I’ve struggled over the last few days, trying to come up with a reason for a column.

I scanned a few of my favorite news sites and except for the school funding issue in Harrisburg, there’s not a lot going on lately.

Still, there’s my need to write. Not because I have to do it, but because I like to do it.

Then, it hit me.

Sunday is Father’s Day. Surely, I thought, as a practitioner of that inexact science, I could come up with something as an homage to all those dear old dads.

Instead, it got me thinking about my own Dad. It’s amazing that though he’s been gone a long time, he’s still with me in so many ways.

He was born in the first quarter of the last century, one of 10 children of Eastern European immigrants who found their way across the Atlantic and somehow wound up in the Middle Coal Fields of northeast Pennsylvania.

Growing up in the 1920s and 1930s wasn’t easy for Dad. His father, like many others of the day, worked in the coal mines. So Dad, to help out in his early teens, got a job at a scrapyard not far from home. For 50 cents a week.

He learned a lot of things there.

He could strip lost coins and tools from the seats of cars as fast as any of the other kids he worked with.

Dad used those tools to learn about how cars worked, something that he never realized would pay off later in life.

And he used those coins to buy cigarettes - underage, of course - from the vending machine at the gas station next door.

I remember him telling me smokes were 18 cents a pack, and you used two dimes to buy them. The machines didn’t give change, he explained, so the guy filling them would cut a slit in the cellophane of a pack of Lucky Strikes and slip in two pennies.

Never finishing high school and forbidden by his own father to work in the mines, Dad got a job in the local garment industry, which was booming as Adolf Hitler started his march across Europe.

With three other brothers already serving their Uncle Sam, Dad stayed behind until one of the brothers got his ticket home from Nazi Germany.

In 1944, with the war winding down, Dad found himself running a motor pool in Frankfurt, Germany. His junkyard days paid off, earning him a field promotion for filling a captain’s request.

Back at home, Dad was with his own father in the summer of 1947 when he passed away - the victim of years of coal dust. His mother passed two years later.

Not too long after, Dad met his future wife, telling her mother he was going to marry her daughter someday soon. His prophecy fulfilled, he and mom set off as many others of their time, starting and raising a family.

Growing up, I spent most of my time with Dad. We did everything together. My earliest memories come from when I was 5 or 6 years old, hanging with Dad at his favorite corner gas station on Sundays, when blue laws were supposed to keep it closed.

Dad made some extra money for the family, changing a tire or a muffler or doing a quick brake job for customers. I loved exploring the garage, once getting kicked out of the back room that was decorated with “girlie” posters and filled with the thick haze from some stogie-smoking guys in an impromptu card game. I learned to appreciate language there, too. Some Italian. Some Polish. Some Slovak. None good.

I could go on and on.

Looking back, I learned more from Dad than I realized, often just by watching. Those lessons paid off for me as I grew older and took on life as a father and husband. From cars to carpentry and painting to plumbing, the examples of a child of the Great Depression live and breathe in these aging bones.

I was with Dad when he passed about 15 years ago. At 86, he’d lived a full life and I guess he decided it was time to be with his bride, who’d passed years before their golden years could begin together.

I still talk with him from time to time, especially when I’m stuck.

Last week, he helped me repair a friend’s garden sprayer using stuff I had laying around my garage.

On Wednesday, sitting at the keyboard and struggling for a column topic, I asked him what I should write about.

Problem solved. Thanks, Dad!

And Happy Father’s Day!

ED SOCHA | tneditor@tnonline.com