My father was born in 1935, the younger son of Eastern European immigrants. He grew up in Neil Simon's town of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, a Jewish ghetto in everything but name.

He was old enough to remember World War II, but far too young to participate directly. Still, his patriotism led him to enlist in the army on his 18th birthday, just in time to train for—and miss out on—the conflict in Korea. He served an eight-year tour, making it as far as staff sergeant before retiring in 1961.

His high school had been full of budding talent, just waiting to make their impact on the world at large. Barbra Streisand, Neil Sedaka, Harvey Keitel; heck, my father used to play basketball with Louis Gossett, Jr.! Sadly, though, neither professional sports nor the entertainment industry was to be his calling. His first-generation American work ethic led him straight to the flashing lights (and high stress) of Wall Street.

In the early 60s, American prejudice against Jews was at an all-time high; only Communists and (ironically) Nazis ranked lower on most people's lists. So to get any job at all, my father had to hide part of his identity: changing his last name to something less ethnic, and lying about his background. Still, the best alternative at the time would've been manual labor, and my father had no desire to join any mobster-run unions.

To relieve his workplace stress, now that he was too "old" to play basketball, he took up bowling. His best friend convinced him to join a league, and since the team needed a fourth, he asked one of the young ladies in the secretarial pool if she was interested. She was, in more ways than one; they were married in 1965, a month after his 30th birthday.

(He happens to share his birthdate with Bob Denver, and is exactly one day younger than Elvis Presley; which has led to the running gag that my mother tried to marry Elvis, and wound up with Gilligan.)

Three years later, he was the proud father of three. Unfortunately, the time away from Wall Street had cost him his job, and nobody seemed willing to rehire him; no company wanted to be the stepping stone from which he could jump ship and re-launch his career. So in the end, he was forced into manual labor after all: supermarket stockperson, deliveryman, and other paycheck-to-paycheck jobs. For a while, our family moved every year or two like clockwork, as he struggled to pay the rent on a place large enough to support five.

His big break occurred in 1975: the owner of one of the companies he was delivering for—a small pet food shop in central Brooklyn—was retiring and moving to Florida. He offered my father the business, lock, stock and barrel; one year later, my father had done well enough to open a second store on Long Island. And finally purchase a house, two miles from the new shop; at last, we had a place we could really call home.

Commuting to the Brooklyn store soon got to be too much—a terrible string of luck with a succession of live-in housemaids certainly hadn't helped matters—so he sold it off and concentrated on the new one, eventually growing it into a local chain. That ended up backfiring on him two decades later, when the proliferation of new warehouse stores, and the price wars between national pet food chains vying for market share, drove him (and practically every other mom-and-pop operation) out of business. Worse, the stress of the situation drove him over the edge, to the first of two heart attacks.

Already forced to start over at the age of 60, he was soon hit with another crippling blow: my mother's illness, which turned out to be cancer. In trying to cover her hospital bills and keep everything together, he ended up losing the house, and most of his possessions. Nor did my mother make it; it was definitely a low point in all our lives.

My father has never been the type to dwell, however; he found a small apartment, and a managerial position at another pet shop. A few years later, when heavy smoke damage forced him to abandon the apartment, he moved in with my sister—who by then was going through a divorce and needed the moral support, not to mention the help with raising her own three boys.

And having learned from my mother's unsuccessful battle, and his own cardiovascular troubles, he began to go for regular medical checkups—which meant he was able to catch and treat his own cancer early enough to pull through, and beat it back into remission.

These days, he's a surprisingly active 73-year-old, one who can easily be mistaken for a decade younger. He's more careful about his eating habits than he used to be; it may help that he has three grown children from which to draw inspiration, as well as the incentive to keep up with his four (soon to be five) grandchildren. Fully retired and living on Social Security, he spends a good part of his time helping out his fraternal order, and his many friends therein.

And best of all, after all these years he's finally internet-savvy enough to go online and read this paean for himself. Happy Father's Day, dad.