Father's Day & Ted Engel: The Toughest Man I've Ever Met | Engel Angle

I'm really tired. Where are we on flying cars? Tell you I fought tougher men, but I really can't remember when. He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile. Mac Engel, Fort Worth Star Telegram, Ingle, Angle podcast, Sunset Lounge, Stolen Water Media. Happy June. Happy summer to you. I hope you all have a wonderful summer, a great summer, and enjoy wherever it is that you are and with whomever you are with. Because we are in that window of time, that very rare window of time on the calendar where there are no notable holidays to go blow money on. And I am well aware of the big one in June. I'm talking Father's Day. Father's Day. The day for dads. The one day in March designated for dad. Here is the problem with our economy, The United States economy. We have the number one economy in the world. And you want to know why credit? It's not fathers. Absolutely. It is not dads. The number one reason why The United States economy is a thriving machine. Please disregard the debt. Is a thriving machine is women. If it were up to men, the only stores that would be killing it, sporting goods stores, probably Home Depot and Ace Hardware. Lowe's is in that conversation. Without that, the shopping that would be done. Maybe one grocery store. And you could probably combine that with a pharmacy. That's it. That's really about it. That's all we need. If we did not have women running around this country buying all the crap that we don't need, America would be dead. Thank you women. Thank you mothers. Thank you girlfriends. Thank you sisters. Nieces, thank you moms, thank you all for keeping this thing humming along at a breakneck speed. Because if it weren t for you, our economy would be at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean right now, sinking fast. Because Father's Day is coming up and this is the one day where men get to stand up and say, quit spending money on bullshit. We don't need it. Take it back. Where's the receipt? I don't want it. Get rid of it. Throw it out. Quit buying money. I don't need it. I don't want it. Please stop. That attitude collectively was applied to every other day on the calendar. We would be so screwed. So screwed. Father's Day is coming up and you want you want to know what I want? It's the same thing that I would say 95% of dads in this country want, which is quit spending money. Stop. And yet I know as a good American, you better get out there and buy because if we're not buying, we're dead. Most important thing that we do as Americans is consume. I'm not very good at it. So, on this wonderful holiday, Father's Day, I want to give a shout out to the man who sort of passed down this philosophy and someone who is to me the toughest person I have ever met. Now, I go on about my father, I want to make sure I give equal time to my mother. I didn't do one of these for mother's day. Probably should have, sorry. But Ann Prince, shout out to you. Love you. You're the best. Gave up a whole lot to raise six mouthy kids. My mom is the best. The best of the best. Gold medal, gold jacket, first ballot hall of fame. Mom can be a pain in the ass, but passively. So I do want to certainly give a shout out to my mom before I talk to you about the toughest guy I've ever met. I'm talking about my dad, Mr. Ted Ingle. You've probably never met Ted Ingle. But when we talk about the greatest generation of Americans, that's the cloth that he was cut from. Even if he was too young to serve in world war two. My dad was born in New York City in 1932. Think about that. 1932. He is currently 93 years old and he is showing me that if you want to live well into your advanced senior years, you gotta really want it. You gotta really deal with some shit if you wanna make it to 93. You really gotta fight life. You really gotta fight your body. You've really gotta put up with some stuff to get to 93 and enjoy a day. No matter what that enjoyment might look like, it might be as simple as just going out to dinner. I watch what that guy has done and continues to do. It puts a completely different perspective of a, what I bitch about or b, what I've done in my own life, which I'm sure in his own way, he takes some perverse joy in. He would never say it. Anyways, when we talk about toughness, when we talk about persistence, when we talk about getting after it, when we talk about putting up with some crap, when we talk about taking care of what needs to be taken care of, my dad is about as good as there is. Dad was born in 1932 in New York City to a man who at the time and for most of his life wasn't the best father figure. Now his father, also named Theodore, like I am, that's my first name. That's my real first name. I never met him, but by all accounts, he wasn't much of a guy. Probably bowed a little bit of alcoholism, maybe some mental defects. Back then they really didn't have a diagnosis for that sort of thing. But my grandfather would go on to father seven more children with my grandmother. And they eventually left