Hope and fathers are entwined in below-ground news. From Chile comes the good word that one of the miners buried underground is a new father. Naturally, he named his baby daughter Esperanza (Hope). And notice arrives — that brings a smile to Greek tourism officials — that an elaborate underground tomb more likely contains the remains of Alexander the Great's Pop, the Macedonian military master Phillip II, rather than feeble half-bro Phillip III.
Each side brings with it honor as Jack Thorpe files his lawsuit against Jim Thorpe (the Pennsylvania city, not his iconic father). It is very unlikely they will leave the courtroom that way.
Son Thorpe, 72, has brought suit against various people and the government of what was once Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, until they made a deal to merge and rename themselves Jim Thorpe, Penna., and rebury the remains of America's most famous non-warrior Native American. The deal made with Thorpe's third wife — JT is son from the first marriage — was that the town would inter and celebrate the great man's life. The son says fifty years on it is time for the great man's soul to be put at rest through reburial in tribal lands in Oklahoma.
Unfortunately, as is the way of most judicial pursuits, from this point forward younger Thorpe is more and more likely to come across as someone taking his own last shot at fame and money while the town fathers (and mothers) will appear ever more pigheaded and small.
On the other hand, it could be the two sides are in cahoots to bring some more attention to the legacy and create a little tourist buzz as well. If so (and we can only hope) then consider WD well played.
The son loses his father to war without ever knowing him. His mother remarries and the newlyweds rename the boy (both middle and last name), not yet five. He has a learning disorder, but grows up quiet, a bit odd, a wrestler and, eventually, a writer in search of father characters.
Such is the biography of writer John Irving. Such are many of the works of Irving. And, with some variations on his usual themes, such is the new novel, "Last Night in Twisted River," that is a picaresque quest of father and son, begun when the child skillets the cranium of a woman, fearing she is a bear instead of a mistress (and his sitter) looming above his pleasured father in flagrante delicto.
In writing his fictional fathers and sons, Irving is in search of himself. Still, the magic is that his words, somehow also turn out to be the same search — yet unique to each — of many other dads and their children.
Every kid believes dad is a hero, but too few learn in time the secret truth of how or why that's true.
Teresa Irish of Saginaw, Mich., discovered her father's secret in his trunk after his death.
A month and a day following Aarol Irish's death his daughter lifted the lid of his "Army trunk" and found thousands of letters describing his soldiering experiences during WWII. He had promised his children that one day he would show and tell them about his baggage. The day, too late for him to tell, finally came and as proud as Irish is of her father — and even as she now knows what horror her father commemorated every year on April 9 — she still regrets she didn't get a chance to talk with him about this part of his life.
Charlie Watson's superpower secrets were kept in his lungs. Two years before cancer killed him — lung cancer traceable to the Army's "wheelbarrow-full" distribution of Camels and Luckies — he showed and explained the story of his Bronze medal and much else of his life to son Warren.
