Tales from the Dad Side

by Steve Doocy

  After the show I walked into the greenroom, and there were my dad and Namath laughing up a storm like a couple of frat brothers. It made me feel good that I could give my dad a chance to chew the fat with a bona fide football hero, who, I might add, seemed genuinely happy to share the couch with my father. One of our college-aged interns looking in would probably just see a couple of old guys sharing a laugh, but I saw two legends.

  One guy made millions throwing a ball; the other guy never got that big break, didn’t get to go to college, and worked hard and long until his back gave out. But his spirit never did.

  I have had the pleasure of meeting and working with some giants of modern American history, but for heroism nobody ever got close to Jim Doocy, my biological father, a gentleman who once carried an autographed football on his lap across the country so he could present it to his grandson, who had no idea what a Joe Namath was.

  13

  Humor

  The Joker Gene

  The five-hundred-mile drive to Grandma’s house in northern Iowa was mind-numbingly dull. My mother invented a time killer called “What am I thinking about,” which usually lasted ten minutes before my younger sisters lost interest because they didn’t care what my mother was thinking about.

  The halfway point was the Missouri River, which we’d cross on the triple-cantilevered Abraham Lincoln Bridge, as it is officially designated by the state of Nebraska. But we called it by the name of the town it sits next to, Blair, Nebraska.

  “Fifty miles to the Blair Bridge,” my dad would announce when he’d see a road sign for the state line. Just that announcement would start almost an hour of anxiety because for a family from the country’s most landlocked state, a triple-span soaring bridge was scary.

  “Twenty-seven miles to the Blair.”

  The closer we got to the bridge, the more the tone of Dad’s announcements changed. First they were simply informational; then as we got closer things would get more foreboding. There was one more petrifying component to my dad’s little soap opera; the bridge deck was made of a metal mesh that made an ominous sound as you crossed.

  Mummummummmum.

  The faster Dad drove, the higher the pitch, and the louder and scarier the sound the bridge sang to us.

  AAAAAMMMMMMMMM.

  “Three minutes,” he announced. “Hang on!” He started sounding like the NASA guy whose job it was to count backward: “T-minus one minute and counting…”

  “Jim, stop it,” my mother said. He never did.

  As the car angled up the long steep approach, my sisters and I would crouch down in the back so we didn’t have to watch, and to this day I can remember closing my eyes and praying that it would be fast. Keep in mind, this was about the time the movie The Poseidon Adventure was in theaters, and our car flying into the river seemed as plausible as Shelley Winters hanging by a chandelier upside down in a ballroom as Maureen McGovern sang, “There’s got to be a morning after…”

  AAMMMAAAAHHHHHHHHHEEEEERRR.

  The sound and the height combined to quicken our little hearts, but that was never enough for our dad; always midspan, at the height of our personal peril, he would swerve a little. On some trips he’d throw his hands up in the air like people on roller coasters do, steering with his knees. Of course we’d never see that, because our eyes would have to be pried open first.

  “Kids, we made it!” he would announce with the same satisfied voice Chuck Yeager would use after a successful test flight of some eminently dangerous flying contraption.

  In reality all that we’d done was cross a bridge that was probably thirty feet above the Missouri, which at that location was probably as deep as Paris Hilton.

  The reason my dad did that every time we’d cross it was he thought it was comical, yet to this day his joke haunts us all. Today my sisters and I all get sweaty palms at the thought of crossing a bridge. Unfortunately for me, a really big one stands between me and a paycheck, the George Washington Bridge, one of the country’s longest, highest, and ultimately scariest bridges. A bridge-fear expert once suggested I drive across it wearing a puffy orange Coast Guard-approved life jacket, which I did as a joke until the Port Authority police stopped me because they thought I was wearing a belt bomb.

  Not long ago I asked my father if he realized that he’d permanently freaked out his entire family, and he played the humor card. “I was just trying to be funny.”

  I said nothing, letting him twist a little.

  “Listen, if I wanted to scare you, I would have worn shorts to the pool.”

