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June 20, 2004
Happy Father's Day
It being Father's Day and all, I wanted to pay some sort of tribute to my own. Looking at our family from the outside, it might seem that the two of us have little in common. Especially when you consider the degree to which my dad dedicates his time to sports. My lord, if he's not playing them (and he's not letting his age keep him from that at all), he's watching them on television. It doesn't matter what it is. Baseball, football, basketball, tennis, golf, professional bull riding, hockey, you get the point. As long as it's competetive, he's loving it. Growing up, it was easy to see that my older brother was cut from a similar cloth. My poor father, each successive kid realized the law of diminishing returns...my brother was a superstar, good at any game he tried his hand at. Most notably basketball, but he could hold his own in any of them and make it look effortless. Me, I was good enough not to completely embarrass myself, though it seemed like it took a whole lot of hard work on my part to achieve even that. And my younger sister, well she was born without much athletic ability at all and has never really tried to disguise the fact.
My father is not all sports, though. He's an incredibly bright man, and spent his career working as an educator. Each of us kids were encouraged to think for ourselves and to be creative and to consider the learning process as something important. And it's easy to see his influence in our current lives. My brother is a high school teacher and coach, I'm a librarian and my sister works for a humanitarian organization.
But as I write this, it occurs to me that one obvious father-son bond I share with my father is right here, staring me in the face! My father is a big action adventure fan and I can remember sitting by his side as a wee boy soaking in James Bond movies. He was always game to talk superheroes with me, his all-time favorite being Superman. And he followed the trials and tribulations of Captain Easy, which we would discuss after my dad had some time to relax after reading the evening paper. I guess I assumed all dads read the funny pages and wanted to go over the story arcs with their boys. I still remember thinking he was crazy when he told me that Easy's pal Wash used to be the star of the strip--I mean, c'mon, that pip squeak couldn't handle himself in a fight. How on earth did he expect me to believe that?
So it is for my father that I present this Wash Tubbs strip from May 6, 1929, proving once and for all that my father was right on the money, and I was a fool to doubt him.
For those not in the know, this is the very first meeting of Wash and the man who would steal the show.
Posted by Thrillmer! at June 20, 2004 10:37 PM
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