National Opinions

Thank you to all my fathers

Daniel Moreau is a retired financial writer who lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

One photograph on my desk is of my childhood family - my father, Arthur; my mother, Doris; my older brother, Dale; and me. I'm 3 years old. My mother is 43, my brother 10. My father is 59. He will be dead in less than a year from the ravages of tuberculosis. I am the only one in the picture who doesn't know what's going on.

In 1953, the year this picture was taken, tuberculosis was diagnosed in 84,304 patients in the United States and led to the deaths of 19,707,according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because the disease is so infectious, TB patients spent their recuperation then in such places as the Niagara Sanatoriumin Lockport, New York. Beautiful, wooded settings with plenty of good food and fresh air, they provided a healthy treatment for an otherwise incurable and often fatal disease.

For a 3-year-old kid, this was an awful and confusing arrangement. My father was sick, and I couldn't be with him. But "the San" was in my hometown, and I loved to visit its country club setting. My memories include going inside to attend the hanging of a mural my father painted while he was there. He was a photographer and a graphic artist, well known in Lockport, and the mural represented his link to his vocation and his home.

This visit is the only verifiable contact with my father that I can recall. I touched his mighty, big thumb as he sat in a wheelchair for the unveiling. I remember the joy at seeing him. The caution not to be too close that we both obeyed. The pride in the room for this artist and his art.

Otherwise, I was limited to waving at him as he stood in a window on the upper floors of the hospital. Sometimes I could see him, most times I couldn't. But I knew from my brother that dad was there, somewhere, and that he loved us.

I have a watercolor portrait of me that he did from his hospital bed in the final months of his life. I'm a smiling, Tom Sawyerish figure wearing an oversized straw hat - poised, it would appear, for a day of fishing. In the little cards he illustrated with farm animals such as donkeys and pigs that he would send home with my mother were messages promising we'd go fishing when he was better.

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Of course, we never got to go fishing. Other men in my life, my uncle, Bill Kincaid, as well as Harry Foster and Ward Hall, kind neighbors without their own sons, would eventually teach me to fish and to be patient with snagged hooks and wet boots.

My father died in early May 1954. At the funeral home I was thrilled to see him again, looking good in one of his beautiful suits, a natty tie and that thick black hair that had never grayed. The funeral home director, a family friend, cleared the room and set a chair in front of my father's casket.

And alone in that room with my father, I told him how glad I was to see him, that I hoped to see him again and that I would be good until then. My mother said even the undertaker was teary.

I wasn't good all the time, it turned out. Growing up for me was a hodgepodge of achievement and setback. I had missed what a father can give a son. But I instinctively sought adult males who would mentor me, who would protect me and, more than once, rescue me.

Durward Wildman, the treasurer at the boarding school I attended, saved me from expulsion, stepping in to be the responsible adult male and telling me in certain terms that the deal was my good behavior in exchange. He got it. The editor of the magazine where I got my first big job took me under his wing and said I needed to change with the shift in editorial direction at the magazine or I couldn't stay. I shifted and thrived. Thank you, Ted Miller.

These men, my real father and these father figures, uncles, neighbors and professionals are whom I salute on Father's Day. Yes, I had a father, Arthur Moreau. I loved him, and he loved me. There is no greater gift than a loving bond between a parent and a child. To the other men who stepped in, thank you for knowing what to do and more importantly, your willingness to do it. You so honored the bonds and duties of one generation for the next.

I had many fathers, and I love and cherish their memory. Happy Father's Day to each and every one of you.

Distributed by The Washington Post

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