Manhattan for Staten Island, New York. And that is where my father grew up. My dad grew up on Staten Island, right in the middle of the depression. That very much formed the way he viewed life and specifically the power and importance, good or bad, right or wrong of a dollar bill. And that had a tremendous influence on me. Right or wrong, good or bad, it did. So my dad and his siblings grew up in a very small house on Staten Island. My dad, he was about 10, 12, 13 years old, started to get out of the house. He started working. He started making money. He started doing anything to be busy and to get out of the house. And one little anecdote that he shared with me once that I never forgot is, you know, obviously he was living in New York City at a very eventful time in the evolution of America, specifically the second world war, as well as any number of other events. His dad took him to the backyard to watch one day the Hindenburg fly over its house. Think about that for a second. That's a significant American global event. And my dad at the back, in the back of his house, watches the Hindenburg fly over. And then he finds out later that the Hindenburg blew up in New Jersey. He didn't see that. So at the time, my dad was very much a public school kid and he had to go to high school. And in New York City, one detail about New York City, maybe you don't know, New York City has three premier high schools, but you have to test into them to be admitted. They're they're glorified private schools, but they're public, publicly funded. And again, you have to take a test to get into it. Now, as I grew up and I heard stories about my dad, he did it. He didn't get in the way of, of what I thought he was. And that is this unbelievable student. This man who is just Ivy league educated, self made, walked through the middle of a snowstorm in the middle of July to get to work where he was paid 2¢ a day, borderline prisoner like details and qualities to his childhood. He didn't necessarily dissuade me from believing those up to and including this test that he passed with flying colors to get into this school. My dad went to a high school called Brooklyn tech. So, like I said, there were, there are three premier high schools in New York City. One is Stuyvesant, which is the public high school located at the bottom of the Island of Manhattan. That's probably number one. And if you remember, you might've heard the name Stuyvesant high school. That's the school that became sort of an epicenter of activity, unfortunately, during the terrorist attacks on nineeleven. The other one is Bronx Science and that's obviously in The Bronx. And then there's Brooklyn tech. So I always thought, man, I'm so amazed. Look how smart my dad is. He got into Brooklyn tech. It's incredible. He must have had the greatest grades in the world. And not only that, to get to Brooklyn tech high school, my dad would proudly tell me what that commute was like. A commute when I was growing, I couldn't even fathom. I grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, where everybody takes a bus or a school bus or drives. The idea of public transportation in most American cities, certainly a place like Indianapolis is foreign and usually a four letter word. But in Manhattan, it's part of everyday life. So my dad would walk to a bus stop, get on a bus, take the bus down to the North end of Island Of Staten Island, get on a ferry, take a ferry boat across the harbor where he would see lady Liberty every day. It would drop him off at the bottom of Manhattan near Battery Park, gets on a subway and takes it all the way to Brooklyn. And then he would have to walk. And the way he described the walk sometimes is that it was very treacherous, borderline the equivalent of walking through the middle of some third world country where you're being attacked constantly. And that was where he did his homework. And he's an amazing student, my dad, to get into this school and I'm thinking, my God, he must have been a four point zero student. He was so good at math when I was a kid. He would do this math, the math that I couldn't even comprehend. And he was still doing it right in front of me. I'm like, I couldn't do this. I couldn't do it then. I couldn't sure as hell couldn't do it now. He was in his forties, late forties and fifties, he was doing my math, helping me. No, he was helping me. He realized I couldn't do it. So then he graduates from high school. This would have been in the late forties. And I'm thinking to myself again, as I'm thinking about all this, well, he must have been one hell of a student. So because he was dead broke and by this time, the oldest of eight children, eight children. This is back when people had big, big families. And here's the kicker. He's not Catholic. Okay. What was going on there? So he graduates from high school. He ain't got any money. So what did he do? He joined the Navy because he wanted to be a part of America's efforts to defeat Korea and the Korean conflict. We didn't call it the Korean War. We called it a conflict. It's