Tag Archives: Father’s Day

Father’s Day Takes A Special Turn

by Woody

How was my Father’s Day? Thank you for asking.

For starters, my daughter and her family, who live in the Bay Area, moved into the first home of their own earlier in the week. Hence, they were quite literally boxed in from making the trip south to celebrate with me.

My son, meanwhile, spent the week in San Francisco on a work trip and was driving home to the South Bay on Sunday. He hoped to make it to Ventura for a dinnertime visit.

Oh, yes, my wife was also up north babysitting our 2-year-old granddaughter during the chaotic days following the big move-in. She was driving back with our son, enjoying a nice long chat in the car, turning the day into Mother’s Day for her.

So how was my Father’s Day you ask again? To borrow from my favorite John Wooden-ism, it was a masterpiece day!

Jess made my Father’s Day special with a “Pops” Date.

To be sure, I missed being with my dear daughter and second-to-none son-in-law and grandest of granddaughters, but we visited on video chat which hands down beats a phone call. And my son and wife made it home for dinner, and not just any dinner, but mouth-watering lobster rolls from Maine.

Still, the truth is that my Father’s Day was extra special precisely because circumstances left me home alone. Actually, that is a half-truth. Because I was going to be alone, my son’s fiance drove two and a half hours to spend the afternoon with me, just the two of us, like the “Daddy Dates” my daughter and I still enjoy.

Call this one a “Pops” Date for that is what my future daughter-in law calls me. I in turn fondly call her JB, which is short for Jessburn, which is a story for another time. While having the whole family together is magical, there is also a rare gift in one-on-one time with loved ones.

JB and I talked, and laughed, for hours on end and capped our Pops Date with an el fresco happy hour at a downtown pub. Even after knowing her for two years, I learned much more about JB and her family; about her work in the tech world and about her worldly travels; about her dreams and her dream wedding in the planning for next summer.

“What’s your favorite thing about GB?” – short for Gregburn, which is one of my numerous nicknames of endearment for my son – I asked JB at one point. Without even a wine sip’s delay to think, she replied beaming as brightly as her engagement ring: “He’s the genuinely nicest person I’ve ever met.”

So says the person who once, when my wife and I were visiting them for a pandemic picnic, literally went out of her way by walking alone two miles roundtrip to a specific pizza parlor because I love their slices and had been looking forward to them but deliveries had unexpectedly been canceled that day.

Honestly, I would have been happy with bread and water because spending time with GB and JB was truly what my wife and I were looking forward to. Looking back, it is just one example of JB’s genuine niceness.

But I need not look back nearly that far – back to Father’s Day and how she again went out of her way for me is far enough. Actually, I need only look back to earlier this morning (as I write this) to JB’s text wishing me a good day and telling me to have a nice run later this afternoon.

How was my Father’s Day? Pops Day was a masterpiece!

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

The Little Fellow takes the lead

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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The Little Fellow

takes the lead

The other day, a friend texted me after returning from a run with his 9-year-old son. I could almost hear the dad’s shortness of breath and see his smile in the electronic message.

I know it made me smile for it reminded me of a poem that hangs near my writing desk. It is titled, “A Little Fellow Follows Me,” author unknown, and seems especially worth sharing before Father’s Day. It begins:

A careful man I want to be, / A little fellow follows me; / I dare not to go astray, / For fear he’ll go the self-same way.

My Little Fellow then…

Growing up, my little fellow’s bedroom walls were plastered with posters of Olympic runners. As a second-grader he wrote a poem that also hangs in my office, titled: “I Am A Boy Who Loves To Run.”

That little boy grew up to be a six-foot-three young man who still loves to run. A former collegiate racer and more recently Boston Marathon finisher, he is far too fast for me to keep pace. But in my mind’s eye, I still see our side-by-side runs from long ago.

I cannot once escape his eyes, / Whatever he sees me do, he tries; / Like me he says he’s going to be, / The little chap who follows me.

We talked a lot on those runs together. He would tell me about his friends, about school, about his beloved Lakers. Often he made me laugh: “Was Gramps really a kid once?”

And: “Is Mom growing shorter?”

Me: “What?”

“Dad, I think she’s shrinking!”

…My Little Fellow now.

