I have written about my father on previous occasions in this BLOG but, with this being Father’s Day weekend, and with my dear old man heading toward 81, I am not so sure which special day will be his last. With that in mind, I feel compelled to again write about how much one person can mean to another’s life. We hear the tragedies of bad parenting all the time. In truth, it is so common that it has become popular as a defense strategy for felons committing all varieties of heinous crimes as adults to blame their parents - more often than not, their fathers - absent or present - for their psychopathology. Dads get plenty of bad press. So, to change the focus - if ever so slightly - I want to give my father (and the millions just like him) - fathers of we "baby boomers" his due.

My dad grew up in the hardest of times in the great depression and was not quite 10 when the bottom fell out of the stock market, America’s finance and his own family’s little world. His dad, my grandfather, was a smalltime lawyer. And when the clients had no money, he had no clients. Like my practice today, he was a solo practitioner and hung his shingle with a single name - Louis Claude Albright, LL.D. Dad speaks of him going to his downtown office in those harsh financial times and, sitting all day alone at his desk, warming his office in winter with whatever wood and scrap coal he could find. He would not spend the 10 cents for the bus downtown and would, instead, make a sandwich, and walk 6 miles to his one room "law office". He would rather his 4 sons and his wife have the money that save on a little shoe leather. When he came home, he would say he was too tired for supper and usually went to bed. Looking back, my dad is convinced this was a father’s simple sacrifice so his growing family would have more supper to eat. He died, relatively young (in his 60s) of a ruptured gallbladder and resultant sepsis, never bothering to go to the hospital for a what he considered "just a stomach ache". I was only 5 or 6 when he died but, strangely, I remember him much better that I remember most of my relatives from his generation.

He was a smallish man, no taller than 5 foot six inches but he ruled his little kingdom as men did in those days. His tool of enforcement was the razor strap he sharpened his straight razor on and, serving double duty, was not infrequently used to teach his four rowdy sons what it meant to be responsible men. His sons, by the time they were in the late teens, were all taller and heavier than he was but all four knew that he was unchallenged King of his castle. And they were all the better for it.

Two of the sons went to college; two, the two youngest - my dad included - went into the service together. As luck would have it, when they had served their stint in the Air Force, they both took the civil service exam for the U.S. Post Office and both became carriers of the mail. Throughout their lives, they carried with them the lessons their father taught them. Neither rain, nor cold, nor sleet nor gloom of night kept them from walking their 6-8 mile routes (these were the days before jeeps and trucks and carriers actually had mailbags over their shoulders) and delivering their cargo. Bronchitis bordering on pneumonia, the flu, kidney stones and even a lunchtime vasectomy didn’t keep my dad from completing his day’s work either. When he retired after 30 years of "pounding pavement" (as he called it), he had something like 2000 unused hours of sick leave. Like his father before him, sickness was not an excuse for not doing a job.

Vividly, I recall the "dog days" of the Alabama summers when dad would come in after his miles of carrying a 40 pound leather bag along the steaming streets and looking very much like a wrung-out washrag. He would slowly ambulate up the stairs to his bedroom, change his sweat-drenched clothes, find a fan to sit in front of and quietly drinks glasses of iced tea, one after the other. He never talked much in these few hours but I learned lessons that have stayed with me all my life just from watching this 6 foot two inch, 220 pound man, weak as a kitten from hard labor, coming home to me and my mother, proud that he - like his father before him - had done an honest days work for an honest day’s pay.