very nice because my dad very much was influenced by the propaganda. And I shouldn't even just say propaganda. That's that's cruel. But the influence that of the success of the United States military had when it won World War two. A lot of young men who glamorize that experience. So he joined the Navy, sent him out to California. He becomes a draftsman, and they bounce him out this this place and that. And I grew up the entire time thinking the only reason my dad never did actually go to Korea was because of his eyesight. Now my dad has unfortunately very bad eyesight. He's just very, intensely nearsighted like I am. Thanks, dad. And I always thought, well, gee whiz, that's the only thing preventing my dad from going to war and becoming a purple hearted hero. Congressional Medal of Honor winners. His damn eyesight wasn't very good. I believed that for forty years. Among a host of other half truths about my dad. My dad never went to Korea, served for however many years gets out and he decides, okay, now I'm going to go to college. Oh, it's a Ivy League school. It's basically Harvard. It's Yale. It's Princeton. It's one of the celebrity hallowed institutions of higher learning in this country. My dad went there and not only did he go there, he got multiple degrees from there. This is what I grew up knowing and just idolizing and thinking, Oh my God, he has every right to put me in my place when I'm a terrible high school student. This guy went to Cornell and got three degrees at a time when nobody gets three degrees, at a time when getting a master's of business administration was unheard of. Five people did it. Now five people do it on your street every year because universities are just printing these secondary degrees. Pardon me. These graduate degrees. That's what I grew up thinking about my dad. I'm like, oh my god. That's amazing. And then I went back to New York City when I was in college and I saw the house that he grew up in and I got to meet some of his brothers and I got to spend some more time with his wonderful sisters. And I learned more details about just how fucked up and dysfunctional this house was that he grew up in and basically escaped from on some level. And they all, all of them looked up to him so much because he was so much older than them. And then I meet a sister of his who lived in Manhattan. Oh my god, what a character she was. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this explains so much. And this is remarkable. I'm hearing all these different things about my grandfather, none of which were particularly flattering. And then I'm hearing all these different anecdotes about my grandmother. Both of these people I only met one time when I was four years old. I have no recollection of either one of them, but I hear tight tales of her, just the reverence that the children had for this woman and the shit she put up with from her husband. And I'm like, how did he do this? And what am I complaining about? That was one thing my dad would always complain about. And he was right. He was right. Hello. It's Mike Reiner of Your Dark Companion here. Let me ask you. Are you looking for something to fill the long dead air hours of your day? Well join the Sunset Lounge DFW and your dark companion on patreon.com, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. Replace those sad, slow hours with sports, pop culture, music woven into interesting conversations. So step inside the green door, have a seat at the bar, and get in the groove with those shows and so very much more. So he goes into the training program for the Kroger company, And that is where he meets my mother. Dad was in the training program for Kroger company and they moved him from New York to Charleston, West Virginia. And if you've never been to Charleston, West Virginia, I assure you it is not like New York City. Now by that point, my dad had traveled around quite a bit because of the Navy, and this was his first stop out of college. They put him in Charleston, West Virginia, where he was more or less an assistant manager. And when you are an assistant manager of a store like that, especially like them, what you basically are is a stock boy. And he did it. He meets my mom. At the time she was an undergraduate student at the university of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And there's parts of this story that I've never quite heard all of, but I know this. He would go down to Chapel Hill occasionally and they would visit and then they got married. Then sometime, let's say nine months on the day after that, my oldest brother Frank arrives. Now my mom grew up in Charleston, West Virginia. Two wonderful families, certainly terrific parents, but very much, I would say details to it that were not like New York. My father was a damn Yankee and nothing like the South. And I'm not talking about dirty South, ugly South, the South, but I'm talking about Southern elements to it. So those backgrounds and cultures were quite different. And her family was not necessarily crazy that she married a damn