. My appreciation for classical music goes to those early years as well. Dad frequently read the Sunday paper while listening to Rimsky-Korsakov, Dvorak or Beethoven. He liked baseball and I wanted to be a baseball star. He listened to pop music on the radio as we drove in the car, and he watched the television shows which were popular in their day, such as Bonanza, Perry Mason, and Saturday Night at the Movies.

My dad's days were quite proscribed by the rituals of rising each morning, putting on the radio at 7:00 a.m., making breakfast and driving off to work, returning at 5:30 every evening. After supper, he would sit in his chair reading his books with the TV on. Having grown up poor, Dad valued frugality, saving and responsibility.

I even noticed that some of my tastes with regard to humor were related to the way Dad responded to various comedians. The Marx Brothers were funny, Jerry Lewis was not. He never told me I couldn't laugh at Jerry Lewis, but one could sense his scorn and it shaded the way I responded at the time.

In short, the dye runs deep into the fabric of our developing souls, and it can be challenging to identify where our own personal values get chosen and where they get imprinted.

What about people who grow up without fathers? Who shapes their values? In particular, I'm thinking here of the up and coming generation of inner city black youth with absentee fathers and fractured families. Or rather, I was reflecting on Orlando Patterson's New York Times editorial, "A Poverty of the Mind."

Patterson, a Harvard professor of sociology, opens the discussion with this. "SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it."

After pointing out examples where the problems of black youth are systemic, he notes, "What's most interesting about the recent spate of studies is that analysts seem at last to be recognizing what has long been obvious to anyone who takes culture seriously: socioeconomic factors are of limited explanatory power."

Patterson's editorial gives me the impression that the problems of race in America are going to be with us for a long time. The freedoms won by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., including the elimination of Jim Crow laws, are external in nature. Whether red or yellow, black or white, there are deeper internal victories that each individual must achieve in the arena of their own souls.

We all tend to oversimplify problems, in part because we'd also like an easy fix. Lenin, in the Russian Revolution, put forth education and electrification as the twin objectives that would make for the brightest tomorrow. We hear it here all the time. If only the schools were better.
Unfortunately, it is not that simple according to Patterson.

An anecdote helps explain why: Several years ago, one of my students went back to her high school to find out why it was that almost all the black girls graduated and went to college whereas nearly all the black boys either failed to graduate or did not go on to college. Distressingly, she found that all the black boys knew the consequences of not graduating and going on to college ("We're not stupid!" they told her indignantly).

SO why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the "cool-pose culture" of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black.

For young black men, however, that culture is all there is — or so they think. Sadly, their complete engagement in this part of the American cultural mainstream, which they created and which feeds their pride and self-respect, is a major factor in their disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.

What we're seeing is a bi-product of our racist past. Fortunately, a majority of blacks, according to Patterson, have escaped these social patterns. This does not mean we can close our eyes to the serious cultural issues in our inner cities.

The article, whixch is worth reading, challenged a few of my cherished notions which may need to be discarded or re-examined.