Until the day he died, I always called him "Daddy." He was Walter Harry Ebert, born in Urbana in 1902 of parents who had emmigrated from Germany. His father, Joseph, was a machinist working for the Peoria & Eastern Railway, known as the Big Four. Daddy would take me out to the Roundhouse on the north side of town to watch the big turntables turning steam engines around. In our kitchen, he always used a knife "your grandfather made from a single piece of steel."
I never met my grandparents, and that knife is the only thing of theirs I own. Once when I was visiting my parents' graves, I wandered over to my grandparents' graves, where we'd often left flowers on Memorial Day. I realized consciously for the first time, although I must have been told, that my grandfather was named Joseph. My middle name.
What have I inherited from those Germans who came to the new land? A group of sayings, often repeated by my father: If the job is worth doing, it's worth doing right. A good woodsman respects his tools. They spoke German at home until the United States entered World War One. Then they never spoke it again. Earlier than that, he was taken out of the Lutheran school and sent to public school, "to learn to speak American." He spoke no German, apart from a few words.There is a story he told many times, always with great laughter. It was from Joseph. Before a man left Germany for America, the school master taught him to say "apple pie" and "coffee." When he got off the boat, this man was hungry, and went into a restaurant. "Apple pie," he said. The waiter asked, "Do you want anything on top? The man replied, "coffee!"
My father was raised in a two-story frame house with a big porch, on West Clark Street. His parents believed they couldn't conceive, and adopted a daughter, Maud. Then they had three more children: Hulda, Wanda, and Walter. Aunt Maud and Uncle Ben lived north of Champaign in a house made of tar paper, heated by a stove. This was not considered living in poverty, but simply their home. It was always comfortable and warm, and I loved to visit. Uncle Ben drove a heating oil truck, and would sometimes drive past our house and wave. Always with a cigar stuck in his mug.Hulda and Wanda remained at home. I spent hours with coloring books on their floor or at their kitchen table, and tiptoeing up and running down the scary staircase. They had an old ice box, and I got to put out the sign so the iceman could see from his wagon how much ice they needed. We sat around the kitchen table covered with oil cloth and ate beef and cabbage soup. Hulda contracted TB, and I heard, "She has to go live in the sanitarium up on Cunningham." This was spoken like a death sentence. She died, and the body was laid out in the living room. I was allowed to approach her, and regarded her solemnly.
I regret I never knew Wanda as well as I did my uncles and aunts on my mother's side. She worked most of her life as a saleswoman for the big G. C. Willis store in downtown Champaign, and we'd visit her there, my father always buying something. Everyone seemed to like her. The last time I saw her was in the 1970s, after she moved to a nursing home. My mother and I took her out to dinner. I enjoyed, and was a little surprised by, her warmth and humor. When I was a child she had seemed tall, spare and distant. "Your father's initials are still carved in the concrete on the curb in front of the old house," she told me. I went to look, and they were.
My father as a young man moved to West Palm Beach, Florida, and opened a florist shop with a man named Fairweather. "We delivered a lot of flowers to the Kennedys in their mansion," he said, when Jack was elected President. There was a photo of him, trim and natty, standing beneath palm trees with a cigarette in his fingers. They lost the shop in the Depression and he had to move home to live. He apprenticed as an electrician at McClellan Electric on Main Street in Urbana, and then "got on" at the University of Illinois, where he worked for the rest of his life.After the war, Bill and Betty Fairweather moved to Urbana, where Bill, the son of my father's partner in the florist business, would study psychology. He'd been a bomber pilot, and later became famous in his field. Night after night, the voices of Bill and Walter and drifted in from the front porch, as they talked late and smoked cigarettes. In the 1980s, the Fairweathers came up to visit. "Rog," he asked me, "did you ever wonder why a PhD candidate and an electrician would spend so much time talking? It was because your dad was the smartest man I ever met."
Growing up, I always found books in the house. Daddy's living room chair had a couple of bookcases behind it, including bestsellers like USA Confidential and matching volumes of Hugo, Maupassant, Chekhov, Twain and Poe. We took both Champaign-Urbana papers and the Chicago Daily News. He told me as soon as I learned to read that if I read Life magazine every week and the Reader's Digest every month, I'd grow up to be a well-informed man. Every night at dinner we listened to Edward P. Morgan and the News, "brought to you by the thirteen and a half million men and women of the AFL-CIO."
I was told, "the Democratic Party is the friend of the working man." He was a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and my mother told me, "Your father may have to go on strike." I pictured him consumed in flames and wept until it was all explained. To this day, I will not and cannot cross a picket line.Walter was 37 when he married, 58 when he died. Of his earlier life I knew little, but one Sunday during the Rose Bowl Game the phone rang, and it was an old girl friend of "Wally" from Florida, who told my mother she'd found his number from information. My mother handed him the phone. There was ice in her eyes. After the call finished, I was told to go back downstairs and watch the game.
The TV set in the early days was banished to the basement, because my mother didn't want it "cluttering up the living room." Half of the basement held my father's workbench, and the washer-wringer. The other half had been supplied with reclining aluminum deck chairs. Later there was room for my science fiction collection and a desk that represented the offices of the Ebert Stamp Company. Daddy and I faithfully watched Jack Benny, Herb Shriner on "Two for the Money," Omnibus and particularly the Lawrence Welk Show. Welk reminded him of his father. When something good came on, my father would shout, "Bub, you'd better see this." She was usually right upstairs at the kitchen table, reading the papers, listening to music on the radio. When she came down, she usually remained standing, as if she didn't want the TV set to get any ideas. Otherwise she could have my chair, and I'd sit cross-legged on the floor.
My father woke up about 5:30 every morning. I'd hear him downstairs, taking clinkers out of the furnace and shoveling in coal. Then he'd turn on Paul Gibson from WBBM from Chicago. Gibson had no particular politics; he just talked for two or three hours, usually nonstop. Daddy would make coffee and toast, almost burnt, and the aromas would fill the small house. I'd stumble in and he'd hand me a slice, slathered with clover honey from the University Farms. Gibson didn't play much music, but one day he played "The Wayward Wind" by Gogi Grant. I walked into the kitchen. "You like that?" my father asked, nodding. The song has haunted me ever after.He spent a good deal of time tinkering with the house heating. In Reader's Digest he read an article about the importance of humidity, and hung empty half-pound coffee cans by wires beneath the registers in every room. We'd fill them up with water from a coffee pot, poured down through the grating. "What if you don't hit the can, Daddy?" "It will all come up sooner or later." He'd hold his hand above a register "to see if the furnace is putting out." Every autumn there was the exciting adventure of cleaning the furnace pipes of a year of dust, "so it doesn't all blow back up and get your mother's curtains dirty." I would put on old jeans, a sweat shirt and swimming goggles, and crawl up the pipes with the extension hose on our Hoovermatic. By the time I grew too big for this task, we had "put in gas."
He took me to see my first movie, the Marx Brothers in "A Day at the Races." I had to stand to see the screen. Daddy laughing a lot. He had seen the real Marx Brothers in vaudeville at the Virginia in Champaign. We went to see "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," with me prepared to clap my hands over my eyes because Our Sunday Visitor said the movie was racy. Together we saw "Bwana Devil," the first movie made in 3-D. And we saw Danny Kaye in "Hans Christian Anderson." Oh, and Cleo Moore in something. She appeared at the screening, and I got her autograph. Those are the movies I remember us seeing together. My Aunt Martha took me to most of my movies.At Walter's lunch hour, he'd come home and fix himself something. His favorite meal was a peanut butter and jam sandwich and pickled herring in wine sauce. "The sweet and sour go against each other and make every bite fresh." When he cooked at dinner, rarely, it was usually hamburgers, pressed on a device of his own manufacture, or round steak, sprinkled with Accent and flour, pounded with the side of a saucer, and fried. He made chili with some bacon in it, and let it improve in the refrigerator overnight. He always drew onion-chopping duty, with his father's knife.
He's play catch with me in the driveway. He took me hunting in Brown Woods with my BB gun and we found a dead fox and brought it home to show my mother. He'd take me to Illinois home games at Memorial Stadium. "See those electrical pipes? I installed them." When the All-American J. C. Caroline broke away for a touchdown, he and everyone around us yelled so loudly it could be frightening. When it was very cold, he'd send me downstairs for ten-cent cans of hot chocolate, to hold in our pockets. In the cold air the smoke of his Luckies was sharp. Both my parents smoked. Everybody smoked. Ray Eliot, the legendary Illini coach, smoked on the sidelines during the games. After my father was told he had lung cancer, he switched to filter-tip Winstons.
Walter was a tall man for his generation, 6'2". I never saw him angry with anyone except my mother, and their arguments were usually about money: How much they were helping her family, and how much they were helping his. Sometimes my mother would lay on my bed at night, sobbing after a fight, but I pretended I was asleep. My stomach would hurt. I have never been able to process anger.They pushed me. I would go to the University and get an education. I wouldn't be an electrician like him. He refused to teach me a single thing about his work. "I was in the English Building today, and I saw those professors with their feet upon their desks, puffing on pipes and reading books. Boy, that's the job for you." When I was first in grade school and used a new word, they would laugh with delight and he'd say, "Boy, howdy!" When I won the radio speaking division of the Illinois High School Speech Contest in 1957, the state finals were in a room on campus in Gregory Hall. My Aunt Martha told me years later that he had hidden in a closet to listen to me.
I always worked on newspapers. Harold Holmes, the father of my best friend Hal, was an editor at The News-Gazette, and took us down to the paper. A linotype operator set my byline in lead, and I used a stamp pad to imprint everything with "By Roger Ebert." I was electrified. I wrote for the St. Mary's grade school paper. Nancy Smith and I were co-editors of the Urbana High School Echo. At Illinois, I published "Spectator," a liberal weekly, my freshman year, and then sold it and went over to The Daily Illini. But that was after my father's death.Harold Holmes asked me before my junior year in high school if I wanted to cover the Urbana Tigers for The News-Gazette. This caused a debate at the kitchen table. I was not yet 16. I would have to work until 1 or 2 a.m. two nights a week, and drive myself home. My mother said, "those newspapermen all drink, and they don't get paid anything." There was some truth in this. My father said: "If Harold thinks the boy can do the job, we'll always regret not giving him the chance." For a story I wrote in the autumn of my senior year, I won the Illinois Associated Press sportswriting contest. In September 1960, when my dad was in the hospital dying of cancer, I took him the framed certificate. It was the most important prize I ever won.
As a younger man, he drank. My mother determined to put an end to this. "She put your father through hell on earth," Aunt Martha told me. Advised by a family doctor, she added some substance like Antabuse to his coffee. When he had his next beer, it made him deathly ill: "He didn't get up off that Davenport for two days." This was before I was born, and I never saw him take a drink. When the old Flatiron Building in downtown Urbana burned, he took me down to witness the flames, and I saw tears in his eyes. It had been the home of the Urbana Elks Club. "Why are you crying, Daddy?" "I had some good times in that building."
We went for drives. We went to Westville, south of Danville, to eat Coney Island hot dogs made the same way he'd had them on West Palm Beach. We went up to Wings, north of Rantoul, to have Sunday dinner, and they brought a tray with kidney bean salad, cole slaw, celery sticks (stuffed with canned cheese), carrots, green onions, radishes, pickled peppers, candied watermelon rinds and quartered tomatoes. Every single time my father beheld this sight, he said exactly the same thing: "They fill you up before you even get your meal." Then he would glance at me, to signal that he knew he said it every time. That's how I gained a lifelong fondness for repeating certain phrases beyond the point of all reason. "For this relief, much thanks," from Dan Curley, via Hamlet. "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart," from John McHugh, via William Butler Yeats. "A wee drop of the dew," from Bob Zonka. "Irving! Brang 'em on!" from Billy Baxter. "Tip top." These and other phrases are not tics, they are rituals in the continuity of life.
We drove to Starved Rock State Park. Turkey Run State Park. The Great Smoky Mountains. Rockome Gardens (above), the big rock garden in Amish country down around Arthur, Illinois. These destinations I found interesting, the drives boring. I read books in the back seat. Sometime we'd drive with our neighbors Don and Ruth Wikoff and their son Gary, up to Mickleberry's Log Cabin on 95th Street in Chicago. This was a long drive in the years before the interstates. Sometimes we'd just drive up to Rantoul to see the Panama Limited go barreling through. "It must have been going 90 miles an hour," my father would say, glancing at me because he said exactly the same thing every single time, no matter how fast it was going. Then my mother would want to run into the Home Theater to get popcorn and Necco wafers, which we would share when, on our drive home, we parked at Illini Field, north of Urbana, to watch the planes land. My father's great crime in my eyes was that he didn't approve of a dog for me. "It will ruin the wall-to-wall carpets." I have already written about my dog Blackie and the time I was sure they lied to me about what happened to him. They told me while we were parked at Illini Field.
Daddy loved music, and as a member of the University staff he could let us into the balcony at Huff Gymnasium to "keep an eye on the lights," while we watched the orchestras of Harry James, Count Basie, Les Baxter, Stan Kenton, Les and Larry Elgart play for student dances. On his belt he carried a leather pouch with his smaller tools, and a key ring large enough for a prison warden. He needed to be able to get into his buildings at any time. On nights when a fierce thunderstorm would descend, the phone might ring. The lights on campus were out. I would already be awake, ready to get into his maroon 1950 Plymouth for the drive across the dark campus to the University Power Plant. We would plunge into the darkness, he would adjust something, and tell me to stand by the door. Then he would throw a switch and the campus lights would all spring on. We would drive home through the lighted streets.The University was smaller then, and so was Champaign-Urbana. We went to a cemetery to feed the swans. To the Atkinson Monument Company to pick out pieces of discarded marble for his rock garden. To every dairy that had an ice cream counter. He scouted out little restaurants. There was a place without even a name up by the Big Four shops, where the train men ate. They served breaded perch. There was the Huddle House on University Avenue, which had a counter with perhaps 15 stools, at the front of an enormous building with no apparent purpose. Every time we went there, he speculated that the Huddle House was a front for Russian spies. He liked the Race Inn on Race Street, where you got all the fried smelts you could eat on Fridays. And Mel Root's on Main Street. You know how I joke about movies with a cafe where everybody in town comes, and they all know one another? Mel Root's was that place in Urbana.
I wonder what he was really thinking about his life. He married a beautiful woman, and I believe they loved one another. Whatever had happened in West Palm Beach, stayed in West Palm Beach. He married in his late 30s, held a good-paying job, owned his own home on a corner lot. He debated politics with my Republican uncle Everett Stumm, was militantly pro-union, worried me with his depression when Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson the second time. He never said so, but I got the notion the Republicans were not the party of the working man. He read all the time. In another generation, he would surely have gone to the university and read books with his feet up on the desk, so he wanted me to do that for him. Sometimes I resented him, as when blinded by summer sweat working on the lawn when he repeated, "If the job's worth doing, it's worth doing well." He thought rugs were more important than dogs. Did I know how much I loved him? I do now.
In the spring of 1960 I announced that I didn't want to go to Illinois, I wanted to go to Harvard, like Jack Kennedy and Thomas Wolfe. This was on a warm day, the screen door open in the living room. "Boy, there's no money to send you to Harvard," he said. "But I have my own job," I said. To my astonishment he began to cry. Then I learned what my mother already knew, that a month earlier he had taken the train to Chicago and consulted a specialist who told him he had lung cancer.Surgery was at Cole Hospital. I waited in the small rose garden, my mother inside. The surgeon closed up his chest and told us he might live two years at the most. He came home. He worked for a few weeks, then took sick leave. He read. Harry Golden, the North Carolina liberal Jew, had a new book out, and he loved Harry Golden. He never missed Lawrence Welk. I was busy pledging a fraternity, dating, working for The News-Gazette, publishing my science fiction fanzine. I would sit in the living room or the basement and read with him or watch TV. He told me he was doing fine. Lighting up a Winston. I saw my mother's eyes, but we didn't speak of the unthinkable. He went back to the hospital, and I brought his Harry Golden book over for him.
That day I saw something I am so grateful to have seen. He sat up on the edge of his bed. "Hold me, Bub," he said. "It hurts so much." She took him in her arms. "Oh, Wally," she said, "I love you so much."
Gogi Grant, when she was nearly 80, singing "The Way Wayward Wind."
Roger: You are one hell of a writer. Very nice piece. And, then, to cap it off with John Prine...holy cow.
(I believe that "my old man" song was written by your Chicago boy, Steve Goodman.)
Daniel Day-Lewis could play him in the biopic.
I have tears in my eyes. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for sharing. My dad is receiving hospice services now, so this remembrance means a lot.
What a beautiful story of a wonderful, and conflicted, relationship. I'll simply say thank you.
Darn it, Roger, you made me cry again.
I'm sitting here at my desk in the new Agriculture (ACES) Library and I can imagine the places that you are talking about, and here your dad's voice (much like my grandfather's voice...Grandpa worked for the Illinois Central out of Clinton.
The sun is setting over the power plant and the undergrads are getting ready for spring break.
Bless you, sir...
Was hoping you'd do an article such as this. First thoughts went to Studs Terkel. Been reading some of his old stuff again. Only person I guess who I've really never stopped reading. He'd liked this one. Then "The Wayward Wind." Gogi Grant. Nice tune. Holds up well, as you would say...and do.
youtube.com/watch?v=uSPLSo3U46Q
You've written a wonderful appreciation of your father, Roger. I'm sure if heaven exists, he would be looking down on you with a big smile on his face, immensely proud of what you have done with your life since he died.
I do have a question about something in your entry. I'm confused about something in the following paragraph:
My father as a young man moved to West Palm Beach, Florida, and opened a florist shop with a man named Fairweather. "We delivered a lot of flowers to the Kennedys in their mansion," he said, when Jack was elected President. There was a photo of him, trim and natty, standing beneath palm trees with a cigarette in his fingers. They lost the shop in the Depression and he had to move home to live. He apprenticed as an electrician at McClellan Electric on Main Street in Urbana, and then "got on" at the University of Illinois, where he worked for the rest of his life.
How was the first bold part possible if the second bold part happened too?
Well, you certainly know how to end a piece. Thank you again for the weekly writing lesson.
