Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: Father's Day

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...I hope you’ll forgive me if I get a little personal this week. It is Father’s Day and I've been thinking about my father of late. Friday I was having lunch with a new friend and he asked if I liked what I do. Instead of answering him directly, I surprised myself by starting to tell him about my dad. I told him about how my father worked when I was growing up. How he got up early in the morning to go to his first job of the day (yes, his first job, he always had at least three). First thing in the morning he would drive his school bus run. When that task was finished, he would go to his second job, working in a grocery store. He would spend the morning alternating between working in the store and delivering groceries to local families.

He would go home at noon to eat lunch and take a short nap before driving his afternoon bus run. When he finished his bus run at about 3:30, he would go to work at his full-time job as a middle school janitor and put in a full eight hours before heading home at midnight.

He did this day in and day out, never complaining about the work, but considering himself lucky to have the work in the first place. He instilled in me a love of work that I have passed onto my children.

My father was not an educated man, but he was always trying to learn. He always bought books at garage sales. He instilled in me a love of books and reading that I have also passed on to my children.

What's interesting to me is that the way my father worked was not that unusual for our family or for other families at the time. All of my uncles had two or three jobs; all worked at whatever they could to support their families. They worked in shoe shops and textile mills, and laid carpet at night, did carpentry, or worked on cars or played music in little bands for $10 a night. All of them were involved in good, hard work. But there was one thing they all yearned for, one thing they would have loved to have happen at least once--someone asking their opinion. They would have loved for someone above them at work to ask what they thought about something. That almost never happened. Their companies and their bosses were happy to use them for their hard work and their strong backs, but, for the most part, they did not really care what they thought as long as they did their jobs.I watched that as a kid, and I remember it now as a man, and it makes me feel so privileged to be able to work with companies that actually pay me for my opinion. I’m paid to tell people what I think and it's a great privilege for which I am very grateful. It is something that, as I told my new friend, I never take for granted.

My dad is gone now. It’s been over three years since we lost him, but I still think about him often. I think about him when people tell me I work too hard. I want to say, “Are you kidding, man? You have no idea what hard work is.” I think of him when I go into the shops I work with and meet the people who are doing the real work. You know who I mean: the guys in that 100+ degree plating shop, or the woman working in the solder mask department thinking of all the things she has to do for her family when she gets home.

And I think of my dad when I see what my own kids are up to these days. My dad had a fourth grade education that he proudly upgraded to an eighth grade education by going to night school when he was over 50. I think about how he valued education; how he literally dragged me to college kicking and screaming and how college changed my life by teaching me to do what I do today. I think about those things often.

As I sit here in a Tucson hotel room on Fathers Day, I think about my own daughter who is on a research trip in the Midwest getting ready to write her Ph.D. dissertation. I think of my son who lives in Morioka, Japan and teaches Japanese families how to speak English. I think of where we would all be without my dad and his example, his love of hard work, education, and family, and I am thankful.

It’s only common sense.