Ten Things About My Father

It's Father's Day tomorrow, the day I imagine is known as "Christmas in June" within the necktie and after shave industries. For today's post I'm going to tell you ten things you may not know about my father. He can be a quiet sort, but he's been around long enough to become a fairly interesting person:

1. He plays the banjo. In my childhood home there was a chair in the living room that always had a music stand and a banjo beside it. As dramatic as my sisters and I (with an emphasis on the "I" part) were about expressing our distaste for banjo music and how loud it was, he was undeterred and played on for the joy of it. He let it go for awhile, but in recent years has returned to it and taken lessons. And once again, there's a banjo parked beside his favorite chair in his living room. Not two months ago he asked me to change the settings on his phone so he could use the new "Dueling Banjos" ringtone he had found.

2. He's very community oriented. He's been a member of the church choir in at least three churches. He was involved in my Cub Scout and Boy Scout troops, and even led his own troop after I had decided I was far too cool to be involved in Scouts anymore. He's coached soccer teams, even if his knowledge of the game was limited to what he picked up from the sidelines while watching my sister and I play on our summer league teams. When he opened his drugstore, he was a catalyst behind a local business association starting up in downtown Elk River. He's been an active member in the Lion's Club for a long time now, and I mean active: After heavy involvement in his local club, he worked his way up to becoming a district governor, which is very much of a big shot thing in the Lions world. I know of people who have dropped his name with members of the Lions Club and got quite a reaction.

3. He's extremely proud of his Irish heritage, and has traveled to visit Ireland...three times, now?

4. Even though he went on to become an incredibly knowledgeable pharmacist, he almost didn't go to college. The only reason he took his college entrance exam in high school was to ditch a class.

5. He's a car guy. If he's out driving and spots a car that could, in any way, be described as a classic, he'll simply announce the make, model, and year of it as if it's a casual observation, while I'd need ten minutes of Googling to even make a best guess.

6. He's a big reader. Our house had so many crime and spy paperback novels, my sisters and I just referred to them as "Dad books."

7. He's always been a Do It Yourself kind of guy. He completely finished the basement of my childhood home and landscaped the entire yard, with little outside help other than things he read in different books and a minimal amount of physical labor from a young teenage son who could not stop complaining about how heavy each wheelbarrow full of landscaping rock was.

8. He loves musicals. His record collection had a good number of Broadway cast recordings to plays I had never heard of.

9. He has certain comedy triggers that will leave him laughing uncontrollably until he's red in the face.

10. Back before he retired and still had his drugstore, WCCO-TV did a human interest story about him: He saw too much of a conflict between being a pharmacist who tried to help people preserve their health, and being a retail businessman who sold all variety of cigarettes and related products, so he stopped selling tobacco. (This was all back in the 1990s, about two decades before national drugstore chains did the same thing and made national headlines for it.) He explained his reasons to the news crew as they showed footage of him standing at the front cash register in his pharmacy jacket, talking to a customer who was expressing her appreciation for what he was doing. The story wrapped up and cut back to the anchors all sitting at their desk, and Don Shelby, one of the most popular and respected newsmen in Twin Cities media, turned to his co-anchor and said, "Now, that is a man of character."

Happy Father's Day, Dad!!