German, eh? In the early, early '80s, I was editing your come-by-wire reviews, and the Features editor absolutely insisted Ebert was pronounced "Ey-Bear." No, says I, on his TV show he pretty much says "Ee-Bert."
She came over and shook her finger in my face. "Then he's wrong, wrong, wrong!"
Ebert: I think in French it rhymes with Aybear, and in German, maybe Aybeart. Someone will correct me. All the American Eberts I know pronounce it my way. It's not an uncommon name.
What a touching memoir about your Daddy. I wish I knew as much about my Dad, although his life was not nearly as interesting: he lived most of his life within ten miles of where he was born.
Thank you,
--Jim
Roger-
As my own Dad battles cancer of the liver and bladder, along with stage one emphysema, I took him out for a movie last Friday- Avatar 3D. All along I got the feeling that this was one of those cinematic moments that he "had to see" before he died.
You have the pleasure of having distance, much distance, from that time that your father died. I wonder if you were to write about him in 1962, if you'd wax of him so fondly, or if you might be upset that he took such bad care of himself.
Last week, my Dad lit up a cigarette and said, "I need a 'cancer stick.'" It wasn't funny.
I hope that in 35 years, when I'm seventy, I can remember my Dad so fondly.
DR
Thank you so much for that beautiful touching story. I was lucky too, to have had a wonderful parent. She also died of lung cancer, and I was the one who hugged her.
On a trip to Germany last year, 2 things tipped me up about your heritage, the first is the name of one of Berlin's main avenues (Ebertsrasse), the second was a guy in the airport, about your age, who could have been your twin brother (unfortunately, a very stiff neck on that day as well as the fear of antagonizing somebody whose language I didn't understand, prevented me from taking his picture).
Wonderful story, one ends up feeling we knew your Dad. To my taste, these are the blogs where you excel the most ROGER (My apologies, in my country you don't call people by their first name until they allow you to do so, on the other hand, in the US you call your presidents Jimmy, Bill, etc., which I dont' find easy to understand).
Such a beautiful, touching and timely entry. My own father passed away seven years ago, and I've been missing him a lot lately.
I like the John Prine video as well. Here's one you might like - John McDermott, singing another song called The Old Man - different from John Prine's, but very touching indeed. (The hat and cane he's holding belonged to his own father.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNL_wGZgV5Q
What wonderful memories! I lost my father at 13 (he was 41, juvenile diabetes complications) and I cherish every memory of him. This invoked so many of those memories. Thank you for sharing w/us. Take good care,
@tildatoo
What a great remembrance! I hope you will be putting some of your best posts in book format at some point. Even though we can read your blog online, there's something about the permanence of objects in physical form that just isn't there for things in virtual form only.
Thanks for sharing. :-)
Here's my favorite Dad song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r594FOieO7U
You sure know how to jerk a tear, don't you, Ebert? Or, maybe a gallon. What a sweet and lovely reminiscence. Maybe you ought to write for a living.
If my whole life I end up accomplishing nothing of consequence, but am able to successfully be as good a father as yours was, I'd have done my job on Earth. Thank you for another fantastic read.
When my grandfather passed away, my father told me something that was inconceivable at the time, "I think about him everyday and I know I'll never get over it."
Since my father passed away, not a day goes by that I don't think of him and I find myself missing him more than I thought. Our family hadn't been particularly close. He had an adversarial relationship with his father, and ours sometimes became a battle of wills. You don't understand this until you loose your father..and when you do, you find you have joined the saddest brotherhood of men.
But it's a strange thing, Fathers and Sons. Our paths goes from worship, to conflict and with luck understanding. I was lucky enough to have that understanding...he knew what kind of man I was and I had accepted him, warts and all.
Eventually, no matter how far we run, or how much time past-we are a reflections of our fathers effects until the day we die.
Thank you so much for this Roger, I also lost my father my freshman year at Illinois and while I'm a generation behind you this piece captured the emotions of love, nostalgia, and happiness perfectly.
Brian
Oh my god, Roger, you move me to tears. Your writing is so real and beautiful.
What a beautiful post. The minutia of life is often the least recorded, but when I remember the people in my life that matter most these are the details that always come back to me.
And as a side note, I love the television arrangement in your house when you were growing up. For most of my childhood we didn't have a tv (and I'm 35, so it was definitely not the norm then) and I'm convinced it's why we spent so much time reading.
Moving blog entry. It is amazing the things we remember back to our child hood. I think of the songs my family listened to growing up. In fact reading this article, mid-way through, I fired up iTunes to listen to some old Hank Williams which was my father's music of choice.
What a tribute. I wish I could write something as beautiful for my father.
Roger,
Every man should know something about his father. I am lucky enough to have a great relationship with my father and so, it seems, did you. I owe much of who I am to my father. It seems that it's our passions much more than our mere interests that make us who we are. My passions I learned from my father. It's great to learn about your father and where he came from and how he, whether he knew it or not, shaped the man you became. I hope that others who read this try to find out about those people who shaped who they are, whether it's their father, mother, sister, brother, or what have you. As much as we humans would like to think that we are our own, we are not.
My god. I understand the sadness and pride you feel for your father. Who couldn't? I also understand your memories seem to be those of an incredibly fortunate man. These stories you commit to words aren't merely nostalgia. They are the fabric of a wonderful life. Thank you for putting it out there for us to read.
Ebert, for the millionth time it seems you've moved me to tears, moved me to want to take up the pen again and start writing myself- (my background is in theatre and creative writing.) It's an honor to read your blog on a weekly basis, to feel as though I know you if only in part, through the intelligent, fascinating glimpses of reality you allow us to see.
From all of your fans, thank you for this gem. Can I ask how it is that you possibly remember so many details, and with such clarity? I have a pretty good memory, but to "hear" you speak it's as though you're writing everything down fresh as it happens! I've never met anyone with a memory this colorfully specific or accurate!
This is beautiful Roger, your father sounds like a very special man!
Roger,
I have taken pleasure in reading your movie reviews for decades. However, its these pieces that will likely stay with me forever.
Thank you for sharing that with us.
I lost my mom to cancer in 2001, three months before my first son was born. Last week I was in the check out line at Wal-Mart, and the cashier was conversing with the customer ahead of me about her own bout with cancer. The cahsier had recently finished her final rounds of chemo and was pronounced clean by her oncologist.
I'm normaly shy around strangers, but this time I felt compelled to speak up.
"Congratulations," I said to her as she began to scan my items. "I like to hear stories about people who kicked cancer's ass."
She smiled and thanked me. We chatted a little bit. We didn't get into the reasons why I hate the disease. Speaking of those lost is not necessary when faced with a survivor. We both knew why I felt the way I did.
I saw in her the joy of life, someone who was truly grateful to have a second chance.
I saw something even more powerful when you were on Oprah recently. My wife and I watched with our kids. We had to explain to them that the tears in our eyes as we listened to your words were tears of joy; not just at your survival, but at the heightened perspective on life that you gained, and that you were able to share with the rest of us.
Thank you.
I want to see more pictures of you as a child
Great tribute. The older I get the more I appreciate having a good Daddy. My father smoked Parliment cigarettes. Then Winston. He called them cancer sticks. And continued smoking while on oxygen. But he was a good Daddy. He took care of his wife and babies. I thought a good Daddy was the norm and everyone had one, until I grew up.
I called my mother and father after I read this, and promised I was going to fly back home in May for my father's birthday. Eight weeks even feels to long now. Thank you for always sharing personal stories, sweet and sad, with us like this, it consistently resonates and moves me. My condolences for the loss of your father, he does sound like a wonderful man.
I've always considered you sort of a naive softie; now I know why. When you are raised by decent, honest and loving people it's hard to see people as other than decent, honest and loving. I also come by German ancestry by way of my father. "If the job is worth doing, it's worth doing right" was also a hallmark of my upbringing. The varient in my house was "A real craftsman respects his tools." As an adult, I try to do the best job I can and tell the truth whenever possible. Both qualities have bolstered my reputation and reined in my ambition. I am not as rich as I could have be, or as successful. But when I go to bed each night, I can sleep peacefully.
The relative scarcity of parents like yours and mine, who set examples worth following, is a national tragedy from which all our other problems derive. Glenn Beck, after all, grew up with an alcoholic mother who committed suicide and lapsed into alcoholism himself in the aftermath. It's got to be a lot harder to trust anybody when that's what you have as a reference point.
Wonderful entry, Roger.
Did you and your father ever discuss the movies you saw together? Did you ever enthusiastically debate films with him as you one day would with Siskel and Roeper?
Ian Dury and the Blockheads - My Old Man
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIs_YRaOXzA
Very nice, Roger.
My mother told me, late in her life, that "you never forget your parents; they are always with you." Since my parents died, I have understood the truth of this. They are always with me, despite the fact that my relationship with both of them left a lot to be desired.
You are writing better than anyone in America. You're a gift to us all. Thanks.
What a well-writen, interesting and very moving piece. Thank you for sharing all these memories and feelings.
Reading it, some questions occured to me. I must admit, they are quite personal and probably silly, but I will ask them any way.
My Fair Lady was released in 1964. Hepburn played the flower girl and the movie was flower-heavy in general. Did that evoke any emotional reaction from you? Of course, it has been almost fifty years since that time.
While watching The White Ribbon, were you thinking that, if you grandparents had stayed in Germany, your father might have been one of those kids?
They really seem silly to me even more right now but I couldn't control my curiousity. I hope you won't find them unforgivably tactless.
Ebert: Yes, and I ask myself, if I had been born in Germany at that time, would I have been a Nazi? I would have had a different education and upbringing. Who can know? Early education is so important. That's why I'm appalled by the plan to rewrite Texas schoolbooks to conform to the notions of a narrow extreme.
This is so beautiful I'm in tears. Thank you, Roger. It's funny: "The Wayward Wind" was already an oldie the first time I heard it, but it haunts me, too.
Hoopeston is North of Danville, not south of it.
Ebert: OMG! I was thinking of Westville!
Dear Mr. Ebert:
I guess all parents commit crimes against their children--big and small. I am glad that growing up, I had pets, from hamsters to dogs--although I'm not so happy about their fates. I would as an adult have rabbits and then dogs and even live with cats. Here's the link to your entry about Blackie.
My father, too, died and left my mother widowed. It was a sad and long journey to death for him and in another time, I would have been a goth girl--very dark and contemplating death for several years until my father did die, when my peers were thinking more about fashion, music and the opposite sex.
When my father knew he was dying, we happened to see a hamster who was obviously seriously ill at the local store. We purchased it and my father built a wonderful little house for it. I think the tiny hutch may have had a thatched roof. Hamsters do not live long and this one died very soon after we purchased it. However, we didn't complain about it. It was my older sister who took the hamster as her own pet.
In many ways, I feel my father was demonstrating to us how one wants to die and I'm not sure he was able to have that when he did die and there is a lingering sense of bitterness in our extended family about that.
In any case, this was a lovely essay about a father and son and a way of life and loving. It made me think of my father. Thank you so much for writing it.
Such an amazing piece, you are a touching writer with a gift for displaying emotion in all that you write. Reading this I think that someone really needs to shift through various posts here and make a memoir out of your various personal and political writings here.
That was very beautiful. Thank you for sharing this. We never really realize how much we love someone until it hits us how much that person had an effect on the way we live our life.
How lucky you were, Roger, and beautifully written, as always. I loved the line "When she came down, she usually remained standing, as if she didn't want the TV set to get any ideas."
One of the things I love about your writing is that you display informed empathy. You recognize that the world is different today - you don't wonder, for instance, why your dad didn't go to university, you know he couldn't have gone - but you don't go on about how "sad" it is that he didn't have the chance. You have empathy but you don't drown in maudlin sympathy, and especially not simply to prove a point about your own good luck or to make yourself feel good.
I write this because contempt masquerading as sympathy seems to be pervading the Internet these days. A blogger posts about how seeing a disabled man clumsily walk down the street helps him feel better about his own life, because at least he isn't like that. A forum user expresses the most fulsome sympathy when discussing an infant with a facial defect, only in the next sentence to suggest that the child be killed. Both of these guys probably think they're being sympathetic, but in both cases they're actually showing an immense amount of contempt for a person they don't even know. One wonders how they would feel if the tables were turned on them.
I think my father, Gary Jordan, went to High School with you. He was in the class of 1964. He lived over on East Main. His parents ran Chief Studio on West University across from the baseball field (Beckman Institute is there now).
My father always tells stories about all the same places you do in your excellent blog. I've been trying to get him to write a comment here on your blog for 2 years.
My uncle Floyd Jordan died at the TB sanitarium on Cunningham.
My grandfather (Wayne Jordan) lived at the TB Sanitarium on Cunningham from age 3 to age 13 (in the mid 1920's late 1930's.) The TB settled into his hip joint and ate it away. He was (according to his own words) a "cripple for life." He watched so many people die there alongside him and listened to amputations. What a terrible childhood!! When he got out he quickly caught up in school and became an entrepreneur. My grandfather was also a big Kennedy Democrat.
My grandma Twila Jordan was a waitress and later cook at several area restaurants: Steak 'n Shake on Green St. (in the 1940's before you would remember) and later (1950's) The Beacon, The Dixie, and Bidwell's.
Ironically, my other grandfather, Lawrence Kirby, was in the IBEW like your dad (he even taught apprenticeship classes), but has always been a Republican. I've never asked my Grampa if he knew your dad. He's still living near Urbana. I'll ask him next time I can.
A good friend of both my Grandfather's was Martin Harris. He worked with my Grandpa Kirby at the City of Champaign for many years. Martin Harris was a kind, gentle man. He had been a survivor of the Bataan Death March. I've seen before and after pictures. They resembled Holocaust pictures. Flesh and Bones. I knew Martin Harris when I was a child, he was really something. I was too young to thank him for serving our country the way he did. When he died, I inherited his 3 piece suit. He knew both my parents through their father's and introduced them.
I had minor surgery at Cole Hospital as a small child. Since then Cole Hospital has been converted into The Carle Pavilion, a mental health center.
I remember anything else, I'll share it with you.
Ebert: I well remember your dad. And I remember Bidwell's. As Allen Sherman sang, "Tear down the Alma Mater, tear down Lincoln Hall, but please, boys, don't tear down Bidwell's!"
My wife's dad died two years ago next month. They were very close, and I'm learning a lot about grief by watching her. Your post is a great example of one of the most interesting and terrible things about grief: it's not linear; it doesn't gradually fade out like the lines of a curve merging with the x-axis. It spurts up and attacks then disappears.
Your 50-year-old grief seems as fresh as my wife's two-year-old loss. I'm constantly amazed at how some days she's right as rain and other days a smell or song or taste or some spark from another world brings a new and fresh torrent of pain for her.
She's decided that some days are just bad days. And maybe the only thing to do on those days is relish in the memories and stories and songs and smells . . .
All that to say "Thank you." She and I just enjoyed reading through your post and listening to John Prine and having a great bad day together with you.
Thanks for this piece. It really came home to me. My dad had a heart attack when I was twelve. It frightened us all -- my mom, my little brother and me. Maybe it was this grave event that gave us all an urgent cue to cherish our time together. Now 28 years later, my dad is in his mid-80s, and we talk every day. He's wonderful, and I'm lucky enough to know it while I can still tell him.
Roger,
It's stories like these that reinforce my belief that I should be spending as much time as possible with my father, who is now retired and in good health. We are fortunate to share the hobby of live steam model railroading. I feel very lucky to have him.
A lot of your story is distinctly and wonderfully American. My father's side of the family also comes from German (and English) immigrants, farmers from Ohio and now a whole family of brilliant engineers. My grandfather also died of his lifestyle, three squares and a pipe every day. but he also helped develop the first hard drive along the way, at IBM. My father lives in the same ranch style tract house the family bought new in 1963, after moving back in to take care of my grandmother until she passed away a few years ago. Both my father and my grandfather worked at the same employer for nearly their entire working career. Those days are now gone, and it seems as if the entire western world is sliding slowly downwards since that time of remarkable stability and freedom.
A quick note about your railroad: The day after the Peoria and Eastern was incorporated, it acquired the right of way of the Ohio, Indiana and Western, and on the same day turned the operation over to the big four, otherwise known as the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway. The P&E name and company was likely just a temporary front for some kind of large, complicated transaction between businessmen. I'm glad you got to see the roundhouse and the operation there.
take care,
--Mike
I left my parents' hometown when I was 17, to go to the university. At the time, for whatever reason, but mostly because I was an adolescent, I thought it was not only OK, but necessary for me to go live in another city. That was 25 years ago and, except for two brief periods of a few months, I have never returned. However, I speak with my parents every week on the phone. To my mom, I give the latest news on how my children are doing, how my 5 year old son basically is teaching himself how to read and write and how he and his little sister play new games all the time. Before I had children, we would talk about my friends and my relatives. With my dad, for years we talked about work and the weather. But for some years now, we found this pattern of conversation where we talk, every sunday, about the weather, baseball and, lastly, movies. He will ask me what's good and I will recommend something, or we will discuss a movie we both have seen recently. He reads his hometown's local film critic (a very good friend of mine) every week on the paper and we comment on my friend's opinions. When I was younger, we used to argue on the phone and in person from time to time. I can't remember the last time dad and I argued or were angry at each other. Most of the time, when I watch a movie or a baseball game, I begin to enjoy beforehand the conversation he and I will have about it. In his most recent visit, I had the great fortune to go see with him Inglourious Basterds and we basically laughed our asses off. And then last week we were talking over the phone about how much we had enjoyed watching Christoph Wlatz win and accept his Oscar. Dad is 72 now and I can only hope these talks will continue for several more years. There are still plenty of great films to discuss, plenty of ball games to watch.
Thanks for this piece, Roger.
I think you're doing the best writing of your life now, Roger. Your remembrances of these small moments with your father are the stuff of life. As I read this memoir, I smiled more than I cried. I hope you did too.
*laugh* When you write about yourself, you remind me that nearly any two random people probably share something in common. But at the same time, the opposite experiences can be just as enriching.
