My father, who passed away nearly 16 years ago, would have been 61 today.

I owe him a whole lot. Dad was a forklift operator at a food warehouse. He worked overtime many nights in unpleasant conditions in order to provide for the family and put me through Harvard, which he was already promising me he would do when I was in second grade.

It’s more than that, though. For one thing, it was my father who first pointed me in a free-market direction, which is why I dedicated my introduction to Austrian economics to him. For another, I inherited his thirst to learn things. Dad didn’t finish high school, though he did earn his GED when he was in his 40s. This made him self-conscious, which partly accounts for why he was constantly reading, about anything and everything. I once found him reading Voltaire’s Candide, and playfully told him enough was enough. No one wanted to read that, I said.

Also, he was funny. Very few people can actually make me laugh out loud. He was one of them. Once, when my mother discovered at Denny’s that the bottom of her English muffin was green, my father called over the waitress and said, “I’m not going to pay a lot for this muffin.”

If you don’t get that, you will after these 11 seconds. This was a popular commercial in the 1980s.

When he died I hadn’t yet written a book, or even done all that much public speaking. It saddens me that I have not been able to share those parts of my life with Dad. Sadder still is that he never got to meet my wife, or the four little kids he would have loved.

But I consider myself fortunate to have known him at all, and I remember those years with great fondness.

Requiescat in pace, et lux perpetua luceat ei.