I've written before about how my dad taught me to be an adult. He also taught me to be a dad — and was a better one than me, I realize, now that I write it all down.
So here are five lessons in fatherhood from the late, great F. Lance Hoopes.
First: Teach kids to love their neighbors — by example.
Growing up, if I needed to find my dad, first I would check his shop. He was always out there fixing musical instruments when he wasn’t at his night job, playing in bands, or his day job at the high school — as a band director, then an administrator.
If he wasn’t in the shop, I could often find him by looking on top of other people’s houses. In Tucson, Arizona, we used evaporative coolers and my dad was really good at fixing them. Everyone in the neighborhood would call him when their air conditioning broke.
My dad never charged. He helped anyone, his whole life long. When we moved him into an assisted living center near my sister in Connecticut, we weren’t surprised to learn that the residents elected him their representative.
Second: Show off your kids.
My dad was immensely proud of his children, our whole lives. Any chance he got, he would put my brother’s piano playing on display, from our living room to the nursing home. He bragged about his daughter’s high school debate success in Tucson and then her marketing career success in Manhattan. He read stories I wrote as a child aloud to guests.
It reminds me of Mother Teresa’s dad. He was a community leader who had meetings at his house that always began with his daughters singing a song. The confidence he gave Mother Teresa changed the world.
The confidence my dad gave us changed our lives. I have in front of me the “Life of F. Lance Hoopes,” which the fourth-grade me wrote about my father’s adventures in a log cabin that was once his home. The assignment was for one paragraph. I wrote four pages, bound with construction paper and adorned with photos of my dad. I’ve been writing ever since.
Third: Teach your kids to be bold (but not cocky).
Dad used to take me with him to the Chicago Music Store in downtown Tucson. He was lifelong friends with the guys there ever since he talked them into hiring him as a repairman when he was a teen. Their repair shop had a bunch of clarinets whose keys needed re-padding before they could work on my dad’s, so he offered to help.
“You can re-pad clarinets?” the guy asked.
“Sure,” said my dad, who had never done any such thing in his life.
So they hired him, and by watching the lead repairman, and asking questions, he learned how.
I finally told him in his last weeks how that story changed the way I looked for jobs (boldly) and how I worked (carefully) ever since.
Fourth: Cry for beauty.
I remember finding my dad crying in his room one day when I was 8. I rushed to my mom to ask what was wrong. “Paul Desmond died,” she said.
That was my dad’s favorite saxophone player (yours, probably, too). My dad said Desmond played like Ella Fitzgerald sang: clean, unaffected, pure and light.
Later, when my dad wrote a book about his experiences as a high school band director, he mentioned times “I had to catch my breath when the kids played a passage so beautifully it brought tears to my eyes.”
Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar said, “Whoever sneers at [beauty’s] name can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love,” and that beauty “forms a halo, an untouchable crown around the double constellation of the True and the Good.”
I like to think that my dad’s love for beauty was a lesson in loving God.
Fifth: Love your wife.
When my mother suffered from A.L.S. and lived the last years of her life with one muscle group after another shutting down, my dad knew exactly what his job was: her. He helped her dress, helped her eat, helped her walk, then pushed her in her wheelchair.
For the last six months of her life, he slept in a chair next to her, and woke up every 8 minutes to vacuum out her saliva. He told my brother, Patrick, about it several weeks after she died.
“I wish I was still doing that,” he said, in tears.
“Why?” Patrick asked.
“Because I love her.”
When my own wife suffered a major stroke, I knew what I needed to do: whatever she needed. My father taught me that.
My dad died on October 6, 2025, at 4:16 in the morning in Connecticut.
In California, my brother Patrick woke up at exactly that moment and prayed a Chaplet of Divine Mercy for him.
F. Lance Hoopes was not a man of faith, at all, but he was a baptized Catholic and consented to receive last rites from a priest, “Because it will make you happy,” he said.
It did.
The day he died, the readings at Mass were about Jonah, who fled God but couldn’t get away, and the Good Samaritan, who didn’t have the right religious beliefs, but loved greatly. Just like Dad.
He taught me goodness, beauty, and love. I hope he finds its purest form in heaven.
