Oy, My Papa

Larry Austin, an agent who has written nothing beyond insurance policies, was crowned at Sloppy Joes as the most lookalikable to noted suicide Ernest "Papa" Hemingway, author of the "Old Man and the Sea," "A Farewell to Arms" and other American literary classics.

Intriguing and despairing for so noteworthy a literary talent is the irony of the nickname "papa" hung on the writer by friends from his days fishing in Key West. The writer's dad shot himself when Ernest was 29; and he would take his own life by shotgun at age 61. As for his legacy as a father, his son Patrick, a 79-year-old Montana resident survives his older brother Jack "Bumby" Hemingway, who passed away in 2000. He also survives his half-brother Gregory — lone child from Hemingway's first marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer — who died in a woman's prison cell in 2001, answering to the name of Gloria after being arrested on charges of indecency and public intoxication ... and some undetermined period after undergoing a sex change operation.

No word was forthcoming on Austin's patriarchal legacy, but he has been married for nearly 35 years to the same woman so it is likely to be at least a bit more stable.

** Once more a father's fiction on paper is no match for the facts in his life. **