Oddly Bound

Unusual bonds work to bring dads together with daughters and sons, too.

Arm wrestling. Most beloved as a bar sport is the love of Elizabeth City, N.C., fathers and daughters Nanney and Dowdy. Presumably dads Donald and Keith tipple should the opportunity arise, while daughters Brandy and Bryce do not. Drinking or not, the dads are beating other dads while their girls watch and the girls are crushing on the forearms of other girls and even boys to the joy of their fathers.

Of course, girl arm wrestling — is it macha? — is really no stranger than the idea of liberals on the western range. Maybe it's less strange if one tuned into the recent Republican narratives. Or maybe not. By claiming U.S. Senate seats, Tom and Mark Udall, the sons of brothers Morris and Stewart, are revising the conventonal wisdom that the American west is a hot dry plain of conservative thinking. Their fathers — Stu an Arizona congressman and Secretary of the Interior and Mo who took over his brother's seat for 14 terms — were conservationists, pragmatists and, by all reports, very liberal. And it looks like that will be the legacy of the sons as well. Still, it seems odd.

Not quite as odd, however, as the ties between Ted and father Robert Edward Turner II, at least as glanced over in the new Turner (actually, RET III) biography, Call Me Ted. The father beat the son and the son the father; the son called the dad a quitter and the father shot himself. Even though "mouth of the south" Ted doesn't dwell too much on the strangeness of the legacy his father left him (beyond the billboard biz and small fortune that got him started) it is clear that the ties between father and son are deep and very odd. They have also had intriguing to watch but difficult to explain results.

Still, for good or bad, the odd ties bind as tight as the "normal" ones.