My viewpoint of Father’s Day began to change on April 1, 1966 when the first of our three sons, Ed, was born. We named him after my father who, for reasons we will never know, ended his own life several months prior to my eighth birthday. I grew up as the fifth of six children in a single-parent home in the small town of Lawler in northeast Iowa...

My father was the best man I ever knew. As a man, he was everything I ever wanted to be.  He was an outdoorsman par excellence, he loved his wife (my mother), and he always made me feel loved and spoke to me as one person to another, imparting his wisdom with kind firmness. Dad was also a very troubled man and struggled with depression for year...