Me (suppressing a laugh): “No, I think you’re just growing taller.”

You can see why I loved running with The Little Fellow Who Follows Me, even when I had to go slower than I would have preferred in order to keep him from actually following me. Admittedly, I knew that would not last long. Indeed, like his shrinking mother, his dad was growing slower.

More than that, The Little Fellow was growing into a faster fellow.

He thinks that I am good and fine, / Believes in every word of mine; / The base in me he must not see, / The little chap who follows me.

I fondly remember one magical day 19 years ago – I know the date for it is in my running diary – when my 11-year-old Little Chap Who Follows Me and I went on a three-mile run together. Reaching the turnaround point, I was struggling not to be The Old Man Who Follows Him.

Shortly thereafter, sensing I had fallen slightly behind, he turned around and came back for me. I urged him to go on ahead, but he ignored every word of mine and ran alongside me at my pace the rest of the way. I had known this watershed day would arrive, but had thought it was further down the road of life.

I thought wrong. The future had arrived. A couple days later, midway up “The Long Monster Hill That Makes Your Legs Burn” – as he nicknamed this stretch of heartbreaking asphalt – I breathlessly insisted that The Little Fellow Who Follows Me go on ahead to the top. He flew off like Hermes.

I must remember as I go, / Through summer’s sun and winter’s snow; / I am building for the years to be / That little chap who follows me.

With summer’s sun setting, I crested the hill well after The Little Chap Who Follows Me. Seeing me, he waved and grinned a big toothy smile. Truth be told, I was even happier than he.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Advice From Dads for Father’s Day

by Woody

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Dadvice for Father’s Day

Father’s Day cards will be opened tomorrow, so it seems apropos to begin today with a Hallmark-worthy thought from Mark Twain who famously observed: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

More recently, classical pianist Charles Wadworth expanded on Twain’s quip, noting: “By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.”

Or a daughter.

My friend Barry Kibrick, host of the Emmy-winning PBS book-talk show “Between the Lines,” once told me of raising his two sons: “I never worried about over-praising them and building up their self-esteem too much because there are plenty of people in the world who will try to tear them down.”

Author Jan Hutchins had a similarly wise dad, sharing: “When I was a kid, my father told me every day, ‘You’re the most wonderful boy in the world, and you can do anything you want to.’ ”

Clarence Budington Kelland, a 20th century novelist who once described himself as “the best second-rate writer in America,” made a first-rate compliment about his own father: “He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”

Best-selling essayist Robert Fulghum put it this way: “Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.”

American inventor Charles Kettering likewise advised, “Every father should remember one day his son will follow his example, not his advice.”

From attribution unknown comes this pearl: “One night a father overheard his son pray: ‘Dear God, Make me the kind of man my Daddy is.’ Later that night, the father prayed, ‘Dear God, Make me the kind of man my son wants me to be.’ ”

The rock band Yellowcard offers this lovely lyric about the power of a dad as a role model: “Father I will always be / that same boy who stood by the sea / and watched you tower over me / now I’m older I wanna be the same as you.”

Hall of Fame baseball player Harmon Killebrew apparently had a Hall of Fame Dad, the son recalling: “My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, ‘You’re tearing up the grass.’ Dad would reply, ‘We’re not raising grass – we’re raising boys.’ ”

A great attitude for dads of daughters as well, naturally.

Speaking of girls, John Mayer strikes the right chord with these lyrics: “Fathers, be good to your daughters. You are the god and the weight of her world.”

Getting further to the heart of the matter, John Wooden, who believed “love” is the most important word in the English language, said: “The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”

From another basketball coach, the late Jim Valvano: “My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person – he believed in me.”

My friend and mentor Wayne Bryan, father of doubles legends Mike and Bob who are even better people than they are tennis players, advises parents: “Shout your praise to the rooftops and if you must criticize, drop it like a dandelion. On second thought, don’t criticize at all.”

In closing is a home-run thought from Hall of Fame singles hitter Wade Boggs: “Anyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a dad.”

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Father’s Day Story Packs a Punch

by Woody

Is your Club or Group looking for an inspiring guest speaker or do you want to host a book signing? . . . Contact Woody today!

