A dad of the year nomination

To the editor,

I used to enter the mother or father of the year contest in The Riverdale Press. I was always the senior citizen competing with the very young set in praising our parents, in nominating them for the honor, and I always won. I loved it. Friends remember it and miss it and asked me to write again at this time. So contest or not, it is time.

Often my June 20 birthday falls on the Fathers’ Day that I was born. Not this year. What a gift I must have been during those turbulent war years — the world has changed, but the chaos, no.

This year my dad, Morris Schneider, my nominee for father of the year, would have been 100 in April. He died on Dec. 7, the day of his Army discharge, the Army he served in but hated! He was a man who missed out. He had to leave college to support his family and had to work as a tailor, a skill he learned in the army, to support us. He did it for more than 50 years in Saks Fifth Avenue, where at 79 he was fired for being “slow” and helping the new people. Alas!  

My father was as devoted a person as any I knew. Every week he visited his mother; he called everyday. He loved us, me and my two sisters and, of course, my mom, whom he called the mayor. We lived in the ever-changing Marble Hill projects and in what they then called the step-up Amalgamated Houses. He made sure we succeeded in spite of ourselves in school. He made sure we thought about marriage and family.  

He loved the “Price is Right” and once attended the “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” but was upset she didn’t give him a vacuum cleaner or some other prize. He was a curmudgeon, yes, but he was so loved, and is so missed. He had four grandkids that adored him and six great-grand kids. Although he forgot their names sometimes, he always remembered something about them to jolt his memory. All over the apartment where he lived in until his last weeks, there were photos and chachkies of his life. My mother died 10 years before him and thought he’d never make it without her, but he did. 

Meals on Wheels, Access-A-Ride, visits to the VA and love from all of us got him through.  I wave to him symbolically to the now-occupied-by-some-other-family apartment on the 14th floor of the Towers. I tell him the world is nuts, Muhammad Ali died and Trump is on the ballot.  Yikes! And I miss him. There are no replacements for parents. No one can take over my dad’s place in the world.

Judith Veder