Brad Todd is a public affairs and political campaign consultant, and co-author, with Salena Zito, of “The Great Revolt.”
I taught my 14-year-old son to shave recently, and it took me back to the Norelco electric razor with rotating blades that my grandfather gave me when I was his age.
My mother’s dad was just 44 years old when I was born. By then, he was a master of his strengths and certain of his future as he hit middle age. I got the best 25 years of his life. The tutelage and example I received from him, and still get from my own dad, are what I celebrate on Father’s Day.
“Granddaddy” is still with me in many ways. I still use his pitching wedge on the golf course, keep his union card in my desk drawer and show visitors to my office the three now-antique radios he owned. But the real evidence of Granddaddy’s influence can be found in many of the things I value.
As a baseball fan who played catcher in one of the thousands of adult baseball leagues that entertained Americans in the immediate postwar era, he cultivated a fandom in me, and I still obsess over the sport’s strategic nuances. He taught me to play golf, to carry a pocket knife, to embrace vexing menial chores.
He taught me how to pick out rib-eye steaks at the butcher and how to properly grill them: seven minutes per side, per inch of thickness, and not a second more. He kept his cars and trucks clean, inside and out. He sang heartily in church and draped his arm on the pew, gently touching the shoulder of someone he loved while he listened to the sermon.
He coached me through a 4-H Club biscuit-making contest when I was 9 years old and celebrated the blue ribbon I (we) won. We had to settle for second place the next year with cornbread, but to this day I think of him every time I make either, using his old aluminum measuring cup to scoop — but not precisely measure — the ingredients. I can hear his voice saying, “Stir it only till the dough follows the fork — no more.” Every activity was instructional and welcome, at least in my memory.
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As I age into the life phase where he was in my childhood consciousness, I realize my frame, hairline and gait come from him — and I took his modeling for some of my own relationships.
Granddaddy was gentle and faithful. The banter he enjoyed with our golf partners introduced me to the way grown men enjoy each other’s company. He revered strong women in our big Appalachian family, so I loved them, too, and learned from his example.
Sometimes, his best intentions for me blinded him. Having barely got by on a subsistence farm as a child, he aspired for me to make a living with my mind and avoid manual labor. He tried to shield me from it. Luckily, my hard-working dad understood that physical work was a man-making experience. Today, when I get the joy of exhaustion that comes from splitting firewood or hauling brush, I silently thank my father — and smile at the memory of my grandfather’s overprotection.
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Granddaddy was a master bird hunter, as fading news clippings I store in cigar boxes attest. He was so talented that the manager at the nuclear weapons complex where he worked sought him as a guide. Eventually, Granddaddy asked the big boss to return the favor by hiring his son-in-law, my dad — a request that got the newlyweds home to Tennessee and ensured that I, his future grandson, would be raised in the same valley where five generations of our ancestors had grown up.
In his last years, when I was in my 20s, I finally began to see Granddaddy’s imperfections. He retired a few years early because the computerization of his work intimidated him. He was unjustly frustrated by my inability to take off an afternoon from work to play golf. He disliked politics and failed to understand why I found it missional. Even these discoveries were helpful — if we don’t see the foibles of our idols, we might miss their humanity.
The National Retail Federation says Americans will spend an average of $190 per dad for Father’s Day this year — far shy of the $254 spent per mom on Mother’s Day. Our sitcoms and movies tend to portray mothers as heroes and fathers as the butts of jokes. We lionize single mothers without lamenting what’s lost with when the father is absent.
I’m not sure why the culture is quicker to celebrate nurturing over mentoring, but I’d argue that the country would benefit from also elevating men who provide strong, purposeful role models. I’ve been lucky to have three of them — and I would never get to be the man, or the father or the grandfather I hope to become were it not for their examples.