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1StrawberriesCoverWooden-&-Me-cover-mock-upFor a Personalized Autographed copy of “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME” or “WOODEN & ME” mail a check for $25 to:

Woody Woodburn

400 Roosevelt Court

Ventura, CA 93003

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Story for Father’s Day Packs a Punch

The photograph is from the early 1940s, black-and-white and slightly overexposed in the outdoor sunlight.

It is of a man, in his early 20s, with a thin mustache and a thick nose. His jaw is square as a brick’s edge. His hair is dark and short and flattened by sweat. His eyes are hidden in shadows.

The man is a boxer. He is in his prime, stomach flat and muscled, shoulders broad and powerful. He is working the speed bag, which is a blur after having just been struck by his left fist.

Jimmy Harvey, an Oak View resident with a gray-and-ginger goatee and bear’s build, cherishes this picture of his father taken between 1942 and 1946 while Roy L. Harvey was in the Navy during World War II.

Jimmy saw the photo for the first time when he was 14 and promptly asked his dad to teach him to fight.

1JimmyHarvey

Jimmy Harvey, who I would not like to box or fight!

“He said, ‘No, you don’t want to learn from Ol’ Canvas Back,” Jimmy recalls clearly a half-century later. “I asked, ‘What does that mean?’ ”

Answered his dad: “In boxing terms it means you spend more time on your back on the canvas than fighting.”

Looking through the prism of time, Jimmy, now a grandfather five times over, understands: “I think the reason Dad never taught me to fight is I used the term ‘fight’ and he used ‘box.’ He boxed for the art of it – I wanted to hurt somebody.”

In truth, Jimmy was the one generally getting hurt.

“I had my nose broken a few times,” he allows. “I wouldn’t back down. I was just stupid. I was getting expelled from high school all the time for fighting.”

The most memorable time Jimmy refused to back down happened not at school, but at home.

“I was 16 and Dad thought I was feeling my oats a little too much,” Jimmy shares. “We squared off, looking each other in the eye, and Dad said: ‘I know what you THINK you can do.’

“I was so mad. I really wanted to pop him and he knew it. He told me, ‘Let ‘er rip.’

“I decided I was going to sucker punch him quick,” Jimmy continues, pantomiming what followed by pounding his right fist into his left palm: “He caught it.”

Awed by the feat still, Jimmy adds: “Dad looked me in the eye and said, ‘You’re not ready.’ That cooled me off a bit.”

Sparring partners, in a manner of speaking, described their relationship. “We were never close,” the son allows. “I was a product of the ’60s and Dad was of the ’30s and ’40s.”

Time has a way of shrinking generation gaps. So does terminal illness. In 1988, at age 68, Roy was in the hospital. As Christmas – and death – approached, Jimmy visited daily.

“It was a race between liver failure and lung cancer,” Jimmy shares, his piercing blue eyes suddenly awash with emotion. “I was with him when he died. That was tough. Uncle Del was there, too.”

Flipping through a photo album at the wake, Del came to the picture of his brother working the speed bag.

“I said, ‘There’s old Canvas Back,’ ” Jimmy retells. “Uncle Del asked me what I’d said?

“I said, ‘Daddy told me he was on his back all the time so they called him Canvas Back.’ ”

Uncle Del replied, and sharply: “Son, I don’t know where you got your information, but your dad was All-Navy two years running.”

Tracing a finger over the grainy boxing photo, Jimmy rejoins: “He must have really been something in the ring.”

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden & Me Kickstarter Front PhotoCheck out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Father and Son Role Reversal

by Woody

1StrawberriesCoverWooden-&-Me-cover-mock-upFor a Personalized Autographed copy of “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME” or “WOODEN & ME” mail a check for $25 to:

Woody Woodburn

400 Roosevelt Court

Ventura, CA 93003

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Experiencing a Poetic Role Reversal

Words from William Wordsworth’s poem “My Heart Leaps Up” came warmly to my mind recently – and with the coming of another Father’s Day seem worth sharing.

Wrote the wordsmith in 1802: “The Child is father to the Man.”

Perhaps more famously, given the influence of Hollywood’s silver screen, in the 2006 film “Superman Returns,” Jor-El – father of Kal-El, who becomes Superman on planet Earth – tells his boy: “The son becomes the father and the father becomes the son.”

