Even though he passed away June 19th 2006, all I have to do to see my dad is look at my furry monkey arms, my unkempt eyebrows that need constant attention, or notice the many habits I inherited from him. Since Sunday June 15th is Father’s Day I wanted to write this little blog about my dad. Hopefully yours is still around to share the day with.

My dad was strict. I mean really strict. He was a guy you didn’t want to cross. When I was a kid, many of my friends were scared out of their Keds at the mere sight of him. When I heard his car pulling in the drive I looked around, making sure my room was halfway in order, and if there was something I was supposed to do before he got home.

Even though I basically feared him, the one thing we had in common was cars. Playing with cars (big and small) was a common practice in my family. My dad always had different cars in the yard since he and a friend of his were always “flipping” them to make extra money to feed their kids. That was before it was called “flipping.” Along with my Uncle Bobby, who has also passed on, my dad’s life revolved around cars. If he didn’t have a family of 5 kids to raise my dad would’ve had 20-30 cars. His first car was a ’49-’51 Ford Business Coupe, and he seemingly always had one, or was looking for one. The thing is, they never ran. He usually had one, but he was either working on it, or working on something else, which kept him from ever finishing it.

He wasn’t really into Mustangs, though. He liked the shoeboxes – big cars. He once owned a ’69 T-Bird with a big honking Thunder-Jet 429 and suicide doors, but the brakes barely worked. I remember him plowing both legs into the floor to get the thing to stop. That car was a beat, though. The only Mustang I remember is probably the first one I saw, and it was a ’65 Mustang convertible. Of course, it was red with a black top. He didn’t have it long, maybe a few days. I was just a young pup at the time, maybe 9 or 10, but I remember that car like it was yesterday. I remember he didn’t do a thing to it, but he made money on it.
He quit school in the 8th grade or so to work in North Carolina tobacco fields so he was pretty much a life-long smoker. That life caught up with him, and lung cancer took his life. What was once an invincible rock, someone that at one time I thought was bulletproof; the cancer turned him into a shadow of his former self.

The last time I saw him was a Thursday evening – June 15th, 2006. I was leaving the next day to attend the former NMRA Motorsports Nationals at Maple Grove Raceway. I knew he was near the end. At the time I thought it would probably the last time I would ever see him. He was on so much medicine I don’t think he knew who I was when I left. Even though he was at home with my mom, his last words to me were, “I want to go home.”

Those words are now tattooed on my chest as a reminder of my dad – my hero. See ya later dad. Happy Father’s Day.