My relationship with my father was, as with all adolescent males I suspect, occasionally contentious. There was the time, shortly after he married my stepmother (I was about 9 or 10) that I said something harsh to her on a day she was particular tired from her job and trying to prepare supper in a hurry. She didn’t make a scene but dad found her sobbing, quietly, at the sink while she was doing the dishes. He asked the cause of her distress and, when told of my boorish behavior, set out to exfoliate my hind quarters. His tool for this task? His official, government-issue postal belt. Without my stepmother’s intervention, I very well might have been the first child to succumb to fatal hemorrhage of the derriere but she stopped him short of homicide, of which he was surely intent. I gained a new respect for my new mother’s compassion (even when I didn’t deserve it) and, as a side benefit, learned an entirely new way to walk and how to read standing up for the next several days. The real lesson was the most valuable: Respect for parents is an essential requirement if you wanted to live a full, pain-free life in the Albright household.

Dad was no intellectual, He didn’t read books or anything more than the Sunday newspaper. But he was a "fixer-upper". He was a carpenter, plumber, electrician and car tinkerer. He had the kind of intelligence I never developed: common sense and an almost innate knowledge for the way things worked and went together. I failed to drink from this bottomless well of "horse smarts" and, as a result, I am useless around the house when it comes to fixing anything. I wish I had been more interested in his tinkerings but I had other pursuits in mind. To whit: reading in my room and soaking up the knowledge of men from antiquity that I thought, at least at the time, were wiser than my father. It was only as I grew older that I realized the could not have been more mistaken.

Father and son did the usual things fathers and sons did in those days: fishing, hunting, and tossing the ball around the backyard. He was usually tired and I know his body would have preferred to be resting on the sofa, but he did what fathers do and made no show that it was a chore for him to do so. The hunting and fishing never captured my fancy, but I did play the usual sports in school and, I think, my father was proud of my accomplishments in that realm. He hardly ever missed a baseball game at the local Little League field and absolutely never missed one of my high school football games. I think he was more excited and proud that I when our senior high school football team went undefeated way back in 1968. It was, after all, his son out there, playing for his dad lost glory.

The most important lesson I learned from my father was the importance of an education. He stocked my room, from the first days of school, with books. Books on science, geography, the classics and an encyclopedia. He demanded (the post office belt always in the back of my mind) that I excel in school. This was nonnegotiable. His son’s life would not be that of a laborer. I was going to "be" somebody. An "A" on a report card was expected and, as such, went unpraised; anything less always brought negative reinforcement. Demanding? Yes. Unwavering? Absolutely. Rigid? Sure. Unfair? Not in the least because he was convinced that, in America - and especially where his son was concerned - there was nothing that hard work and diligence could not overcome.

From as far back as I can remember, all he and my mother spoke of was "when I went to college". There was never "if Ronnie gets into college..." or even discussions (at least to my ears) about how two lower-middle class parents could even afford a college education for their son. It was simply a given fact of life that college was going to be my destination after high school. And somehow, they pulled it off. Sure, I worked all through college to buy my food and pay for lodging but they always somehow came up with the tuition and the book money. I lacked the luxuries of some (a car, a nice apartment, the fraternity experience, et cetera) but I got by. I never felt I was missing out on much as I was too busy trying to keep up with my "betters" - those 2^nd and 3^rd generation college kids who had all the trappings of wealth. They lacked, however, what I had an abundance of: the faith, of my father - apparently absorbed by osmosis - that I could be anything I set my mind to.

I have achieved some small measure of success in my life and, needless to say, my father was the engine, the invisible hand, that guided me to where I am today. His unfailing Protestant work ethic, alive and well in me even today, drove me to deny failure (though it often nipped at my heels) and overcome some hurdles that others might not have faced. For this - and countless other lessons my father taught me - I am forever grateful. He was a man who took what life handed him and did the best he could under difficult circumstances. He never faltered in his primary objectives: to love his family and to raise his only son to live a more privileged life than he did.

Today, as he is fully into the sunset of his life, I know he is a proud man for the one thing he holds dear: a life that may have been unremarkable but that resulted in something he can always take a large measure of solace from. He molded his son, filled him with a family tradition of hard work and determination and, ultimately, that fulfilled his American Dream. And, in turn, that son loves him and his many sacrifices he made to have that dream come true.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.