Enjoying pizza, and a role reversal, in NYC.

Enjoying pizza, and a role reversal, in NYC.

So it was when I visited my own Kal-El in New York City; in many ways the 27-year-old son and the 56-year-old father reversed roles.

I embraced this turnabout as happily as I embraced him at the airport. In fact, his surprise greeting at baggage claim was the beginning of “The Child is father to the Man.”

You see, I was going to take the subway from JFK and meet my son at his apartment in Lower Manhattan. However, he was worried about me navigating the subway system and thus covertly trekked out to meet me. A very father-like thing.

So it was the rest of my visit. My son insisted on carrying my luggage, gave me his bed, lent me the jacket off his back when the night air turned cold.

The most dramatic way my Child was father to this Man occurred my first full day there. Just as I used to take my son to Ventura’s now shuttered H.P. Wright Library, he was taking me to the venerable New York Public Library.

Getting on the subway, however, I got a “Welcome-to-New-York” shove from behind just as the doors were closing. Unable to shut because of the rugby-like scrum, the doors instantly jerked back open.

My right index finger, somehow, got pulled into the slit where the sliding door recedes. The result was like a carrot meeting a potato peeler. Quick pressure with a napkin largely stanched the bleeding.

We exited at the next stop and my son located a pharmacy so we could buy Band-Aids and tape. Removing the napkin to apply a proper bandage caused the red floodgates to reopen.

“I’m taking you to get stitches right now,” the Child-turned-father-of-the-Man demanded.

At Urgent Care, my son signed me in and did all the necessary paperwork – more accurately, e-work, on a touch-screen. He even accompanied me into the treatment room as I long ago did with him numerous times.

The first of two anesthetic injections made me curse; the second was threefold more agonizing. The whole while my son held my other hand and told me how brave I was being. He then made me laugh – kept me in stitches, if you will – as I received 16 stitches.

To be honest, the pain of it all was worth the experience of seeing this side of my boy-turned-man.

For the remainder of my visit he kept the tables turned. He changed my bandage. He focused our itinerary on me. He led and I followed.

Too, the son I have always tried to be a role model for, now stepped into this role. At a jazz club one evening, we arrived early and were rewarded with the best table in the joint.

Minutes before the performance began, however, the manager asked us if we would consider changing places with an elderly man who was physically too feeble to sit on a tall stool in the back of the room.

Because my son and I are tall, the manager felt we could still see the show, but emphasized: “You really don’t need to. I just wanted to ask.”

Without a beat’s pause, my son replied: “Of course he and his wife can have our seats.”

We went from the first row to worst row – and I could not have been happier or more proud.

Wordsworth’s poem also includes this line: “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky.”

So, too, did my heart leap up beholding the Man my Child has become. I wish this same rainbow, one day, for all fathers.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden & Me Kickstarter Front PhotoCheck out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

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Dads Forge Memories

by Woody

 My new memoir WOODEN & ME is available here at Amazon

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One Role of Dads is to Forge Memories

Dads have countless roles and surely one of the most important is to forge lasting childhood memories for their kids. In honor of Father’s Day, here is one of mine.

1dadsdayThe summer of 1969, a month before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would walk on the moon and two months before Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin rocked at Woodstock, my dad planned to take my two older brothers on an epic fishing adventure in Canada. Having just turned 9, I was deemed too young to tag along.

I felt more left out than Apollo 11’s third astronaut, Michael Collins, orbiting the moon in the Command Module.

T-minus two nights before our family Plymouth station wagon with faux wood side panels was to blast off, Pop’s friend, Mel Olex, who was to fill out the travel party, fell ill. It was not the first time Dr. Olex had come to my rescue: after separate accidents he put plaster casts on my broken leg and fractured wrist.

Now, he healed my broken heart because in his absence there was room for me. After all, food for four had already been packed. For me it was Christmas in June.

For Pop, now the only driver, it was a long haul from Columbus, Ohio, north across the border to Canada’s Lake Heron. We then hopped a motorboat to an isolated island where we stayed in a one-room rustic cabin at the Westwind Lodge. The name was fortuitous for it brought to mind a poem my Grandpa Ansel used to recite when he took us three boys fishing at farm ponds:

When the wind is from the north, / The wise fisherman does not go forth.

