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Dick and Nancy's Father's Day Stories

Nancy Leson
Nancy Leson, her Dad, and his favorite pickles

At the start of this Father's Day edition of Food for Thought Nancy asked "Hey Stein – do you feel left out on Father's Day because you don't have children?"  After assuring Ms. Leson that I have all the tacky neckties I can use we moved on to Tales of Our Dads in regard to cooking and eating.

I credit my father with teaching me to keep my fingertips curled under when slicing stuff.  To this day the remaining 7.5 of those tips thank him for it.  Murray also gave me my first exposure to fermented tofu – a taste he acquired during prohibition while dining with the Chinese bootleggers he sold supplies to.

Nancy's tales also center on San Fran.  Her parents divorced when she was quite young and her father moved there.  "So it wasn't until I was about 20 that I really started spending a lot of time with my father."  She remembers going with him for her first taste of sashimi.

"I was trying so hard to impress my dad with my worldliness – and not get sick over the thought of eating raw fish."  But when they brought out the fresh tuna all it took was one bite.  " I tasted it and it was so delicious we had to order more.  I became a Japanese food junkie from there on in."

But what really blew me away was her casual mention that her father was a close friend of San Francisco's Queen of the Bordellos, famed madam Sally Stanford – later elected mayor of Sausalito.  "She was a kick in the pants," Nancy remembers, "But she was quite elderly by the time I was having Thanksgiving dinner with her.  I remember her telling a joke and then falling asleep..."

Fathers and food.  Share some memories with the rest of us.

And finally, I just couldn't decide which "father" quote I liked best to wrap up this post.  So I'm using both.

"When I was a boy of 14 my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21 I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

– Mark Twain

"Yonduh lies da castle of my faddah."

The most famous line never spoken by Tony Curtis

Dick Stein joined KNKX in January 1992. He retired in 2020 after three decades on air. During his storied radio career, he hosted the morning jazz show, co-hosted and produced "Food for Thought" with Nancy Leson and wrote and directed the Jimmy Jazzoid live radio musical comedies and 100 episodes of Jazz Kitchen.