SHI BLOGS TOO

My Daddy.

Father's Day is coming up soon. I found a picture of my dad on a nephew's MySpace today. I don't have a scanner, so I haven't been able to upload alot of photo's that I would like to put here. So, I downloaded this one of my dad off of the nephew's site. I'm sure he will not mind.

I know this is an early entry for Father's Day, but I can't resist posting it here today. My dad died on June 8, 1974. He was sixty-one at the time. It was one year after his retirement from the old Fisher Body Plant in Flint, Michigan. He was a crane operator there for thirty-five years.

I regret that he never got to meet my daughter Julie, nor my two youngest son's Patrick and Matthew. He did, however, get to know my two oldest boys - Michael and Christopher, when they were both very young. He loved children and enjoyed singing to them when he bounced them on his knee. He had a voice like Perry Como's. Only daddy was Irish, English, Scotch, and French Canadian...not Italian like Mr.Como was.

Daddy could sing "Ava Maria" as good as any proffessional, though. But, my very favorite song that he would sing was always "White Christmas." He would sing it every Christmas Holiday Season for as long as I could remember. He was notorious for getting up on the stage at the local tavern and singing into the microphone with his velvety mellow voice. He had the good looks to go with the voice too. The locals loved it when "Ray" would get up on stage to sing. It seemed the more beer he would drink the more he would "love" to sing.

My three brothers and three sisters and myself, all loved it when daddy would sing for us. Especially at Christmas time, when he would bring home those huge candy canes and cut them up for all of us. Get out his peppermint schnapps and give us each a sip of it...and sing White Christmas to us all.

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