In Memory of My Dad

My Dad was born on Valentine's Day 1904. This day was always special in our home, mostly because it was Dad's birthday. He was a very cool parent. He was 41 when he married so when we kids came along he was more like a grampa than a dad. He had time for us kids. Everyone loved him, he was called Daddy-O by everyone. He had no enemies.

During Prohibition he was a rum runner, and had keys to over 100 speak easies in New York City, NJ, and CT. He was Irish but always drank responsibly, no getting stinkin' drunk. What he loved almost as much as his family were the horses and ponies. I was in high school before I figured out that The Daily Racing Form wasn't a daily paper for any of our neighbors. I also thought every family had a bookie. I wasn't sure what a bookie did. I just knew that what the bookie said determined my Dad's mood.

The best gift my Dad ever gave me, besides the gift of life, was a box containing every letter I had ever written home. The letters started in 1953, when I was in Girl Scout Camp. Those letters help me a lot with my scrapbooking in that when I'm scrapping photos from the first few years of marriage I just get out the letters from that time and I have the details of where we were and what we did. He also saved every letter his 1st cousin sent to him from WWI. His cousin died during the influenza epidemic. The man surely would have become an author. Each letter is 10 - 15 pages long, with all kinds of very interesting details about the local environment, people, etc.

On the day he was born his father gave his mother a beautiful gold bracelet, which she wore the rest of her life. It has my Dad's baby teeth marks indented in the gold because he chewed on it when he was being held. I now have the bracelet and think of him every time I wear it.

My son and his wife gave their baby son my Dad's 1st name as a middle name. I wish he was still alive, he'd be so proud.

In the girl looking photo he is 3 y,7 months old. In the haywagon photo he's the one standing on top of the hay . The old man is his grandfather, who died when my Dad was 12. The other person is a cousin.

I miss him everyday.