Happy Father's Day!

HALLIE EPHRON: It's Father’s Day, so let’s talk about our dads.

Mine was a gifted and flawed creature. A screenwriter who'd been president of his senior class at Evander Childs High School in the Bronx. His father owned a rug store on Fordham Road, but it was his mother who saved the family from bankruptcy during the Great Depression because she'd been secretly investing in real estate.

He was the youngest of four brothers. The only one who went to college, he got himself thrown out of Cornell in In 1934 in his senior year for stealing books. He landed in Hell's Kitchen and talked his way into a job as assistant stage manager, met my mom, and talked her into writing a play with him which was produced on Broadway and led to them moving to Hollywood to write screenplays.

He was mercurial and charming. A storyteller who loved to take center stage. On the down-side, he was bipolar and alcoholic. You never knew, when you arrived at his NYC apartment and knocked, which version of him would answer the door.

And yet the one thing he got right was to make every one of us, his four daughters, feel loved. Adored. We were the cleverest, the funniest (even better), and the most adorable. It didn’t patch over his ‘issues,’ but it gave me resilience I needed to meet the inevitable road bumps in the real world.

Tell us about a dad in your life.

JENN McKINLAY: My father was a brilliant artist and a deeply troubled man. He was handsome and charming and a fabulous storyteller. He had a smile that lit up rooms and when he laughed at something I said, I felt like I was brilliant, too.

He was also angry and terrifying and hurtful and scared the bejeezus out of me on a regular basis. My relationship with him taught me about establishing boundaries and loving someone despite their flaws. He died three years ago and I miss him still.

As flawed as he was as a father, he was an excellent grandfather. As my oldest hooligan just said, "Pop pop taught me about second chances -- from the stories you've told me about who he was to the man he became that I knew and loved." I am ever grateful that my dad had that chance and that my boys remember him well.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: My dad grew up on a cotton farm in Sulphur Springs, Texas, one of eight kids. He never finished school, but left the farm in his early teens and came to Dallas to find work. He adored his youngest sister, but otherwise did everything he could to distance himself from his family and his background.

He worked three jobs during the depression, started his own business, married, divorced, then married my mom when he was forty-four and she was twenty. They adored each other for the rest of their lives.

He had a creative streak--he always wrote his own advertising for his businesses--loved to read, and was incredibly proud of me. I think if he'd had the education he could have done so much more. He was quiet, kind, incredibly generous, and also suffered from depression, which he never spoke about. Interesting and complicated, my  dad. He died in 2004 at 96. I still miss him.

LUCY BURDETTE:  My dad was a metallurgical engineer and devoted father and husband. He went to the University of Michigan and left in the middle of college to sign up for the army to fight the Germans. I think that those years he was in Europe with his 1057 engineer cor​ps​ ​were the most meaningful in his entire life.

He loved camping and teaching and supporting us four kids, and he put up with the menagerie of animals that my mother encouraged.  I suppose his fatal flaw was that he simply could not be alone.

After my mother died too young, he was married fo​u​r more times. He would tell you that th​ree​ of his five  wives died before he did, and therefore he should not be​ held​ accountable for those marriages ending! The other two I think he fled into in order to escape the inevitable loneliness that comes after losing a spouse.

Even as diminished as he was in an assisted living at the end of his life, he asked me for the money to buy a diamond ring. He planned to propose to one of the caregivers he adored. He was funny and charming and I miss him terribly!​ ​And PS, my sister Susan Cerulean has written a memoir about caring for him at the end of his life. It will be out next spring and I will make sure she comes here to talk about it. It’s a wonderful book!

Rhys Bowen: My dad was a lovely man. Really kind and generous. He had dreamed of being a doctor but had to leave school to support his mother after his father died when my dad was a child. He had an aptitude for everything mechanical, landed a job in a paper factory and went on to run the place.

He also studied at night to pass his engineering professional certification. When WWII came he went to volunteer, even though he was in a protected occupation and spent four years in Egypt and then Palestine. Although there were battles and obvious hardships I believe he looked back on the time fondly, enjoying the camaraderie and makeshift sports. He was a really good athlete and had played soccer for junior London. I think his life was wistful thinking of what might have been.

He really wanted me to be the doctor he dreamed of being but alas I did not like the thought of all that blood. He would watch every medical program on TV, exclaiming in delight "Look, Margie. He's got the heart in his hands and it's still beating!"

My mum was the tough one. He was soft. And very proud of me, although he didn't like to show it. "IS that what you are wearing?" he'd ask with a grin when I was going out as a teenager.  When I was going to a party he'd ask what time it was over. If I said eleven o'clock he'd say "I'll be outside at ten thirty."  Daddy! I'd wail but he never wavered. 

He had a major heart attack when he was 60 but when he and my mother moved to Australia he perked up a lot, proud of his garden and taking long walks on the beach. Unfortunately his heart gave out when he was seventy five. I still miss him.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: My biological dad died a couple of years ago. He was the music critic for the Chicago Daily News when I was born, and as sensitive and talented and intelligent and intellectual as anyone could possibly be.
It was completely crazy--my mother always talked about this--that this thoughtful peaceful tolerant poetic person was drafted into the infantry for World War II, and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and was taken prisoner of war, and got the Purple Heart after he was released from prison camp by the Red Army at the end of the war.  He would never discuss it.

He taught me all about music, and poetry and  art and reading, and even though my parents were divorced when I was six, we still stayed in constant touch, and when he joined the foreign service and spent much of his life as a diplomat and  out of the country with a new family, (every one adorable), we still were close. He wrote two nonfiction books about American music, both published by University of Chicago press. And did a radio show on music for what turned into NPR.

I read one of his favorite poems at his funeral at Arlington National Cemetery.

My stepdad? Equally brilliant, but a tough and brusque corporate lawyer, who absolutely knew right from wrong, in every way, even philosophically, and would make sure you knew it too. If you dared to disagree with him, then you were simply wrong. Some of his favorite quotes were “what do you represent?” when I showed up in a too-short skirt. And “ It is a matter of supreme indifference to me” when we asked a question he didn’t have time for. He did not allow us to speak or interrupt during Perry Mason. Nothing we could do was good enough.

But he taught me to be inquisitive, and determined, and skeptical, and a persuasive speaker. And I am truly grateful for that.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: My birth father was a USAF pilot who died in a plane crash when I was only six months old. Some thirteen years and one bad marriage later, my mom renewed her acquaintance with her college boyfriend (also USAF) who had recently been divorced. Shortly after they wed in 1976, he adopted me, one of the great events of my life.

After losing my mom last year, I'm increasingly aware of how lucky I am to still have my dad around. He's a quirky guy - a brilliant engineering type who never met anything he couldn't fix who lives on take-out and restaurant food now my mom's not around to cook for him. He's very introverted, but was the calm center of a blended family of eight kids. He's the old-fashioned kind of man who says what he means and stands by his promises, and although they were so different in many ways, Ross had that quality too, and it's one of the reasons I fell in love with him.

I think the great gift my dad gave me, my brother and my sister was to show us, up close and personal, what a good man, a good father and a good husband looked like. Having kids myself now, I realize what an incredibly important role that is.

HALLIE: So on this Father's Day, who are the dad's in your life and how are you celebrating?