Tom Junod

And then one of us would say, wait a minute, wait a minute, dad, your father calls every couple of months to ask for money.

And he would just look at us and repeat, I never had a father.

But he would go to the movies when he was growing up in Brooklyn, and he absorbed everything.

He absorbed how to dress from Fred Astaire.

He absorbed how to talk from Cary Grant.

He absorbed how to treat women from Clark Gable.

And he was a student of all that.

I mean, the thing about my dad, so he was a rough kid growing up in Brooklyn.

But by the time I knew him, he had expunged every bit of his Brooklyn accent.

And a lot of that was because when he was in World War II, he was wounded.

And then instead of being shipped back to the front,

a lieutenant heard him sing and put him in a show.

And so he became, you know, a crooner singing in a traveling army act called For Men Only.

Which is almost too on the nose.

It really is.

And when my dad came home from World War II, he tried to make it as a singer and did not.

But one of the things he still did was go down to the basement and tape himself singing to instrumental records.

For an audience of himself?

He behaved the way a crooner was supposed to behave, but he crooned his daily language.

I mean, he was a crooner even when he was talking.