Tomorrow is my father’s birthday. Had he not died a year and a half ago, he would have been 95 years old.
Last month, during a weekend visit to my childhood home in Queens, I read through a chunk my father’s files. My brother had already started this process and created a spreadsheet with name of each folder, a brief description of the contents, and suggestions on what to do after I reviewed it. A few folders were labeled, “keep.” Most said “read and discard.”
And even though I’m the one often chiding my partner about his insistence on holding onto things he doesn’t need, I found it really hard to throw most of these files away. Not because there was anything extraordinary. Mostly I read through correspondence related to his job: thank you letters from people who appeared on the public affairs talk show, Straight Talk, which he produced for WWOR-TV (way before it was owned by Fox) as well as several letters of appreciation and a smattering of complaints. Not surprising, since he didn’t shy away from controversial issues in the talk show, nor in the documentaries he wrote and produced for the station, though he was meticulously ethical about the obligation to present different points of view, back in the days when the FCC’s fairness doctrine demanded balanced media.
There was another file folder where he kept his attempts to market his outside writing: TV scripts and plays in his early years, before he settled into his professional life, and a memoir he attempted after he retired. That file was filled with rejection letters from agents back in the days when agents actually wrote letters and didn’t simply ghost you. I threw away all the ones that said, blah, blah–doesn’t meet our needs, but I kept the ones that were specific, like this one from May 1, 1952:
I even kept this nastier one, because, hey, chances are we’ve all gotten letters like this once in a while. (I have, at least. I hope those of you who are also writers haven’t.)
Even though he never sold any scripts, he persisted. Because writing for the sake of writing, whether or not it got published, meant something to him. In fact, falling asleep every night to the clack of his manual typewriter was one of the first inspirations that led me to becoming a writer.
I’m hoping I’ll find just the right moment to shred all my embarrassing teenage diaries, love letters from old boyfriends, angsty journal entries, and more angsty journal entries disguised as faltering poems and thinly disguised failed fiction, because, yes, I also hold onto things I really don’t need, and because–God forbid–I don’t want my children or grandchildren, or any other relatives stumbling upon them after I die. But at the same time, I’m thankful to my father that he kept so much of his life intact in those folders, and that I can choose some of them to hold onto, even if he’s no longer there.
Happy birthday, Dad!
Stanley Friedman, age 91. Photo by Shel Horowitz
Subscribe at https://ddinafriedman.substack.com