Tales from the Dad Side

by Steve Doocy

  Tales from the Dad Side

  Misadventures in Fatherhood

  Steve Doocy

  To my father, of course

  There are three stages of a man’s life: he believes in Santa Claus, he doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, he is Santa Claus.

  —Author not known

  (but obviously a dad)

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  1 Birth: Dad on Arrival

  2 School: Don’t Eat the Paste

  3 Duty: Young Men in Uniform

  4 Trouble: Fatherhood Is Hard—Get a Helmet

  5 Legacy: Should I Follow Tom or Diane Sawyer?

  6 Jobs: I Was a Teenage Bread Pirate

  7 Dexterous Dad: My Father Is Martha Stewart

  8 Rivalry: Never Lick a Steak Knife

  9 Sports: The Coach Bag

  10 Work: Take Mom’s Spy to Work Day

  11 Male Call: Things Only a Dad Can Teach a Boy

  12 My Father: Jim Dandy

  13 Humor: The Joker Gene

  14 Independence: Driving Miss Doocy

  15 Sex: The Birds, the Bees, and the Rubber What?

  16 Worry: Don’t Fall Off That Volcano

  17 Booze: From Tang to Tanqueray

  18 Role Reversal: The Parent Trapped

  19 Letting Go: I Can’t Cut the Cord

  20 College: Can I Pay with Bonus Miles?

  21 Pride: Dad, Stop Pushing Me Around!

  22 Emotion: Daddy’s Mascara is Running

  23 Landmarks: The Innings and Outings of Life

  24 Road Trip: What Happens in Dublin Stays in Dublin

  25 Loose Ends: Goodnight Moon

  26 The List: What Every Father Must Teach His Child

  Thank-yous and Shout-outs

  About the Author

  Other Books by Steve Doocy

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  Why, you’re asking yourself, does this guy think he’s an expert on the topic of fatherhood? Forget the fact that I hosted a network show on parenting—I only did that for the catering. The fact is that as a longtime professional journalist I have been observing my father for fifty years, not counting the twenty years I’ve chronicled my own children, for a sum total of seventy years, which is remarkable for a fifty-year-old guy. This is the same math logic I use to calculate my taxes.

  “You want to be a dad on a sitcom?”

  That was what the legendary chairman of NBC, Brandon Tartikoff, asked me, wondering if I wanted to be a wisecracking albeit misguided father on a situation comedy for one half hour each week. I’d be the peacock network’s latest version of Bill Cosby, who at that same time was making hundreds of millions of dollars as he dispensed heartfelt advice that always ended with a punch line to his camera-perfect children, who were not really his children but highly compensated actors pretending to be blood relatives.

  “Steve, you look like the perfect dad,” the NBC chairman added after I taped my show at 30 Rock.

  I look like the perfect dad? That seemed odd because at that moment I was wearing heavy Pan-Cake makeup and a bib. To the best of my knowledge, the perfect dad does not wear eyeliner and a bib, unless it’s cross-dresser night at Red Lobster.

  Instead I returned to television news and I did not take that sitcom job, which ran almost a decade and made the guy who did take the job tens of millions of dollars. My wife just showed me a photo layout of him in a recent In Style magazine surrounded by supermodels on his private island lighting a cigar with a fifty.

  There’s more to fatherhood than looking the part; a real dad is someone who would do anything for his kids. My friend Mary, whose father was a legendary columnist during Hollywood’s golden era, didn’t know how to break some bad news to her dad. A clever, proud man, he was in his eighties and had slowed down a bit—he made Larry King look like Billy Elliot.

  “Dad, I’ve got MS.”

  Stunned, the father said nothing for a moment. Mary could see the wheels in his head turning. “Don’t you worry, we are going to lick this thing,” he said. “Do you want me to call Jerry Lewis’s people?”

  Mary paused to reflect on his generous offer of cashing in one of show business’s most valuable assets, a favor.