My dad's an electrician too. From the age of six onwards, he took me to work with him on school holidays and frequently in the summers. But he taught me everything. I still have the Klein tool bag he bought me when I was 7 or 8. By junior high, I had my own light key. (I didn't leave my classmates half-dressed in the dark locker room *too* often.) Learning all the big stuff led me to the small stuff, and just as personal computers became cheap and plentiful.
Where would you be if you'd been raised in Germany? Where would you be if your dad had taught you his work? But where would I be if mine hadn't taught me his? Would I still have spent four years shuttling between Everitt Lab and DCL earning a EE degree? Who can say? Where those choices led us turned out to be good places, didn't they?
Hey Ebert! This piece is way too well-written! It is evocative, heart-wrenching and honest. It made me tear-up and smile at the same time. I mean really, don't you think you should just stick to reviewing movies?
Reading your beautiful tribute to your Daddy brought tears to my eyes. With all the modern technology, it's much easier living half way round the world but there is nothing like being in the same room as the ones we love. I miss the way my dad always smells like onions and the funny way he sneezes.
One of my first memories is seeing The Sound Of Music and how emotional he was watching the film. At the time, as a child of five, I couldn't understand why my father cried. When I saw it with my own kids, I finally understood.
Did you and your father ever discuss the movies you saw together? Did you ever enthusiastically debate films with him as you one day would with Siskel and Roeper?
One of your best and most powerful pieces. You come from great stock. Did your mom live to see you achieve fame?
What a great and moving story. Thank you for sharing it.
I've heard a variation of that apple pie and coffee joke.
A man, who spoke not a word of English, came to America and got a job at the same factory his brother worked at. The job did not require him to speak English, but ordering lunch did, so the brother told the man to get in line at the cafeteria and when the person behind the counter talks to him, say "apple pie and coffee."
The first day at lunch, the man approached the server and was asked, "What would you like?" He said, "apple pie and coffee" and was given what he asked for.
A few weeks went by and when asked how he enjoyed the job, the man said he was tired of eating apple pie and coffee. His brother told him that the next time he goes to the cafeteria and the person behind the counter talks to him, say "American cheese sandwich and tea."
The next day at lunch, the man approached the server and was asked "What would you like?" He said "American cheese sandwich and tea." The person behind the counter smiled at seeing the man finally getting something different and said, "Great! Would you like that on white bread or whole wheat?"
The man looked at him for a few seconds and replied, "apple pie and coffee".
Timing is everything. It's been a bad week. We found out that my mother, who has survived two separate lung cancers and lymphoma, has nodules on her lungs; we're waiting for the biopsy results.
I made it through your piece, thinking about you and your family, and me and my family. And I was doing OK with all of it.
Until I saw the clip of Prine singing Goodman. And then I cried like a baby. Thanks for sharing your memories, and for helping me remember mine.
There was a golf cart driven into the water in my movie "Falling Down". Wasn't suppose to be funny though.
How lovely. Thank God for good fathers. I'm off to call my daddy now.
Another beautiful piece, Roger. Thank you for sharing it with us. It reminds me of my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, who died more than a year ago. He was the patriarch of my family. Things have not been the same since.
His favorite joke in the entire world was a variation of the "apple pie and coffee" routine your father told.
In this version, a man comes to the United States knowing how to say "apple pie and coffee." So every day he went into a diner and that's what he ordered. One day, a friend asks him why he always orders the same thing and suggests he orders an egg.
The man complies, ordering an egg. The waiter looks at him and asks, "how do you want your egg?" The man, confused as ever, waves his hand in disgust and says, "Ach! Apple pie and coffee!"
Nobody really thought this joke was funny, but it cracked him up. It was wonderful to relive it through your father.
Thank you again!
Jared Diamond
I thoroughly enjoyed this post Roger.
I could care less about the ramblings of Beck and his ilk,but this post concerning your "Daddy" was a tear jerker and brought back a flood of memories of mine,and how my Dad forged a big part of who I am all these adult years.(both in positive and maybe even negative ways).
I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree saying,is quite correct.
The Wayward Wind had a similar affect on myself.
Because of my Dad, I have passion for the arts and sports,especially hockey,baseball, and great operatic arias,tenors and sopranos.
Because of my Dad, I have a work ethic.
There is much I could say, but a simple 'thank you' Roger,for evoking some fine memories.
My parents eventually divorced when I was in my late twenties, and it was a shattering event.
My Dad died at sixty two,and as I enter my sixty sixth year on earth, I do hope my kids (seven),will look back on their Dad after I leave this earth, with love in their hearts, and fond memories.
I tried my best.
Roger, your writing moves me in ways I cannot articulate. I hear your voice as I read along, and I wish to thank you from the bottom of my heart for
sharing. Please keep writing, dear. Your words often bring me to tears and teach me so much about life and the cinema. I love you so.
I just wanted to say thank you for sharing your gift of writing with all of us mere mortals. I'm sure your father would be proud. A beautiful, heartfelt, and inspiring post!
I'll just add my extreme admiration for this entry in your journal, as well as for the journal as a whole. I feel compelled to suggest to the Library of America that this work be collected in however many volumes it would take. You're as much a national treasure as Mark Twain or any of the others.
But as a side note, I have to say that I very much appreciate the little videos you so often link to. They're wonderful.
As you wrote about cancer and alcoholism, regret and loss--and love and hope--I was reminded of Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus," in which he considers Oedipus, from whom "a tremendous remark rings out: 'Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.'" It's absurd and heroic, but that's good, because "there is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night." Thanks for rolling the rock one more time.
Very moving Roger. This may be your best piece to date.
My father's father also was an immigrant from Germany. And my dad, too, had his catch phrases, which always began, "As my father used to say...":
My father didn't finish college. He was a traveling salesman who sold sporting goods to retailers in many states. He was the president of or advisor to everything worthwhile in our community. And he told everyone each time one of his two sons accomplished something. He smoked, and he died of cancer in 1983, at 65. He lives in his sons, both of whom have Ph.D.s and put up their feet from time to time, but who also love to travel in their work, just as he did. A bit of him lives in his grandchildren, most of whom he never had the joy of loving.
Sir,
thank you for sharing.Very moving and poignant stuff. I am going to call my parents today.
I was doing fine until that last paragraph and then the tears came. Powerful, amazing writing, Roger.
Mr. Ebert, your tribute is unutterably beautiful. I am seriously choked up. I think I'm going to go call my Dad tonight.
Roger,
Your blog entry is very moving. Now I need to call my dad.He loves Hugo too.
I'm reading you from France and I like your reviews about european novies and even American movies.
Roger,
Stunning. Beautiful. To tears you drove me.
Reminded me of a few years back when my own father visited India, the land of his father, after having divorced it emotionally decades earlier. He wrote a travelogue of the experience, and at times, spoke of his relationship with his long deceased parents. Of his father, he wrote, "As I begin to write this, I don't know if I loved my father, or if he loved me." But in revisiting moments as an adult that he experienced (and interpreted childishly) as a teenager, he understood his father anew. And realized how truly deep the well of love was for both of them. Fathers and sons, huh? Tragically, magically, beautiful.
I loved your description of your father pointing out the elements he installed on campus and encouraging you to attend college instead of following in his footsteps. It reminds me of the great scene in Breaking Away when Dave's dad walks him through the Indiana campus at night and talks about cutting the stones for the academic buildings and convincing Dave to pursue his education.
No words...
Hi Roger,
I greatly appreciated this post. It articulates what I feel for my own father, but would have difficulty expressing to him. He's been around my entire life, been a good Dad to me and my sisters. For some reason he’s always held a cloud of mystery for me.
His father died when he was 29, just two years older than I am. How he moved through it with a young wife and two small children without missing a beat I’ll never know. His only answer when asked was "I didn't have a choice". It’s only on rare occasions that he speaks about life before he met my Mother, and it took a long time for us to reach some sort of semblance of understanding of each other. I once had my late uncle pull me aside to tell me that my father too, was the smartest person he ever met.
Excellent. Music in language.
Through the notes I hear again my own father, now six years gone -- though not so much through the melody as more the harmony.
Hi Roger,
I greatly appreciated this post. It articulates what I feel for my own father, but would have difficulty expressing to him. He's been around my entire life, been a good Dad to me and my sisters. For some reason he’s always held a cloud of mystery for me.
His father died when he was 29, just two years older than I am. How he moved through it with a young wife and two small children without missing a beat I’ll never know. When asked he responded that "he didn't have a choice". It’s only on rare occasions that he speaks about life before he met my Mother, and it took a long time for us to reach some sort of semblance of understanding of each other. I once had my late uncle pull me aside to tell me that my father too, was the smartest person he ever met.
Dear Roger,
I've been reading this blog for roughly a year now, and this is the first time I've felt compelled to write. What a touching tribute to your father, I can only hope to write one as well-written about my Dad someday.
As an MA Journalism student in London (by way of Rochester, NY), every post I've read of yours helps to get me thinking of writing, which can be difficult when you're dealing with the outside pressures of new city, new culture, etc.
As an aside, I'm going to Bradford next week for their Widescreen Weekend Festival, where they show films in 70mm and Cinerama. Any tips for writing about festivals I should be aware of? Or just go and enjoy the experience?
You are an inspiration to those of us who love film and good writing. Please keep it up. Thanks.
My neighbor lady back home in Iowa lived through the Depression. She never talked about how terrible it was to want but taught me how to draw a scorecard to track a baseball game on the radio because it's what she had. Free entertainment and a way to know precisely what happened in a game. Many Friday nights were spent with her playing Monopoly on her childhood board so old there was no single box for the pieces and the board; they were separate. This board she kept until a Christmas gift replaced it with a new-fangled anniversary edition, and we bought her childhood board $1.75 at her yearly rummage sale. The board held no sentiment for her and was just a way to get $1.75 for something she no longer needed.
Why mention her? You wrote about getting by with what we'd now call less but they might not have called it that then. Watching trains and planes for the sake of watching them. Reading for the sake of being well informed and not for an assignment. Collecting discarded marble for a rock garden. Now we'd probably go to the Home Depot to buy the rocks on a Saturday, build the rock garden on Sunday and have it be a perfect part of the perfect yard until mood moves us to change it for more perfect perfection the next summer. While I don't know whether one way is "better" than the other it is remarkable how different they are.
Next Wednesday my father will get the results of a biopsy to be taken on Monday. There's a chance it's pancreatic cancer, which is terrifying in its virtual death sentence; yes, it can be beat but often is not. He's 54 and a lifelong smoker. For the past week, as we've waited to know what it could be and what they have to do to find out, I've been cataloging my turbulent relationship with him and how we've interacted both the good and the bad. At 34 I've had time to get to know him and have thought a lot about how we used to walk together and he'd tell stories about his life before being a husband and a father, about who he was when he was just him, and memories of those walks are what I'm pleased to have right now. All things must pass, but I'll be grateful if I've had as much time with him as I've had if things move swiftly. I would venture a guess you don’t think about the how short the time you had with him was, but I’d also venture a guess it would have been okay if it had been longer.
My failed marriage produced two boys, both still very young, and I'll have such a finite amount of time with them I wonder whether they'll be able to produce memories years from now such as you did today. Time is the only commodity worth worrying about and to know it is helpful when it will be short in supply.
Thanks for the post, Roger. It was good to read today. Not that your other posts aren't good to read because they all are, but this one fit well today. It was good to read about fathers and sons and pasts worth remembering today.
What a great article about your dad and family. Very touching.
Roger,
I always wanted to know about your father, so thanks for making this wonderful blog post.
Roger, you manage to move me to tears in most pieces you write. You have a gift to tell the story of your father. My dad was of the same generation, spent most of his life in the military and I did not know him nearly well enough. I envy your ability to share these memories with us all, in ways that are both personal and somehow shared. You have made us richer in the telling.
Appreciate you writing this, Mr. Ebert. Discovering that your father is also just a man, with all the faults and complexities of others is a benchmark in life, or at least it was for me.
My father died in 2004, a day after I got engaged to my wife. I got to tell him the news, for which I will always be as thankful as I am sad and angry that he wasn't there for my wedding, or to see me move back home and buy a house only a 20 minute drive from where he lived (after having been away at school and other jobs for 8 years). We could've had a lot more good times together, but I'm glad for what we had.
A beautiful post, Roger. Thank you for sharing it even if you made us all cry.
Actually, thank you *because* you made us all cry.
It is my fondest hope that when I am an old man, my children will still call me Daddy. Thanks, Roger
I remember your having mentioned he liked "Duck Soup" (inspiring me to see it) and the present memoir has given me a craving to watch that delectable film a second time.
Roger,
This is beautifully written. You are an inspiration. This blog is one of my favorite things to read. I'm sure your father knew how much you loved him and respected him. Family history is really the most fascinating history there is. Thank you so much for this.
This post will be the definition of my day. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
What a lovely remembrance. Thank you for sharing it with us.
Beautiful piece. Relocate the family to inner-city Chicago, add a dash of Irish and change the names a bit, and you could have told the story of my own great-grandparents. My dad still has his grandfather's toolbox, which was regularly sanded, oiled and varnished back when Great-Grandpa built balloon frame houses all over the Northwest Side back in the early 1900s. My brother and I grew up hearing all the repeated sayings and stories too, and we miss them as if we knew them ourselves, even though they all died 20+ years before we were born.
You know, my grandfather and his brother never spoke German at home (they were born just before WWI) but they remembered their parents reading the Arbeiter-Zeitung and my great-grandmother speaking German to her own family. Our last name is pure German but sounds & looks very Scandinavian. I often wonder if they were slow to correct people if they mistook it for Swedish or Norwegian. On the other hand, the Irish side of the family claims a murky ancestry going all the way back to the 1400s, and flusters at the sight of orange on St. Patrick's Day like they fought in the Uprising (neither of which is true).
And what is it about having a dog in the house on carpeting that upsets old Germans so?! The same exact thing happened to my father ;)
These nostalgic posts of yours are my favorite kind. I know I had a great childhood, I only wish I could remember it half as well as you. I remember the entry about Blackie and the dime set in your bbq set.
I can't get enough of this.
You really shouldn't make people cry at work :). I'll be 50 in August and still call my father Daddy. I love that you do too.
God, he would have been so proud of you-- with your feet up on your desk all these years, reading books and writing, writing, writing.
This is a beautiful tribute.
This reminds me of some of my own family stories - we were also a German-descended, Southern Illinois family, over around Alton along the Mississippi. My great-grandparents immigrated in the early 20th century. There were some hard times where people didn't want to do business with German immigrants, and the family had (still has) a very German name. So the German language and heritage were pretty quickly and completely abandoned, particularly once WWII started. But I've noticed there was and is quite a concentration of German-descended families in that region, though only the surnames really demonstrate it. And the occasional Oktoberfest.
I lost my grandfather a couple years ago. He was a terribly smart man, but he had to drop out of high school in 10th grade when his own father died, to support the family. He started out delivering milk in rural communities, and eventually opened his own small dairy and then a general store. They had a soda fountain that was the big center of social happenings in the very tiny community of Moro. His employees over the years loved him and a number of them showed up at his funeral. Grandpa was not a wealthy man, but he had his priorities and he did well enough to meet them. He had five children with my grandmother and insisted that they would be educated. Four of them earned college degrees, the last after high school became an entrepreneur much like Grandpa. My mother was the first in the family to graduate from college and then to earn an advanced degree. I spent a lot of time with Grandpa when I was young. The world was his classroom. He would read everything, but most of all he would talk to people, ask questions, see how things worked. He was my example of how intelligence, education, and knowledge are totally separate things. Particularly since in my own education I met plenty of people who weren't intelligent or knowledgable at all!
Thank you for sharing that, Roger. A beautiful post. Simply beautiful.
I'm a 36 year old dad of a 4 year old son...read this late last night, and had to go into my son's room and hug him in his sleep...I hope he someday appreciates the sacrifices I make for him the way you have your dad's...
Tim Russert would have loved this piece.
Don't you think we should all sit down and write our parents' stories? We owe it to our kids.
Roger, am I remebering correctly ? Is the barbecue grill the one which in a past post you wrote was built by your father and had a dime cemented the foundation ?
Ebert: The very same, faithful reader. From stone chips found at Atkinson's.
Just downloaded Gogi Grant from itunes. It's as devastating and beautiful as your piece. Thank you Roger.
I have been watching you since the early 80's when they aired your program on KCET. (Before you and Gene Siskel took off and got big). Interesting as we watch someone through the years we see them as a friend, very strange. But, you really did something with this writing about your father. I am left speechless. It is deeply thought provoking. Not only have you shared your thoughts on movies and the process of movie making (do you still hate the use of the word film?)but, now you have opened yourself a little and have allowed us to see the human side of Roger Ebert. Thank you.
I think that this may be the best thing that you've ever written.
My father shared your mother's belief that you weren't watching the television if you were standing in front of it with your arms crossed in disapproval.
After watching for a minute he would then say something like, "Obviously the man with the red hair was having an affair with the blond woman, and is the murderer." Then he'd leave the room. He was almost universally wrong in his drive-by plot summaries. I guess TV cliches weren't his thing.
As a child, I ran a small newspaper out of an old desk that I referred to as "my office." I had two subscribers.
Where I come from, what you call a workbench in the basement would be referred to as "the shop."
Thank you so much for this, Roger. As a father of two young boys, it only reiterates how important the responsibility of parenthood is and how my very being for them may be the most important influence on a person I will ever have.
It reminded me of some advice my old man gave me when he came to visit me after our first son was born. I had a baseball cap on backwards (as is the fashion nowdays). He simply said, "turn your hat around, better yet, don't where it all unless you're at a ballgame." I asked why and he said, "it connotes immaturity to your son." I laughed...he looked me dead in the eye and bluntly told me, "Son, they are going to soak in EVERY single thing you say and do..."
Roger,
That was lovely. Uplifting and heartbreaking at the same time. I am so glad that you have been sharing all of this with us. As much as I have loved your writing about movies, your writing about the world beyond movies is a rare gift.
Many thanks,
WJ
What a beautiful tribute to your father. Thank you for sharing him.
This is gorgeous. I can only hope my son will write of me with such fondness.
Again, just a gorgeous piece. Thanks for sharing it.
