Happy Birthday Dad

Today is my Dad's birthday. Bob Regan (His college buddies at St. Benedict's called him Rube. Mom called him Bobby) would have been 85 today. If you'll indulge me, I'll tell you a couple things about Dad, for those of you who weren't lucky enough to have known him.

He was an orphan, and crippled by polio at an early age. Raised by two aunts in the house next door to where my mother lives now, he grew up in Kansas City's heyday, taken as a child to speakeasies by his wild Aunt Kate and a witness to gangland gun battles. As an adult, spared service in World War II because of his withered right leg, he graduated college (one of the few members of the class of '44 at his all male college) and went to work in the local beer business, where he would spend his career. His first stop was with Lafferty-O'Gara, the Pabst distributor, then with Bevington-Basile who sold Schlitz products in a low building behind Union Station. He was an immensely talented artist and writer. He raised, with the love of his life Patty Ann McCunniff, nine children, losing his oldest son Timmy at age 6 to a bad heart. He served as the Honorary Mayor of Westport (once a larger town than Kansas City, Westport was annexed by Kansas City, Missouri in 1897 and today is residential and entertainment district), a completely made up, barroom based position in which, among other official acts, he once declared war on Kansas City and founded an annual convention of other towns called Westport around the world that continues to this day. My Mom will be attending this year's gathering in Westport, Newfoundland over the summer. With a bulky leather and steel brace on his leg, and confined to a cane or crutches his entire life, he refused to park in handicapped parking spaces, telling me once when I asked him why that it was because there were a lot of people worse off than him that might need it. In spite of his physical and financial limitations, Dad loved life and lived it well. And, my God, did he have fun. Like nobody else.

And I think about Dad today, and whenever I think about the Kansas City Irish Fest. He didn't live to see Irish Fest happen, but I have no doubt that if he had, he would be sitting where I am and I'd be a volunteer in the beer tents, with him barking orders to me. He would have loved what we're building here and he would have been right in the middle of it, even at 85. I guarantee it.

The early morning in March that Dad died, with all his surviving kids and his loving wife by his bed side, we were playing his favorite record, a collection of Irish harp tunes by the blind composer O'Carolan played by the Chieftains' Derek Bell. My Mom said that she wanted the last things that Dad heard to be Irish music and voices of his children. And they were. We should all be so lucky as to die so well.

Happy Birthday, Dear old Dad.