  My father was simply keeping up the time-honored tradition of the dad as tickler of the family funny bone. He has since passed down his big clown shoes to me.

  After taking my kids to see the movie Toy Story, where Mr. Potato Head and Barbie come alive, that evening while tucking my four-year-old-daughter Mary into her bed I said, “Don’t forget, toys really do get sad when you don’t play with them.” And then I pointed around the room at the legions of mute toys waiting to play. A kiss good night, I turned off her light, and instantly forgot about my little joke.

  Nine years later, over dinner, Mary blurted out that when I told her toys got lonely unless she played with them, she started spending ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty minutes a night kissing each one. If she heard somebody in the hall she’d jump into bed, and when it was time to resume the kissing she’d forgotten her place and would have to start over.

  “I was joking” was my only defense, but that did little to remedy my attempt at humor, which tortured her for years. She’s now in college, and I believe she’s over it, but if she needs to speak to anybody professionally, I’ll get her some therapy as soon as Dr. Joyce Brothers opens an office at the Garden State Plaza next to the Sprint kiosk.

  I would officially like a do-over on the Toy Story kissing incident.

  Despite the fact that my own father’s sense of humor tinged me, for three decades, he still makes us all laugh. My sister and her brand-new husband of five minutes were posing at the altar for their final wedding photographs when somebody noticed that my daughter Sally the flower girl was making a strange sound. It wasn’t exactly a hack, but more of a cough, short and wheezy. Initially it didn’t register as anything other than a little bark until her eyes got glassy and we realized she wasn’t breathing.

  “Did she eat the flower bouquet?” No.

  “Is she too young for the Heimlich?” Probably.

  Somebody suggested we give her a drink, which seemed like a bad idea to me, and it was about that time that Sally started crying. She couldn’t breathe, but she could cry, and she was simultaneously turning blue. For someone choking to death she was remarkably calm. As we stood there playing Twenty Questions, she started a series of gut-wrenching dry coughs until, just like a cat belting out a fur ball, she sent a projectile flying two feet straight out of her mouth. It wasn’t a flower or a piece of candy. It was a quarter.

  “Thank God she’s all right!” the bride exclaimed, and this was followed by a round of “Amens.”

  Crisis averted, my sister Ann the caterer asked, “Who wants cake?” and we adjourned to the parish hall. We were not inclined to blame whoever had left the quarter on the floor of Our Lady of the Immaculate Kitchen.

  The next day Sally climbed up on my dad’s lap. She seemed a little lower key because she’d learned a lesson: “Don’t eat da money.” She repeated her new mantra to her grandfather. “Don’t eat da money.”

  “That’s right, don’t eat the money.” Then my father, Mr. Catskills, went back to work. “Sally, do me a favor. How about coughing up another quarter? Grandpa needs a newspaper.”

  14

  Independence

  Driving Miss Doocy

  See, it’s like a triple-legged H.” My father pointed to the top of the gearshift during my first driving lesson. The family car was a 1963 Plymouth Belvedere that my father had bought from a friend who had used it as a stock car. Most people get their first taste of the road in a vehicle
that’s “street legal”; I, on the other hand, learned how to drive in a car that had, next to the license plate, a parachute.

  “It’s a little souped-up, so let’s take it easy,” my dad said after a thorough thirty-second orientation. When I turned over the ignition I immediately heard the deep throaty lub-dub-dub-dub of a 427-horsepower gas-guzzler modified to feature “double carbs,” which had nothing to do with the Atkins diet.

  My father taught me the basic tenets of driving over half a dozen afternoons on little-used dirt roads where the land was flat and the cops were few and far between. In Kansas, if you were involved in some branch of agriculture, you could obtain a “farm duty” driver’s license at age thirteen and a half, which was my age at that moment, so I applied for and got one. Being honest, to justify the license my parents made me find an actual farm job, which wasn’t hard, because farmers were always searching for young men to work on impossibly hot days, slowly squeezing the life out of them.

