I'm kinda fond of Hooters. As chain restaurants go, it is a fine establishment with a specific culinary point of view. Food-wise it never tries to be anything it isn’t. The food is deeply fried and tastes like shame, but the bathrooms are always very clean. The domestic beer is served in a frosty cold mug.

The service is spectacular, and I'm not making a dumb joke about boobs here. I've had waitresses scare me up cigarettes after casually mentioning that I'd love a smoke, I've had waitresses offer to watch my computer while I go have a cigarette or make a run to one of the pristine bathrooms, I've even gotten the rare corporate beer buy-back. But mostly, the service is attentive and friendly without being overbearing and obnoxious, which is sort of an amazing feat considering the dress code.

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I finally got a glimpse of who he was as a person, though that person had departed an hour ago. Despite walls plastered with awards, numerous bestsellers, bushels of adoring fan mail and the company of great men, his face was etched with disappointment.

As a boy, my vision of my father was hindered by physical fear. All I saw was a giant, one who would periodically strike me to unleash his rage.

Just as I became a man, my father, William Manchester, rocketed to international fame after the publication of his bestseller "The Death of a President." Now he towered over me in the world. All I saw was how much he had achieved and how little I had in comparison.

Just as my father reached the age I am now, 60, the mask of the famous author slipped and I saw a very different face, that of his shadow.

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Every morning at six, we'd gas up at a 7-Eleven and treat ourselves to a Diet Dr. Pepper to get our juices flowing.

"What's our saying?" Dad would yell as he turned the key in our old brown Dodge pickup.

"The early bird gets the worm!" we would shout in unison.

It was the early 1980s and the oil boom was in full-swing. Our sales strategy consisted of driving the back roads of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas and Iowa looking for prospects. We kept our eyes peeled for the lone gas station attendant or a do-it-yourself mechanic working on his car. But what interested us most were the oil rig sites where, at any given time, a group of two or three migrant workers could be found taking a smoke break or digging into the sandwiches they'd brought from home.

"These guys have so much money in their pockets they are just waiting for an opportunity to spend it," Dad would say as we pulled up to a job site. "Well, they are about to get their chance."

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Daddy was a "professional gambler," if betting daily on greyhounds and thoroughbreds could be considered a profession rather than an addiction. His mornings were spent at the desk in my brother's room, hunched over the Racing Form in his robe. And most of his days and nights would be at Hialeah or Gulfstream or the Miami Beach Kennel Club, doing mysterious things that seemed to pass for his life's work.

The only legitimate thing Daddy ever did to earn money was invest in a plot of land on nearby Di Lido Island, so when someone asked us what Daddy did for a living we were able to say he was in "real estate." In fact, I was so prepped by Mom to say those two words that when the teacher asked my name in kindergarten, I proudly blurted "Real Estate."

I noticed a curious thing about gamblers from an early age: Daddy didn't get excited when he won at the track. No, the adrenaline would be flowing, the monologue would be deafening and he'd come roaring into the house, pacing up and down and yelling -- when he'd almost won. And he'd be cursing when he lost.

So when he was quiet, I figured he'd won some money. He wasn't often quiet.

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Somewhere along the line I think I forgot that raising kids was a marathon and not a dash. I foolishly believed that conscientious parenting covered zero to five years, and with that good base, the kids were set for life. They're in school now, my job is done, I tried to make myself believe.

The reality is that, as I write this, Ava will soon graduate from middle school, and I don't know if I've ever felt less prepared.

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That might be the most widely quoted passage from Harper Lee's novel "To Kill a Mockingbird." The book was made into a terrific 1962 film starring Gregory Peck as Finch, a widowed lawyer who raised Scout and her Jem while fighting a noble but doomed struggle to defend a poor black man wrongly accused of rape. Peck's Oscar-winning performance as Finch became the gold standard for representations of fatherhood on film, and whenever you run into a list like this one, he's all but guaranteed to top it. So let's take him out of the equation.

What are we left with? The following list of 10 great pop culture dads -- very different men who are faced with their own unique, difficult challenges and rise to meet them.

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In his new book, "The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family," Smith argues that fatherhood in America is changing as it comes to encompass taking care of kids, as well as providing for them. And as the recession throws so many men out of work, he contends that fluid family arrangements like his own are becoming more common.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are just 159,000 stay-at-home dads in the country, but Smith suggests that those numbers undercount many fathers, including him, who have served as their children's primary caregivers by day and continued working part-time at night or in the early morning.

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It's like Robert Louis Stevenson said: "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor." That's a man talking.

Father's Day is all about retail sales and zero about me and I am having none of it. I've got enough cheap cologne to open a funeral parlor and I don't need neckties -- I just carry one for a tourniquet in case of snakebite -- and I don't want a card that says "It's Father's Day and I'm here to say: when it comes to the Long Haul, I'm awfully glad that you're my Dad cause you're the BEST of all!!!" because you and I know it ain't me, babe, so why say it?

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I didn't always feel this way. Father's Day and I actually got off to a good start. Even though my parents divorced when I was 4, they always accommodated each other so that my brother and I could spend Father's Day with our dad, whether the holiday fell on his designated weekend or not. Back then, when I was just a little pisher, Father's Day was a gas. I'd make my dad a card at school -- usually having something to do with baseball -- and then go with my mom to the mall to buy him a book or a CD. I'd always end up getting something, too. Then I'd go to my dad's house, where'd he'd always planned something special: a baseball game, a fishing trip, a drive to a wildlife reserve to watch birds and catch frogs. For sheer good times, Father's Day was just a notch or two below my own birthday.

