Since we are talking about dads it makes me remember mine (ours). He was an easy going, mostly calm guy. His brother converted him to Catholicism and, despite having lots of kids and struggling workwise, he sent the first 4 of us to Catholic school. He never pushed religion and I can remember him reading us the comics a lot and the bible, almost never. He had a pint of whiskey in a cabinet and nursed it for years. Very occasionally did he even have a beer. He did smoke a lot and it bothered us so much all us boys vowed to never smoke and we never have. He started out as an architect but the times were wrong for individual designs and went into commercial aircraft tool design which got us from a small home in S. Dallas to an upscale, older neighborhood. He lost his job due to national politics and we moved to N. California where he found design work for the Polaris missile. Then on to Seattle and the SST. He often played with us when he was not working overtime and often took us on outings at some nearby lake. I am named after him and was a jr. All in all, with both parents ours was a real free range family and we pretty did as we pleased and still found support from both parents. One funny event happened when they came to visit me in Germany. We went to Munich and the Hofbrauhaus. It was late and on returning to our hotel mom and I were walking along a dark narrow street and we noticed dad was not with us. We retraced our steps and saw him looking in a shop window. It was a sex shop and I doubt he had ever seen such a thing. My mom went to him and gently steered him away saying that’s not for you. His death was very strange. He had fallen into a lake when a boy and one lung filled with water. He was taken to a hospital and a hole was cut into his side to drain the water. That massive scar kept him out of the military. All the boys in his family had high cholesterol and high blood pressure. He ended up with lung cancer and a brain tumor and was sent to a hospital to deal with the tumor. My mom got to spend the night with him and he refused to take his BP medicine. That night his lungs filled with fluid and he basically drowned. Here he is on front of our house on my brother's motorbike.