Since I wasn’t able to attend my father’s funeral in the Summer of 2022, due to my cancer diagnosis and imminent treatment schedule, I did the next best thing. I wrote a eulogy for my brother to deliver at the service. The following piece is the one my brother delivered. I think it’s filled with some hilarious anecdotes that would appeal to all readers, even ones who didn’t grow up in our family. Two things you need to know if you choose to read: it’s meant to be delivered from my brother’s perspective, and it references some elements of our Catholic heritage, with church terminology that would be understood by the congregation listening to it. At the bottom of the post, I list a few other posts I’ve about my father over the years. He was a funny guy, so he comes up a lot when I share family stories.
Dad hams it up at the barracks in the 1950s. (Family photo. All rights reserved.)
There is a character you see a lot in sitcom TV shows. He’s a father, he’s got a huge, wacky family, and they drive him absolutely crazy. Week in, week out, this exasperated and often exhausted Dad cracks jokes, and demonstrates time and time again that he is the rock on which his family depends. That is literally the description of every TV Dad from George Jetson to Ray Romano.
He’s often the breadwinner. Occasionally he comes up a few words of wisdom that no one was expecting. And though he always seems to be the butt of every joke around the house, he’s always there when the chips are down.
I’ve just described every dad in this church right now.
But I’m here today to talk about one dad. Mine. Frank D’Agnese.
The thing with parents—all parents—is that their kids grow up thinking that the people who shower them with love, the people who are their protectors and trainers in life have *always* been grown-ups. That’s what you think as a kid. Your father was never really a kid. He was always Dad.
No. That’s not true at all, kids. Your parents had a life, with hopes and dreams, long before they became your parents.
My Dad grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a shoemaker. My Dad was barely into his teens when his father died at age 47. My dad was not a great student. He trained in a technical school program for auto repair. Back then, he could take a car apart with his hands, and if he had apprenticed with someone, I’m sure he would have had a great career doing that.
But he had a dream. He loved music. He could play both flute and clarinet, but he excelled at the saxophone, all three versions of that instrument—alto, tenor, baritone. The way he made money in his teens and twenties was he’d play with various bands all over Brooklyn and Manhattan. He used to brag that he once was the only white guy in an all-black band. He was obsessed with the Big Band sound. The sound of brass. And the sound of jazz.
That sax of his put money in his pockets, and once saved his life. He was stationed in Georgia during the Korean War and was summoned to see the general of the post about shipping overseas.
The guy looked at him and said, “Don’t you play in the band?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Sax, is it?”
This general must have a sweet spot in his heart for music. Or else he didn’t like his good time at the officer’s club to be compromised in any way. He pointed at the middle drawer of his desk. “Your papers are in my drawer, Private,” he said. “Let them stay there. Dismissed.”
So my Dad never went to Korea. When he left the army, I don’t know what happened. He set his dream aside out of practicality, I guess. He said many a musician pulled him aside in those days and said that he if wanted to get married and settle down, than he should get the heck out of music. You couldn’t have a decent family life if you were out playing every night.
My father heard that there was good money to be made in the Garment District. If he took this one six-week class, and he did well, he’d have all the skills he needed for a lifetime on Seventh Avenue.
He took the class. The rest is history. My brother still has in his collection of books the workbook our father used to graduate that class.
He supported himself, then my mom, and then our entire family for decades on a six-week class and life experience. He was a pattern maker. He translated the image drawn by a fashion designer into a full-sale production template that the manufacturer would use to make thousands, perhaps millions of coats.
Dad’s claim to fame? The faux leather Fonzie jacket!
He once bragged to my sister-in-law, “Dear,” he said, “dear, you know, I introduced fake fur to the children’s market.”
He was hilarious, by the way. A natural-born story teller and comedian.
But he was not joking about this. This was serious.
Fake fur for the children’s market. Wow.
Something I didn’t know America needed. But my Dad did that.
He used to work in the city during the day, and had this hilarious entourage of men that he would have lunch with in the District. I think that’s how he perfected his storytelling, hanging out with Jewish and Italian guys. (The Garment District back then was solidly Jewish and Italian.)
One day, lunch would be pastrami sandwiches and matzoh ball soup. Another day, it was spaghetti with clams. And every minute of it, these guys would be trying to outdo each other with the stories they told.
Dad brought home extra work to do freelance at nights and on weekends. When we were older, we used to help him out in this studio in the garage or the one he rented downtown in the town where we lived in NJ.
He’d have this machine that he worked on that would allow him to size a clothing pattern up and down. It had these little fractions on it, quarters…eighths—it was nuts. He’d roll those dials up and down, adding the fractions effortlessly in his head.
I asked him once, How do you know how to do that?
“The quarters and eighths are easy,” he said. “It’s the 32nds and 64ths that get me every time.”