  “Look, Jerry owes me big. So does Dean, but I can’t collect from him, he and Sammy are long gone,” the former scribbler for Variety, Hollywood Reporter, and TV Guide confided to his girl.

  “Dad, calling Jerry Lewis’s people would be great if I had muscular dystrophy,” Mary replied, “but I have multiple sclerosis. Maybe you could call Annette Funicello’s people?”

  Disease confusion.

  Fathers are generally big-picture guys who get all sorts of important details scrambled: diseases that start with the letter m, birthdays, times of school events, and with painful frequency even the names of their own children. Generally mothers never make those kinds of mistakes, because while they’re both parents, dads are different from moms.

  That could be the greatest understatement since Noah turned on the Weather Channel and found out that the next forty days called for a 20 percent chance of light rain.

  Mothers are reassuring comforters and healers who dole out unconditional love, while fathers are the family muscle, the providers, the tire-gauge-in-the-pocket practical guys who twice yearly try to be romantic.

  “Roses, on a Tuesday?” Mom observed as Dad walked through the door. “Were you stopped at the light again?”

  While there is no disputing that nine months of pregnancy is rough on a woman, she should walk a mile in a father’s Hush Puppies with thirty or forty pounds of wiggling kid around her neck for the first five years of a child’s life. Seeing a father able to stand up straight after a full day of piggyback rides without a trip to the chiropractor would be as remarkable as seeing Mary-Kate Olsen finish an entire niçoise salad.

  “Pops, what time’s curfew?” Cain asked his father, Adam.

  “Be home before CSI Mesopotamia.”

  “But Dad…”

  “All right, ask your mother.”

  That was not what the youngster wanted to hear, because everybody knew his mother, Eve, wore the fig leaf in that family.

  History has shown us that ever since the beginning, moms and dads have been different. In reality, new moms are better at parenting than new dads, but there’s a reason why: they are programmed to mother. What is playing with a doll if not mommy practice? In fact, there is a mega mother industrial complex made up of thousands of magazines, books, classes, and TV shows that instruct women on how to raise the perfect child. Once a week Oprah tells how to do it despite never having raised a child, unless you count Dr. Phil.

  Spontaneously upon umbilical cord snipping they become lifelong members of a special sorority with every other mom, which explains how my wife was speaking to a total stranger on a buffet line when the woman confessed, “Forget knee pain, honey, I had an episiotomy with sixty-nine stitches.” Vaguely familiar with the procedure, I quietly crossed my legs and politely nodded in horror.

  So they have a vast mommy-wing conspiracy. Meanwhile, across the gender aisle, fathers are usually clueless about what to do with that new baby at home. I considered it a good father-son outing if I didn’t accidentally break off an arm even though he had a spare. This is what happens to an entire species that has no special father TV shows, zero Maxim articles on “Nine Simple Cures for Diaper Rash,” and certainly no practice-dad toys. If you think G.I. Joe inculcates in a boy how to be a father, you’re nuts. G.I. Joe is not something to cuddle. He’s not even a toy. G.I. Joe is a molded plastic killing machine, and let’s keep it that way.

  In grade school my
brothers-in-law were momentarily fascinated by their sister’s Betsy Wetsy, to the point that they disemboweled her to see the doll magic that made her piddle. After their fact-finding jackknife surgery they returned the doll to the crib, where she was still fed her bottle, despite the fact that from that day forward Betsy peed from her armpit.

  So a man doesn’t have much of a foundation in fathering. It’s more on-the-job training, and it starts the day he becomes a father, which for me was the greatest day ever. Those stories about how life changes are absolutely true. On the birthday of my first child, when I walked out of that hospital, the sky seemed bluer, food tasted better, and the songs on the radio were happy and apparently written just for me! I had a reason to be on earth; I was somebody’s dad.

  I would witness my kid’s first steps, first haircuts, and the bloody loss of his first teeth. I am, however, not Superman. Nobody can be there for everything, which is how I can live with myself for being on the mower when my son said his first words, which my wife insists were “trust fund.”

