I couldn’t have said it better myself. My dad is like the real-world version of the movie “Yes Man”.

Matt and I were the kids in the neighborhood who had a dad with three antennas on the back of the Mazda 626 that everyone HAD to know about.

We’d drive around listening to what was going on in the city with dad translating the 10-codes for us.

I still call him to this day when I see something big going on that involves police/fire people, expecting him to be able to fill in the what/why/who.

My guess is that newspapers are not only failing because of their inability to monetize their Internet businesses, but because people like dad aren’t made anymore.

I suppose I should save things like this for later, when you are dead, before I recount these stories…but then why should I be the only one who is uncomfortable?

Every morning I look at the newspapers online and then I wander over to your post and see what you have added. I of course look forward to reading about the new things you are getting into down there whether it be on a bike or off it.

Today was a special treat for me with your posting of the Kent State “never forget” story. So much so that I sent an email to someone with your link so they could see it as well. Here is the email that I sent…

Subject: And this is why I have been trying to be like my older brother all my life…
Growing up with a brother who is 9 years older certainly put some “knowledge” distance between us, but growing up I was fortunate enough to realize that he was the real deal.

Other kids had comic book figures or sports figures they idolized, I had him. He was the living encyclopedia that everyone else was out buying and thumbing through to try and catch up with the 60′s.

He didn’t have a regular job, he was a newspaper photographer and he had a police scanner in his car. He would come in and say something like, “car accident with injuries at the intersection of 75 and 25 want to go?”

Like kids who might have been asked if they wanted to take a ride in a rocket ship, we of course clambered into the 1959 red Buick Station wagon and raced to the scene of the accident.

We would sit in the car along the side of the road and listen to the scanner and try and get a look at the accident. The scanner wasn’t really a scanner at all. It was a police radio that you had to manually dial the frequencies for the fire, police and sheriff department. I can remember he had marked with a black magic marker the points on the dial where the different departments were and you still had to carefully tune in the frequency to listen.

He knew all the “10-codes” so he could narrate what we could not understand. “10-97″ He would say, “they’re on the scene…” Knowing the “10-codes” was the same as understanding the Rosetta Stone as far as we were concerned.

He could interrupt everything they said in code that we weren’t suppose know and tell us what was going on.

Sometimes we were lucky enough to find ourselves locked in the basement with him in the darkroom and we could watch the accident re-appear again before our eyes. It was magical and mystical and we had both front row seats and backstage passes.

The posting this morning is just a sample of what we would hear over the phone when he would call home while he was at Ohio University, or when we would go there over Thanksgiving break….

“Never Forget”

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Thanks, Mark. Despite all your kind words, I’m still sure you are trying to kill me so you can attain Oldest Brother status.