You know, I think I understand why he found it so effortless. There’s a knack for precision that he nailed early on his life. Math is everywhere in every discipline he ever mastered. It’s there in car engines. It’s definitely there in music. And it’s there in fashion design. Math followed him when he retired and got into woodworking.
I don’t know how old I was, probably after high school, when I realized just how talented my parents were at hands-on skills.
My mom was a great cook, a great gardener, a seamstress. My dad was tailor, a woodworker, a tinkerer. He could fix most things around the house and build or fix whatever we needed.
“You need to do a pinewood derby car by Monday? We’ll do it this weekend. You’re doing the work, kid.”
“You need a replica of the Ponte Vecchio for Italian class? Okay, let’s get some cardboard, a picture of the real bridge, and some glue. You’re cutting the cardboard.”
My brothers and I grew up with the sense that our parents would be there to help us out, but we always knew we would have to do the work. They’d be there at our backs, but we would do the heavy lifting.
Eventually the word got around town that the D’Agneses, husband and wife, could sew. My mother ended up getting drafted to sew the school flag for our Catholic elementary school.
“I did never this before!” she said, late one night when she was sewing away like Betsy Ross and feeling nervous that the result would turn out looking terrible. That flag hung in the foyer of that school 30 years later. The school went out of business long before that flag quit.
My father, on the other hand, got drafted by our church another way. He went to 7:30 AM mass one Sunday, which is what he liked to do, and at a certain part of the mass, the priest comes down the altar and makes a beeline for my father.
“Peace be with you, Frank,” he said, uttering the customary greeting. “I have a hole in my pants…do you think you could fix ‘em up for me?”
Neither of my parents had much schooling. But it almost didn’t matter. They raised three sons who, I mean, seriously, the three of us have one degree after another, but the best lesson we probably ever learned was that there’s no shame in doing things with your hands.
When they got older, my parents moved out here to San Diego. It was probably the best thing they ever did in their lives. I mean that. It’s the largest city they ever lived in since they left New York. They met the most diverse group people they had ever known, and they just kept growing emotionally. My father used to love going out to eat. For the first time in his life, he ate Mexican on a regular basis. He’d ask me, “Hey when are we going for Pho?” He loved bibimbap, too. You name it.
We used to drop my sons off at my parents’ house when they were little and my mother would teach them how to make gnocchi. My dad played saxophone. And as the boys got older, there were the inevitable school projects. Pinewood derbies in the scouts. Birdhouses. My father and I would stand over the boys as they did this work. And the message was the same:
“We’ll show you, but you’re cutting the wood yourself.”
I don’t know how you become a father. Believe me, I am one today, and sometimes I think if I had interviewed for the job, I would have never gotten it. But you fall into it. You become the exhausted father, the beleaguered patriarch. Sometimes, yeah, you’re the butt of all jokes, the guy who is wearing black socks with shorts in summer because you just came from the office. But if you are blessed enough to stay on the job, you become the rock that family needs. And if you are truly lucky, the way my father was, you end up schooling a whole new generation of kids.
My father had this sense of wonder about everything my two sons did. He could not believe the prodigious rate at which my oldest child read books. He used to love coming to this church on Wednesdays because that’s when the St. Michael’s kids would have their morning mass. Dad would stand outside the church and high-five the kids as they came out. And he was there when my youngest son took up saxophone. He used to love going to the band practices at this school and later at the high school.
When it came time to buy my son a sax, we found a Craigslist ad and agreed to drive to the home of the man who was selling it.
“Look,” my father said, “when we get in there, let ME do the talking. I’m gonna see if I can talk him down a few hundred bucks.”
My father was a great negotiator. The salesmen at car dealership ran when they saw him coming. Ran AWAY.
So what happened with the sax? We get in there, my father tests the sax for two seconds. He puts it down, and without consulting me, says to the guy: “We’ll take it—full price!”
I got outside and I exploded, “What did you just do? You screwed up the plan!”
My father practically had tears in his eyes. “Tony—fuhgeddaboudit! The sax is perfect!”
A few days ago, after he passed, I went to my father’s house to start cleaning out the garage. All these tools. All this wood. In the middle of it all was this beautiful hand-made trunk he was building for my son who is leaving for college in a few days.
I said to my son, “Well, it’s Poppa’s last woodworking project, and he never got to finish it…”
It was bittersweet, but what are you gonna do?
My son is standing there looking at it, and goes, “No, Dad, it’s a piece of cake. All we need is few hinges and the handle. We can finish it for him.”
And that’s what we’re gonna do.
Good fathers, great fathers, spend their whole lives showing you the ropes and bringing you just far enough.
And then one day, they’re gone.
If they’ve done their job right, you get to finish the job yourself.
Over the years, my father has appeared in other blog posts I wrote for other sites. You can check them out here:
How my father got me my first sit with an editor when I was in my teens.
How my father got the shock of his life when I opened a detective agency in the garage.
Crazy Old Photo of Me at My First Job
Photo of sky at top by me.