Remembering dad.

Even though I’m hungry and not 100% motivated to write a post at the moment I didn’t want to start grazing through the refrigerator before I extended this holiday greeting to dads everywhere.

My own father — Herbie — passed away in 2002. I have countless vivid memories of him, especially our regular junkets to various amusement parks throughout my childhood because dad enjoyed them even more than I did. In the mid-1950s we had Fun Fair (see below) that was actually walking distance from our house in Skokie, but dad also shlepped us to Hollywood Kiddieland on the north side of Chicago near Lincoln Village because I was really impressive at age four behind the wheel of their miniature tractors. He used to brag about me.

When I was a little older — maybe 9 or 10 — dad introduced us to Chicago’s iconic Riverview Park, a moderately seedy (it was seedy by 1960, anyway) 70-acre amusement mecca built in 1904 that featured enormous scary roller coasters and big-kid rides like the Bobs, the Flying Turns, the Rotor, the Water Bug (motorized inner tubes that operated like bumper cars in a huge pool), the Silver Flash, the Comet and the Chutes.

Dad loved roller coasters and rode them all with me, but my favorite was the Chutes because you’d get drenched to the skin and it was the only ride at Riverview that didn’t make my little sister throw up. I remember waiting in line for what seemed like an eternity, listening to a recorded safety message that repeated every 10 seconds until it got so wedged into my brain that I can still recite it verbatim half a century later later. Keep your hands inside the boat. Don’t grab the side of the boat, hold onto the handles!

And now it’s finally time for lunch, probably Cheetos and leftover egg foo young, followed by a brief afternoon nap until it’s time to drive to the airport to pick up Sam. He’s been gone for eight days. I’m so excited I can hardly stand it.

Thank you for reading this!