  Note to self: No more motivational baby books by Donald Trump.

  As I prepared this book for publication I asked my daughter Mary, who’d known only a childhood in the leafy suburbs of New York, if she had any idea what my childhood was like growing up on the flat-lands of America’s Great Plains.

  “Not really,” she started, but “I bet you sat around and popped a bunch of corn pills.”

  For the record, I did not spend my Wonder Years lurking outside a Kansas grain elevator in some sort of a corn silk coma. But she proved what I had believed to be true—she didn’t know much about my life, which was not the case when I asked her about her mother’s history.

  “Mommy had a convertible with a personalized plate that was BLUIZ, and that gray-haired guy on CBS took her to a Halloween dance.” She continued with such detail about her mother’s personal narrative that if there had been a piano sound track, it would have sounded like an episode of A&E’s Biography.

  Mary didn’t know much about my life before she came along because just like my father and his peers in the Greatest Generation, we don’t like to talk much about ourselves. Some don’t want to brag; others don’t want to bore. Personally, after a hard day at work I’d rather go home and listen to their daily dramas from school rather than gossip over the dinner table about which of my associates was stealing office supplies.

  These stories are all true, which will prompt some of you to question why I have not yet been charged with endangering a child or impersonating a parent.

  While I have a highly visible job on the Fox & Friends program, in real life my wife and family are the stars. Kathy, my wife of more than twenty years, really deserves the complete credit for the wonderful children who were raised at our house. Allow me to introduce them: they are Peter, Mary, and Sally, whose names we have abbreviated for necklace-engraving purposes to PMS.

  The other person who casts a long shadow over this work is my own father, Jim Doocy, who in 2008 finally retired after sixty-two years of working for the man. Now he has more free time to chat with me on the phone, which is terrific for me because he always has a great idea about how I can fix a carburetor, shingle the garage, or vacuum the refrigerator coil. He’s good with mechanical things; however, some of the newfangled digital stuff dumbfounds him. “Stephen, check your fax machine,” he told me this morning. “I sent you a fax. After you read it, send it back—it’s my only copy.”

  I could tell him that the original is still in his machine, but there’s no reason for me to lecture him. Like many, he thinks the facsimile machine is like the transporter from Star Trek, magically transmitting whole sheets of paper through the phone lines. But I won’t tell him how it really works, because I don’t want to hurt his feelings. He’s the only dad I’ll ever have, which means I am honest and direct with him much the same way the Macaroni Grill is an Italian restaurant—not so much.

  1

  Birth

  Dad on Arrival

  July 21, 1987, was the day I became a father. My wife, Kathy, had gotten pregnant nine months earlier on or around my thirtieth birthday party with things we had around the house.

  My wife had been having contractions for over a month, and the doctor decided to induce the labor during the hottest, most humid stretch of the year, on the kind of day when Angelina Jolie would try to adopt a kid from Antarctica. For my wife’s induced delivery we showed up very early at the east door of the George Washington University Hospital, just a few blocks from the White House. This was the same trauma center where six years earlier they rushed President Reagan, when the world discovered that John Hinckley liked Jodie Foster in a much stranger way than Joanie ever loved Chachi.

  We have a very romantic story. I met my wife for the first time when she was five. We weren’t neighbors or schoolmates or even vague acquaintances. I saw her on television, where she starred as the most incredible girl in the world, Mattel’s talking doll, Chatty Cathy. Pull a string in her neck and without moving her lips she’d start repeating one of numerous recorded sentences, bossing around whoever was unlucky enough to be holding her.

  “Please change my dress.”

  “May I have some tea, Mummy?”

  “Will you play with me?”

  A limited conversationalist, she’d incessantly repeat the same handful of demands over and over again. No wonder there was no childhood obesity back then—little girls were jumping through hoops for Chatty Cathy, one demanding hunk of rubberized plastic. At age five, I watched the commercials on our black-and-white Zenith in Kansas, not knowing that twenty-three years later I would not only meet Chatty Cathy but also marry her.

