(Me note: Google doesn't save everything, although a process has to involve something be available for Google. That wasn't the case apparently on June 15, 2003, when this column ran, on Father's Day).
Every Friday night, during the season, for years, it was a simple routine.
Leave around 6 o'clock, drive for five minutes to East York (Pa.) Bowling Lanes, and race around and annoy adults for about the next three hours.
Dad bowled; I played. He'd get done around 9:30, and we'd go home, he'd put a T-bone on the stove, and we'd watch "Love, American Style" or "The Odd Couple." Or we'd go over to the home of Ed Bell, a bowling teammate and co-worker at Standard Register, for a little while.
When I eventually started bowling, the goal naturally was to employ the same style he did: curl the pinky into the palm and flip the ball out toward the right gutter and it would hook into the pocket. It was like a slow curve in baseball rather than a slider.
He mastered it. I didn't, and had to adjust. Still, I did bowl a 205 when I was about 12.
It's Father's Day, and I think of bowling, but that's not all.
Our greatest trip came in the late fall of 1974.
Some family friends lived down the street from Mark Brenneman, who just happened to be the starting center for Notre Dame's football team.
Like most people in my neighborhood, I grew up as a Notre Dame fan. Of course, I went to a Catholic high school with a team nicknamed the Fighting Irish, so I had no choice.
I don't remember how I met him, or even when. But that summer, I'd had a little operation, and at some point, my parents and the family friends and Mark came up with a plan.
All of a sudden, my dad, our friend Andy Sylvanus and I were departing Harrisburg International Airport and flying to South Bend, Ind., and good grief, I was going to a Notre Dame football game.
Just got goose bumps writing that.
It was a wet snow, and Andy cursed like a baseball manager, sailor and mobster at the weather. Me? Shoot, I was 11, it was snowing, and there was Notre Dame playing Army in front of my very eyes.
Ah, so this was heaven, huh?
After the game, we went into the locker room. The funny thing was that these players I'd read about and cheered for -- Tom Clements and Drew Mahalic and Wayne Bullock and Mike Fanning and even one Gerry DiNardo -- knew who I was.
Are you serious?
Seems the South Bend Tribune did a feature that week on Mark, and he talked about liking kids, and of how my parents were surprising me with this trip. So these guys -- absolute mountains, they were -- came up and said, "You must be Mike."
No way.
Way.
Yes, I still have the program with all the autographs, and a copy of the story. And I can picture the smile on my dad's face while I bounced around like the awestruck pest I was that day.
You grow up, you change how you look at things, and Notre Dame doesn't mean a thing to me now except as part of what's wrong with college sports. But there'll always be that trip, though, and the memory of what it was all about back then.
My interest in sports came from both parents. Mom was a passionate Reds fan, having grown up in Dayton, Ohio, about 40 miles north of Cincinnati. Me? I was the only one in the family not born in that area, emerging into the world in York, an hour north of Baltimore.
So my first real sports memory is waking up as an Orioles fan just in time for the 1970 World Series between Baltimore and Cincinnati.
Summers were whiffle ball with Kurt and Scott Buckler up the street. Their side yard was Fenway Park, as if it wasn't obvious to everybody. We used imaginary baserunners and had the three Dawes kids in the field.
At night, there were two options: Sit in the TV room watching a baseball game while Dad would relax in the recliner with a cigar and a beer with our Great Dane near his feet; or sit outside with the grill or Hibachi fired up, listening to the Orioles with our neighbors and chatting late into the moderate night.
Dad had a magical grill touch, whether it was steak or hamburgers or bacon-wrapped liver, and nobody called baseball games like the Orioles' Chuck Thompson and Bill O'Donnell.
The most impressive thing about my Dad was that into his 60s, he could still play catch in the side yard, whether it was with a baseball or football. Only once did he look or necessarily act his age.
That came when he lay unconscious in a hospital room after falling at a picnic and hitting his head on patio concrete. Then and only then did he look anything like a 71-year-old man, which he was when he passed away nearly three months after the fall, and six months before cancer took Mom.
What I got from Dad and what's stayed with me didn't have much to do with how to pivot for a double play or throw a spiral. It was simply that he was the most compassionate, caring, unselfish person I think I've ever known, a sensitive man who lived the Golden Rule without thinking about it or talking about it.
Of course, I still can't pass a bowling alley without thinking of him, but that's not the only time.
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