I love reading your histories of Urbana and central Illinois, you have a knack for reminding me of all of the good things I remember about growing up. JC Caroline for example, college star for you was my PE teacher at UHS. Such a nice guy. He'd bring in his diesel Mercedes and we'd tune it up in auto shop class.
Beautiful piece, Roger. Fathers are such problematic figures, aren't they?
My father was not a great or even good father when I was a child. He was and remains one of those men who likes the idea of children more than the reality. We spent little time together back then, even before my parents separated when I was eight (and divorced a year later).
His father was a butcher and owned a small grocery store in Malden, Massachusetts, of the type that carried everything a family and even small institutions like retirement homes needed to put dinner on the table. His entire store's contents wouldn't fill one aisle of my local Wegman's today, but it sufficed. Of course, those were the days before anyone knew what quinoa or bok choy or even fresh ginger looked like, when the choice of a dozen breakfast cereals already seemed too much, and the melon season lasted the month of August, maybe six weeks if one didn't expect too much sweetness from either the aroma or the flesh. I think, looking back, one would eat one of those early melons not because they were good, but because they helped you anticipate future pleasures. They were the trailers of the fruit world.
My father worked there -- I ran the register occasionally when I was a small boy -- and later became successful in real estate, but in-between he opened his own fresh produce market. The best memories I have of him from those years involve watching him build that market almost from the ground up; he had bought a building that previously had been a stone-cutting shop (for headstones and such) and gutted it. He puzzled over the arrangement for the display tables, and I somewhat precociously -- I might have just turned seven -- made a suggestion that he used.
After the store opened, I wanted to spend a day at work with him. We left the house before 4:00 a.m. to go to the wholesale Chelsea market. I had been once or twice before. The workers were mostly Italian and mostly "connected," as they say. They ran numbers games. They served coffee with a little liquor in it, because, after all, the market was cold in the morning. One, named "Spike," even gave me a lock-blade one time, a present that my mother quickly confiscated later that day. (My guess is that a guy named "Spike" had others.)
I watched as my father inspected the produce, rejected most, bargained for the rest. By 7:00 we were on our way back to the store. By 8:30 all the displays were full and gorgeous. The store was busy all day, and my father hardly stopped the whole time. It was about 9:00 that night before we were on our way home, an almost 18-hour workday. I was quiet in the truck; something was bothering me. "Dad," I said, "can I ask you something?"
"Sure, son."
"Would you mind very much if I didn't go into the produce business?" He chuckled, and assured me that that was fine with him.
When we are children, most of us -- the boys, anyway -- find our fathers intimidating, whether as heroes or as villains. Then comes a time when they become merely human to us, and perhaps it's natural to resent that earlier intimidation. If we are lucky, they live long enough that the gulf between us shrinks, and we can view them simply as men. My father, though second generation American, was from an immigrant culture. He chafed under the old world rules, quit school, and left home as soon as he could. Then, when he was home from the Coast Guard on leave, he was the only survivor of a boating accident that killed his younger brother and uncle (my grandfather's son and only brother) in front of the entire extended family. Never cursed with an excess of self-awareness or an instinct for reflection, those factors probably got in the way of his happiness and that of us who depended on him.
He's a much better man now than he was, and we're closer than we've ever been. Perhaps it's just what LaRochefoucauld said: "When our vices abandon us, we flatter ourselves that it is we who have abandoned them." But maybe some part of wisdom is more than just weariness. Maybe some small part of is is actual growth.
I'm sorry you lost your father so comparatively early, Roger. But imagine what he must have felt when he saw that framed sporswriting certificate. He wouldn't live to see the Pulitzer, but with a little imagination he could see a path that could lead to one. How proud he must have felt, and -- more important -- how content! His life was ending, but he could die knowing that his son's future was bright. No greater gift could be imagined by a man who had done his best to set his son on the right path.
Thanks for sharing, and I hope my own reminiscences do not seem self-indulgent.
I figured there must have been a good reason you attended the University of Illinois. If you had attended Harvard, do you think you would be wearing red pants right now?
I am in awe of your writing Mr Ebert another beautiful piece.
I hope you realise that all of us who read your work and comment feel a great deal of love and warmth towards you too.
Roger, your memories evoke such wonderful thoughts from my own childhood. I think we are all so similar, that even a modicum of love and security in our upbringing goes such a long way.
My maternal grandparents were also German, born in northern Wisconsin before the first World War. I never heard a word of German from their lips, but I'm sure they each spoke it as children. My mother told us that as a girl of about 7, she held the lantern for her father as he worked late into the night hammering in the floor for their house. He worked the day shift at the Ford plant making Model T's or A's. When we visited in the 60's, a lot of the homes around them were still tar paper houses and most of the men still worked at the plant. We went to the corner grocery for penny candy and to the ice cream parlor at night for Blue Moon ice cream. A special treat, only once each vacation, was a trip to the A&W drive in, where the mugs were hung on the car window. People visited each other's homes more back then, sitting out front on summer nights or playing 500 rummy on the dining table. I remember the smell of that house and the raspberry patch in the back and the bamboo fishing poles stacked in the basement.
It's the simple things that stay with you.
Thank you (so much, always!) for sharing your gifts and for your memories of your "old man" and your family ~ They do live on, don't they? Perhaps you might appreciate the following as much as I do, written by Christian de Quincey:
"From nothingness, from the play of molecules in evolution, passed through countless generations, tokens of vitality and form, my seed atoms came from you. Carried on a wave of chance, coincidence and hidden necessity, my portion of cosmic dust passed through you. I am awed by the miracle at each step that leads to my being. Yet here I am! And so, you are. I am the messenger of my father and mother, a conduit for your future, and through this you live in me. Not just the stuff of your genes, but the stuff of your dreams, too. For as I feel the years imprint their inevitable marks on my skin, I look more honestly and clearly into my soul and see you. I feel your fears and sorrows in my chest, caught in the intake of my breath, thumping in my heart; I feel your cherished joys pumping through my veins when I hear a favorite song, after I've run along my Skyline, when I look out on the waves, or face the sun and feel it warm my smile. If I'm quiet and still enough, I can feel you living through me. I recognize your spirit stirring memories, emotions and desires. Sometimes I look out on my world as if my eyes are windows to our common soul. I share this with you in gratitude and love. Always."
~Christian de Quincey
"From You, Through Me, To You: To My Parents, Donnie and Rita"
My dad's brand was Kools. Someone left a pack on top of the mailboxes of my apartment complex for a couple of days, and it brought back such memories, even though I'm almost certain that, as with your father, it's what killed him. (Heart attack, though, not cancer; he was 44.) I've never smoked, and it's probably because of Dad.
It was 1983. I was six. I have few and scattered memories of him, such as that he would never admit that we were going to Disneyland, which we did every year in late summer. Once, we were in the parking lot, and he was still trying to convince us that we were going to the convention center. (We told him he could, and we were going to Disneyland.) He'd ditch us for a bit and go use his E-ticket on Space Mountain.
A few years ago, for Christmas, his kid sister gave each of us a book of her collected memories of their childhood. It is one of my most prized possessions, and I cry every time I read it for the memories like yours that I will never have.
Heh. This was very moving and beautiful, but I hope the anecdote about you worrying about your father's depression after Adlai Stephenson lost wasn't TOO serious, because it kind of made me smile. It reminded me of my own overreaction to Bush's victory in 2004 (the first Presidential election I was old enough to vote in), spending the next several days in a bitter, disillusioned funk.
Regardless, you seem to have inherited your father's politics, and that might provide the closest thing to an answer you're likely to ever receive about whether you would have ended up a Nazi if you had been raised in 1930's Germany. Your father, standing for the party that 'champions the working man', does not sound like the type who would have had much love for Nazis, regardless of where he was born. We are just as much products of the parents who raise us as we are of the society we live in.
Kinda cool that both you and your father were born when Roosevelt was President.
This morning my 7-year-old son asked me if we could play catch this evening; I told him no, I had a conflict and would be home late. I just cancelled the conflict and hope to get home a little early. Thanks, Roger.
Roger, thank you. My father died suddenly when I was a kid. My younger brother doesn't really remember him at all, his death was so traumatic for us. But I can remember that he loved me, loved us all, even if I remember nothing else.
Can't thank you enough for sharing your life!
In Jim Valvano's famous ESPY's speech, he suggested that folks' lives would be richer if they'd laugh, think, and cry everyday. He might as well just have admonished us to read Roger Ebert.
Hi Roger,
Thank you again for such evocative writing. I feel blessed to share such initimate memories with such an esteemed Professor of Nostolgia (as I am one as well)! I'm sure my dad will read this soon, as we share a love for your thoughts and prose. Love you Dad!
Brilliant and moving. My father, recently dead, was born in 1917 to working class Irish immigrants, and our families seem to have moved in parallel.
In my media writing class, we were just assigned to do a story on a dead relative. I didn't know how to write it and then I read this. You wrote everything beautifully and I couldn't be more inspired.
Thank you for writing that sir.
I'm crying at work. This was beautiful; I didn't envision reading something like this, but now I realize I wouldn't have wanted to read anything else. Thank you so much for sharing.
I read that from start to finish. It was beautiful.
Great piece, Roger. My dad, Raymond Hicks, died last November after a long and terrible battle with alzheimer's and other ailments. It's another reason that your own courageous fight with your health problems has been an inspiration to me, since youve been something of a cinematic "father figure" of mine for decades. Thanks very much for that, my friend.
Roger,
This is such an incredibly moving and beautiful tribute. It appears that you were 'a father's boy' rather than the cliche momma's boy (/daddy's girl).
I read you often, and I have to ask if you have considered writing about your mother? If not, why not?
Roger,
I'm glad to know you're among the lucky who have fond memories of their father. I'm in that camp, and I think it affects everything from the flavor of one's ethics to one's fondness for father-son stories... it's certainly why I am overly enamored of Burton's Big Fish. Any other father-son movies that you could recommend?
Oh wow. Beautifully written.
Roger:
What a lovely, touching article. I group in the Chicago area during the 50's and 60's. So many of the details of your life with your father brought back vivid memories of my early years. I also had a father (he passed in 2000) who still looms large in my life. Thank you for sharing your memories.
An added bonus was your mentioning Paul Gibson. I haven't thought about him for decades. Even as a young boy, I loved listening to him. Again thank you.
You reminded me of two things.
1) In high school english (circa '75 - '79) i remember seeing a short indie film adaptation, actually shown on a film projector wheeled into the room, of Hemingways "My Old Man". I remember the warmth i got from the identification with the young boy and his feelings for his father in the film. (I was reaching the age when i would soon only shake hands with my father rather than hug him.) The story telling was somber, succinct and it made scared for it introduced me to the notion that he might not always be with me. I'll always remember this. (Wish i could find that film. IMDB doesn't have a listing. Only the awful, imo, remakes.)
2) The husband of one of my mothers friends had died. As we saw almost infrequently, i never felt my father had much feelings for either. I remember coming home in the afternoon from school. My father was in the kitchen with the lights and tv off. He was sitting at the kitchen table, slowly drinking a single glass of whiskey on the rocks from a newly opened Cutty Sark bottle. (While my father was not a teetotaler, and Jack Daniels or Wild Turkey was usually his preferred 'poison' if we went someplace, the Cutty Sark was recognizably out of place.) He told me that Cutty Sark had been Jim's drink... He was having one for him.
While i saw and remember him doing many things, and miss him now very much, before or since that time, i had never seen him perform such a solemn and genuine action.
I miss my daddy!
Next time i'm out, i'll have a drink toward you and your dad!
Thanks,
Russ
Mr. Ebert: my husband has been reading your blog, maybe since you started writing it, and he often tells me about it in the evenings. Today, he sent me the link because he quoted some of your sayings, and I asked him if you said why you were talking about your Daddy today.
Today is my Dad's birthay, and his name was also Walter. He used Joseph for his middle name because my mother was Catholic and today is St. Joseph's feast day, but he didn't really have a middle name, and was 35 when he finally got one. He was born in Belfast in 1919, and he, too, died at the age of 58, but of a heart attack that took us all very much by surpise. It was 33 years ago, but the older I become, the more recently he seems to have been here. I think my sons, nieces and nephews know their grandpa well because we repeat many funny things he had said, mostly to annoy my mother. (He was Irish after all.)
Best Regards.
What a wonderful essay, and as good an occasion as any to tell you how you are linked in my mind to my own father. I have been thinking about this ever since finding your blog a few months ago. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, my father said most everything we kids watched on TV was garbage. (It was.) There was very little he would watch, but he would sit with me and watch your show every week. He would also watch golf, documentaries on Channel 11, and liked The Muppet Show so much that he would unplug the TV and move it to the kitchen table so that we could watch it as we ate dinner on Saturday nights. He is about your age, and when younger resembled you somewhat. His politics differ from yours (he was generally Republican, except for being ferverently anti-war, having come of age in the Vietnam era), though he is moderating. He was an English major, and had a great love of reading. Now, dementia has stolen his ability to read or even follow a story that is new to him. But I believe that he would have enjoyed your stories very much. Thank you so much for sharing them.
What a wonderful essay, and as good an occasion as any to tell you how you are linked in my mind to my own father. I have been thinking about this ever since finding your blog a few months ago. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, my father said most everything we kids watched on TV was garbage. (It was.) There was very little he would watch, but he would sit with me and watch your show every week. He would also watch golf, documentaries on Channel 11, and liked The Muppet Show so much that he would unplug the TV and move it to the kitchen table so that we could watch it as we ate dinner on Saturday nights. He is about your age, and when younger resembled you somewhat. His politics differ from yours (he was generally Republican, except for being ferverently anti-war, having come of age in the Vietnam era), though he is moderating. He was an English major, and had a great love of reading. Now, dementia has stolen his ability to read or even follow a story that is new to him. But I believe that he would have enjoyed your stories very much. Thank you so much for sharing them.
All we have is the second we are in now and our memories. I loved reading the apple and coffee story. That is what I call weak humor, and its my favorite kind of humor. I could not stop laughing. Now I cannot stop crying about your love for your father and all your amazing memories of your father. Your mother telling your father that she loved him so much just finished me off here. In tears. We should all write about the people we love while we are still here. We should have to do that for the people we love. We never know how long we have left, and what a comfort it would be for the people left behind after we go. lol over your father going on strike, that was so funny. ie what you thought about it. Never know what a kid will think. Thanks for sharing your stories with us all. Have a great day, you had a rich life growing up. Carol
Mr. Ebert, now I miss your father in addition to my own. Thank you so much for sharing him--and your always amazing, churning mind and spectacular words--with us.
And to be frivolous for a second: thanks also for using the word (or repeating your aunt's word?) "davenport." My North Dakota-raised grandmother always said that, and it delighted me to hear it again!
Lovely, Roger. My own Chicago Dad, who learned English when he was five in his Humboldt Park nieghborhood, used to tell that apple pie and coffee joke. Thank you for introducing us to your Dad. It's nice to know that the intellectual omnivore didn't fall far from the tree.
Roger every day I miss my parents. Every single day! When my dad died at the age of 61 of cancer after a 6 year fight my mom was devastated. They were never apart and had a great love affair. She died of a broken heart 25 months later.
For months after his death she would say to me that one of the things she missed the most was the out and out laughter they would share about some silly thing. She said she just wanted to truly laugh again. I gave her your book I HATE HATE HATED THIS MOVIE. I had just finished it and some of the reviews made me laugh so hard I thought she might like it. The night before she died she called me to thank me and asked if I knew about your website (I did.) She had such a good laugh reading some of your reviews that she went online to read about other movies she liked or did not.
We talked about those things mothers and daughters chat about, my children, work etc. As she hung up she quoted her favorite part of your Caligula review and we gigled like naughty kids. I thought to myself at the time I should write a fan letter to you thanking you for making my mom smile.
She died the next day and I never did until now. Thanks for making my mom's and my last conversation one filled with laughter.
I love your autobiograhical stories. I love your use of language and the way you write. But...Can I pick one tiny point about your language here? I feel uncomfortable with the way you described your father's siblings. After all would you say "His parents gave birth to a daugter, Maud. Then they had three children."???? No, you'd say "three MORE children". Or here you might want to say that his parents adopted a daughter, Maud and "Then his mother gave birth to three other children" The other way it sounds like Maud was not as much their child, which I know isn't how you meant it.
I think you posted once that your father took you to see "Hans Christian Anderson" starring Danny Kaye, so you can add that to the list.
Roger, this piece reminded me of something. In your review of Frequency, you begin by noting that you have a tape recording of your father's voice that you haven't listened to since he died, and you related that to Frequency's fundamental wish-fulfilling theme of a grown son being able to hear his father's voice again. I was wondering if you think about that tape recording any differently today after you've been thinking a lot about records of your own voice.
It feels like your trusting your writing
more, i.e.,, that you let the words go
freely, and that leaves one feeling pleasure
at its flow.
Don't be afraid of any restraint at extremes.
I reckon your Beck piece got people thinking.
Ebert the provocateur!
For truth, and that is a compliment.
Cheers---Peter Pickles
A lovely remembrance that's striking in so many ways. The one that especially woke me up was the realization that your father had a life before he married and had a family. I've often wondered about my own father's life before his kids arrived on the scene (there are four of us) - the dreams he had and the ambitions he chased. I feel lucky because just as your father left Florida in Florida, my father left those things behind and spent the rest of his life on his children and wife - for which I am profoundly grateful.
My family visited Rockome Gardens years ago. I don't remember much about it, but I remember making candles. And I still have a small piece of wood with my name burned into it. I must admit, too, that up until a few years ago, I thought it was "Rock Home" Gardens. On a trip to Chicago 6 years ago, we drove past the exit and I smacked my head when I realized for years I'd had it wrong.
Hi Roger.
First of all, this article is a heavy metal that we'd never see it on Wikipedia. Along with How I Believe in God, this is the most personal piece I've ever read by you.
As I was reading your words, I was praying that you mention your father's flaws, only to know who really was the man.
My own father, Idris El-Asha, has just gone to Egypt and I want you to know that your honest words profoundly helped another human being, I say it with deep sincerity.
When I was child, I used to look at my own father as a phenomenon; a man like no other, but then, like most teenagers:
I turned to look but it was gone
I can not put my finger on it now
This child's grown
The dream's gone.
