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

Two Hundred and Twenty

Pretty big day today... Abe Lincoln would be 2oo, and my daughter turned twenty. Though she's not yet on the cover of any magazines, my gut tells me she will be some day. She's just that kind of girl. As my Grandma Newman was fond of saying, "Now I hain't braggin', ya hear, but..." and it was usually something about what people said about her cooking, which was mighty fine. In this case, I sort of am braggin' 'bout something mighty fine. Like many dads do, I s'pose, they see something special in their girl.

This past weekend Christina and I went together to the Father-Daughter Ball here in Duluth, an annual tradition of 13 years for some dads, but approximately eight for us, I suspect. In the beginning her dance step was pretty basic. But she's got rhythm and she's a quick study, so she held her own. This year she showed me all the moves I've never had. She knows how to move dem feet. And with her old man, we danced ourselves out. Gosh, it was fun.

As for Abe, something tells me he wasn't that much of a dancing man. That did not keep him from being a significant president, though he has had his share of detractors, hated by many in the South who considered John Wilkes Booth a hero.

Lincoln was born 200 years ago, on February 12, in a cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky. On a family vacation to my own Kentucky roots my present family (as opposed to the one I grew up in) visited this rough-hewn Lincoln homestead. Though he spent most of his adult life in Illinois, working a series of odd jobs before becoming a lawyer and eventually a politician, he no doubt felt the same as I regarding his modest Kentucky birthplace. It is a remarkable thing that here in America one can still, through hard work and a bit of luck, rise up from literally nowhere to achieve much.

Last week I found an article in the February Smithsonian that does an excellent job of putting Lincoln into perspective. "Lincoln's Contested Legacy" begins by outlining this premise, that Lincoln has been a touchstone for many points of view, even for contradictory viewpoints and political rivals. It reminds me a little of the search for the historical Jesus, except with a lot more material to work with.

Writes Philip Kunhardt III, author of the piece, in its opening, From the time of his death in 1865 to the 200th anniversary of his birth, February 12, 2009, there has never been a decade in which Abraham Lincoln's influence has not been felt. Yet it has not been a smooth, unfolding history, but a jagged narrative filled with contention and revisionism. Lincoln's legacy has shifted again and again as different groups have interpreted him. Northerners and Southerners, blacks and whites, East Coast elites and prairie Westerners, liberals and conservatives, the religious and secular, scholars and popularizers—all have recalled a sometimes startlingly different Lincoln. He has been lifted up by both sides of the Temperance Movement; invoked for and against federal intervention in the economy; heralded by anti-communists, such as Senator Joseph McCarthy, and by American communists, such as those who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the fight against the fascist Spanish government in the 1930s. Lincoln has been used to justify support for and against incursions on civil liberties, and has been proclaimed both a true and a false friend to African-Americans. Was he at heart a "progressive man" whose death was an "unspeakable calamity" for African-Americans, as Frederick Douglass insisted in 1865? Or was he "the embodiment...of the American Tradition of racism," as African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr. sought to document in a 2000 book?

For an interesting, though brief, interview with Philip Kunhardt III, who also co-authored the book Looking for Lincoln, check this out.