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in the dark he couldn’t tell if the guys were airport employees or loiterers.

    As they got closer, he noticed they were staring him down. He continued to play it cool. Don Fey had grown up in West Philly, where he lived comfortably as a Caucasian minority. Of course these guys couldn’t know that. His heart was beating a little faster as they came within ten feet of each other.

    The guys looked at him intently, then one turned to the other and said, “That is one boss, bold, bladed motherfucker.”

    That’s Don Fey. He’s just a badass. He was a code breaker in Korea. He was a fireman in Philadelphia. He’s a skilled watercolorist. He’s written two mystery novels. He taught himself Greek so well that when he went to buy tickets to the Acropolis once, the docent told him, “
    .” (It’s free for Greek citizens.)

    Neighborhood kids would gather on our porch just to listen to him swear at the Phillies game.
    (Andy Musser talked too goddamn much. Games were often “over” by the sixth inning. “This goddamn game is over. The sons of bitches choked.”)

    When watching the Flyers, he would change the channel during commercials and he always knew exactly when to turn it back to catch the start of play. When my cousin marveled at this ability, my dad was matter-of-fact: “You just wait ninety seconds.” Isn’t everyone’s brain a Swiss watch?

    Don Fey is a Goldwater Republican, which is his only option. If you’re Don Fey, you can’t look at Joe Biden and be like, yes, I want to be led by this gentleman with the capped teeth. You’re not going to listen to John Kerry pretending to empathize with you about the rising cost of your medications. You certainly aren’t interested in the “unresolved father issues” that rendered Bill Clinton unable to keep his fly closed. Don Fey is not going to put up with that. Don Fey is a grown-ass man! Black people find him stylish!

    Don Fey has what I would describe as pre–Norman Lear racial attitudes. Once the Bunker family met the Jeffersons, every interaction between blacks and whites was somehow supposed to be a life-changing lesson, especially for the white people. My generation carries that with us, only to be constantly disappointed by Kanye West and Taylor Swift.

    The twin house I grew up in was across the street from the border of West Philadelphia where Don Fey grew up. Don Fey certainly had friends of other races and religions. He has told me a couple times about the night he kissed Lionel Hampton. He was at a jazz concert as a teenager with an all-white audience. At one point in the show, Lionel Hampton would invite a woman from the audience to dance with him, but the white girls were all too scared to be seen dancing with a black man. To ease the tension, Don Fey jumped up and fast-danced with Mr. Hampton, at the end of which Lionel Hampton kissed him on the forehead to a round of applause.

    Conversely, he would tell us things like “If you see two black kids riding around on one bike, put your bike in the garage.” This wasn’t racism; it was experience. Those kids were coming from West Philly to steal bikes. The social factors that caused their behavior were irrelevant to a Depression baby. When you grow up getting an orange for Christmas, you’re going to make sure the twenty-five-dollar bike you bought your kid doesn’t get ripped off.

    Norman Lear might want us to take time to understand that those kids went to poorly funded schools and that their parents, while loving and dignified, were unable to supervise their children’s behavior because they were both at work doing minimum-wage jobs, but by then our bikes would be gone.

    The late seventies were a dark time of “family meetings” about “tightening our belts.” The embarrassment of Watergate led right to the Iran hostage crisis. Three Mile Island was in our state. It was always “Day 27” of something in Beirut. There was an infestation of gypsy moths killing the trees in our