Roger Waters meant something else by this, but mine was a dream of inhumane utopia.
Now with his annoying flaws and the relentless opposition between us, your words added the touch of clemency or rather symaphy toward a human being.
What appears to be undeniable to me and you and most of us, is that your old man and mine were only men who tried to coexist with a loving energy called fatherhood; they were men caught under the muffled sounds of a divine care; they were the men who shaped an unforgettable effigy of our future; they were fathers.
P.S. What do you think I should tell my "old man" when he come from Egypt?
I am sixty years old and also still think of my father as daddy. your story reminds me so much of my own growing up and the feelings i have for my daddy. I guess everyone does.Life is funny and so many things that seen so important really dont mean anything for as i look back and think of my dad and mom I feel sadness from missing them but also laughter and love. I hope everyone feels that way.
I just got back from visiting my dad in the hospital. Things looked grim at first, but it turned out just to be a problem with the dosage of his medicine. He's 79 and still in good health.
There aren't that many great movies about fathers and sons. My favorite is probably OCTOBER SKY, because my dad was from a small town in Virginia, and we didn't always get along. But eventually I was smart enough to realize that he's a great guy.
I'm a few generations past you, but it seems like fatherhood never changes. No one's praise makes you feel greater, no one's criticism makes you feel worse. It seems stupid, but there are times where I hate my dad for making me love him. It would be so much easier if I could just hate him for who he is. And I know it's not going to be long after he's dead until I can really understand him, and I hate that too.
As I see my father deal with his cancer, I often think about who we are and what we've done together. An imperfect relationship between imperfect men. Your story was inspiring. I am not going to rush over to his house in the middle of the night and hug him tightly as in a movie, but I understand a little more about the man and his dreams and how it's a common theme with all or most of our dads, and his struggle to give us the best he can, and hopefully point us in the right direction.
Roger, it was sweet of you to make that edit. You are one classy guy! I really hope you are compiling this all into full memoir. It is just terrific.
After my dad passed a few years ago, one of my cousins told me she was always a little jealous of my relationship with my dad. My father has always been Daddy to me as well. She said there was something that she didn't have with her father and calling him Daddy never, even as a child, felt right to her. As I read your piece, I marveled at how lucky we were to have had such loving champions in our lives.
I saw in you and your father the same kind of affection I had with mine. We would read some of the same books to talk about them later. When I was little, Daddy would take my brothers and me fishing. We watched movies together often especially John Wayne or silly comedies. He would leave the room if a film made him tear up. While he was far from perfect, he was a great Daddy.
I read long ago that most any man can father a child, but it takes someone special to be a dad. I guess I would add that only someone truly extraordinary can still be Daddy to his grown children.
my dad is a doctor. i never saw him much during the weeks but i always loved saturday mornings. i would wake up early and go to the hospital with him while he made his rounds. then we would stop at krispy kreme and get donuts and i would sleep in the car the rest of the way home. hadn't thought about that in a while before i read this post.
My father is also an electrician, a member of the IBEW (acting president for the local chapter), and also a lot smarter than you'd guess by his profession. He has instilled in me the same pro-union sentiments (which makes living in conservative Manitoba irritating at best) that you describe. He gave me a sense of justice, he gave me a great dislike of bullshit, and he gave me a love of reading and music (as I understand his father gave him).
I often think that he's just going through the motions of what other people call a life. He mows the lawn, maintains his cabin, makes nice with the neighbors, but there is this undercurrent of regret, like he wants to be somewhere else all the time. Possibly Australia, where he spent part of his young adulthood (and there's a good chance I have some taller, more well-tanned half-siblings down there, considering).
I regret being an anchor to him. I regret that he, like many of his generation, sired a lazy slacker, as many of my generation are.
I will probably never be as great as you, Roger, or as well-known (they aren't the same thing, after all). But I take a bit of pride in the fact that our fathers are quite a bit the same.
Every year on Father's Day, from the time I was twelve or so, I'd sing for my father Groucho's Father's Day song. He's gone now, but I sing it anyway. Here's Groucho with Dick Cavett: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FeyAGn6690
Sometimes I'll watch Groucho in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
This was a very touching story. I went through so many of my teenage years resenting my parents and it wasn't until I found myself in a hospital from Guillain Barre Syndrome that I realized how much they loved and cared for me.
My father died two years ago this month, and one thing I did not expect was that he would still speak to me during dreams.
But what I actually forgot to say was, all those space opera stories we devoured as kids — invariably, the scientist/genius/tycoons in them could also machine parts for their rocketships themselves. Being able to make things yourself was part of the mythos. Peculiarly American.
Or maybe they were all modeled on Howard Hughes.
That intimate vignette of your father and mother at the hospital pretty much says it all. Love, happiness, sorrow, tenderness all wrapped up and distilled into a single moment. All the arguments, disagreements and moments of unhappiness dissolve away to meaninglessness. Love conquers all and bridges the chasm of time and space.
What a beautiful story of your father, thank you so much for sharing it.
My father was one of those professors who read all the time. Books everywhere in our house, little slips of paper sticking out between the pages. The GI bill gave him the means to earn the life his father and grand-father, failed farmers both, could only dream about.
In my persistent memory, he sits in his armchair, feet up on his footstool, head tilted down towards the book in his lap.
He also died of cancer, at 70, way too soon.
What a wonderful tribute to your father. You are a truly gifted writer.
I love the inclusion of a video praising Ray Elliott. I grew up in Urbana and heard him speak when I was a child and still remember it. He was inspirational and unique. He does not get the credit he deserves as a great college coach and an even better human being.
I hope you keep making us think, cry and remember.
In 1964 I was seven, and said to myself, "Seven times three is twenty-one, and that's when you're a man and have to leave home." We were in the car, my mom and dad up front, my sister and I in back. I began to cry, and leaned up against their seat to be close to my parents. Mom asked, "What's wrong, honey?" I cried that I didn't ever want to have to leave them. Mom said, "Oh, honey, you won't have to go. You can stay forever if you want."
Now they're nearing 80. And they still love me. My 79-year-old dad tells me, "I loved you before you loved me." I smile and reply, "No sir."
I meant to stay tuned in, to never miss a day of it. But the last three decades have been a blur.
There's still some time, but I'm so numb now that most times I can't feel anywhere near the precious beauty of it. Sometimes I come tantalizingly close, it feels, but only for brief moments at a time. The rest of the time I long to really feel it deeply enough.
Hi Rog, thanks again for sharing this. My old man also had a picture like that: the pomaded hair, the suit and of course, the sepia. We were a "clothing" family, specialising in tees and tank-tops. Working with him on the long cutting table was one of the joys of life back then.
On a different note: there's really nothing phallic about the dragon in the upcoming Dreamworks' picture. The Pokemon franchise have been at it for years. I thought Pokemon was well-known in the US. Oh well, guess I must be wrong.
This piece to me was more than a lovely tribute to your father, which it was. It was so densely packed with detail that it seemed like you wanted to have a place to put all these things tumbling from your memory so they would never be lost. I smiled so many times while reading about your family, thinking of the similarities to my upbringing in Wisconsin, remembering the slower pace of life, the German work ethic, LIFE and Readers Digest, car trips, oil cloth, and pickled everything.
You had two parents who really loved and respected you which is, as I am sure you know now, the best piece of luck any kid can get. Through your work, your humor, your thoughtfulness, and your courage, you pass that love and respect to all of us in a way, and we are better people for it.
And...I had apple pie and coffee for dessert this evening!
Hi, Roger!
It's after midnight in Honolulu, and I thought I would read your journal entry before going to bed. Afterward I watched Gogi Grant sing THE WAYWARD WIND.
During these moments you created it was as though you were right here sitting aside me telling me this beautiful personal story about your Daddy.
And he was here too, I swear it. Then my Daddy came along to meet your Daddy, joining us in time to hear Gogi's haunting song. My Daddy - also a hard-working, decent union man- always with a cigarette hanging from his lips up until the day he died of lung cancer. Hadn't thought about him for awhile. Didn't realize how much I miss him.
So you see? I've already had this magnificent dream before going to sleep tonight. Such is the amazing power of your writing!
Mahalo dear Roger, and much aloha!
Jeannette
Mr. Ebert,
Thanks once again for a wonderfully touching and beautifully crafted piece of writitng. I have to blink away tears as I write this.
I had almost forgotten about Mickleberry's Log Cabin. I grew up on 98th St, and even though it was close we only went once or twice a year for birthday dinners, of course all dressed up in jacket and tie.
To repeat what others have said, PLEASE publish a collection of your blogs posts in a real book. There is a majesty and magic in books that can't be matched by a computer screen.
One of my favorite books is a collection of letters of E.B. White. It is a book I re-read often. I may pick it up when I have five minutes to read, or I when I want to sit and read for 2-3 hours. One of my favorite memories with my daughter is soon after she finished Charlotte's Web the first time a few years ago. I mentioned I was reading a book of letters by the same author ("What are letters, Daddy?" "They're kind of like emails, except more fun to read.")
So we flipped through E.B.'s letters together, occassionally stopping to read one in its entirety. I will always remember her shock and delight when we discovered the first letter in which E.B. describes standing and watching a spider in his barn, and deciding her name was Charlotte.
I imagine a book of your blog essays would hold a similar place in many of our lives.
Thanks again.
Dear Roger,
Thank you so much for sharing your memories with us. My glasses are all fogged up now from my tears...
I too lost a parent, my mommy, to lung cancer while I was in college, not too long ago. (Unfortunately in her case, my mom had never smoked; for years her coughing has been misdiagnosed as asthma)
It's interesting though, some of my most fondest memories of my mother are from those last few years. At one point, she was strong enough to travel and my family was able to go to Rome, Venice, Paris, and a few other places. The first time I watched Roman Holiday was with my mom, and I'll never forget when we stuck our hands in the Bocca della Verita, and marveled how Audrey Hepburn once had her hand in there too.
I'll always remember one time at the hospital toward the end when a nurse asked my mom to count from 1-10 to see if her medications were making her confused. To which my mom indignantly replied, I have a PhD in Econometrics, you count from 1-10.
oh, dear, now I'm crying again.
thank you so so much for this.
What a beautiful, personal subject you've chosen to share. Thank you for entrusting us with your memories.
Am I correct in assuming that "Bub" is a contraction of "bubbie" and thus pronounced with the o͝o sound, or was it really "Bŭb," rhyming with "rub?" Please forgive my pedantry; I'm hearing your voice in my head and tripped over a mental question mark.
My father died of lung cancer in 1991, two weeks after my son was born. He was 54.
Nearly 20 years, I often find myself thinking, "Wow, Dad would have loved this." Maybe it's a new movie with Clint Eastwood, his favorite. Or a pitcher's duel that's decided in the bottom of the ninth. Or a cold beer after a hard day's work on a scorching summer Sunday. Dad's credo was, "The better the day, the better the deed."
So often I've wished he were here to look me in the eye and challenge my thinking. And then to offer a steady hand. But more than anything, I wish he'd had the chance to know our children and to be a part of their lives. I can't imagine anything that would have given him greater joy.
This isn't where I expected my thoughts to go on a snowy Saturday in March. Thank you Roger.
As always, Roger, great writing. But you left out the early career: doing magic for the younger kids in the neighborhood in your basement. My sister still thinks some of it was _real_ magic. And I think I spent most of my paper route money playing pin ball and Wayward Wind on the juke box.
Ebert: OMG. I'd forgotten those magic shows! Mostly with tricks from the old Johnson, Smith catalog. Wasn't I wearing a cape or something?
Some random thoughts after reading comments to this post:
Edmund Gosse wrote a very beautiful portrait of his father as well, warts and all, called Father and Son. Since it deals with evolution's implications on Gosse's father's strict religious beliefs (and how it conflicted with his profession as a zoologist), you might find it worth reading, Roger, provided that you haven't read it already.
My grandfather moved here from Italy. Since he was fluent in Italian, he did a local Italian radio show once a week (this was back when my father was a child). Like you, my dad only learned a smidgeon of this language, and I know even less.
When I was very young, my grandfather still smoked "stogies," but he quit sometime when I was in elementary school. He opened up his dental practice during the Great Depression, of which my dad always reminds me when I tell him how difficult it is to find a job. Not in a way that suggests that he was able to do it during worse conditions, so why can't I, but rather that what he did is in my blood, and so I can't help but succeed (and I just teared up writing that line, thinking of what my mom told me today over the phone: "Coming home is not an option." Again, not in the sense that I can't come home--because, as she also said, I can always come home if I'm really stuck--but in the sense that she wants me to not have that safety net to fall back on. That way, I'll cross that tightrope, instead of figuring out when to fall off of it. Like you, I was/am blessed with wonderful parents).
Interestingly enough, my grandfather's first name was also "Joseph," which is my father's middle name (and my uncle's first name). And my middle name? William, the same as my dad's first name.
My father hates me. Your dad seems great.
So that's what your old man looked like, Rodge. Those eyes, which you have, say his people migrated into Germany from the East who knows how long ago.
"Eber" still means boar. I'm guessing it was long enough ago so that the "t" was the tail end of "heart," when English and German were still alike. The first Ebert was known to have the heart of the mighty boar. They're still a frightening creature, note the pic I sent.
My mom's is my German side, Clouse and Steinmetz. I think "Clouse" isn't "Klaus" or Nicholas but "nailmaker," as that family is from Alsace-Lorraine. "Clou" means nail there. A steinmetz cut tombstones, I'm told.
My looks are Alsatian. My brother tells me there are whole towns full of people in that area who look just like me. Imagine that... once upon a time we all lived in tribal villages where everybody looked just like us. Outsiders would think so, anyhow. Most of us are these outsiders now. We are no longer astonished to meet someone with a different hair color than our own.
My dad was John Bull back to Willie the Conk; before then, when not carousing the swamps of Jutland, sailing around to get away from them.
We're no different from breeds of animals. Alsatians and their hounds are alike in temperaments, well and ill. John Bulls and their bulldogs, the same. I don't doubt that an Ebert will charge fierce and toothsome when disturbed. It's a good thing that we're mutts, which are known to be smarter than purebreds.
Like your dad, Roger, mine checked out relatively early. I forget why I've mentioned that on other threads here. I was 36, though, just mature enough to view it with some affection, "that's just like ol' Bob," who didn't waste time yakking or mooning around on a planet he'd had enough of.
For 10 years, and continuing, my dad for all intents and purposes was a black man named Hamp Johnson, of Saratoga Springs NY. He was head cook of the 24/7 Spa City Diner, which still exists. He's long retired.
I just found his photo here on the 'net. A little dated, but here's my other dad:
http://books.google.com/books?id=RBcBMR_Y3N8C&pg=PA154&lpg=PA154&dq=Hamp+Johnson+Saratoga+Springs+NY&source=bl&ots=u-tpwFHyp6&sig=jOumz2RacuBKkAr0a9Gu0E6JnNc&hl=en&ei=ex6lS7vNGcSqlAfJ8bDICA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Hamp%20Johnson%20Saratoga%20Springs%20NY&f=false
And I am more than gobsmacked. I worked with that man 14 hours a day six days a week, excluding schooldays, for ten years, minus music gigs and other odd jobs. I never knew the extent of what had happened, only a passing mention of it, and all these years later, here's Mr. Jay and his kids, with the story in Ebony Magazine.
I "inherited" a forbearance and flexibility from him that my John Bull father never had, but to this moment I never realized the extent of it.
I'm gonna gaze at this pic awhile...
Great piece Roger, it reminds me of so many things from my own life. My father worked the line crew for the electrical company for 30 years, and as a child lived in a four room house on the Kansas prairie (10 miles from the nearest town) with 15 brothers and sisters. I hear echoes of his life in your writing. In the last few years my brother and I have taken a digital video camera and interviewed all of the surviving siblings about their childhoods, and we hope to make a quasi-documentary about them.
Your writing keeps getting better and better and I feel you are edging closer to the universal as you get more personal. Another thing I was reminded of during this essay was the poem
Those Winter Sundays By Robert Hayden (www.poemhunter.com/poem/those-winter-sundays/). If you don't recall it you should check it out, it is beautiful and matches your tone.
I'm an avid movie fan, and to be honest you've inspired much of that facet of my life. You're recommendations led me to the great directors and I took it from there.
Thanks for everything Roger.
Blake
Are you ok, my old friend?
Let us remember good Whitman:
"They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier."
We get nostalgic and miss our beloved ones, however, if Pascal wagers correctly, we shall meet again and have an apple pie with coffee on that Mel Root's place in eternity.
As an agnostic I found no respite after the passing of a beloved friend, until an old college chum came to me and said he is in a better place now, I told him, "I don't believe in that," to which, he replied, "Well, . . . he does."
Take care, and if you need anything, we are here for you. Regards.
Having just reread your Wit (When Movies Hurt Too Much) piece, I find this one particularly touching. We (my family of origin) are planning an event for our father's 80th birthday in November. He just recently retired from teaching (med school) and I find myself mulling over his age in a worrisome way. I am fortunate to still have both my parents, hale and hearty and independent.
Your tribute to "daddy" makes me think about how we remember the people we love. It's the small, intimate things that seem to matter most: time spent, experiences shared, rituals taught. I know I haven't truly appreciated my parents as I should and as I will. I can only hope that I have given the gifts they gave me (and your father gave you) to my own children. I don't know that I have.
Beautiful story Roger.Dad will be 85 next month and I have been wandering through memories for days.Dads diagnosis is vascular dementia not so scary as alzeimers but plenty tough.Growing up I was surprised to learn most people didn't work 6 days a week,Dad did.Giving back.Every monday night for 35 years Dad worked at the Children's Hospital building slant boards and frames for kids who were disabled.
When I moved to an old house in the country he insulated the basement himself because everyone else said it couldn't be done.My brother and brotherinlaw installed a outside weather door so badly I called my father in dispair and he said not to worry he would fix it.He had been there when they had put it in but didn't want to interfere so the next day he did it over by himself.
The first word my son said was YaYa as he gazed adoringly at my Dad.
"Being a salesman is the best job in the world,cause no matter where you are in the world someone is always selling something to somebody".
