My father was a sergeant with the Connecticut state police. My mother was a hairstylist.
We know what happens to little black boys that have no dads; we've heard that, we get it. But no one is really saying that young women who are born without fathers have real serious issues especially when their mother had no father and the mother has issues.
My father was one of the fortunate wartime servicemen: he made a full recovery from his injuries, was promoted to captain, survived the war, had a satisfying career as a colonial officer and, eventually, died in February 2002, a month before his 85th birthday.
I was three years old, and I walked onstage during a performance that my father was a tenor in 'The Barber of Seville.' I walked out onstage, and people started laughing and clapping, and that was it. That was all it took. Laughing and clapping, I still enjoy today.
And so I put down some of the things that he said, about keeping your tools sharpened and not letting them lie on the ground where they get hurt or get abused and dirty and can't find them. And some thoughts about how his father used to do things.
I had a very distant relationship with my father. It was always just me and my mother. It was a shattering blow when she died. I was 16.
I feel fortunate to have a huge family that is beyond race, creed, culture, and have a Father who shepherds us all. When I think about that, my mind is blown.
Because of my father, we are that Shining City on a Hill.
My father was a man's man and was always respected for being a straight shooter. My dad always had an amazing sense of calm about him.
Saud bin Abd al-Aziz was the moon-faced, shortsighted, bespectacled son of the old founder of Saudi Arabia, who'd always been his father's protege but had never quite lived up to everything that his father had.
I am a southerner who grew up with and around guns. I own some still. My father gave me a .22 rifle when I was 9 and a single barrel .410 shotgun when I was 10.
It's nice to have money, but the first thing I did with money was buy my father a snow-blower, because my job was to shovel snow, and I wasn't there to do it any more, so I was able to buy him a blower.
I knew real show business from my father, who had been an actor since he left the world of boxing.
My father was so in love with showbiz, all the different aspects - what we're doing here, making the movies, everything about it.
My father left our family for his 'yoga buddy' in 1984, when I was 15. I always stayed in touch with him - I had a deep need to be connected to my father, even though it could be painful at times. I shunned the yoga community because of his actions but eventually realized that yoga could be the antidote to my pain.
My father took my mother, me, and my brother from Sicily to New York. He got us one-way tickets but booked himself a return flight. He dumped us with my mother's parents, who had just arrived from Italy, and abandoned us. That was 1986. I didn't see or speak to him for another 12 years. That's cruel.
One of the things that made me persist in the Antarctic in the face of sickening discouragements was my determination to name a portion of the earth's surface after my father.
I was born and raised in Liberia in West Africa. My mother is Sierra Leonean, and my father's Liberian. I grew up at a time when there was a lot of civil unrest in both countries, so when something would happen in Liberia, we'd go to Sierra Leone, and when something would happen in Sierra Leone, we'd go back to Liberia. We moved to save our lives.
My father was born and raised in Sierra Leone, and my mom was from Bermuda.
In 1973, a woman could not get a credit card without her husband or father or a male signing off on it.