After 83 years, my father passed away on Wednesday. If you knew him, you knew he was a force - stubborn, loving, smart. The things he was and what he meant to us can’t be boiled down into one post. But I have to highlight some things that stand out in my mind right now:
- no way you could keep away him from any USC football game. He had season tickets for decades. And once retired, he and my mom traveled to every. single. game.
- dessert fanatic: dark chocolate. His mom’s cheesecake. Pie n’ Burger’s boysenberry pie. Just some of his favorites.
- he loved Chuck Berry (maybe more 50s rock-n-roll, but I remember it specifically as Chuck Berry). As a 4-ish-year-old kid, I remember him standing me up on the two-level cat scratcher, putting on Chuck Berry and “teaching” me to dance. We got to dance together to Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen at my wedding.
- as my mom would put it, he was born with “itchy feet”. He loved to travel - and did so extensively. He shared this love with her, with me and with Kris.
- avid bridge player (something I never understood and never plan to get into, but he loved it!)
- voracious reader - constantly reading. The newspaper, magazines, and all the books. He also had a memory like a steel trap. I’ve never understood how he could hold on to so much information (especially historical facts - my mind does not work in the same way when it comes to history at all!)
- Magic Mountain enthusiast. He loved roller coasters. We had season passes as a kid and he would take my Girl Scout troop on our end-of-year trip. His requirement was riding Colossus twice before moving on to any other rides.
- (not to get political, but I just always found this so delightful) he got more liberal as he got older. Once he told off a conservative caller trying to raise money for a particular cause and recapped it for me afterwards. I was so proud!
- animal lover. He demonstrated this in many ways (including pointing out every squirrel/bird/cat that went by) but my favorite way was the period where he captured the feral cats in his neighborhood, found homes for them if they could be domesticated and got the ones that couldn’t cleaned up and fixed. We had A LOT of cats growing up!
- lived life by his own standards! There’s a lot to back this one up but that’s a whole other series of stories!