I first penned this tribute to my father in 2015. It has been 35 years since he passed away and not a day goes by that I don’t think of him, especially on Father’s Day. With a few minor edits, I present it again this year. My dad was a man with a limited education — he only made it through the seventh grade — but the wisest man I ever knew. He was also the hardest working. For 49 years and four months, he toiled for the Railway Express Agency. Most of that time was spent working outside in all kinds of weather, including his last day on the job. In all those years, he missed three weeks of work. That was because of an emergency appendectomy in a time when hospital stays were a lot longer than they are today. His childhood had not been a particularly happy one although he rarely talked about it. His mother died when he was 4. His father was a bit of a bully and his stepmother was clearly partial to her own children, not the ones the marriage brought into the family. There wasn’t a lot of love there.