When the wind is from the south, / It blows the hook into the fish’s mouth.

When the wind is from the east, / `Tis not fit for man nor beast.

But when the wind is from the west, / The fishing is the very best.

Fishing at the Westwind Lodge thus promised to be the very best.

In the chill of dawn we would head out on the lake in a small boat with a temperamental outboard motor that leaked an ironically beautiful rainbow of ugly gasoline on the water’s surface.

By late afternoon we would have a collection of pike, walleye, perch and bass which the lodge cook filleted, breaded, fried and served us for dinner.

The first three days we returned to the Lodge for lunch before heading out for a second round of angling. This limited how far we could venture, so when Pop learned about a distant “Secret Cove” – doesn’t every lake have a “Secret Cove” that isn’t really a secret? – where northern pike the size of VW Beetles were reported to lurk, he got the cook to pack us lunches.

Next morning, Pop gave us our assignments: Jim was to make sure the rods and reels were all in the boat; Doug was in charge of the lunches and the cooler with the sodas; and I was told to put on my life jacket and try not to fall in the lake. Again.

We were starving by the time we finally found “Secret Cove” and decided to go ashore for lunch before catching some VWs with gills. We three boys bolted from the boat and soon learned an important lesson: when standing on an uprising smooth rock landscape, don’t pee facing uphill.

Pop (still in the boat): Hey, Dougie, where’d you put the lunches?

Doug (sneakers getting wet on land): I think they’re by the life jackets.

Pop: Nope. I don’t see them or the ice cooler anywhere. Dougie, you didn’t leave the lunches on the dock did you?

Doug: Stone silence.

Pop: (We boys would have gotten our mouths washed out with soap if we repeated what Pop said next.)

While I cannot state this as fact, I am convinced the true native name of that “Secret Cove” was “There Ain’t No Fish Here Cove.”

I am convinced of this, too: hippies at Woodstock didn’t have a more wonderfully memorable summer of ’69 than my big brothers and I did at Westwind.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden-&-Me-cover-mock-upCheck out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

Column: A Story For Father’s Day

by Woody

A Father, A Son And A Promise Kept

The boy, seven years old, was in the family barn doing chores. This was a full eight decades ago, yet the boy – my dad – remembers it like last week.

“I was cornered by rats,” Pop shares. “Big ones. Lots of ’em. To this day, I have a real phobia.”

The frightening memory of a Midwestern rat pack surging out of the hay is, surprisingly, also a cherished one because Pop’s boyhood dog, a terrier mix named Queenie, came running.

Pop, right, with grandson Greg and me.

Pop, right, with grandson Greg and me.

She did what terriers instinctively do: caught each rat in her teeth and gave it a side-to-side neck-breaking shake, tossed it aside like a rag doll, and then went after the next one and the next and the next. Lassie rescuing Timmy.

“She may not have saved my life,” Pop continues, “but at the time it sure felt like it.”

If Queenie did not literally save Pop’s life that day, it is still fair to say she was roundabout responsible for saving many other lives – hundreds, if not thousands – in the future. I will explain.

Queenie’s defining moment actually did not happen in the barn that afternoon; it occurred on a Sunday evening the following summer. The boy, now almost nine, noticed his dog was sick. Soon she went into seizure.

Unbeknownst at the moment, a deranged man had laced raw meat with strychnine – rat poison – and fed it to more than two-dozen dogs throughout the small rural Ohio neighborhood.

What the boy did know was he needed his father’s help, and urgently. Unfortunately, this was eons before cell phones so he could not reach his dad, a country doctor who was out making weekend house calls.

It would have been no problem had the boy known what patient his dad was visiting. Back then the boy did not even need to dial local phone numbers – he would just pick up the telephone and tell the woman operator (it was always a pleasant woman) the name of any person in town and she would connect them simple as that, the operator all the while chatting with the boy until the other person answered.

Tearfully, helplessly, anxiously the boy watched out the front window at 210 Henry Street for his dad to get home.

“I was so scared for Queenie,” that boy, now 87, recalls.

At long last the boy’s dad – my Grandpa Ansel – came home. It proved to be a life-changing “house call.” Ansel put down his well-worn black leather doctor’s bag and checked out his critical “patient.”

