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.

POUGHKEEPSIE POOP -- Thank goodness for the Roosevelt

The theater, that is.

Technically, the theater is in Hyde Park, not far from the FDR Estate on Route 9.

I don't know if the Horowitz family still owns it, as they did when I was much younger -- and, well, when I had a crush on their daughter Alicia, truth be told :)

Anyway, I digress. Whoever owns it, God bless 'em. In these difficult economic times, they somehow still make it work for the consumer. You can catch first-run movies at the Roosevelt for $4 matinees on the weekend. Four bucks. And, get this -- their idea of a matinee doesn't end at 4 p.m. Any movie that starts before 6 p.m. is considered a matinee.

My wife and I caught the 3:45 p.m. showing of Sex and the City on Saturday -- yeah, yeah, whatever. I was a fan of the show when it was came on HBO nine or 10 years ago and I, me, moi, was the one that turned my wife onto it -- for less than a $20 bill.

Moreover, the Roosevelt offers a ticket pack available at any time that features 12 movies tickets for $49. That's about $4.08 a ticket for those of you doing the math at home, and you can use the ticket at any time. Yes, even after 6 p.m.

Let me tell you, when you have kids a $4 movie is a pretty darn good deal.