My father was a golden boy.
My father was a black sheep.
My father was groomed from the day he was born to become an influential Presbyterian minister.
My father was a truck driver, a coal miner, a watermelon picker, a car assembler, a copper smelter, a professor, an office worker, and a night janitor.
My father was ashamed of his Southern family’s slaveholding past.
My father was the love of Alice’s life, and she waited until she was 70 years old to become his bride.
My father was not always a very good husband to my mother. But he was in the end, when fighting her cancer became his cause.
My father may have chosen my mother to wed first because he sensed what a wonderful mother she would make.
My father was an ardent supporter of underdogs.
My father was a historian who asked my still-green 8th-grade U.S. history teacher if she intended to teach pablum or the truth in American history. (“I could have kissed him,” she said. “By asking he was giving me his permission to go boldly.”)
My father was of the opinion that applesauce improved any meal.
My father was allergic to the concept of wasting anything.
My father started organizing at a very young age, par for the course when you’re the oldest of eight.
My father’s family car growing up was a Packard limousine, the only thing big enough to hold them all.
My father was the captain of his junior high school football team.
My father was also a swimmer and a basketball player and a rower.
My father played the oboe, because the oboe has two reeds, making it harder to master than other woodwind instruments.
My father was a three-time Virginia state champion in Latin.
My father was extremely fond of potatoes. My mother wooed him with a dinner of spuds four ways.
My father was a terrible cook, but he took ages artfully preparing and arranging his meals. He cut even the tiniest blueberry into four still-tinier pieces.
My father was usually one to look for a way to pitch in and help.
My father wasn’t good at saying I’m sorry.
My father was a bully.
My father was a feminist who defended abortion clinics to help protect a woman’s right to choose.
My father had bigger hopes and dreams for his next-youngest brother than for any of his five sisters.
My father was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy at 38 as part of a routine physical to start work in the coal mines. At the time, national statistics suggested he had about a 5 percent chance of surviving the next decade. He lived another 40 years.
My father was profoundly moved by injustice.
My father was profoundly moved by good in the world.
My father added Tabasco sauce to his food every day as a self-imposed challenge during a six-week stateside training session for the Peace Corps. He wanted to be ready for even the hottest local Yoruba cuisine by the time he reached Nigeria.
My father was a gift giver.
My father was never early unless it resulted from running late for something else.
My father learned the names of every kid on my 2nd-grade softball team over the course of a single practice by simply paying close attention.
My father was deliberate.
My father was the most moral person his best friend Syd ever met.
My father was a hero to several of my cousins.
My father’s Radcliff girlfriend turned him down when he proposed because the ring was too small.
My father was a scholarship student at Harvard who worked in the dining hall.
My father completed seven years of coursework toward a PhD in sociology at Columbia but left ABD (all but dissertation).
My father wrote a thesis—for a later master’s degree pursued at Johns Hopkins—on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima as reported in the Indian press.
My father was hard to please.
My father could communicate his disapproval without saying a word.
My father was ill equipped to handle stress.
My father put himself in stressful situations again and again.
My father was not yet a high school senior when he testified against the peacetime extension of the draft before the Senate Armed Forces Committee.
My father was called on as an interdenominational church delegate to the 1955 NAACP Youth Convention to deliver a major resolution condemning the Eisenhower administration for moving too slowly to enforce school integration.
My father was a seminary student until he realized he was agnostic.
My father was one of only three white students to stand with black seminary students picketing Richmond’s Thalhimer’s Department Store for a seat at the lunch counter.
My father signed up for the Peace Corps the day Kennedy announced it and spent the next two years teaching English and Latin to high school students in Nigeria.
My father ate dinner with Winnie Mandela in her home while Nelson was imprisoned after hitch-hiking down the continent of Africa.
My father was part of a delegation of anti-war youth activists that went to Cuba to meet with representatives of the North Vietnam liberation forces.
My father smuggled revolutionary literature back from Italy by sacrificing decoy sausages to customs agent inspectors.
My father went to Italy to meet my mother in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius—after she told him he could either show up or she would move on.
My father was arrested more than 10 times. The first time was in 1968 with 1,000 fellow students after a week-long occupation of Columbia University campus buildings to protest both the Vietnam War and the school’s plans to build a gym on Harlem park land.
My father’s FBI file—what I’ve received of it so far—is more than 1,000 pages long. It covers the first half of his life, before I was born.
My father left the rooms his National Security Agency (NSA) brothers-in-law entered on Thanksgiving holidays so they wouldn’t have to report things they’d heard him say.
My father was beaten savagely by men who hated his attempts to organize his fellow coal miners to strike.
My father was colorblind and devoted the year after my mother died to sorting her 20+ boxes of fabric by color.
My father was a patient gardener who coaxed bulbs to bloom in Boston and harvested boundless tomatoes in DC.
My father was unmatched at choosing absurd hiding places when he played sardines with me and my younger brother. This once included the second shelf of the hall pantry.
My father spent months making a paper maché mountain with a tunnel going through it for my young son’s trains.
My father was the person you called when you needed to figure out how to make something more complicated.
My father traveled to Philly from Boston every week on the Bolt Bus to wash dishes for me after my first child was born so I could get back to work as a private chef.
My father’s nickname, “Red,” was a nod both to the hair color he shared with his father and four siblings and to his politics.
My father sang the best rendition you ever heard of “Sippin’ Cider Through a Straw.”
My father was a lifelong advocate for peace and justice.
My father was a doting grandfather affectionately referred to as “Pa.” He was especially good at sneaking.
My father was still hoping to fight a few more fights.
My father was always up for a party.
My father chronicled every part of his life from before he was born and left his papers to me as his legacy.
My father was a hard act to follow.
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