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Alas, the aura of nobility that once surrounded Father's Day has dulled a bit over the years. A holiday that used to honor earnest widowers has become a day when even K-Fed gets a special treat at Denny's. And you can forget about giving thanks in hushed pews. These days, you're more likely to be battling the mobs in the power drill section of Sears to see who can buy Dad the biggest surrogate penis.

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Some people consider cicadas pests but I found them comforting. I suffer from tinnitus, the ringing in the ears, and the cicadas chitter in the same frequency range as my inner ear and mask the ringing very nicely. I stood in the park where they were whirring around and I felt relief. Medicine has no remedy for tinnitus. I've tried acupuncture and that doesn't work either. My only alternative, I guess, is to wander the planet in search of cicadas.

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I hand my daughter, Emma, her toothbrush and spy a damp, green bath towel heaped on the floor, no doubt the property of her brother, Ben. It's frivolous, an errant towel, and should be no more than a nuisance on this glorious Wisconsin day. But it's the same green towel that was heaped on the floor yesterday, and the day before. Today it sets me off.

I snatch up the towel and stalk into the living room with the evidence.

"Ben. What is this?"

He glances up absently from the sports page.

"Ah, let me see. A towel?"

A smartass reply from a smartass 14-year-old. And normally I'd let it slide or come back with my own smartass reply. But he levels his remark at me with a look of such disdain -- a glower that I see more and more as he grows older -- that I lose it.

"Goddamn it, Ben." My circle of vision collapses. I can see no light, no detail. Only the smug scowl on Ben's face.

And it becomes my target.

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Susana's dad is an inmate at San Quentin State Prison, serving 21 years to life under California's rigid "three strikes" sentencing law. Caught four years ago with stolen property -- and not for the first time -- he's been determined by the court to be of no further value outside of prison. Unfortunately, he is of vital importance to Susana (not her real name).

There are more than 1.5 million men incarcerated in the United States today. The majority of them are fathers. It's a role that may not have been central to their lives before they were arrested -- most did not live with their children, nor with the mothers of those children. Certainly their status as fathers is barely recognized by prison administrators or advocacy groups. Of the limited number of programs that aim to sustain family bonds during incarceration, the great majority are aimed at female prisoners.

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Reality bit one afternoon in 1960 when his return from work, signaled by the uneven roar of a powder-blue MG with a hole in the muffler, coincided with my making a sudden stop on my tricycle, which caused my mouse, Linda, to fall off the handlebars and be squished, by me, by accident.

My father was still behind the wheel in his white lab coat when I presented him with the smashed mouse in cupped hands and calmly, under the circumstances, asked him to fix her. Knowing that our (first) honeymoon was over, my father postponed the trauma by taking the mouse into the house and holding it under running water while he figured out how to tell me that he wasn't who I thought he was. (I figured it out for myself when I saw Linda's small intestine swirl down the drain.)

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Before "La Cage aux Folles," Veber wrote "The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe" and "L'emmerdeur"; they were remade in America as "The Man With One Red Shoe" and "Buddy, Buddy" (one of the great Billy Wilder's worst movies). In the years since "La Cage aux Folles," Veber directed as well as wrote a succession of French hits ("Le Jouet," "La Chhvre," "Les Comphres" and "Les Fugitifs") that became American bombs ("The Toy," "Pure Luck," "Father's Day" and "Three Fugitives"). To add self-inflicted injury to insult, he directed the remake of "Three Fugitives" himself.

No matter how the remake of "The Dinner Game" turns out (Dreamworks has it in development, and Veber may direct), the original, now in theaters, should win back the goodwill of comedy-watchers everywhere. It's a sour, sweet, then sour again spree. The two leads are a smug, good-looking publisher and an accountant as squat and badly-used as a neighborhood dog's favorite hydrant.

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On a Tuesday in early February, I received a fax from my half-brother Jan asking me to deal with my father, his stepfather. Ralph survived his fifth heart attack last month, but had to move into a nursing home. Jan wrote that Ralph's health is deteriorating quickly and that he's easily confused, extremely restless and deeply paranoid. The Robison Jewish Health Center is one of Portland's finest and most expensive facilities; he is there because an on-the-ball hospital social worker discerned he was a Jew in trouble, living in a transient hotel and squandering his social security checks on Night Train and library fines. She managed to fast-track free admission and ongoing care for him at Robison. Jan thought it urgent that I visit because he was refusing to sign over power of attorney and if someone didn't assume legal guardianship soon, we'd have to go to court to have him declared incompetent. The doctors at the center said they would have no difficulty testifying that he is no longer capable of taking care of himself. I took the first flight out on Thursday.

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One story did come to occupy center stage: the victims' wrenching testimony and calls for retribution. In the New Yorker and on ABC, former prosecutor Jeffrey Toobin extolled the role of victims' rights advocates in the case; in the New York Times, Professor Lawrence Tribe of Harvard Law School attacked Judge Matsch for suggesting that some of the emotion might be "inflammatory." "Closure" for Oklahoma City's victims became the watchword of television news anchors.

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