First sale training session I ever attended I laughed out loud to find out the course was in fact based on stuff Dad had done instinctively.
"See that little guy,I'm going to marry him".Mom to her best friend after one dance with Dad.
He remembers some things and that is ok,it is our turn now to look after him.Tough but so is he and as it turns out so am I.
Now I wonder if Walter Ebert, not Darren McGavin, was really the most feared furnace-fighter in the Upper Midwest?
We had a coal furnace when I was a kid, but I never quite got a lot of the furnace references in "A Christmas Story".
The Ebert household was clearly well versed in furnace lore.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071014111047AAdr9lk
"Clinker" sound bites:
http://www.moviewavs.com/Movies/A_Christmas_Story.html
Beautiful. I have tears in my eyes from reading this. Thank you.
The picture of the Plymouth in the dappled sunlight is as beautiful an image as you will find anywhere, anytime. It over powers my senses. It beckons. Thanks.
Dear Roger
Your father sounds a bit like my grandfather. He came over from Holland before WWII, as a teenager in the Farm Exchange program, and worked hard to get established in Hamilton, Ontario. He loved gardening, building things and fixing cars, all accompanied by CBC Radio. When I was about 5, I used to sit nearby in his basement workshop while he worked. There was a long cabinet behind the workbench with what seemed like hundreds of little drawers and I used to spend time opening them and gazing at the screws, nails and other little things necessary for his work. Sometimes he would build models from scratch, I remember a steamer ship about two feet long with wonderful detailing and some airplanes that when they were done flew from the basement ceiling.
Like your father, my grandfather never spoke Dutch. He wanted to be Canadian, to fit in, and not be seen as an immigrant. We stayed at my grandparent's house a lot and I remember getting up early on Saturday morning and Granddad would be up making his blood sausage and he would make me cinnamon and sugar toast and give me a little bit of strong coffee in my cup. This had honey and milk added in and tasted divine. I sat and watched cartoons in the living room and he ate at the table and after we were done, we both went out to patrol the 1/2 acre garden with his collie to see what was up. Then it was out to the greenhouse to check on the roses and I felt free to go back in and have the rest of my breakfast with everyone else.
I loved Cornelius Vandevelde with all my heart and it was a terrible thing when he succumbed to Alzheimer's and all his joy and cleverness were gone.
Thank you so much for showing me your father.
I love the old pictures. People (Men at least) used to dress so well in the old days.
Roger,
I LOVED your review of Bounty Hunter! You've truly outdone yourself, sir.
In honour of that fine review, I'd like to add another cliche.
The situation: Roger Ebert writes a sentimental blog entry, at least one commenter replies...
...
...
You would be excused if you thought the correct answer was 'accuses Roger of being an ignorant liberal', but the correct answer is actually that the commenter 'bursts into tears of sadness and joy while reading the blog'.
I enjoy your blog as much as the next person, but I think all this bathos from the peanut gallery is a little much, don't you? What ever happened to facing adversity with a stiff upper lip.
How I long for my native England, where cool detachment is part of our national identity. On the very day of the London tube bombings, we English were already coping with the events with wit and humour.
Ebert: Yeah, my readers seem to be a bunch of big softies.
Dear Uncle Roger,
Thank you for sharing this beautiful reflection of your father. Your father died knowing he had done a great job in his short span of life...you made him proud to be a daddy! I LOVE YA
Miss Ina
Such a touching tribute to your father. You evoked in me the memories of my mother, and how much I miss her. I don't feel that I've ever truly come to terms with her death from ALS.
Just last week I had a dream in which she told me she wished I'd take better care of myself. Of course she's right....she always was.
On a much lighter note, as others have mentioned I appreciate the way men dressed in the past. Especially in the earlier part of last century. They cared about their appearance - much more so than we do now it seems. Sadly, I must admit to dressing for comfort more often than I should, but it would be nice to see a trend towards a more distinguished look for men. I know this bears no real importance, but it's something I think about when I see pictures like the ones you've so graciously shared.
Wow... The Wayward Wind. That's my mom's favorite song. I learned to like it from her. That really brings me back. She always liked your show, now that's another thing she has in common with you.
Beautiful, as always. Thank you. And to reciprocate, here's Dan Hill's tribute to his father:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnQqNXef7yw
Dude, I hope you write an autobiography or something. All the entires I read in your blog are amazingly well written. I know you have a couple books out but I would like to see your whole story, by you.
Mr. Ebert, your inspiring strength pushes me to continue to attempt to write.
I am surely a hack by comparison to your legendary art, yet I feel even a man of your magnitude wouldn't turn a nose up at effort.
Bless you and yours, and I join your legion looking forward to your next entry as I add your blog to my blogroll of a legion of one follower = myself
Peace
Roger,
You helped me stop drinking and using tobacco. THANK YOU. Now you have helped me accept my rather tenuous relationship with my still living father. THANK YOU AGAIN.
Your moving tribute awakes me to the fact that I don't much know about my father. Although most of relatives on father's side live near our house, I seldom meet them. I and my younger brother have been very close to my mother's family instead. One of uncles has six daughters. The eldest is middle-aged mom with college kids and son of the youngest is in kindergarten now. These cousins had been baby sitters for us(with no payment), and they still talk about some embarrassing details of my childhood. They're pretty much like sisters from "Punch-Drunk Love".
These cousins and other relatives are quite interesting people in my life, anyway. We used to go picnic or have a vacation together, and I was exposed to alcohol in early age(2) thanks to them. Whenever they gathered, there were always lots of booze(screw you, AA!) and gambling in small scale. And their space was sparked with bundles of life forces. They are a little annoying, but they certainly know about joy of living and my childhood would have been very boring without them. As a matter of fact, I usually acquired some money from their gambling or lots of empty bottles.
They're still amusing people. One of uncles turns out to be a member of Intelligence Agency after his retirement. I was always curious about why he went to work everyday except some vacation. Relatives said he had been associated with some counter-intelligence activities, and he sometimes gives lecture to recruits now. He must have stories from the cold between North and South Korea, but he never talks anything about his work in the past. Like his peers, He has been recently subpoenaed several times by special committees and he is tired and annoyed by that.
In contrast, I and my brother have been less acquainted with relatives on father's side. Except grandmother who lives alone in his hometown and dentist uncle(from him, I came to know that most of Korean dentist watched "Marathon Man" at least once), we have never been close to them. My father moved from his hometown to nearest city by himself after enrolled in high school in the city, and then went to Seoul while finishing his graduate course. He worked as a civil engineer at various construction sites while being promoted step by step in his company and we moved along with him.
Even though he still visits his mother regularly, he does not talk about himself or his past much. There isn't much to find about him even in his hometown. He demolished his old house entirely in 80's and built new one. And then he has changed it constantly and there are just few mementoes. I feel vague whenever someone asks me about him, although I do know what he has done for us well and we openly talk with each other about many things.
With my mom, he made affluent and gentle environment for his children to grow up and be educated well; that's what any good father should do. I am not sure whether I will know about my dad more clearly in future, but I respect and love him for what he has accomplished. And we go to movie theater sometimes. I think "Hoop Dreams"(I really have to confess you that I have been very petty promoter for this great documentary without visible success) is just plain 3 hrs documentary in his view, but there are lots of other good ones we both enjoy. Yesterday, I took my parents to multiplex and showed them "Up in the Air" and they loved it. I have failed to convince them both many times that movies they watched with me are wonderful(They disagree with each other more than you and Mr. Siskel), but there are few moments everybody is happy and yesterday was one of them.
Tender, nostalgic, evocative, and beautifully written as always. Everyone should have a father as loved and as loving as yours.
I, too, would like to hear more about your mother. Maybe we'd find out why the son of a Lutheran (so I assume) father attended Catholic school as a child. (Or am I wrong about that?)
Roger I too called my father Daddy until the day he died. I am so moved by this piece that I can hardly type. There are so many likenesses between our fathers. Mine too was a staunch Democrat who revered Adlai Stevenson and absolutely hated Ronald Reagan. He worked with his hands his entire life and had only an eighth grade education but read voraciously. He was 30 years old when he married my beautiful mother who was only 17. He was extremely personable but loved to argue for what he believed in. My father's parents were first generation Ukrainian immigrants. I had my father until he was almost 91 when he finally succumbed to Alzheimer's Disease. And even after having him for all of those years, there are so many things I am not sure I really understand about him. At his death bed he held my hand in his arthritic old hand and kissed it tenderly over and over.
I adore memoirs, particularly of childhood - and this one is wonderful. I would love you to publish a book of pieces like these, a sort of American equivalent to one the great books of the last decade, Alan Bennett's 'Untold Stories'.
Thanks for this entry, Roger. I've been thinking of my mom, who died of lung cancer five years ago in July. She was 86. Not a day goes by that I don't think of her or talk to her. The first movie she took me to see was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the State and Lake Theater, (I think it was the State and Lake). We got all dressed up, took the bus and the old el. Got popcorn and Milk Duds. I can still taste them.
Years later, when she was in hospice and was deep into and drifting in and out, I would sit and hold her hand and babble on about what happened during the day, how her grandbaby was doing. Sometimes, she would turn to me and smile. Yeah. I always think of my mom. Not a day goes by.
Thanks again for this entry.
Roger, Roger, Roger...
I have been putting off writing about my Daddy for awhile now but as usual you have inspired me. I loved this piece.
I lost my parents ten years ago - my "mama" (named Maude) died suddenly in her sleep and I lost my daddy (named Walter) ten months (to the day) later.
I'm going to go write about them now.
Thank you so much for writing this piece. I wasn't expecting such an emotional reaction on an ordinary Sunday morning. My dad died in a plane crash six years ago, and I still miss him every single day. The details in your piece really brought it all back, the simple ways that love expresses itself. And if I wasn't crying before, the John Prine song would have done it!
I'm beyond grateful for this truly amazing piece, and I'm beyond grateful to your mother and your daddy for having you.
While I knew and respected you as an extraordinarily insightful, intuitive film critic and true lover of film, I'm also profoundly grateful to now be able to follow you on Twitter and subscribe to this journal, where I learn SO many truly interesting things from you - daily!!! As far as human beings go, to me, you are a divinely perfect Tri-fecta: You make me laugh, cry... and think.
Bless you for your most loving desire to share not only your opinions about films, but anything and everything that interests, entertains, inspires, excites or irritates you... And bless you for sharing your most beautiful heart with all of us.
Thanks to the internet and your uncanny gift with words - combined with your amazing passion and energy to keep writing and keep sharing - I am continually inspired by you on SO many levels. Roger, you are a rare being - and a hell of a lot of fun!!!!!!
#6words for you - Roger Ebert, you are a blessing.
Big love to you and Chaz!
What a beautiful tribute to your father. It's fun to read about your memories of Champaign-Urbana, and of growing up.
You really strike a chord with this piece. Thanks for sharing!
All the best to you & Chaz,
~Susan
Your wrote a beautiful remembrance. It made me think of my late mother and father, of whom I still think once or twice a day, without fail.
This article made me reflect on my own heritage. I think I shall, too, write of my eclectic family ties. Thank you for the heart felt, sad and wonderful insights into all that made you who you are today. Sad, poignant and insightful are just a few words that come to mind.
Roger, your talent for self-reflection is amazingly understated. You tell more about yourself by showing us your observations of others. God Bless you for sharing this. I find your heart the truest of the modern day writers. Thanks for bringing me to tears by playing it straight.
You do your old man proud.
Thank you,
Tom
This was as fine a testament to a father as I have ever read. I lost my own at 27, to an aneurysm when my father was but 52. A week or so ago, I wrote what later seemed quite harsh to me about the firing of Variety's McCarthy. Reading your words here reminds me of the importance of seeing humanity all around, even in a world filled with inequity.
Wow. A beautiful piece and a writing clinic. Thanks.
My dad turned 81 last month; although we have both survived cancer, he is healthier than I am at 43, and is in better shape. He is an only child, born just a few months before the stock market crash, and very much a product of the Great Depression. Dad served in the Army Corps of Engineers, then came back from the Korean War to finish his Civil Engineering degree. He worked for the same firm for almost 40 years; he is a stereotypical engineer-- frugal, conservative, meticulous. He taught me to use a slide rule when I was 8 (just before pocket calculators emerged). As a girl, I thought he could fix anything, which is still mostly true.
We have butted heads through the years, much more vigorously in the past than we do now. I think I threw him an unintended curve when I hit puberty; he seemed bewildered that his little girl looked like a woman. We are still on opposite sides when it comes to things that are most important to him: politics and religion. In spite of this, I know my father gave me the tools I needed to succeed at the life I chose: I, too, am meticulous-- a crucial quality in my profession.
I was scared when my dad called 16 years ago to tell me he had prostate cancer; he cried 7 years ago when I called to tell him I had breast cancer. We have both forged on through the intervening years, glad that we still have each other. Dad is not a very demonstrative man, but of all the things I know in this life, I know that he and Mama love me-- that they always have and always will.
T.S. Eliot comes to mind:
“There's no vocabulary
For love within a family, love that's lived in
But not looked at, love within the light of which
All else is seen, the love within which
All other love finds speech.
This love is silent.”
Thank you, Roger, for sharing your memories, and for allowing us a place to share ours. You are a dear treasure to me, and I so look forward to reading your blog each day, and to reading the comments of all these dear friends I have never met.
I'm surprised that you misused "immigrated" in the first paragraph. It's not like you.
Ebert: My bad. Fixed.
Speaking of fatherhood, I've noticed a few comments in various threads of yours that mirror my experience watching Siskel and Ebert in the PBS days. It came on so late in the evening that anyone under 18 watching it usually had some company - their father.
I'm in Newfoundland, which is an hour and a half beyond Eastern Time, even. Dad is a night owl, so he'd be up anyway. But on Thursdays (and eventually Sundays), I would stay up until 2 am to watch. Dad would mutter the same warnings every week ("You better get up tomorrow", "Don't fall asleep there"), but we'd always watch together.
He's a pretty quiet guy, so I was never sure how much he soaked up. Then one night I brought home "Blood Simple", we started watching, and he said "those guys talked about this one". During the "burial scene" in the middle, he chuckled, which is something he does when he sees something done well, from a beautiful sports play, to a well built house, to a grandchild's achievement. It was nice.
So, inadvertently, you were fostering the father-son relationships of movie geeks everywhere. I assume it was inadvertent, anyway.
Thank you Roger, for sharing your most personal memories with us. I imagined you as a child with your dad, and I thought of my dad when he was a young man. I miss him so much for all his faults and quirks. May God bless your father's soul. My dad's too.
My dad's a quiet guy; has been for as long as I can remember. He's never been one for adages or sayings. He spends his days working, his nights watching ESPN. Like your father, he has an affinity for tinkering with heating systems - in our case, a pellet stove - and seems to spend much more time on its maintenance than it actually requires (although I admittedly know nothing about the maintenance of pellet stoves). He occasionally gets angry with our dogs for snooping for food in the kitchen and calls them names that don't make sense, like "desperadoes." He's periodically prone to strange new hobbies, like collecting headlamps (the kind that miners wear) and using them for completely mundane tasks, like taking the garbage out. His most recent interest was in designer jeans, although for reasons that had nothing to do with them being trendy or popular (and that are still unclear to me).
I make him sound very eccentric, but really he's a very typical middle-aged, working class man with a few strange quirks. He can be very gruff, at times almost veering on anti-social, but he can also be very kind and generous, sometimes to complete strangers. He has an innate honesty to him that I really admire; he never bullshits people.
We used to play catch a lot in my front yard, too. I grew up a Yankees fan, despite ninety-five percent of the people around me supporting the Red Sox, because of him. We used to always go to card stores, where I'd spend my allowance every week on a new pack of baseball cards. I had a pretty big collection (over four hundred cards of Wade Boggs alone), but it was nothing compared to my dad's. Gradually, I kind of grew out of the whole baseball card thing and got rid of most of my collection. I became interested in different things - movies and music and generic teenager stuff. I remember the day my dad told me my grandpa was in the hospital, and that he was going to take me and my brother and sister to visit him, and I protested because I had already made plans with my friends. He didn't argue with me, or force me to go. And I'm not sure whether it was because my brother and sister had excuses, too, or that he didn't even bother to ask them after I said no, but he ended up visiting my grandpa alone. I will always regret that.
My dad and I no longer have a lot in common in terms of interests, but we occasionally still talk about baseball, or old Clint Eastwood movies. He hasn't taught me a lot of outright lessons, but I've learned a lot about hard work and being a good person just by living with him. Our relationship's far from perfect, and I wished we talked more, but I'm glad he's my dad and I'm grateful for everything he and my mom have done for me.
Thanks for the article. It was really moving and it's great to learn that many of us may have more in common than we thought.
Ebert: You know, your dad sounds like a nice guy. "Desperados?" I like that.
You've got a lot of people thinking about their fathers now. My two cents is two thing. One, I had the extraordinary good luck to have my father guest star in a dream of mine this year, and I became aware it was a dream, and I asked for and got a handshake from him (he wasn't much of a hugger after my brothers and I got to about 10 or so) before I woke up. The other is that it is easier and easier to fill in his half of the imaginary conversations I have with him.
Loved the Groucho clip, especially the reference to "Pop Goes the Weasel."
I'm glad you had a father like that. Mine was the opposite. No fond memories.
Thank you for sharing your Daddy with us with this beautifully written, insightful piece into who he was through your heart, eyes and words. Wonderful vintage photos, too!
Well, I should have known better than to read that without a box of kleenex.
Thank you so much for sharing your memories and bringing back some of my own.
Your writing is beautiful.
Roger-
As always, you hit the mark. I'm sure that you've heard the original Steve Goodman recording of "My Old Man" - the spot where he pauses a bit to control his emotions - always chokes me up.... (he did it in one take)
Try this one on for size and see if it doesn't reduce you to blathering like a baby....
Chet Atkins - I Still Can't Say Goodbye"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rupWcoKR2c
Thanks Roger - We Need You
Lovely, Roger, just lovely.
So much of life is in the little details.
They accumulate without our realization.
Then one day they begin to reappear in our minds and blossom.
So many people in the world.
So many unique stories.
So much to be remembered.
