The Tribune

Today is December 14. You’d think I would be used to it by now. But I am not. Every year, the date catches me and twists my insides around like a pretzel with a stomachache. It is the anniversary of my father’s death, December 14, 1966, 67 years ago.

I remember the phone call as if it were yesterday. My then husband and I were living in Louisville, Ky. where he was wrapping up a six-month contract to build a large steel industrial plant. That night I was packing my suitcase, flying back to Boca Raton, Florida the next day to see my father who had been alone and not doing well since my mother’s death the year before. My husband would follow a week or so later. I was going back to help him celebrate his birthday, December 25. He would have turned 59 on Christmas Day.

It was the call I will never forget and to this day, I cannot remember who broke the news, I just remember the chill that came over me, the piece of clothing I had been packing suspended in air as if it had frozen solid when I heard the words, “I am sorry to inform you your father died a short while ago. He choked on a steak in a restaurant…”

They called it a café coronary. Death by sirloin or filet or whatever it was. Dragged off to a men’s room to die so as not to embarrass the guests who were dining oblivious to the man who at one time would have commanded the attention of everyone in that place with his larger-than-life personality or because he was who he was. He wasn’t easy but he was something else. A man who never finished high school but became president of the Philadelphia Businessman’s Society and raised funds with celebrities for worthwhile causes, a mover and shaker who loved nothing more than the art of the deal, a good card game and a day with family. He was the least handy man I ever met but one of the smartest I have ever known. He never bothered to learn the difference between a flat and Phillips head screwdriver or how to start a lawn mower. I never saw him change a light bult, but he could start a business, grow it, sell it and try something new. Find the right partners, grow the next business, stay with it until it bored him and sell it. From car lots to an amusement park, from a movie theatre to becoming the first major developer of Boca Raton, Florida, he was never afraid of failure though the only time I recall his failing was a decision to buy an Edsel dealership. It nearly did him in.

In Florida, before we moved there full-time when I was nine, my father and I walked every night after dinner. It was the time he could smoke his cigar, away from the house, and he would buy me an ice cream cone and tell me all sorts of stories and lessons. Holding his hand, I thought even if I were gawky and wore glasses, I was the luckiest young girl alive.

To this day, I live by many of the lessons he taught me.

He taught me that when you love something, don’t hold back. Love it as fully as you can.

He taught me when you see something wrong and you don’t do anything about it, you are as wrong as the person who committed the wrongdoing.

He taught me that we are responsible for what happens around us and to us and to those we love.

He showed me that when an old man is crossing the street in a blizzard, you may not be able to stop the wind from blowing, but you can take the man’s hand and help him cross so the wind does not blow him over. I remember that lesson well because as we crossed a street in downtown Philadelphia one frightening, wind-whipped day with a sky nearly black from the bitter storm, my father took my hand and pulled me back with him to grab the hand of an old man struggling to cross the busy avenue, stooped low against the punishing wind and as we took him by the arm frail inside his winter coat, we were nearly hit by a car.

He taught me when you need something done, go to the top. There is a reason why the president or CEO or chairman is the president or CEO or chairman. They are not afraid to make a decision. It is a piece of advice I have used time and again, like when the same model washing machine/dryer failed three times in a little over a year and I could not get any satisfaction from the local supplier so I wrote to the chairman of GE. The next thing I knew I had a call from his office. They were FedExing me a washer/dryer. Mind you, I did not just write any ordinary letter. I quoted the chairman’s words back to him as quite by accident, I had heard him deliver a virtual talk not long before and had taken notes about customer service. And, yes, I included documents showing the history of the failures.

My father was not a perfect man. He drank too much from time to time. Sometimes he would get on a plane and go to Vegas to gamble and disappear for days at a time. But he worshipped the ground my mother walked on and taught me that even when someone does not always show love, it can live and burn quietly on the inside where those who have it know it.

So I approach the holiday season, the Chanukkah and Christmas and New Year, with the tears I shed for my father every year and with the wish he could see his grandchildren and greatgrandchild and know that the lessons he taught me I try to teach them in the hopes that one day they will bring to the world the strength and sense of responsibility for caring for others that he did, that we are that old man’s keeper, and what we do matters.

He died too young, but he left lessons in his footprint, in his higher moral ground that was the better part of a flawed man. It will not be the flaws that I recall on this day of the 67th anniversary of his death but the lessons my father taught me.