I found this buried in a drawer over the holidays.  It appears to be from a 1976 edition of the Readers Digest.

Happy Father’s Day!

The following essay, which had evidently been written by a young schoolgirl as a Father’s Day assignment, was found blowing around in the front yard the other day:

The best thing about my father is that he doesn’t use  words like groovy or gross or try to talk like a kid.  When he drives me and some of my friends to a show, he doesn’t tell any jokes.  He just groans a lot and sometimes mutters to himself.  All the kids think it’s funny the way he groans.  Many of them have fathers who tell jokes, which are boring.

When he taught me to throw a baseball like a boy, he didn’t say it was becasue girls throw baseball funny.  All he said was that if I would learn to throw a baseball the way he showed me, he wouldn’t get sick to his stomache watching.

My father says that women can be anything they want these days, judges or scientists or even President.  But he says in all these jobs it’s important to keep your room cleaned and brush your teeth after every meal.  He says it is bad to cheat at games, and points out that when he is playing with us kids, the only times he cheats are when he would lose otherwise.  My father has worked very hard for every dime he has, a fact which he mentions from time to time.

My father has this weird thing about telephones.  He says that were intended to convey a message in two minutes or less, not to giggle over for 45 minutes.  Alther he doesn’ think people should talk on the telephone, he talks to people on the television all the time.  We tell him the people can’t hear him, and he says that’s just a lot of propaanda the TV people put out to stifle dissent.

He always says that he doesn’t want anybody to give him anything expensive for Father’s Day, and he claims that’s the only thing he ever says that anybody around the house pays any attention to.

– Bill Vaughan, NANA