Immediately he suspected poisoning and took out a bottle of ether he kept in his medical bag for emergencies such as putting a patient to sleep before setting a broken bone.

Humming softly, Ansel gently held an ether-soaked cloth over Queenie’s snout in the same gentle, caring fashion he used to calm a frightened child crying in pain until the anesthesia took its hold.

The ether-induced unconsciousness temporarily stopped Queenie’s potentially deadly seizures, but when the potion wore off the fierce convulsions would return. It was imperative to keep the dog asleep until the poison could hopefully run its course; however, a continuous does of ether would itself prove fatal.

Hence, Ansel had to constantly monitor the dog’s breathing and administer a brief whiff of ether when necessary. By doing so he was able to keep Queenie precariously balanced on a high wire between slumber and seizures.

Throughout the long night, Ansel kept vigil by the ill dog’s side while the boy kept vigil by his country-doctor-turned-veterinarian father’s side. Soon, Ansel had two sleeping heads on his lap, albeit only one required ether’s aid.

“The next day Queenie was better,” Pop shares, his voice filled with marvel and gratitude all these years later. “She was the only one of all the poisoned dogs to live. The only one. All because of my dad.”

And here is the most important thing. Pop adds: “That dog, that night, changed my life. Right then I promised myself I was going to become a doctor, just like my dad.”

Happy Father’s Day to that boy who kept his promise.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Check out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

Column: Dads, Sons and Daughters

by Woody

Ignorance, Bliss, Dads, Sons and Daughters

 

Father’s Day arrives tomorrow, so it seems apropos to begin today with a hallmark quote from yesteryear. Actually nearly 140 yesteryears ago when Mark Twain famously observed: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

 

Charles Wadworth expanded on Twain’s thought, noting: “By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.”

Dallas and Greg, who make being a dad so great!

Dallas and Greg, who make being a dad so great!

 

Clarence Budington Kelland, a 20th century novelist who once described himself as “the best second-rate writer in America,” made a first-rate compliment about his own father: “He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”

 

Similarly, from Mario Cuomo: “I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.”

 

From attribution unknown comes this eloquent pearl: “One night a father overheard his son pray: ‘Dear God, Make me the kind of man my Daddy is.’ Later that night, the Father prayed, ‘Dear God, Make me the kind of man my son wants me to be.’ ”

 

The rock band Yellowcard offers this lovely lyric about the power of a dad as a role model: “Father I will always be / that same boy who stood by the sea / and watched you tower over me / now I’m older I wanna be the same as you.”

 

PBS book talk show host Barry Kibrick told me of raising his two sons: “I never worried about over-praising them and building up their self-esteem too much because there are plenty of people in the world who will try to tear them down.”

 

Author Jan Hutchins had a similarly wise dad, sharing: “When I was a kid, my father told me every day, ‘You’re the most wonderful boy in the world, and you can do anything you want to.’ ”

 

Or, as my good friend, author and coach Wayne Bryan advises parents: “Shout your praise to the rooftops and if you must criticize, drop it like a dandelion. On second thought, don’t criticize at all.”

 

Hall of Fame baseball player Harmon Killebrew apparently had a Hall of Fame Dad, the son recalling this: “My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, ‘You’re tearing up the grass.’

 

“ ‘We’re not raising grass,’ Dad would reply. ‘We’re raising boys.’ ”

 

A great attitude for dads of daughters, too.

 

Speaking of girls, John Mayer strikes the right chord with these lines of song: “Fathers, be good to your daughters. You are the god and the weight of her world.”

 

            As for fathers and sons, 19th century French poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore asked rhetorically: “Are we not like two volumes of one book?” German poet Johann Schiller knew these two “volumes” need not share similar DNA, noting: “It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.”

 

Getting further to the heart of the matter, John Wooden, who believed “love” is the most important word in the English language, said: “The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”

 

Another basketball coach, Jim Valvano, shared one of the secrets to his success when he noted: “My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person – he believed in me.”

 

On the topic of “gifts,” a Jewish Proverb states: “When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.”

 

Here’s some good advice from Bill Cosby when it comes time to open a gift Sunday: “Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.”

 

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for the Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Woody’s new book, WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” is available for pre-order at: www.WoodyWoodburn.com