MIKE McCORMICK It was 34 years a week ago today that I and our family lost my dad to a brief battle with lung cancer.
He was 64 and in a month would have turned 65 had he made it to Sept. 12.
Doctors in May of that year diagnosed a cancerous tumor the size of a softball in one of his lungs.
Dad lived three months and a week to the day after they had discovered that tumor.
There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about him.
Even with the sadness that goes with it, I’m sure he wants us to focus on the good times we had and look at the positives he brought to our lives.
We had many good times together.
My wife Pat, daughter Meghan and I spent his last Father’s Day in 1988 with him along with other family members.
My wife reminds me fairly often I have a lot of characteristics of dad in me, both good and bad.
When thinking about him, I try to recall the good times we enjoyed together.
Dad coached my baseball teams from the time I was in second grade up through the first couple of years in high school, primarily during the spring and summer. Several of those years he was the head coach.
I played basketball through my freshman year of high school, too. He helped coach my grade school teams.
I always admired dad for the time he took to coach me, though I felt he was tougher on me than other players.
During much of my high school years, he was gone for long periods of time due to his work. We didn’t get to spend as much time together as I would have liked.
When I was about in kindergarten, he played on a company softball team that he later coached. I served as batboy for a while.
He began taking me dove and duck hunting at the age of 4.
I started hunting rabbits when I was 10 and then quail at 12.
From then on, he focused on quail hunting. Occasionally, we took a pheasant trip. His love for hunting was the quail and the three Brittany bird dogs he had throughout those years.
He finally stopped hunting about five years before he passed away, and really did little hunting during the last nine years of his life.
I hunted with him until he couldn’t go any longer. Fortunately, I continued to do it, carrying on some of those traditions.
As I’ve spent time reflecting recently, I know in my heart he loved us and always did the best he could for all of us.
Staff Column