Yankee, a New Yorker, a guy who was a glorified assistant manager stock boy at a local grocery chain. And at that point, they made it clear. Good luck. You're on your own. We wish you the best. Okay. And because they grew up in an era where people had large families, they proceeded to have a large family. Six kids, each of whom suck. I love my family very, very much, but I'm, and I say that tongue in cheek, but we were a challenge. And this was at a time when the man worked, provided, and the woman kept the home very much. And that's what my dad did. And he worked his butt off. He worked his butt off. But there are details to that ascension that I never knew about until about five years ago, up to and including when my dad went to Cornell. I thought he'd get in right out of the Navy because he had amazing grades in his transcript that was to kill for. Apparently not. I found out later because he told me that when he graduated, when he finished the Navy, he had originally applied to Michigan State in Utah. I'm like, Michigan State in Utah? Well, how'd you wind up at Cornell? He's like, because the guy suggested I just give it a shot. He's like, I didn't have the grades for it. And I'm like, what do you mean you didn't have the grades for it? You went to Brooklyn Tech. You're this amazing mathematician, business guy, all this stuff. He's like, no, I was not a good student in high school. He's like, was a very good test taker. And I'm like, oh my God, you've got to be kidding me. I've for thirty five years, I have grown up thinking you were this amazing student who went to one of the most prestigious high schools in New York City and thus The United States, and you were not a very good student, and you just got lucky to get into Cornell. Yes. He basically thinks he got into Cornell because he was a vet. And the stipulation was at the time he applied to Cornell, he had completed an associate's degree at a local community college there in New York City. And Cornell told him, yes, you can come here. However, none of those credits that you just earned at that local college, yeah, they're not gonna count here. So he basically had to start over again at the age of like 22. So he was a freshman at 22 because of his service time in the Navy, as well as the previous year that he had spent studying. I knew none of that stuff as a kid. I couldn't believe any of this. I'm like, what are you talking about? And in a way it impressed me even more because he wasn't really that great of a student. What he was, was an incredibly hard worker and he'd stay after it. And the Navy thing, as well as what he gets into Cornell and then he crushes, he does very, very well. Now by this time he's in West Virginia and he gets an opportunity to go back to Ithaca, New York, where he is going to pursue an MBA and potentially maybe set up life there where he would become a professor at Cornell. Well, it didn't really work out. He didn't really love it that much. But what he realized along with my mother is that when you're in a college town and you're not a college kid, it's a totally different life. They kept cranking out kids. He moves back to Virginia. They have my sister. They may, they now, this time he keeps following promotions. And the one deal about that is you can get promoted, but if you get promoted, you gotta move. That's tough. That put a ton of stress on my mom. But he's got mouths to feed. He's not getting a lot of help. He's gotta run around and chase these opportunities because if he doesn't get those opportunities, things are gonna look a lot different at home. And those people sacrificed to provide a detail that may have been mentioned to me once or twice indirectly, moved to Cincinnati, gets a promotion, moves to Indianapolis, Indiana, gets a promotion, gets promoted, but he's gotta move back to Cincinnati. Great. Now he's five years later. Okay. We want you to move back to Indianapolis, Indiana. By this time, I am already born. I'm about four or five years old, period of three to five, someplace in there. And we move and set up shop in Indianapolis, Indiana, which is where I was raised. And of the six of us, I'm the youngest of six. And of the six of us, there is the biggest age gap between me and a sibling as opposed to the other five. There's five and a half years between myself and my next closest sibling as opposed to the rest that came out like five minutes apart. I'm exaggerating, but I'm pretty close. So as I was growing up, my father was a little bit older. And there was a run of time in there where he and I really didn't get along that well. We didn't fight, but we didn't get along that well because I didn't try very hard in school. I was just a very, very average student and I didn't like it because I wasn't any good at it. Something that I've talked about here. I was a very late bloomer to that stuff and it really justifiably frustrated him. So I really didn't get in a lot of trouble with him because I didn't didn't do anything to get in trouble. But my grades were just so average and I just I didn't I