My father use to say if coal died, the country died. He was right. Our economy rests on the back of the coal miner. If we did not have the black diamonds of the mountains to burn, we would lose more than half of the nation's energy reserves.
I grew up in Manchester, and we were very poor. My father was a miner who joined the Navy during the war and developed a lung disease and had to have a lung removed.
When my father started talking about strip mining in the Appalachia back in the '60s, I remember a conversation I had with him where he said, you know, this is the richest state in the country if you look at the resources and the land, but the poorest people after the state of Mississippi: the 49th poorest people in the country.
Between 1958 and 1963, I sold about 40 million records - to the shock of my mother and father because I was always playing Beethoven. But I bought my mother a mink stole. She was very happy, and she said, 'I think this is better than Beethoven.'
My father's name is Dee, so when I was born they named me Katherine Dee and they took the K from Katherine and put it with his name, sort of to give me my dad's namesake. But it's hysterical how often it gets misspelled. I used to be like, 'No one capitalizes my D!'
Like my father, I don't want to see anyone mistreated, anything like that. I'm very racial-conscious because my father had a lot of, you know, challenges in the area of race. I'm very sensitive to that kind of issue.
My father was a veteran. He fought in World War II. He was a patriot. On the other hand, he had no illusions whatsoever about how Uncle Sam had mistreated him and other black soldiers.
Father John Misty imagines that he is a rebel. He is, but he does not realize what he is rebelling against.
Father John Misty is rebelling not against repression or foolishness but the ephemeral nature of mankind. He seeks permanence in a fleeting age, and he does not find it because the one place he could find an answer, he considers closed off: a locked door.
J. Tillman was kind of an alter ego. There was a lot I didn't want people to know about my real life. With Father John Misty, I leave everything in: so much so that I lose sleep before these albums come out because there is always a line or two in there where I'm just like, 'This is not going to go down very well.'
In the modern world, it may be that a living father can only be half a father to a boy - the dead father is the other vital half: the half that grows the boy up once and for all.
Superman's original name was Kal-El, or Swift God. His father's name was Jor-El. Superman was clearly drawn as a modern-day god.
We want to create more jobs. We want to qualify more lenders and expand lending markets. But also, I want a very different SBA - it's not your father's SBA. I want to modernize it and reposition it so when people think about jobs, they think about how the Small Business Administration would really be helpful.
My mother Molly had a nervous breakdown after my father Chic died, aged 50. He was a very generous man who ran a shop in Dundee giving a lot of people tick. When he died, a lot of people hadn't paid their bills, so he died with a lot of debt. After he died, my mother went doolally.
Emotional grandeur, rendered in the vernacular, has been Mona Simpson's forte. In her novels, 'Anywhere but Here,' 'The Lost Father' and 'A Regular Guy,' Simpson wrote wide and long and high about the most profound human bonds: parents and children lost each other, found each other, lost each other again, but differently.
My mother had a master's degree and had been a schoolteacher before she started having kids at 30. But my father's family were landowners, farmer-merchants. Moneymaking was extremely important, like one of those semi-rapacious families in Lillian Hellman, where they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
My mother and father, Joe and Theresa Montana brought me along and taught me to never quit, and to strive to be the best.
My father had risen in the British Army under the revolutionary aegis of General Montgomery, who was mad about training for battle, not muddling into disaster.
My father would take me to the playground, and put me on mood swings.
It's not that my father didn't love me, it's just that he wasn't capable of consistently being there. His mood swings were gigantic.
