DAD AT THE BALLGAME Published January 13, 1997 Other Columns by Ken Kurson Tripod Interview with the author	What brand of peanut butter do you buy? Marketing experts will confirm that it's probably whatever brand your parents use. In fact, the more "personal" the item, the more likely you are to inherit the brand preference from your parents. Shaving cream and what I red-facedly call "feminine products" are even more likely to match the brands used by your p's. When it comes to attitudes about spending, nothing is more personal than money itself. How a young person -- and when I say young person, I include my rapidly balding, spare-tire-wearing self -- thinks about money is more heritable than eye color or a bad personality. Which brings me to my dad. My dad wasn't a cheap man. But he was in the habit of weighing all decisions, particularly financial ones, with the gravity one usually reserves for life or death issues. Like a lot of people his age, he had many habits that seemed annoying to people whose idea of a depression is Elizabeth Wurtzel. Turn off the lights, eat the heels of a loaf of bread, finish the grody milk when your cereal's gone. And like a lot of Jews, his relationship with money was made more complicated by the freight that goes with that religion's supposed facility for producing dollars. There's a joke -- actually there're a million jokes, but this is the one I'm going to tell -- about how a guy goes into a store for a bottle of pickles. "How much?" he asks the shopkeeper. "Ten cents for the first bottle, five for the second," comes the reply. "I'll take the second one," says the customer. My dad loved that joke, loved any joke where illogic was evidenced in business. One time we were in a store in Toronto, buying batteries for a Lego motor he'd bought me as a present for keeping quiet during a business meeting. The batteries were kept in a big bucket. Atop the bucket was a hand-written sign: "$1 each or 9 for $10." The old man considered a penalty for buying in volume among the funniest things he'd ever encountered.
We knew that the concept of splurge wasn't part of his instinctual character.	People tend to appreciate a gift from a cheap person more than one from someone who's lavish with presents. It's simple economics -- gifts from a tightwad are in short supply, which increases their value. The same principle applies when someone who usually prepares a cost/benefit analysis before the departure of every dime suddenly permits a mad exodus from his wallet. My dad was a serious guy. He felt things deeply and walked around with a partial but permanent sadness about the horrible stuff that happens in the world. In general, he was suspicious of fun. "What's the point?" he'd ask when you told him you'd gone parachuting or wanted a motorcycle. And he wasn't criticizing, he just truly didn't get it. So those occasions when he went wild, like when a ping pong table suddenly showed up in the basement, were made more special to his kids, who knew that the concept of splurge wasn't part of his instinctual character. My dad did have one financial Achilles' heel: baseball. He'd take us to games and all of a sudden he was Mr. Lucky -- pennants, Cracker Jacks, hot dogs, the works. Years later, I worked as a security guard at Wrigley Field. Often I'd see families come to the game loaded down like burros with warm pop and sandwiches that would be soggy by the first inning. I'd curse the Cubs and baseball's expensive ways for not allowing those families the couple-times-a-year grace that is a ballpark spending spree. Today, I know that there was method to his ways. He hated the spoiled kids he saw around us and was determined to strike a balance between providing us whatever he could afford and leaving us with the attitude that we had it coming. On my brother's 16th birthday, my dad pulled a set of headphones out of his trunk. My brother was truly appreciative, his tough punk eyes lighting up beneath his Richard Roundtree afro. So that's what makes it good when, seconds later, the old man pulls out a whole stereo to go with the phones.
He didn't know anything about the shallowness of a high school that was the model for "The Breakfast Club."	And now I'll tell you about one of the worst things I ever did. After my parents divorced, I lived alone with my dad. We were poor. I didn't know anything about what work was. What it means to face a mortgage and a recession and a house with no furniture as your heart hurts in your chest and your skin feels like a coffin. And he, having grown up at a time when guys could both play football and sing in the glee club, didn't know anything about the pestilent shallowness of a high school that was literally the model for John Hughes' "Breakfast Club." It was September and my punk ass needed some new clothes. We headed to Marshall's -- a bad omen for someone who ridiculously fancied himself a clotheshorse. I put things in the cart with no regard to price or quantity. We got to the counter and the mental calculator that ran in his brain at all times decided that he wasn't going to have enough room on his credit card to cover it. "Kenny, you're going to have to put some of these things back," he said. I rolled my eyes, embarrassed and irritated. Then, on the way out to the car, laden with bags of stuff that made the cut, I said something. I'm doing okay now. I have lots of stuff and a big house and a couple of cars. But I'd give anything I own to take back what I said as we walked to my dad's enormous Chrysler, its back seat overflowing with old newspapers and limerick books. "Man, are you cheap." My dad died last year. My brother and sister and I made a simple ceremony and bought a simple headstone. He knows how I felt about him, how I grew to admire and embrace his old-fashioned attitudes and old-world ideas, even copying some of them. But it's cold in Chicago and the ground there gets hard as cement. I'm far away from him and he's far away from me. And I wonder if the simple pine box I picked out is keeping my sweet dad warm. Ken Kurson, 29, is an editor at Esquire magazine, a regular commentator on CNNfn, and was formerly an editor at Worth magazine, where he wrote the popular "Advocate" column. Kurson is also the author of The Green Guide to Personal Finance : Money Matters in Your Twenties and Thirties, published by Main Street Books. His money zine, "GREEN: PERSONAL FINANCE FOR THE UNASHAMED," is published quarterly and is available for $3 an issue or $10 for a year's subscription. For more information or to subscribe, write GREEN at 245 8th Avenue, Suite 286, New York, NY, 10011. © 1997 Ken Kurson, All Rights Reserved