My Dad Is So Cool

Between 1959 and 1962 my dad worked for NASA.  He was an engineer at IBM, who contracted him out to work on our fledgling space program.  How cool is that?  My dad helped design equipment in the Mercury Control Center at Cape Canaveral.  He wasn't an astronaut; he made astronauts possible.

Aristotle knew it: part of human excellence is pursuing knowledge of the world around us - of the cosmos we inhabit.  My father isn't a formally trained philosopher, but he was one of the first people to teach me philosophy.  Often, on Wednesdays after work, he'd take me out for pizza and cover napkins with chemical formulas, bits of logic, linguistic information he'd learned from reading Chomsky or from studying Russian and French, the history of circuit design, lessons in physics.  And I ate it up as readily as I ate up the pizza.  He was - and still is, thanks be to God - a man full of wisdom, and that wisdom is evinced by his desire to know more about the world around him.

If that doesn't convince you that my dad is one of the world's coolest dads, consider this: after pizza, he'd always take me to the local arcade and give me half a roll of quarters so I could play video games.  The other half of the roll of quarters?  He used it to play alongside me. 

Thanks, Dad.