THE FAMILY HOOD -- Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there, especially mine, who also happens to be celebrating his 78th birthday today.

People always ask me how I became a writer and journalist. Two words: my father.

As crazy as our life was, my father always came home and plopped anywhere from four to seven newspapers on the dining room table. It could have been any combination of the Poughkeepsie Journal (later to be my first job out of college), the Daily Freeman, the then Newburgh Evening News (shuttered in the late 1980s), the Albany Times-Union, the New York Post, New York Daily News and Newsday.

I read them religiously and, hoping to someday be a sportswriter, I always made sure to read the write-ups of Yankee games that I watched the previous night on television, just to see how the newspaper writers saw it -- and how they saw it differently.

Happy Father's Day and Happy Birthday Dad. I know you probably won't see this, since you have enough trouble working your cell phone, much less a computer :) But I love you.