My three dads

Kevin Sweeney never really knew his father, who died young. In the memoir "Father Figures," he describes picking a trio of replacements to teach him how to be a man.

By King Kaufman

May 27, 2003 | Kevin Sweeney was 3 years old when his father died of heart failure. Jim Sweeney had held a series of increasingly lackluster jobs, the last of which was driving a street sweeper in San Bruno, Calif., the San Francisco suburb where the Sweeneys lived. When he died he left a 34-year-old wife, six kids, no money and a gaping hole in the family's life.

Jim's youngest boy, his fifth kid, grew up to work in politics. Kevin, 44, was Gary Hart's press secretary during his presidential run, worked for Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in the Clinton administration and is now a consultant on environmental and human rights issues.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, Sweeney found himself thinking of the thousands of kids left parentless by the attacks. Perhaps he could help them a little by telling his story? Despite the sad event that defined his childhood, Sweeney says, "I was a pretty happy kid." How had he pulled that off? In an essay for Salon in November 2001, he explained that five years after his father died he had chosen three new "fathers" of his own:

"I picked out three men from our working-class community and decided that they would teach me how to be a father. None of them would know about their surrogacy, but I would watch them closely."

That essay became the book "Father Figures: Three Wise Men Who Changed a Life," which fleshes out the story of how Sweeney chose Jim Gaffney, Chick Kelly and Sherm Heaney to guide him. All three were, like Jim Sweeney, Irish Catholic and the head of a large brood. Gaffney was handsome and smooth, "DiMaggio with kids running around." Kelly was a butcher, a former all-city football player who, though a quiet man, "filled a room." Heaney, who played basketball at the University of San Francisco just before Bill Russell and K.C. Jones won championships there, was the friendliest guy anybody knew, and he taught Sweeney a worldview through sports: "If you could play good defense, well, there would always be a spot for you," Sweeney writes. "The greater lesson, though, was in knowing how a game was played, in how something was done well."

Sweeney writes that his Irish-Catholic family was typical of its time and culture: They didn't bring up sad things, didn't talk about their feelings. At Jim Sweeney's 1962 funeral, a priest told Kevin's mother, Marian Sweeney, "I want you to have that smile on your face that you always have." He writes that it wasn't until 17 years later that the Sweeneys began to talk about their sadness. In many ways, the issues were still unexplored until Sweeney wrote "Father Figures" and showed the manuscript to his mother and siblings.

The book also forced the family to face some hard facts about Jim Sweeney. Though well-liked, he was an alcoholic, a man whose adult life in many ways followed a steady downward course. Sweeney hadn't learned these things as a kid, when his dad was always described in shorthand as "a great guy" and a wonderful dancer.

Some disclosure is in order: Sweeney is a frequent contributor to Salon, where his wife, Jennifer, is an editor. (They live in Piedmont, Calif., with her daughter, Hannah, 16, and their daughter, Julia, 7.) He's also a good enough friend of mine that I declined to review the book, although after our conversation he wrote to let me off the ethical hook: "You need not look out for a friend as you edit this piece."

A pair of work-at-home dads, we spoke by phone from our respective home offices.

I know you were approached by a publisher after your Salon piece, but why did you write this book?

It's not a book I ever imagined writing, but I wrote the piece for Salon after Sept. 11, and I had a specific reason then. I'd seen all those obituaries in the New York Times, and seen that there were now thousands of kids who were going to be raised without either a father or a mother. It was overwhelmingly sad, and then I realized, well, that's me, I know something about that, I lived through that.

And then I went to another level and realized: But I didn't have a really sad childhood. I had a really sad event, but not a sad childhood. So I wrote that piece looking to reach, specifically, men in the communities where people had been victimized by the bombing. After that I got a lot of feedback, from all different kinds of people, not just men who saw themselves as father figures. Some of it was from single women raising kids on their own, or from people who had experienced the death of a parent at different ages and wanted to tell me about what they'd been through, or who wanted to mine my experiences for something that would help them. So it became kind of a much more broad topic, something perhaps more universal.

Was there any suggestion to write it from a self-help angle? "How to Be a Dad," or "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Fathers."

I didn't want to write anything that I thought would be a self-help guide because I think there's a lot of hubris in that attitude. I'm not stupid enough to try to write a how-to guide for dads. I don't want to demean anybody who has, but I don't have enough confidence to say, "This is how you do it."

Let's talk about your father figures, these three men. You're a dad. In the book you mention in a generic way that there are times when you say to yourself, "What would Chick do here?" But can you recall a specific time when you called on something that you learned from one of them?

Two weeks ago my [16-year-old] daughter and her friend did something that was against house rules, and I just acknowledged it. And then after about 20 minutes, I realized, well actually, this friend of Hannah's that was over, she doesn't have a father. She's actually kind of like part of our family. Her name is Ashley. And I realized I shouldn't leave it unsaid, I should go up and explain specifically why I was upset, and I should tell them that I don't want them to do it again because it has to do with their safety, and that I care about both of them. Not just Hannah. I care about both of them.

I did think specifically of Chick Kelly before I talked to them. It's not as if I'm unconsciously saying very often "What would Chick do?" or "What would Sherm do right now?" But in that case, I was acknowledging Ashley's importance in my life.

It's in those instances when I think of Chick Kelly, because I saw him as this emotional rock, I mean this really steady presence, who when something needed to be said, he could establish the right cadence and presence and simply say it. I think of that sometimes when I want to get collected before I talk to Hannah about challenging issues.

Next Page: Like a lot of Irish Catholic families we bottled things up

• View blog reactions