  One phone call and I had a two-dollar-an-hour job. But it did not require a license. I stood on a slow-moving hay wagon, grabbing hay bales as they shot out of a baling machine. Halfway through the first day I pulled out a fresh bale of alfalfa that seemed noisy for hay. I thought the buzzing was the sound of a bee until I saw the tail of a rattlesnake. If the hay-bale hurl had been an Olympic competition that year, I would have advanced immediately to the semifinals. And folks wonder why kids leave the family farm for the bright lights of Omaha.

  Seeing that I was freaked out, the farmer asked me if I’d like to change places with him and drive the tractor. My back was broken and I was thoroughly exhausted; when he offered to switch jobs I had the same sense of liberation that Jessica Lynch probably felt when those marines showed up and rescued her from that hospital.

  “Do you know how to drive a hand clutch?” he asked.

  “Sure do,” I said, having no idea what he was talking about, but how hard could it be? He could do it, and he clearly wasn’t the sharpest tool in the barn. (FYI: sharpest tool in the barn, the pitchfork.)

  I climbed into the driver’s seat and was suddenly presiding over the tractor, which was towing a baler and a hay wagon; I was the conductor of my first three-vehicle parade. The hand clutch did the same thing as a foot-pedal clutch, but they’d installed it up by the steering wheel, apparently just to make it more precarious.

  “Just let the clutch out slowly,” the farmer told me as I maneuvered a hand throttle with my right hand, speeding up the tempo of the tractor, while slowly releasing the hand clutch in my left hand. With both hands busy, I theorized that drivers had to steer with their pelvis, the only available body part approximate to the wheel. The space shuttle had simpler controls than this contraption, which really was a slow-moving lawsuit: fifty linear feet of gas-powered mechanized hardware, dangerous and lethal, with whirling sharp parts and random yellow warning stickers—“To Lose Finger Touch Here.” Perhaps the danger level was why they had resorted to “hand clutches,” because after a few harvest seasons farmers had already lopped off their feet and legs, and hand clutches allowed them to continue to harvest crops while missing a limb or two.

  “You can speed up a little,” the farmer yelled.

  Immediately I followed my captain’s order and throttled up to four miles an hour. As I made a three-quarter turn the farmer pointed to the starboard side in the direction of a twenty-foot-wide swath of grass that I’d simply missed.

  “Back up!” he yelled. I immediately throttled down the gas, pushed in the brake and the clutch, and finally disengaged the power takeoff to the baler. The whole shebang stopped. “Can you back up?”

  “Sure,” I lied.

  Backing a tractor is one thing, but a tractor with two other things hitched behind it is something that causes professional drivers with twenty years of experience to lie on the floor in the fetal position screaming, “Don’t make me, don’t make me!”

  If I told him I couldn’t do it, I would relinquish my seat on the tractor and have to lift another ton of hay bales, so using the wisdom of a thirteen-year-old, I thought, How hard can it be? I shifted into reverse gear, gave it some gas with one hand, and then slowly released the hand clutch with the other, but because I was looking backward, I got mixed up. Within seconds the tractor jackknifed over the baler and I heard the nauseating sound of sheet metal ripping and factory-installed rivets popping. The trailer hitch was pretzelized, and the power takeoff had flown off and hurled in the direction of the rattlesnake hay bale. It was like a Lee Marvin film, although if it had been a movie, the thing would have killed the snake family, but during the editing stage PETA would have petitioned to have the producers take out the pain and suffering of the rattlesnake and replace it with something made of tofu.

  His agriculture armada destroyed, the farmer issued a brief statement. “I think we’re done for today.”

  I never told my children about that John Deere disaster. However, long before the kids were ready to drive I taught them all an important lesson regarding handicapped parking spaces.

  After one of my wife’s knee surgeries she got a temporary handicapped hangtag courtesy of those bighearted bureaucrats at the Division of Motor Vehicles. Three years earlier our golden retriever, Charlie, had shot out of the house like a blond bullet and jumped up at my wife, spinning her around with such force that the torque of the abrupt turn shattered her kneecap. Never once a complainer and certainly not one to get rid of the dog, over time she’d have five surgeries and then a total knee replacement. It was awful. On the bright side, with her temporary handicapped pass, she could park closer to the mall door than any of her friends, because she’d spent more time on crutches than Evel Knievel.

