{"id":94175,"date":"2025-08-31T23:23:31","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T06:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/?p=94175"},"modified":"2025-08-31T23:23:31","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T06:23:31","slug":"celebrating-dads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/blog\/2025\/08\/31\/celebrating-dads\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating Dads"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><em>\u201cI know just how you feel because I have had these deep,<br \/>\nloving relationships with men in my life,<br \/>\nand all my wives were jealous.\u201d<br \/>\n\u2013 <\/em><span style=\"font-family: Verdana;\"><span style=\"font-size: xx-small;\"><strong>Vincent Price<\/strong>\u2019s response when his daughter, <strong>Victoria Price<\/strong>,<br \/>\ncame out to him as a lesbian. And suddenly, all the pieces fall into place.<\/span><\/span><em><br \/>\n<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Last week, we celebrated the 30<sup>th<\/sup> anniversary of this weekly column.&nbsp; That works out to over 1,500 columns \u2013 each of which had about 1,500 words.&nbsp; Oh, the symmetry is almost poetic.&nbsp; I, for one, can\u2019t believe I\u2019ve done the same thing, day in, day out, for 30 years.&nbsp; One minute you\u2019re celebrated as the voice of several generations, and the next minute, you celebrate something a bit closer to home \u2013 the life of <strong>Big Daddy Masters<\/strong>.&nbsp; Yes, at the age of 92, my father passed away after a relatively short illness.&nbsp; I know popular convention says I should feel sad about this, but all in all, I\u2019m mostly filled with gratitude.&nbsp; I had a parent who was inexplicably always proud of me \u2013 and trust me, that was no small feat.&nbsp; He didn\u2019t always say it, but I always knew.&nbsp; With the passage of time and knowing many people who had contentious relationships with their parents, I\u2019m acutely aware of how lucky I was.&nbsp; Rest in peace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI know just how you feel because I have had these deep, loving relationships with men in my life, and all my wives were jealous.\u201d \u2013 Vincent Price\u2019s response when his daughter, Victoria Price, came out to him as a lesbian. And suddenly, all the pieces fall into place. Last week, we celebrated the 30th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94175"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94175"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94184,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94175\/revisions\/94184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}