Jenice Armstrong: Here's to a great Dad

MY COLUMN hasn't been in the paper for a while because my dad,

McKinley J.H. Armstrong

, died Feb. 11. Don't feel sorry for me, though, because I really lucked out big time in the dad department.

Not only was my dad a wonderful father to my siblings and me, but he was a mentor to countless other young people during the 40-plus years he taught school and coached various teams. In D.C. basketball circles, he was a legend. Nearly 500 people, including many former students, showed up at his funeral Saturday. They came with stories about how he'd influenced their lives, helping them forge careers in basketball, business, the military or education. A handful of his former players made it into the NBA and NFL; others got athletic scholarships to good colleges.

When critics make harsh generalizations about the state of black fatherhood, it pains me to think of my dad and all the other great fathers out there getting lumped in with the deadbeat, absentee ones.

"Too many fathers are MIA, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes," President Obama pointed out on the campaign trail in 2008. "They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it."

He's correct, of course. Obama's own father, like so many others, abandoned his mother when Obama was still a baby. But I'd like to remind folks that many men live up to their responsibilities every day of their lives. My dad was one of them.

One of his students, who had my dad as a homeroom teacher from seventh grade until he graduated from high school in 1961, told me dad taught him to balance a checkbook. Others I've met in the last few weeks told stories about how my dad encouraged them to be disciplined and focused. For many, my father was the only positive male role model in their lives.

In too many cases, he was the only thing that stood between them and the streets. He showed them there was another way to live.

To me, though, he was just dad, the maker of pancakes better than any you could get at IHOP or the King of Embarrassment, who always seemed to be frying huge batches of stinky fish when my high school boyfriend stopped by.

My dad had plenty of quirks. He kept stacks of notebooks filled with quotations and sayings written in his large, distinctive handwriting, and he'd spout them at opportune times.

When a Washington Post obituary called him "quotable to a fault" because of all the witty remarks he'd made to sports columnists over the years, I remembered those notebooks.

Once, when an interviewer asked him who were the star players on his team, he quipped, "Stars only come out at night." Dad never met a stranger that he didn't ask, in his booming voice, "Where are you from?"

He had a master's degree in education. Yet, he showed by example how a real man takes a second job waiting tables, working construction or driving a taxicab if that's what it takes to bring home extra cash. He worked up until the day his legs couldn't carry him any further.

At the time of his death, he'd been married to my mother for nearly 53 years. And he wanted more time with the woman he met while taking postgrad courses at North Carolina Central University. But it wasn't in the plan. Fourteen years after being diagnosed, the prostate cancer he'd fought so courageously eventually ran its course.

Although he always seemed larger than life, death came knocking for him after all. He breathed his last the way he'd lived his 81 years, surrounded in love and embraced by the family he'd sustained for so long, giving in death his former students a final lesson about how a real man makes his exit.

Send e-mail to heyjen@phillynews.com. My blog: http://go.philly.com/heyjen.