  Heading to Christmas-shop at Target, where we would purchase large quantities of quality American products at reasonable prices, she asked me to park in a handicapped spot, but they were all taken, so I headed toward the door where I would drop off her and the kids. Then I spotted a shopper with absolutely no visible physical problem practically skipping back to his car in the handicapped section. Clearly he was physically perfectly fine, and really should have been ashamed that he was using sick Aunt Thelma’s parking tag. Just as he pulled out of his spot, as I inched toward the opening, the same kind of van as in the Cheech and Chong movies careened around the corner and lunged to a stop in the spot.

  “Hey! That space belongs to me!” I barked, and then backpedaled. “I mean, that’s your mother’s space.” Nothing agitates a mall crawler more than having a good spot snatched away. Then I made a snap decision; I parked the car right there in traffic and bolted out the door to give the handicapped-parking thief a lecture.

  “What are you doing, Dad?” the kids asked, but I was single-minded as I walked toward the van, which had no handicapped plate, no official state hangtag, no permit, just a bumper sticker that read “I’m Not Gaining Weight, I’m Retaining Food.”

  This should be good, I thought. My kids will see me sticking up for their mother. With the bass line of a Marilyn Manson song thumping from the van, when the driver saw me in his rearview, he lowered the volume and his window, and I was face-to-face with a midforties guy as something that smelled like incense rolled out. “Hey, buddy, these spots are here for people like my wife.” I pointed toward my bride, who gave a little nod, and suddenly I was Lancelot, defending the honor of my Guinevere.

  “Your wife needs it?”

  “She does, and she’s got the parking hangtag,” I said, pointing to the red-and-white placard bearing the international symbol for “Park Close to the Store.”

  “Too freaking bad!” he blared, his surly demeanor having instantly metastasized into naked anger. He then pivoted in his seat commando style and reached down to grab what the sinking feeling in my gut knew was either a sawed-off shotgun or an RPG launcher.

  “Your wife needs it? Well have her talk to my little friend!” he spat in my direction.

  He was aiming it squarely at my chest. Please tell me I’m dreaming,
I prayed as I stared down the barrel of a prosthetic leg.

  “Tell your wife I got here first, and possession is nine-tenths of the law!”

  Horrified, speechless, and suddenly humiliated, I wondered, Where is his handicapped tag or permit? “I am sorry, sir, please accept my apologies.”

  “It’s people like you,” he shrieked, but I’d stopped listening to the words and it came out just blah, blah, blah. It was a cockamamie idea to approach him in the first place, so I stood there and took my medicine like a man. Eventually he ran out of steam and I returned to our car. From watching their official male role model get chewed out by a guy with high blood pressure and a factory-built limb, my observant heirs learned that day that only a nincompoop approaches a total stranger in New York State and asks him to relinquish a primo parking spot.

  My son, Peter, was an eyewitness to that event, and I knew he would not repeat the mistakes of his father, who was in charge of the family motor pool and driving lessons. A veteran of stock cars and farm implements, I wanted to instruct him just as my father had done for me; however, state law said that every student driver had to spend six hours scaring the daylights out of somebody from a professional drivers school, not a blood relative, so my wife enrolled him for the mandatory three sessions. Upon successful completion of the class, Peter received a nonbinding, nonlegal, nondriver’s certificate that was also good for 10 percent off at Jiffy Lube.

  Assured that he was fully prepared for his upcoming DMV road test, I discovered during a practice joyride that despite the certificate and the three-hundred-dollar price tag, little attention had been paid to things like those red octagonal signs, one of which my son drove past at twenty-five miles an hour.

  “Stop sign!” I yelled in a scary loud voice that I’d promised I’d never use, but did because I thought we were going to die.