didn't apply myself. But I would sit there and see him and I'm like, well, I'm not the student that my dad is. He's he's amazing. And then there was one thing I'll never forget. He's reading the newspaper when I was in the seventh or eighth grade, and he's reading a column by a nationally syndicated columnist. And the guy is basically writing about his evolution in terms of how he viewed his dad intellectually. Because when you're younger, you know, you think you go through that period of life where you think, as a youth where your parents know everything and they're on this pedestal and they know everything about everything. Then you get older and you're like, well, you don't know anything about anything. Mom, dad, you're an idiot. And then you get a lot older and you're like, gosh, you guys are really, really smart. I really appreciate you knew a lot more about everything. And I heard that as a seventh or eighth grader. And I remember thinking I would never embrace that attitude if for no other reason I know it's wrong. And it's cause it's kind of cliche too. So I never said that. Never said, you don't know anything, dad. I never said to my mom, you don't know anything, mom. I always knew they were smarter than me. If by no other reason, age and experience. So now I'm well into my forties and I keep learning details about my dad. The more details I learn, the more I'm like, holy fuck, you did what? You're doing what? How is this? You're doing all this? And again, I want to be real clear. I love my dad, as you can tell. The man was not perfect. I mean, he had, but if you look at where he came from, and specifically the house that he was raised in, by the father that he was raised by, you gotta sit back and say, God, I don't know how you did it. Some days I still don't know how he did it. Because as he sit, sat there, didn't sit, never sat. But as he climbed, all he did was, was take care of other people. And I'm not talking about just his kids or his wife. I'm talking about sisters. I'm talking about family members who needed some help. And in his mind, because he grew up in that era of the depression, raised by a father who really didn't work very much. And the sad part about my grandfather was at the time, was the youngest man to pass the state bar in New York, but he wasted that talent for whatever reason. And if you look at where my dad came from, for him to do what he did, how he did it, he understood that he had responsibilities and he understood that he was in a position to help people out. He understood what $5,000 meant. He understood what $1,000 meant. And when his mother was dying, she said, you need to take care of your sister. And he did. She was living in Los Angeles by herself and she had some challenges and he took care of her. And any other time where people needed some help, he did it. This is not a man who lived lavishly, and he probably could have. This is not a man who took the money that he earned and showered it upon himself. This is a guy who worked his ass off, did very well, retired at a time when corporate America was going through a significant paradigm shift where the climate and culture that he was raised in prioritized the consumer profit changed from that to massive financial growth and rewarding those people who had been in those jobs. He missed that window by a little, by a very, very narrow margin. Where corporate America started hiring rather than people not who had been raised in that company and trained to do every different part of the job, but MBAs and people who were exceptional in finance. They didn't give a shit about the product. They gave a crap about how can we pay ourselves and an absorbent amount of money, improve our stock price, and high five each other at board meetings. That became the priority. And that's been pervasive throughout since about '95 and certainly is true today. So my dad understood and still does what it means to help somebody out. And his attitude was about certain people that he used to socialize with. Believe me, that guy can afford it, whatever it was. And he was also a guy who unfortunately grew up in a house where verbal confirmation not only was scarce, it didn't exist. In fact, he grew up in a house where if a person had a good day, the temperature and the climate from his dad would have been to put that person in their place. Just not a great thing. I know it's definitely something that I grew up with, a more neutered scaled down version of that. But that's where he grew up in. He didn't have a dad who sat there and explained him to anything. And he really grew up in a culture where men, I don't want to say suffered, but lived in silence. And that transition from that era of male thinking to being more aware of mental awareness and all that other stuff and depression, that's become far more common to talk about it. Whereas those guys didn't say a word about it. That's where he grew up in. And he had shit going on like anybody would with his own life, his own career, his own family, his own children, where he probably needed to