  My future wife wound up a child television actress thanks to the confluence of geography, a persistent stage mother, and general cuteness. Their family lived in the San Fernando Valley town of Encino, which was crawling with A-listers. In my wife’s cozy neighborhood, Judy Garland, Tim Conway, and Walt Disney all had houses, as did the biggest movie star of all time. One day on the grocery checkout line my future wife was making a typical five-year-old’s demand for her mother to buy her a Hershey bar.

  “Please, I want it!” she begged.

  Standing her ground, her mother, Lillian, said no. The kid kept begging until some impatient man in line behind cleared his throat. The mother didn’t need advice on how to deal with a screaming kid, so she turned to give the stink-eye to the man. The buttinsky was John Wayne.

  “Give the little lady the candy, ma’am,” the Duke directed.

  The fear of insulting Hollywood royalty momentarily immobilized her, so he drove home his point by mouthing the word “Now.” A candy purchase was immediately made.

  Directly across the street from my wife’s house lived the biggest TV stars in the world, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Monday through Friday they were shooting at rustlers and bad guys, but by Sunday morning they were always cleaned up for services at Saint Nicholas’ Episcopal Church. A sign in Roy Rogers’s front yard said BIENVENIDO, which translates “welcome,” which they did every Tuesday afternoon, opening the front door to the neighborhood kids.

  “Who wants to see Trigger?” Dale’d ask as the starstruck children filed by the most famous horse in the world. Trigger didn’t mind the attention, but why would he? He was dead. When Trigger went to that big haystack in the sky, Roy and Dale had him stuffed and then placed him in their foyer. Maybe it became a neighborhood tradition, because when their neighbor Walt Disney passed away somebody apparently liked the idea of keeping Walt around, but they didn’t stuff him and put him in the hall, they just cut off his head and put it in the deep freeze.

  “Okay, kids, when I open the refrigerator door, look on the left, and you’ll see the guy who invented EPCOT.”

  My wife’s father, Joe, was a salesman for a New York–based lingerie company. When I eventually met him I admitted I was unfamiliar with that line of work, but he cleared it up by explaining, “I work in ladies’ underpants.”

 
My wife’s mother, a onetime New York model, started reading the show business trades, finding open auditions, and putting the kids to work. Barely knee-high to a William Morris agent, they did commercials for cars, fast-food joints, hair color, you name it; when they smiled and held up the product, America bought it.

  “You deserve a break today!” My future wife lip-synched Barry Manilow’s jingle for McDonald’s while looking really cute in a paper hat.

  “Here, O. J.” was her line when she tossed the Hertz keys to O. J. Simpson as he dashed through the concourse of the Palm Springs airport. Just think, had my future wife not given him the rental car keys, he might never have gotten back to Los Angeles, and American history could have been much different. Slow-speed chases are almost impossible unless the car is turned on.

  Eventually she wound up at ESPN, as one of that network’s first on-air women, and later at NBC in Washington, where I spotted her in the commissary and made it my life’s mission to get a date with her. After a series of awkward encounters I eventually wore her down, for a mercy date. As I left her apartment that night I told her we’d be married. She presumed I was mentally unbalanced, but real life never lets you down—we were married five months later, and fourteen months after that, she was begging to have a word with the nurse who controlled her pain medicine as the real-life Chatty Cathy was about to birth a baby. Somebody please alert Mary Hart.

  Back to that delivery day. After the hospital admission, she was escorted to a bleak labor room with very unflattering fluorescent lighting and changed into what they called a gown, but in reality, with the back side never fastened it was more of a labor and delivery apron. We asked what to expect, and they explained that sometimes a first-pregnancy delivery went fast, other times it dragged on, so to be on the safe side, her doctor was inducing the labor by injecting her with a potent mix of pharmaceuticals that would trigger some sort of hood release on her southernmost parts. That was the theory. However, the powerful drug Pitocin did nothing to her—she had some immunity to it, and instead we just sat there waiting. Think Amy Winehouse in stirrups.