Too much will be forgotten.
But we will remember your father now.
Thank you Roger.
How can we bear never seeing them again? You brought tears to my eyes.
My grandfather was in tears when I read him this heart warming piece. It triggered three hours of him telling me all about his old man...things I never knew and now I feel like I know him more. I got a glimbse of the kid inside of him.
This makes me want to spend more time with my father. I admire what you're doing here. A few years ago all we knew was Roger Ebert the film critic. Now people all over the globe are getting to know Roger Ebert the man, the teenager, the young boy.
Hi Roger,
Reading your memories sure opened the door to mine. I was 12 when my Father died of lung cancer at the age of 39. I had always dreamed of being able to walk into a diner with Dad and order "the usual"--unfortunately it never happened, but you re-awakened that in me, and I hope to do it with my own son. You remind us readers how important we are in the eyes of our children. Please God let us all be worthy of their love.
Thank you
Roger, thanks for eloquently sharing your memories of your father. It's amazing how detailed you recall these things. For me, I tend not to remember the particulars so much as I do the bullet points of my experiences with my father. But your blog entry made me think of him more insightfully. Some of my favorite memories involved watching Six Feet Under together as well as going on bike rides in the summertime.
This was wonderful, Roger. Wonderful.
(Imagine the following as being told by Hans Conried.)
(Because that's how I heard it.)
An immigrant has been taught by his friend to order "A cup of coffee and apple pie." Which he does for many days and weeks.
Ultimately, he gets tired of always having the same meal and asks his friend to teach him something else to order. After intensive instruction, he goes to the lunch counter with his newly acquired knowledge:
"What'll it be, hon?"
"A cup of coffee and a ham sandwich!"
"White, rye, or whole wheat?"
"Apple pie."
Think your Dad would have liked that one?
Mine did.
Roger,
Is it coincidence that I read this entry just as my Dad was pulling into my driveway for an extended weekend visit? He lives only 3 hours away but we still aren't able to see each other as often as we'd like...
My family has always been fairly emotional and close-knit (hugs, kisses and saying "I love you", etc...) so a hug upon seeing my Dad would've been the norm. However, I couldn't control the power of the hug I gave him this day. His reponse: "Wow! Where did that come from?" I just told him that I missed him a lot. He doesn't have to know that it was largely due to this blog post.
Cheers!
Chris Ortman
Roger,
I don’t know if it’s a German thing (my family background is German too) but I heard a different variation of the “apple pie and coffee” story.
Guy gets off the boat and is hungry but doesn’t know any English. He goes into a restaurant and hears someone order “apple pie and coffee”. He orders the same thing – not knowing what it is -- likes it but after a few days, decides it’s time to try something else. He hears a guy at a nearby table ask for “a ham sandwich” so he orders the same thing.
“Do you want it on white or rye?” asks the waiter. “Ham sandwich,” says the new immigrant. “White or rye?” asks the waiter a little louder. “Ham sandwich,” repeats the man a second time. “WHITE OR RYE?” demands the waiter.
“Apple pie and coffee.”
Great story from you and rang some bells from my Midwest growing-up days.
Roger,
Well you made me cry.
While the life story of my father does not exactly parallel your father's or your father's family, it has a number of similarities.
My father came to the States in 1903 from Greece at the age of 10. From that point on his story is like those of a lot of immigrants. He was a hard working individual with little formal education, who in order to provide for his family, basically let the 24/7 restaurant he owned with my uncle in Blue Island, Illinois put him in an early grave in 1952.
I truly appreciated and loved the short time that I knew him.
I could not help but relate to you and your father's story, and it made me feel good. Since we were both raised in Illinois, and are of the same age group it was at times both a familiar and comfortable story.
A beautiful piece, thanks.
Mike
Again your words resonate with me. My dad died last October, two weeks before my birthday, just a few days before his 34th anniversary. He was always Dad. Right now it's hard to think of anything but the details surrounding his passing. I'm haunted by the uncontrollable sobbing that would grip him toward the end. It wasn't fear - he made it clear he wasn't afraid. And there was no consolation for it: how could anyone else understand the depth of sadness that goes with saying goodbye to your own life, as well as everyone else around you? To existence, itself? It seems unfair that, after him being there for us all our lives, we couldn't offer any consolation in his loneliest moment. As he would probably say, life isn't fair (like your dad, mine had a fondness for the repetition of seemingly silly or nonsensical things as well as the knowing look, something that I've learned to appreciate as well).
I hope I too can recall him with such vivid detail 30 years from now and looking back, with a better regard for the fullness of his life. I also wondered what he thought of his life, his family, life in general, his beliefs, what happened when we died, etc. You know, the big ideas in life. Funny how I can recall little things, including the goofy things he would repeat, but I don't know those really important things...
I'm sorry that he's gone. His type of man is getting rarer and rarer. I love the blue-collar working man who has political opinions based on experience and self-edification--someone who can challenge your ideas with philosophical alternatives while rewiring a house or replacing a carburetor.
Your dad reminds me of my old boss. We would roof houses and I don't think there was a single subject we didn't talk about while we were up there.
I'm sorry you didn't get more time with him; I would rather you update us on something he does rather than the things he did. Thanks for sharing him with us.
Touching story about your father. Today is my Dad's birthday. I had breakfast with him this morning before work.We got into the habit of having breakfast together once a week about a year ago. Now my week feels off I don't have breakfast with Dad. Some of the fond memories I have as a child include laughing at Road Runner cartoons with my Dad & sitting up on the tractor with him when he came in from the field. He bought me a toy tractor and a toy lawn mower that looked like his, apologizing that maybe a little girl wouldn't want these things. I loved those toys spending many happy hours outside with them. Dolls? Boring! I was much happier pushing my toy tractor around!
You had me at "Daddy"
Great story, great writing.
*sniff sniff*
Roger:
You helped to make me think of many things about my dad that I have and still do greatly appreciate and continue to be thankful for. You also made me hope that my five year old son will have as fond of memories of me as you do of your daddy.
Thanks!
My father died of lung cancer when I was 13 and he was 48. He was born and raised in Chicago. The worst part is that I can't learn about him from him. He can't drive me around and point out where he lived or went to school. He wasn't perfect, he was a functioning alcoholic but I think he was a good father. I didn't get to see him as much as I would have liked, he worked so much with overtime to support us. He was quiet and soft-spoken, I rarely heard him raise his voice. Every weekend we went to the movies, going to the movies now just isn't the same.
I can still feel the stubble on my fathers chin when I hugged him as a child. I am now 53 and he is 81 and we have not spoken in thirty years. I forgive him everything, he forgives me nothing. Ignorance and pride have a deep tradition in our family. I pray they die with me.
I should probably just mail any comment I'd write to my father.
Roger,
What a wonderful piece. Wonderful. Fathers and sons... the theme that manages to touch upon so many other themes.
Honestly, you have a pitch-perfect memory machine and you roll the images out fluidly and with great clarity.
I've been watching you and reading your reviews since the 1970s. Have always appreciated your even-handed style and loved the fact that you considered films based on its merits within a given genre before it was fashionable.
Anyway, just wanted to thank you for all the good reading you've provided over the years. I hope you're finding your moments of happiness.
Take good care.
Greg
I was thinking of my dad while driving home from work tonight; I think of him pretty often although he's been gone for 15 years now. Then I came here to read your latest entry and it's this. A little satori for me today. Thanks.
Are we talking about our fathers, then? I was struck by a few similarities between yours and mine, Roger. Robert, my namesake, was born in 1927, son of an immigrant from Poland. Joined the Navy at 15 by lying about his age. You could do that then, it seems. Saw the world. Talked into re-enlisting after his tour ended with promises of an officership that was reneged after he signed on the dotted line. Went AWOL in Europe, cheekily returning to the barracks for clean shirts while being pursued by the MPs. Got caught, went to the brig for a while.
When he came home, he went to the School of the Art Institute and then to California where he perpetrated shady scams with his brother. A landscaping swindle in which he took Bob Hope, my mother once told me. After that he came back to Chicago and opened a business with his father and uncle. There was a family surname change at this point and I have never discovered the real reason why, but instead of a last name with a painfully long string of consonants I have the most Anglo name in the world. He was known as the Powder Blue Flash for his natty suits and speedy gait. He hung out on Rush St.
My mother loved him and babied him. He bought her clothes and jewelry with his impeccable taste. They fought bitterly sometimes but they were a real married couple and couldn't imagine being apart. They were married for 16 years before they had me, and I'm an only child. When I was 3 he lost his driver's license for life. Drag racing. My mother tells stories about paying off judges. You could do that then too, it seems.
He was an intelligent man, an artist, and never able to reconcile the creative life he really wanted with the family life he thought it was his duty to have. He drank. He smoked. He swore fluently and creatively. He gave me my love of public television and taught me to look at things closely. The first time he read some poetry I had written he looked at me and I knew he not only got it, but was blown away that I was able to articulate the thought.
Robert didn't suffer fools gladly or make friends easily but he could turn on the charm like a light switch if he liked you. He continued to smoke while on kidney dialysis. About him was an oddly unaffected air of superiority that pissed people off. He was difficult and hard to know and wonderful.
Thanks for letting me ramble about him. I don't mind if nobody reads it; it was nice to write.
Have been musing what to say about me own paterfamilias next. I see a few people have mentioned dreams about their late dads. Good one, Gary.
Yeah, me too. Better yet, while he was alive, I dreamed he came to visit me one November dressed in his favorite clothes -- paint-and-sawdust spattered work pants and t-shirt -- and shook my hand goodbye. He told me to watch out, my brother in Washington was also thinking about dying, he might be gone in a year.
We were living a couple hundred miles apart then. Before I got 'round to calling him, by January, he died. A year later, the following January, my brother in Washington died. They both show up in dreams now and then.
Was gonna tell this story; but a few hours ago, I got seriously outclassed.
Mind you all, I've just moved to an even more remote area than the one we've been occupying for the past year or two. The chances of my meeting anybody at all in the course of a day are one in a few hundred. The chances of meeting Frank Sinatra's daughter out here are one in six billion. I swear. Roger knows where I live and could send powerful lawyers to screw up my whole life if I am lying about this.
A few hours ago I was sitting outside with the horses, mindin' me own business, when this car driving by slows down, stops and the lady in it calls out "Can I ask you a few questions?
"You can if you tell me who you are," I reply.
"Julie Sinatra," she says. Interesting name. I walk up to her car door and there's Frank Sinatra exactly in female form, born 1943. She's looking around the area to buy or build a house next to the stream below us. Well, come in, I say.
"Any relation to the famous Sinatra?"
"He was my father," she replies. We chat for about two hours.
She's the daughter of Frank Sinatra and Alora Gooding, aka Dorothy Bonucelli, who didn't tell her Frank was her dad until she was 53 and he was dying. She says the separation and name-change was forced by the mafia, who had Frank open the Havana hotel for free -- and not for a suitcase packed with $200,000, which, she said, Kitty Kelly and the rest of them said was the case. There was a murder involved, needing covered up. So for 53 years her name was Julie Lyma.
For about 2 hours, I'm hearing about a very different Frank Sinatra than what's been biographed so far -- and Julie's discovery of all sorts of similarities between the two of them, although they never met, not even on his deathbed. Like f'rinstance she had a career as a singer and also an interest in painting and ancient egyptian stuff, like her dad, never knowing they were related. She says she's got the various missing pieces to her dad's story.
And I'm gonna hear them all and we're gonna play guitars together, too.
She says she dreams about her dad a lot.
Here: http://www.juliesinatra.com/
Roger,
What a fabulous tribute to your father!
The mention of "The Wayward Wind" immediately took me back to my own childhood. When I first heard that song, long before I could fully understand its meaning, that restless wind somehow seeped in to my soul. As soon as I saw your words on the screen I could hear every word and note and felt the same shiver as when I first heard it. I was delighted to find the clip at the end and it is taking an immense act of will to not simply play it over and over. Thank you.
Roger,
Your blog about your father really struck home as I know it did with many other readers. I thought I was, for a few moments, reading about my father. My father, Herbert Kuenneth, was born in Mt. Olive Illinois (50 miles South of Springfield Illinois and 50 miles Northeast of St. Louis Missouri). His father, Charles Kuenneth (born Karl Kuenneth) hailed from the Hanover section of Germany. If you google "Charles Kuenneth" you'll see many references to me, plus one concerning my grandfather (Charles or Karl). He, with some cousins, was issued a US Patent in 1896 on an early electric lamp holder. Karl was born in 1855 and is buried in the Mt. Olive Cemetery about 150 feet from the Mother Jones memorial, which is in the Union Miner's Cemetery a few paces away (across the road from the Serbian Cemetery). Needless to say Mt. Olive was a coal mining town with the usual labor unrest that you would expect. At least until the mines gave out.
My father was born in 1899 and was the youngest of two sons. My dad's older brother Ed was given the family business, which was a hardware store. Mt. Olive was a small, dying town with few career opportunities, so my father left in the early 1920s to find his fortune in Chicago. He never did find his fortune, but instead served honorably with the United States Railway Mail Service for over 45 years, receiving upon retirement in 1966 a commendation from the Postmaster General.
Dad's work routine had to be one of the strangest I've ever heard of, though when growing up I never thought about it. My father literally had to commute to St. Paul Minnesota to start work! My suspicion is when growing up I thought this was a common practice, though the fathers of none of my childhood friends ever did this. My dad would light a cigarette when leaving the house carrying an overnight bag, and I would walk with him a block and a half to Western Avenue, cross and wait for the Northbound bus. I would wave as he departed, heading to old post office to board a train bound for St. Paul. He was "deadheading" this first leg of the journey. He would flash his government postal ID to the conductor. Arriving in St. Paul he would go to the railway mail car he was assigned to and climb aboard and proceed to stand all the way back to Chicago, sorting mail the entire time. Then he'd go right back to St. Paul on the same train, again standing and sorting on the moving, swaying, lurching railway car. There he'd take a room for a few hours sleep, then "deadhead" back to Chicago. He would walk up our front steps after three bus rides from downtown. I sometimes waited for him at the bus stop. This tour took 3 days, but then he had 5 days off before the next grueling tour. Once, in the early 1960s I went down to the train, and even climbed up into the mail car when my father had some business at the post office. It was a dusty, dark workplace in which I couldn't conceive of my dad spending 45 years, pretty much standing on a moving train the entire time.
He married my mother in the mid 1930s and I was born in 1947 (when my father was 48) . We lived in the Southwest side of Chicago, the West Morgan Park area. To help support my older sister and I, my mother worked a flexible part time schedule that allowed her to be off when my father was on the road and work when he was home to watch over my sister and me. My sister is 9 years my elder, so mostly dad looked after me when mom was working (in the loop). In the late 1950s my dad was made, pretty much against his will, the foreman of the crew on his railway mail car.
This drove him to drink. Serious drink. He always liked being one of the "guys". Being the boss created a new, alien, and horrifying dynamic. The stress was something he could not handle. He began to drink big time. He came home from the liquor store with a big brown paper bag and quickly went to the basement. Three or four 2-quart bottles of Pabst Beer suddenly appeared in the basement refrigerator. Probing about after a time, I discovered fifths of whisky hidden in the back of the rag cabinet near that refrigerator. He would go into the basement (I assume), take a couple shots of the hard stuff, then go to the refrigerator and drink beer before staggering back up the stairs. During his layoffs he'd drink himself to and beyond the point of passing out each night. He never drank on the job and strangely enough, as soon as he retired in 1966, he stopped drinking completely.
My grammar school was less than 3 blocks away so I came home every day for lunch. When my dad was home he made lunch for me as well as himself. My dad like eggs, fried in a skillet in melted bacon grease. Whenever he made bacon, which was daily, he would take the grease and pour it into a tin can which he put into the refrigerator to congeal. To open the refrigerator door was to be assailed by the smell of stale bacon grease. He loved it! Every day he would take that can and with a huge spoon, dig out massive dollops of that stiff grease and fling it into the warm frying pan. Two or three eggs would be added and he would take the finished product, if you could call it that, to the dining room table and consume it as he listened to Paul Harvey on the radio.
After I was old enough to understand something of life, I realized my presence here on earth may have been an unintended accident. Nevertheless, my dad was terrific with me and of a calm and gentle demeanor. He passed away in 1977. He always smoked. Mostly it was a pipe. Cigars might take second place in his heart, through only on special occasions because of their cost. He smoked cigarettes as a stop gap, but not usually at home.
During my fishing phase from 1959 through 1964 my dad drove me (and my pals) to the nearby fishing holes. As I battled crappie and bullheads, dad would pull out an aluminum folding chair from the car trunk, sit down under a tree with a pipe and read the newspaper, his hat shading his eyes, protecting his receding hairline from the sun.
My dad's favorite reading was pulp westerns. Usually Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey. He'd take a number of their paperback editions on his commutes to work, and also read them before going to sleep at night. He read the newspaper, knew current events but was never technically astute. After I bought my first 16mm projector in 1971, I used to show dad the films I procured. After a while I finally got a 16mm technicolor print and after seeing it projected, he expressed his amazement that my projector played color and well as black and white films.
Dad was color blind. Visually he couldn't differentiate between certain colors, and when you're driving you have to know when a traffic signal is red or green. His color blindness precluded that! Thus there was a certain urgency to that ascertainment. One lasting memory from our vacations is my dad shouting that there is a light coming up. My sister and I would lean forward in the back seat and keep a running commentary concerning to color of the approaching light. Thus in all our years there never was a problem associated with this visual deficiency.
Music. My father, after our 1957 acquisition of our first TV, watched Lawrence Welk, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Mitch Miller with a passion. He also bought many 33-1/3 LPs of barbershop quartets. As Christmas and birthday gifts, I would scour the barbershop quartet bins of the record store at the "Evergreen Plaza" shopping center to present him with some LP sure to enthrall and inspire him. In fact, after more than 50 years, I can still remember all the lyrics (which in my case is a major feat!) of "Hard Hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah".
My dad died in his own bedroom, looking out of his window at the tree in our backyard after 6 months of a losing battle with cancer.
Chuck
Ebert: Readers: Chuck and his beautiful wife Eileen met many years ago in my U of C Class.
