My father, like nearly all of Levittown’s original homeowners, was a veteran. An Army sergeant, he returned stateside from the European theater with a flat-top crewcut that he wore, graying but somehow never thinning, until his death in 1997. Mom too was a vet; a telephone operator who’d joined the Women’s Army Corps less out of patriotic fervor than a longing to see the world beyond her native Scarsdale. They met in Italy and married there before returning together to New York at war’s end. Then, with $90 down and a G.I. Bill mortgage, they purchased my childhood home on Tallow Lane in 1947 for the princely sum of $7,000.

Dad found work at Burroughs Corporation, now known as Unisys, redeploying skills he’d learned at war to the repair of civilian business machines – analog precursors to today’s mainframe computers. His job entailed leaving home every morning at 9:00 with a black leather satchel of specialized tools that he carried to various client locations throughout Long Island. More a mechanic than a programmer, he would eventually fall victim to a technological revolution that left him surplus to the company’s needs by his middle fifties, when he accepted early retirement.

Burroughs wasn’t Dad’s only job. With a wife and six eventual children to support, he augmented his modest salary by officiating local sporting events. This meant high school football on fall weekends, basketball in winter, and fast-pitch softball in the spring and summer months. His winter routine, as I came to witness it, involved working until 5:00, presiding over the family dinner table until 6:00, grabbing a quick nap, then heading off in his referee’s uniform. Other seasons meant different routines, different outfits – striped shirt, blue shirt, mask and chest protector. The Levittown of my childhood was overwhelmingly white and working-class, and its Little League was the world’s largest. Ours was a sports-centric family living in a labyrinth of suburban streets teeming with the like-minded progeny of other veterans, all of us striving and scrapping at ground zero of what would come to be known as the American Baby Boom.

I graduated high school in 1974, just as a different war was winding to a different conclusion and a countercultural ethos was penetrating even Levittown’s fiercely Republican conservatism. This, combined with his early retirement and an emptying nest, seemed to disorient my father in a way that left him diminished. He spent more time at the American Legion post or in front of the television. He developed a paunch, drank more beer, became quicker to anger. Behind our open hands, his children whispered snide comparisons to television’s Archie Bunker.

Like my brothers before me, I played basketball in high school, and in that bygone era, the drinking age in New York State was only eighteen. This meant rowdy post-game parties at the homes of friends or teammates whose parents were either extraordinarily tolerant or, more likely, gone for the weekend. Courtship was in the air, and fistfights were not uncommon. Then on summer evenings, with school in recess, our same restive crowd would congregate in the high school bleachers, or at the village green, sipping beer or, in a nod to the zeitgeist, smoking a little weed. There were, suffice it to say, many an evening when I’d return home to Tallow Lane in the wee hours, decidedly worse for drink.

And there my old man would be waiting. Not just sometimes, but always, no matter the season and no matter the hour; a slipper-shod Cerberus parked in his leather recliner with a cigarette in one hand and a Schaefer beer in the other, the scene invariably suffused in the bluish glow of the television. There was no escaping him, or the nightly ritual of feigned sobriety required to gain passage through the living room to the staircase leading to my upstairs bedroom. It was a test I dreaded but, with frequent repetition, had come to master.

Or so I’d thought. It was decades later, after both our parents had passed, that I shared this memory with my siblings at a family gathering. Something to the effect that Dad must’ve been a real insomniac because no matter the hour, I’d always come home to find him watching television. To which my sister replied, “Did it ever occur to you that he was waiting up for you, to be sure you made it home safely?”

I’m older now than my father was then, and my admiration for the man grows with each passing year. His own education preempted by war, Dad nonetheless lived to see all six of his children graduate college. While the eight of us shared a three-bedroom shoebox with a single bathroom, we never wanted for food or clothing, sundries or schoolbooks. Because Mom never did learn to drive, Dad’s additional responsibilities included transportation, shopping, and running the manifold errands our bursting household required, all in a used Chrysler he nurtured into antiquity with determination and elbow grease.

And of course, watching over us.

Dad was taciturn by nature. Like many of his cohort, he never spoke of his wartime service. He rarely complained or lectured. He parented instead by example, and from my father’s example I learned, even decades after his death, that the true measure of a man lies not in words but in deeds, and that the tougher the going, the more profound even the smallest of deeds can be.

We may not have been wealthy, but I couldn’t have wished for a richer inheritance.