News, Dad And Me

I just finished putting my father to bed after we watched the memorial service for Senator Ted Kennedy. It's amazing, even now, how much watching television news with my father has shaped my life.


I can remember sitting on our living room floor late in the summer of 1974, playing with my plastic dinosaurs. My father told me to stop what I was doing and watch the television with him. I did as he said and watched a live broadcast from the White House. President Nixon was about to speak from the podium. My dad, no fan of Nixon to be sure, watched with a delighted grin on his face and occassionally glanced down at the floor to make certain I was paying attention. "You need to watch this and remember...this is history being made." Some thirty minutes later, Richard Nixon announced his resignation as the 37th president of the United States. It was, indeed, history being made.


Many years later, December of 1989 to be precise, I was spending a month in Pennsylvania with my parents between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I was sitting in front of the TV with dad again, watching groups of people, young and old, dismantling the Berlin Wall. Once again, dad tells me that we're watching history in the making. It was amazing to glance at my father during that time, and see a look on his face that, without a doubt, told me that this was the most important thing that we could be doing at that moment--watching the news.


Today, I proudly call myself a news junkie, no small thanks to my father. Even though our news is a sorry shadow of what it used to be, I fondly remember the evenings of my youth, hearing "...and that's the way it is," as Walter Cronkite signed off feeding my father fuel for the political discussions that often took place at our dinner table. My father's opinions were clearly his own, but even when I disagreed with him based on my little understanding of politics as a child--and disagreed often, though not vocally--I respected the amazing conviction that echoed through dad's animated voice.


I saw a faint shadow of that animation tonight as dad attentively watched Ted Kennedy's memorial service. I asked him what he thought of it after the last speaker had finished. He paused. "He wasn't as great as his brothers, but he did some good things." He said it with conviction, as though that were the final word on the story.

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Thomas Boylan · Newsdadandme.WAV