So far, no engagements among the blog readers. Come on, crowd! Get the Chuck and Eileen spirit!
Roger:
As for me, I'm pleased you agreed to the Esquire shadow and interview. It was good to learn more about "the man," though my opinion of your writing has not changed.
... besides, I strive to resist the sensation of close familiarity celebrity creates, not for the Roger Eberts of the world, but for the Dennis Freires. Still, I gotta tell you, your perseverance and productivity, your good will and good nature, means a lot to me. Helpful. Hopeful. Tough, broad shouldered, Chicago kind of uplift for me.
Your post here on your father is example of what I mean when I said learning about you in Esquire didn't alter any opinions I've formed of your writing.
Your writing. Well, if your not careful when reading some of your stuff, the next thing you know you don't really seem to be reading, your just listening to a good story well told.
And when you want to, or when the venue or topic (some of your reviews) calls for your wit, concision or saber, man I love the phrases you mint and the smithing you smith.
Other times, and this is what I've most enjoyed through the years, your perception and discernment of the common human denominator and your powers of expression capture for me essences and truths. Your religious sense? Yet, your non-religiosity? Your psychological acumen? Or, your plane old common sense?
When I read, I read for story, I read to learn, I read to argue & debate, I read for pleasure, I read for solace. I'm selective in what I read because there's so much I want to read, and also because I need time to write.
I write for story, to learn, to argue & debate. I write for pleasure, I write for solace. I write to think.
What I gain from reading your blog are moments of how you think, what you think and how you express your thoughts & ideas. What I gain from reading your journalism are the benefits a student receives from learning from a professor. I enjoy movies as an art form and as entertainment: from you I learn how to appreciate the art; I also have the boon of your input concerning on what I may want to spend my time and money for entertainment.
I really liked learning about your Daddy. Thanks.
Dennis Freire
March 21, 2010 4:56 PM
I'm surprised that you misused "immigrated" in the first paragraph. It's not like you.
Ebert: My bad. Fixed.
*****************************************
Well, dang! You've still got it wrong. "Emigrated" has only one "m". You must keep doing this until you get it right.
It's so odd how memories intensify after a loved one is gone. My own dad passed away a month ago. We were never very close, but little memories like the time we played catch and he pulled up at the last moment in his windup for a full-force pitch (Dad had been a champion fast-pitch softball pitcher) or him showing me how to bait a fishhook have recently begun flooding back. And you get a glimpse of their earlier lives like you'd never had before. My dad was retired Navy. He retired when I was very young and I didn't get to see much of his Navy days... so when he was buried in uniform, it was the first time I remember seeing him decked out like the true sailor he was. And the old photos that the family dug up for the service were of this young, rakish, mischievous-looking guy who only somewhat resembled the older, workaday man I grew up with. I certainly don't have as many fond memories of him as you do of your own dad... at least not yet... but I miss him very much. And your piece gives me a lot of solemn reassurance that feeling won't fade.
It seems that no matter how great your life's achievments may be, one can do no greater than to love and sacrifice for another.
I believe every man spends his life trying to impress other men. And at the top of that list of men is his father. Even if his father is gone. No one can push my buttons to get me angry easier than my ol’man because no one else’s opinion of me matters more than his. Last year when we were sitting under a tree after putting siding on my house I told him for the first time how condescending he can be towards me, and he admitted it and apologized in his own way (I know I'm no angel as well). Ever since then we have had a closer relationship. But the thing that made me understand my father more than anything else was having my own son. He is only five, but I have to wonder how our relationship will develop over the years and how I will maintain that fine line between being his friend and being his father.
Thank you again. In the end, love is all we have for one another; its all we need.
Roger's beautiful piece reminds me of another one. Craig Ferguson (another brilliant, long-sober alcoholic, and a superb writer, as his well-reviewed novel a few years ago proves) gave this remarkable monologue after his father's death in 2007. It amazed me at the time and still does.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWlNPq0ftM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYhVnsCbCg0&feature=channel
The way he mixes humorous stories with his obvious grief is extraordinary. Something about the Celts, from medieval troubadours to this, makes them the most amazing story-tellers.
I note that his Scottish accent shows much more this night than it usually does.
My father died suddenly last November 10. He was 56. One of my earliest memories of him is of sitting on his lap to watch one TV show that I knew he never missed at the time: Sneak Previews. "When Roger Ebert likes a movie," he taught me, when I was perhaps 5 or 6 years old, "It means it's a good movie."
It's the reason I read this blog, and I think of him every time I do. But never as much as today - your beautiful memories of your father, more than anything, evoked the beautiful memories of mine.
Part of me wants to be angry with you, Mr. Ebert, for re-opening a wound that was far from closed in the first place. But part of me just wants to sit down with you and swap Dad stories.
Good story. I am heartened to hear you honor picket lines. So few people do and even less understand why it's wrong to cross one. I've been on strike several times in my career and it's no fun. Thanks for respecting the REAL people who built this country.
I'm sitting at work sobbing and I think the other attorneys in my office think I have finally lost my mind. Every piece of this is beautifully written and it reminds me of my "daddy" who made coffee and toast and insisted that my brother and I go to college. We miss him every day.
I lost my own father when I was 18. Our relationship was always pleasant and loving. I am now almost 26, 8 years later, and it amazes me how life goes on when you're young and how little I seem to remember him, and it scares me. But I loved him and I miss him terribly, and it was one of the phrases in your article that made a click in my brain: "Did I know how much I loved him? I do now."
I hope someday to remember and know my father's life at least half of this, with as much love, respect, and tenderness.
I started to read this piece and couldn't stop.
What a wonderful tribute to your father.
I feel as if I really know him. And the piece also tells a lot about you and the motives that drove you.
The first sentence is the best one.
Thank you Mr. Ebert, for sharing your memories of your father with us.
How does your heart feel when you pour it out on the page? Relieved? Bruised? Raw? Lighter?
I can't imagine. I am lucky enough to still be able to enjoy my parents. Your blog entry may have made me a little bit more appreciative of them, quirks and all.
Thank you again for sharing. My best to you.
That was just perfect. All I know is that I need to hug my father now. Roger, we need to clone you and keep you going forever. There is simply no one else I can think of who writes as well as you. I fear the day when you are no longer writing.
Thank you for sharing your memories of your father. My dad is from Chicago and we lived there until we moved to the D.C. area when I was 12. Dad battled dementia the last few years of his life and his short-term memory was spotty. However, his memories of his childhood and early adulthood were clear. He once told me about going to the 1933 Chicago World's Fair with his father when he was about 12 years old. It was a nickel to get in. He told me that he tasted pancakes for the first time at the Fair. I questioned him because I remembered my grandma making some very good buckwheat pancakes when I was a child. Dad's eyes sparkled as he told me that the Aunt Jemima pancakes at the Fair were the real thing and that his mom's pancakes were okay, but just didn't compare.
Roger,
All who were with you for your dad's service were touched by this and while remember the sadness, how realize fortunate you were to hear: "I love you so much."
Maxwell
Not having spent more than 10 hours of quality time with my father (I have reached out, but he's a damaged man), I appreciate seeing some of what I've missed through your narrative.
Wonderful post, Roger. I wish I had a relationship like this with my father.
I know this is very random, but I just have to get it off my chest after reading your tweets during Oscar season. I found your thoughts on Gabourey Sidibe to be very patronizing and highly tinged with "White Guilt". You were not alone of course. Throughout the season and on Oscar night itself, she was portrayed by fellow actors and entertainment anchors as an "inspirational" and "courageous" figure. Again, I found this to be very patronizing and a disservice to Gabby's performance. Why should she not be respected as any other actress without such phony reverence? Actors play unglamorous roles all the time and they are not considered inspirational and courageous just for doing so. A blogger I read sumemd it up like this: "In short: she doesn’t need their overcompensation. She’s not mentally handicapped; she’s obese. They can talk to her like an actress, not like the subject of a human-interest story." Your championing of Gabby was well-meaning, I'm sure, but it came off differently to those who don't know you well.
This wonderful entry of yours turns my mind to my grandfather. He died at the age of 58, after years of fighting heart problems; eventually a big one got him. When he died, I was his only grandchild, and I meant the world to him (or so I'm told).
He was a hard worker, and of a different mindset that the current generation of instant entitlement. He wasn't an easy man, had a temper from time to time, but he loved music, and to read, and he loved his family.
I wish I had gotten to know my grandfather better, and share music with him. For him to have died at the age he did, he missed out on the things he wanted most to take part in.
Anyway Roger, thank you for reminding me of someone special to me (although I didn't know them like I wish I could have), by talking about someone who was special to you.
Got cut off maybe. Here goes again. . . Ebert. Dear, dear Ebert. My father tall, silent [with mom in the room, no other choice.] EVERY breakfast one boiled egg, chopped, and one slice toast. We kids called it 'choppa choppa egg.' When we are at last orphans, we finally have freedom. But, no one tells us the price is sorrow. Thank you, dear Ebert, for being you and enriching us so. C
I met my father when I was three weeks old, and then never saw him again. It was Vietnam, and "sweet songs never last too long on a broken radio"...
My grandparents helped my mother raise me and my 3 siblings. My grandfather and grandmother met in Chicago in late 1920s, he was a bandleader, and she played piano. They played together for ten years before marrying, having children, moving west, and then getting to have grandchildren with whom they would watch Lawrence Welk. My grandfather died when I was 13.
I sobered up in my mid-30s after having my own children and one night of receiving that same icy look from my wife that you mention above.
I bought my two boys a portable record player recently, and took them to a used record store. We picked up Welk's Winchester Cathedral, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, I just went by what instruments they wanted to hear. Mostly stuff I would sit around my grandparents living room listening to, night after night, 30 years past, waiting for my mom to get off work, probably with some crabby disinterested look on my face. The six-year-old really likes Winchester Cathedral, the four year old not so much.
thanks again.
Hi Roger,
I have been reading your journal for about a year, ever since finding it. I must say that as much as I have always enjoyed your movie reviews, going back to the late sixty’s, that I love your journal entries even more. The thoughts and opinions you express reflect the thoughts, hopes and dreams of a true humanitarian. That is true especially in these seemingly acerbic times that we live in. In many regards our society has gone awry with greed, hatred and a complete lack of respect for our own fellow man. You have commented on both the ill’s and the good that is out there. I have always respected you for your insightful movie reviews and now for you recollections and social commentary. I don’t know if you started writing about your thoughts because you had more time to reflect on them as a result of your illness, but I am most grateful to have found your truly eloquent voice for social conscience.
The story that you told of your Daddy remind me of my own dear departed Dad. He passed away about ten years ago after dealing with the ravages of a stroke. I think about, and miss him all the time. We had many differences of opinions about politics and war but we shared a common value system, a love of family and friends. He always believed in giving to charity even when you didn’t have much and in being grateful for the things that you had. Both of our families seemed to share the values of their time period and are sorely lacking in today’s world. We are so caught up in a never ending race these days and I look back with great fondness on those simpler times when people had respect for one another’s opinions and rights. Granted there were a lot of things that were wrong in the sixties, such as discrimination and war. But there were awakenings in our people and the government that tried to right the wrongs of that society. I feel sorry at times for the younger generation with all that they have to deal with in today’s society. They don’t seem to be taught to have the respect for others the way that we used to. They have become immune from all of the noise that is being generated by the loud voices of today.
I have never seen such political intolerance at the expense of the common good. Making a political point is now more important than accomplishing good for all. The conservative political movement and the so called Christian right do not seem to understand the “Christ” part of Christianity. Did Christ preach for giving benefits to the wealthy or did he preach on behalf of the poor and the down trotted of society. You would never know this from listening to their rhetoric. My father would tell me that if you repeated a lie often enough that it would become the truth. Sadly that has become true in today’s political world. The opposition today acts as bullies and interrupts and shouts down speakers trying to explain their case to our citizens. America has developed a short attention span and is always expecting solutions to happen overnight. Those put into power for “change” are not even given time to solve the problems that were many years in the making. The thought is that they have not solved the problems in a year so it is time to go back to the old ways again. The changers had their chance and didn’t deliver on time.
Roger, please keep up the good work! Keep your thoughts and opinion out there for all of us to enjoy and ponder.
Supposedly my grandparents lived near Harry Golden and were fond of him.
How has your background affected the way you critique films about machinists, florists, and electricians?
Damn you Roger Ebert, for you have made a grown man cry. And at his place of work no less.
Roger, thank you for telling us more about your childhood. It was all so beautiful. I like the part about how you seem to notice that as a kid you loved your father more than you realized. That's true of so many of us.
Lee Stringer, blur that line between being father and friend. When it seems you're most required to be "father," it's when "friend" is most needed of you.
Then when this fathering is no longer needed, you won't have a better friend on the planet, who'll know you better than anyone else ever could.
That's how I decided to do it, and 31 years later it's still working great.
Goodness. This is beautiful and inevitably had me thinking of similarities and differences in my dad and my relationship with him. He, too, had his sayings that were left over from growing up a country boy in Wisconson. "Gosh all fried cakes" in self-deprecating surprise was a good one. He was also fond of saying "This,too, shall pass." One day, probably five years after he died, my girlfriend and I were walking through Manhattan locked in one of those seething arguments where you can hardly stand to look at the other person. But I did turn to look at her at a stoplight and, lo and behold, a few feet behind her was a kid wearing a black t-shirt that proclaimed in big white block letters, "This, too, shall pass." It gives me chills when I think about it now; we've been married for nearly three years and have a great 17-month-old boy who shares my and my father's middle name. I wish he could have met them both.
Heartfelt thanks for introducing us to your Dad in this way. For sure he's immensely proud of you and his daughter-in-law, Chaz, as you were and are of him.
Fantastic story. And, the great comments really make you appreciate the people you have in your lives while they are there.
Awww, Roger. My stomach sorta hurts right now from reading this and remembering MY old man--a peach of a guy--and my mom--who like your father used the same phrases over and over until they were a liturgy of our daily lives. Thank you for this--I've always thought you were one good man, and now I have a small glimpse as to some of the source of that. I'm thinking of my dad right now thanks to you. Thanks, thanks, thanks. Boy howdy...race you to the river, shouted the black horse...
Roger, I will pay tribute to your father by praising his son.
You're terrific, pal. Yes, I agree with all your reviews, but I salute you as a man, not simply as a fine journalist. How well I recall your jaunty walk on North Michigan when I lived in the great city in the mid-80s [with Studs ambling on the other side with his cigar].
Okay?
All the best.
Fred Willman
Madison, WI
Thanks for this beautiful and touching remembrance of your father that helps us all lovingly remember our fathers. The sentences "Did I know how much I loved him. I do now." likely applies to many of us who grew up in the 50's and 60's. It certainly does to me.
Thanks Roger for this beautiful and touching remembrance of your father. It certainly has helped many of us to lovingly remember our fathers. Your lines "Did I know how much I loved him? I do now" likely applies to many of us who grew up in the 50's and 60's. It certainly does to me.
Roger, this reminds me of the loss of my parents, particularly my mother. Maybe, I didn't appreciate them as much as I should when they were alive, but I miss them. Jennifer did a real good treatment of this in her film.
Your geographical descriptions, also, remind me of the days I went to school, and lived, in Champaign-Urbana (especially my fun times in Newman Hall). I haven't been down there for about 10 years.
Thanks for the article.
Ebert: HI Vincent. I'm really looking forward to seeing you at Ebertfest!
Thanks Roger. Loved the photos of you as a kid, if you have any more of this type of family history post! It looks like you had a nice childhood, bye.
Roger-
You are a treasure. Thank you.
Mr. Ebert,
Reading your memories of your "Daddy" and remembering stories my father, mother, and grandparents would tell about their childhood often embarrasses me. My generation and my children's generation are so diluted in character, so shallow in integrity, so delicate in self-confidence when compared to them. How did we get to be this way? We're an embarrassment.
You had a wonderful "Daddy." But what's even more important is you recognize and remember it.
Respectfully,
Michael Esslinger
Thanks for such a wonderful piece. You sure know how to weave words together. I could smell the burnt toast! My father died young as well and this really hits home. Love your dog, so cute.
Thanks
Mr. Ebert,
I have always been in envy of everyone who experienced a father's love. One time, I called to talk to a friend and her father, visiting from Chicago, answered the phone. We bantered for about a minute and I was about to leave a message, when he said, "Wait, I hear the click of her high heels on the sidewalk. She will be here in a minute." I have never forgotten his tone of voice, filled with a quiet love that maybe I wanted to hear. I think about that moment a lot. Having a father who would visit you and be able to banter with your friends would be something that I would have enjoyed.
My father loves no one, much less himself. It is the saddest thing to watch as he goes towards infinity. It would have been easier if he had been my "Daddy". Instead, he is Lennon, a lost man who sits and watches boats pass my his house on Tampa Bay.
Your writing is so elegant. It fills a soul with longing, but joy. I am glad there are individuals who were loved by their fathers. It is a source of hope for me watching love between others.
Thank you.
Thank you for this.
I lost my father to pancreatic cancer at the beginning of the year. I got to spend his last three weeks with him, unfortunately one week of that was taken up with packing him up and moving him to my house, and the last ten days was the final coma. I got to hear a lot of new stories about his childhood and early adulthood, growing up in the Bronx and summering in Rye, NY.
He was always a big movie buff- collected move tie in books, worked in movie promotion for a short time. The first film I remember seeing was 2001 with him in Cinerama. We weren't sure how much time he had left, and that put a lot of pressure on the movie selection for the evening. it ended up that the last two movies he watched were The Cat's Meow and A Fish Called Wanda. He had never seen Wanda uncut, only on edited television, so it was in some ways a new experience for him, one that he enjoyed and discussed with me at length the differences.
A few hours later he took a nap, and never regained consciousness.
I'm not sure whether I'll be able to watch it again.
Hey Roger,
Another good look at our Urbana. I wish I had your powers of recollection. I miss my parents all the time and often wish I could let my children realize that they will miss their parents, without being self-serving and mawkish.
Will I see you in June?
Ebert: You bet!
I type this with misty eyes Mr. Ebert. A wonderful, heartfelt tale. The last paragraph of your story fit like a bottle cap on a bottl