Happy Birthday, Dad.

I believe this is from a 1967-8 press release when Dad left Copley Press in L.A. for Madison Avenue, which makes him 29 or 30 years old at the time.

I was really angry with him when he died. He had talked me out of visiting him when he was hospitalized for emergency heart surgery, and then he died within 48 hours of leaving the hospital. It was my decision not to see him, of course, but for a long time I blamed him. I blamed him for a lot of things, actually -- the divorce, and then the kidnapping, and always, always moving. Moving was his solution to most any problem, even though it should have been obvious that he carried his problems where ever he went.

But when I see him here, I remember meeting him at the train from NYC: he smelling faintly of aftershave and cigarette smoke, his cheek at once clammy and scratchy against mine, and I, wrapped in his raincoated embrace, feet dangling, happy.

Today Bob Touchberry would have been 68 years old.