Last year, as Father's Day approached, I asked readers to answer the question, "What did you learn from your father?" The response was impressive. Men and women from all over, most of them baby boomers, took the opportunity to write loving tributes to their dads and to enumerate life lessons they'd passed along. Reading them made me happy, and envious. Many of the responses were posted on my blog, Random Rodricks.
This year, we asked the same question and didn't get much of a response. In fact, only two readers responded. One of those answered the question in two sentences: "Mine taught me how not to be a father. If I could do everything completely opposite, my son may be president one day."
Not sure why response was so poor this time. Of course, many people can't bring themselves to express their true feelings about their fathers. It's not easy. I tried to answer my own question and failed. I know a lot of men who had limited, and even lousy, relations with their dads. Some have nothing good to say and aren't inclined to share that publicly.
Tim Russert, on the other hand, wrote a memoir about his father that became a best-seller in 2004 and inspired others to step up and render tributes as well.
"Of all the things I have done in my professional career," Russert once said, "nothing has been more rewarding than writing that book."
As presented in Big Russ and Me, Tim Russert had a great guy for a dad and a great relationship with him - a stoic, hard-working and modest man who taught with quiet, good example.
Two years later, a second Russert book topped the charts as well. Wisdom of Our Fathers was made possible by a ton of letters from men and women, mostly baby boomers, who had read Big Russ and Me and wanted to tell Russert about their own fathers and express gratitude for what they'd given them.
Gratitude - there's been a lot of that going around for a while now.
Tom Brokaw kicked it up a notch with The Greatest Generation 10 years ago, and the tributes to the diminishing number of Americans who lived through the Great Depression and World War II keep coming.
"You know, they didn't call themselves, 'The Greatest Generation.' It was a book title," says Alex Kershaw, author of a new account of nightmare and survival aboard an American submarine in the Pacific in 1944.