talk about it with somebody. And he didn't. Because none of them did. None of them. Children who were difficult. Mom, pardon me, not a mom, but my mom, his spouse, who had to do a lot of it on her own. Dad went home. And it wasn't like he wasn't home out getting drunk or anything along those lines. He was out working a lot. And it wasn't like he was taking whatever that money he was making and showering it on himself with expensive golf trips or this, that. Nope. None of that. It became about the responsibility of being in a position to take that and help out. My dad retired when he was 62 years old. The Kroger company said, Ted, we want you to retire. Well, there's one other detail in here that I think was significant that happened to me when I was in fifth grade. My father was given an opportunity for a promotion that would have required us to move from Indianapolis to Nashville, Tennessee. And very likely there would have been one more promotion after that, that would have taken us back to Cincinnati, Ohio. And that, those were significant steps. My dad originally took that promotion. And my mom asked, I cannot move again. And my dad went back to his superiors and said, I can't do it. That was an amazing sacrifice. As my father recognizing what my mom had done and the needs of his family, his children were greater than any job promotion. And when you start moving up those chains, when you start bouncing around those places, you realize it's not just the work that you do from nine to five that puts you in a position to advance or move ahead. This is something that I didn't learn until much later. The real advancement happens not from nine to five, but five to nine or nine to midnight. It's when you cultivate those friendships, those relationships with those people who eventually land in different spots and say, I really like that guy. Let's promote him. That's where it gets done. And he had put himself in a position to do, to do that consistently. He recognized that this next one was not going to be it for him because it was the wrong thing to do for his family. That's a big give up. And it was something that he talked about for a long time until he was much older and he recognized it worked out the way it should. He became a constant in that community. My mom and dad became very active in that community and they had have just a whole host of friends that you can get if you work at it by living in the same place for a long, long period of time. My dad is now 93 years old. I would not say he is in great health. He's had some very serious health issues, but he has, he worked for thirty eight years technically at the same company. He has been retired from that company for thirty years. To work thirty eight and to enjoy retirement for thirty. That's an amazing ratio. Some of the other things is that I look at what he's dealt with physically to keep going. It's, it's amazing. And then I sit there and have conversations with him and for a 93 year old man, his memory is remarkable. Reads the newspapers every day, follows his stocks, his bank account, his credit cards, all of that every day. And in his own way, even at 93, he's helping still take care of his children. And I'm the youngest and his grandchildren. He has outlived a brother. He has outlived multiple two sisters. He has outlived a son, sadly, and numerous friends. And there's so many different things that he has taught me not through words. That wasn't his thing, but just by his actions and what he has done. Indirectly, it really puts my own life and accomplishments in a completely different prism. He did what anybody you would hope would do in that position, which is if I'm going to have children, let's make it better for them than I had it. And he and my mom both did that. To which I am eternally grateful in a way that I'll never be able to say thank you enough. And I'm under no illusion that he's going watch this. I'm under no misguided hope that my dad is somehow sitting there thinking, you know what? Let me crush an episode of the Angling. I'm not kidding myself. But I know this. In my career, I've been able to do all of these different things. Life experiences that I wouldn't have had a chance to do without this job. I know that none of them, they're kind of selfish and egocentric. And I know they wouldn't be possible without him. And I know in any of the compliments that I have received from a person or two of note, or maybe even award that I have won, really of compare to the one or two times my dad has said, I'm proud of you. I'm very proud of the fact that Ted Angle is my dad. I'm eternally grateful. And on this, I say, I love you and happy Father's Day. And I promise I won't spend any money. See you next time. And he said, son, this world is rough. And if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough. And I know I wouldn't be there to help you along. So I give you that name, and I said goodbye. I knew you'd have to get This is a Stolen Water Media production. Hazel, get out of here. Goddamn it. Go. Get out. Out. Get out.