One thing science has said often is that they are not wrong but instead they learned and changed their opinion. Two opinions I have often stated I had to rethink about over the last few days. Last week after a five-year absence I ran a volunteer event at the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. A full post about that will be coming. If you are going to be involved in a charity that is if you pick one close to your heart, and your resources are directed at that single charity that you can make a bigger impact than spreading across too many. The second opinion is helping people who cannot do anything for you is a wonderful feeling. These thoughts are what drives me to volunteer and donate the the MSCH.

This past week I had to think a lot about my dad. For those who do not know he passed away on June 9th, 2024. He was in the hospital for the last three days of his life and my mom, sister and I were by his side. After that were a few days of telling stories about him and remembering the remarkable things he accomplished. There are some stories I know, but when you connect the dots, you see what a genuinely great person my dad was, as well as why I am rethinking.

My dad supported my mom in her endeavor in opening and running an adoption agency for handicapped and hard-to-place children. Being a lawyer he was able to bring cases and change the adoption laws in New Jersey. He successfully changed the law that single people could adopt as well as gay couples. These changes, while in the year 2024 may sound normal, in the 1970s they were not. Living under the shadow of being able to change something like that is a challenge that I do not think I could ever live up to.
This hits my second opinion, where my dad was helping others that could not do anything in return. He seems to extend that a bit further, that he not only was helping some people directly, but he is helping others that he has never met. There are hundreds of people who will never know my dad, never know the original cases he brought to the courts whose lives are now changed due to his work. I was fortunate to see the smiles of the children I helped, he is now and will forever be watching thousands or millions of smiles that he was a part of. Bruce Lee said, ‘The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.’ My dad will have immortality, even if the people do not remember his name.
Back to my first opinion about helping people. My dad had a strange business model as a Lawyer. He would take cases if he believed the person was right. He did not chase the financial part of the case; it was more about the purpose. Rumor has it, he never lost a case in court. I did ask him about this, and he continued to insist once a case went to trial, he never lost. He then would caveat it with he settled a larger percentage, so many never with to trial. But as good as he was at helping people his downside was his business sense. He often did not bill people or took whatever they offered to pay. He was the Bon Jovi Soul kitchen of Lawyers.
I started to think about his direction differently. My dad was doing what many said they got in many different professions, this notion of wanting to help other people. My dad though did just that. It was not his side gig; it was not his volunteer passion, but his full-time job was helping people. Whether they could pay or not was not important to him but whether they were right and they needed help was the key. This was quite different to my opinion of working with one charity and you could have a greater impact. My dad wanted to help everyone, his belief that people were good drove him to want to help.
My dad’s greatness as a person was in front of me all the time. My ability to see it as a child was not there, I just saw him as my dad and being a lawyer was something he did. There were no championships on TV, no channels dedicated to attorneys who do good, no post on social media chest pounding what he did. My dad just continued to help people, using his brain and his heart. It is a challenging thing to live up to. He managed to break my rule of only focusing on one, while not only tackling helping others who cannot do anything for you and extending it to helping others who will never know who you were.
He will always be able to smile as he has proved to be the most successful person I know. I will miss you dad. Happy Father’s Day. Along with my regular disclaimer below, please go help someone who will never know who you are.
This opinion is mine, and mine only, my current or former employers have nothing to do with it. I do not write for any financial gain; I do not take advertising and any product company listed was not done for payment. But if you do like what I write you can donate to the charity I support (with my wife who passed away in 2017) Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Hospital or donate to your favorite charity. The fundraising site had to be restarted and NYP Hospital made changes to their donation sites. I pay to host my site out of my own pocket, my intention is to keep it free. You are welcome to comment, but note it is moderated and all spam will be removed.
This Blog is a labor of love and was originally going to be a book. With the advent of being able to publish yourself on the web I chose this path. I will write many of these and not worry too much about grammar or spelling (I will try to come back later and fix it) but focus on content. I apologize in advance for my ADD as often topics may flip. I hope one day to turn this into a book and or a podcast, but for now it will remain a blog. AI is not used in this writing other than using the web to find information. Images without notes are created using an AI tool that allows me to reuse them.
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