Father's Day--a tribute

 

My Cretan great-grandfather, some of his 16 kids, and their one-room house...Yiayia in back in white

Father’s Day is a uniquely American holiday, not one celebrated in Greece. But the truth be told, every day is “father’s day” in traditional, rural Greece—an intensely patriarchal society where male authority remains paramount. Naturally, there are always exceptions to the rule.

 

My father, the son of poor, illiterate Greek immigrants, was an overachiever who rose well beyond his humble origins. Dad was the first in his family to complete high school, college, and graduate school. The first to enlist into the wartime military. Not unlike the Spartans, about whom I've written, he was guided by duty, self-sacrifice, and honor.

Elevated to Major during the Korean War

 

He enlisted in the Marines as an officer-candidate, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and went on to achieve the rank of colonel in the US Marine Corps, serving with distinction in combat theater during World War II—alongside his four USMC combat infantrymen brothers (an unparalleled Marine Corps distinction), while the sixth brother fought in General Patton’s army, helping liberate Europe from Nazi occupation.

 

Six brothers, five combat Marines and one Army infantryman--George on the right

Dad worked as an accountant after the war but was a member of the Marine Corps Officer Reserve until my high-school days. As a pillar of his local society, he served as a city finance commissioner, taught Sunday School, started a consulting business, and spent most of his life helping others—usually without compensation, to my mother’s horror. He was someone unafraid to speak his mind, but he was also the consummate listener. I will never forget one of his often-repeated lines: "I respect your opinion, but I disagree passionately." And passion was another guiding trait.

Six soldier-brothers with sisters, postwar

After WWII

 

He was a lifelong Republican, a proud American patriot, and a dedicated family man.

 

My father provided a model of “manhood” (the word makes me cringe) that is in stark contrast with today’s model. He taught me to shoot a gun but was never a “gun toter.” He never swore, he treated women with respect, and he was a perennial optimist even though he was raised during the Great Depression, when he saw his own family of ten evicted onto the meanest of New York City streets. Rather than whine, he found a third job--while attending New York University at night. He not only endured anti-immigrant racism but stuck his finger in its very face. Bless him!

 

And here's the rub for me--with profound apologies to friends to whom I promised "no politics in this blog!" He would be deeply saddened by today’s America, but more likely outraged, disgusted, and prepared to defend what once was a great and noble nation built on values.

His political party, having sold its very soul to the devil, would be unrecognizable to him. A man who risked his life for the US Constitution, he would have been among the first to defend the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms), but also the First Amendment (the right to free speech). As a sensible and practical man, he would never have tolerated anyone shouting “fire” in a crowded theater—this isn’t free speech, this is anarchy not liberty. He might have had an analogous opinion regarding the Second Amendment, which has been radicalized, distorted, and stripped of its historical basis by a one-time sportman's club (that I joined with him at age 12), and is now, for so many who have tossed their membership cards, little more than a nefarious organization masquerading as a defender of the Constitution and a mouthpiece for mega-corporations motivated my money and nothing else.

 

My father and I disagreed on most topics for forty-two years--he was a lifelong Republican, and I would be described in today's discourse as a dangerous "radical Socialist," i.e., a centrist Democrat--but we shared an unflagging mutual respect, a compassion for others, especially the values of tolerance and basic human decency. And most of all, a sense of the greater good, an ethic in short supply in today’s America.

 

And for that I am proud to be my father’s son.

My homily for Father's Day.