Three days ago, I wrote a blog praising my father, Herbert Zabell, on what would have been his 84th birthday if he was alive.
Two hours after I began, I realized that the salute to my father had to be more than one blog because the first blog — “Happy Birthday Dad” — was long, but was missing crucial information.
As I explained on Oct. 21, my father was very successful professionally. Born poor, he became an attorney, a certified public accountant, and the owner and manager of a few businesses. As a child, I felt that he worked way too hard in part because he dreaded coming home to my mother, who was an always angry rageaholic who might have been mentally ill for decades. He passed away at the age of 49 three days after a stroke.
My Oct. 21 blog didn’t detail how he was a devoted father despite the obstacle of my mother. This blog is about that. Part III of this series will detail how I have felt for most of my adult life that I would have been far more successful if he had been there to provide me guidance.
The most important thing to know about my relationship with my father was that he understood me and cared about me. My mother didn’t understand or care. Like my father when he was a child, I was very shy. I know he was very shy because he told my mother this on innumerable occasions after she had, again, berated me for being very shy. They argued a lot over me. He always defended me. Her endless rants at me from the time of my earliest memories, when I was about 3 years old, were a crucial factor in my not talking to anyone at school in the first place.
My father also became very interested in whatever I was interested in — and treated me like an adult as he introduced me to topics he was interested in. By age 7, I was reading a newspaper an hour a day for the news and the sports, reading articles in the annual Encyclopedia Britannica, and having adult conversations with him about news and politics. My father was very astute. I recall him telling me when I was 8 that he was going to vote for Hubert Humphrey for president in 1968 because Richard Nixon was a crook.
Unlike my mother, my father was very interested in my schoolwork — and frequently expressed how proud he was that I was a very good student. My mother couldn’t care less about anything that I did except for obeying her constant orders. My father also gave me adult books about sports when I was about 10 years old that delved into issues like football teams forcing injured players to play, partly by forcing them to take pain medications, and the players themselves taking drugs for recreational purposes.
My father’s interest in my interests and my mother’s lack thereof led to just the two of us going to a few New York Knicks’ basketball games together every year. My mother, however, insisted on going with us when the game was part of my birthday present.
On Nov. 29, 1969, the three-person trips to Knicks’ games ended. The 23-1 Knicks had the longest winning streak in NBA history, 18, and were playing the pathetic Detroit Pistons at home. For two hours, my mother wouldn’t shut up. She complained about everything from the food to the players to the spectators. Numerous nearby spectators were openly aggravated by her behavior.
The Knicks lost. Afterward, I said “Mommy is a jinx. She shouldn’t go to Knicks’ games.” He said “you’re right” and banned her from going to games with us. In later years, my younger brother and sister often accompanied us to games, but my mother never attended another game.
My Father Trusted Me
I am 100 percent sure that my father wanted, and expected, our bond to last for decades.
Beginning in the summer before my junior year of high school, I went to work with him. For the next five summers, I kept track of a couple of his companies’ receipts and disbursements in accounting ledgers, computed the monthly figures, reviewed bank statements, and recorded the employees’ wages and tax payments in a separate ledger. I felt like a professional accountant.
I also traveled with my father from office to office, from construction site to construction site. He never said “I want you to take over my companies someday” but he was clearly training me for that eventuality, and several of his employees joked about me being their future boss. When he passed away, I was 20, way too young to be part of a formal business succession plan.
My father was overzealous in his desire for me to have a better life. I wanted, for example, to work the kinds of jobs that teens have after school, but he felt those jobs were hindrances to my studies and his wealth made my working unnecessary so I didn’t work during the school year.
He was especially interested in my having the kind of college experience that he never had. He lived at home when he attended college. He wanted me to go to an elite, expensive school that was a community in and of itself far away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and away from home. Thus, for two weeks during the summer before my junior year, we traveled together, just the two of us, around the northeast part of the nation visiting colleges.
My father wanted me to go to Harvard, but I wasn’t that smart. I chose Lafayette (Pa.) College. On Move-In Day, my mother got in the passenger seat of his car as my father prepared to drive me to college. “Get out of the car,” he yelled. “You’re not going to ruin things for him like you always do.” He knew that my mother would nag me about every conceivable issue in front of my classmates — and would probably badger as many of them as she could.
I would have lifted my father’s spirits by doing better academically at Lafayette, but it turned out that I could have done more for him if I stayed at home.
About halfway through my senior year of high school, a doctor told him that he needed to lose weight, reduce his blood pressure, and get in better physical condition. He decided to join a gym, but needed an exercise partner. The managers of the local Jack LaLanne gym told him that you had to be 21 years old to exercise there, but my father said he would only join if his 17-year-old son could accompany him.
For half a year, we jogged together two or three times per week. He was very slow, but dogged.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t motivate himself to exercise alone. As far as I know, he never exercised after I went to college. Perhaps, he needed me as much as I needed him.
Part III of the three-part series on my father will be posted on Storeboard in the next few days, I hope.
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