In honor of Father’s Day, we asked several Lorain County residents – and a former one, too – to share stories about their fathers and how they impacted their own lives. Here’s what they had to say:

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Carol Klear, longtime reporter and editor for The North Ridgeville Press, daughter of Archie Snyder.

My dad was a blue-collar laborer. He didn’t talk to me a lot, but he knew how to do anything. He could remodel the little house we lived in and fix the car.

It was funny how he always figured out how to do projects around the house. He had a glass and would pour it about three-quarters full with coffee. The rest was milk. He’d sit there with his Camel cigarette … the strong, bad ones … it was 6 a.m. in the morning. He’d sit there and not say a word. He’d just sit and think and figure out a project. When he was finished, he got up and did it. He was a man of few words.

We still laugh about his smoking. He had some medical issues (including emphysema; he died in 1974 at age 69). We told him not to smoke. He should have stopped. When he went to the bathroom, he’d open a window and smoke. I don’t know if he thought he was tricking anyone. We never said anything. He was in his 60s by that time. If that was his one pleasure, then so be it. We let it go.

A Pennsylvania native, Archie Snyder was the youngest of 15 children in a family that grew up and settled in the Toledo area.

He was very family-oriented. He always loved the kids. He worked for Autolite, and the choice came that he was going to lose his job or have to go to Bay City, Mich., to work. Mother didn’t want to move, so for seven years he would go there during the week and work, and come home on weekends. That was such a tribute to his work ethic. …

He got a commendation from the company president one time for coming up with a way to economize, to save the company money. He was never a big businessman, but he always did for the family.

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Patti Ewald, former managing editor of The Chronicle, now lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., where she works part-time at the Poynter Institute, editing online courses for journalists, and is a correspondent for the St. Petersburg Times. She also is a volunteer docent at the Salvador Dali Museum. Her father is Ken Glowacki of Amherst.

How would you take care of your father if he broke his foot?

Would you help him to his recliner and hand him the remote?

Bring him sandwiches and ice cream and his mail?

Generally wait on him hand and foot?

Of course you would.

Me?

I took my father – and the 10-pound boot-cast on his leg – to the mountains.

We had been planning a trip to Colorado to see my older son when my father went and broke his foot.

“You can still go,” I told him as he extended his boot and lowered himself into his favorite chair.

“I don’t know,” he said, wincing in pain as he settled into his chair.

“Sure. I’ll push you in a wheelchair in the airport. We’ll be at Mike’s house. It’ll be fine,” I told him.

So, sure enough, that’s what we did – we went to the mountains, boot and all.

He was the good egg he’s always been – when he lived in a house filled with five kids and now that he lives in a house filled with a slew of grandkids coming and going.

He just goes with the flow.

And isn’t that the best kind of dad there is?

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Shari Szczepanski, mayor of Grafton, daughter of Frank Magalski.

Being a mayor is tough. It takes hard work, confidence and determination to seek votes and be accountable to thousands of residents.

Grafton Mayor Shari Szczepanski said it all came from her father.

“He was a very, very hardworking, dedicated, loving person,” she said. “That’s probably where I got my drive from.”

It wasn’t unusual for her father to work 16 hour days at J & L Steel in Cleveland, but Frank Magalski always had time for his family.

“He had the patience of a saint,” Szczepanski said. “He taught me how to drive. A Buick Century. I mean, he was the type of person where if anybody needed a teacher, they borrowed my dad. That’s how patient he was. It didn’t take me long to learn, but he did make me drive around with that student sticker on the car for way too long.”

Magalski was known to his family and friends as a jokester, but he was never mean-spirited.

“He had a humorous side, but it was a very special sense of humor,” Szczepanski said. “He liked to tease people. They were one-liners. You had to really know him to appreciate what it was about. It was very subtle, very indirect. Half the time you never knew he was picking on you.”

She said he was also a firm believer in discipline, but being the youngest of a family that included three brothers, she was often let off easy.

“Although I got my fair share,” she said.

Her parents celebrated 60 years of marriage just before he died about 10 years ago. Not long before their anniversary, the two were at a wedding and were the last couple on the dance floor during the traditional dance in which couples sit down until only the couple married the longest is left.

“The deejay asked him to give some advice to the newlyweds and my father said, ‘She’s always right,’ ” Szczepanski said.

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James Burge, Lorain County Common Pleas Court judge, son of former state Rep. Leslie M. Burge

He said, “Never forget why God gave you two ears and only one mouth.” It took me a long time to realize the wisdom of that.

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Antonio Barrios, chairman of the Puerto Rican Culture Committee, son of Ralph Barrios.

Antonio Barrios, the second of five children, describes a dedicated family man when he talks about his father, Ralph Barrios, now deceased. Ralph Barrios was one of the first Puerto Rican men recruited in the late 1940s by U.S. Steel to come to this country and work in the steel plants.

“I think of dedication,” Antonio Barrios said of his father. “I think of hard work. I think of a man who gave his word and kept it. That’s my father. …

“He didn’t speak English. He saved his money and he saved his money, and when he had enough he sent for his family. I will always be grateful that he gave me an opportunity for a better life because life wasn’t so good in Puerto Rico in the 1930s and 1940s. That will always stay with me for the rest of my days because that’s what a man is supposed to be.”

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Harvey Gittler, former columnist for The Chronicle-Telegram, son of Alfred Jay Gittler.

I’ve written about my father on two occasions back when I was writing a weekly column for The Chronicle. One column was headlined, “For my father, July 4th was a religious holiday.” I explained that my father repeatedly told anyone who would listen, “There is no country greater than the United States of America, and don’t you ever forget it!” I went on to explain that for my father, America was a religious experience and he considered the Constitution his bible.

Another column, written for Father’s Day, was headlined, “A tribute to my father: an unusually accomplished man.” With the passing of years, I have a new and deeper appreciation of what an accomplished man he was.

He came to America with his mother, brother and two sisters in 1903 at the age of 15. His father had come a few years earlier with a small bag that contained all his worldly possession and a sewing machine strapped to his back. He was a tailor and soon found work with his brother who was already here. In just a few years, my grandfather sent for his wife and children.

When my father, Alfred Jay Gittler by name, came to this country, he spoke Polish and Yiddish. He was enrolled in the eighth grade and within one year he learned to not only speak English but won a prize in French.

In reflection, I’ve wondered if he didn’t have a natural ability for languages.

With that eighth-grade education, he went to work in the shipping room of a women’s dress factory in New York City. From there he moved into the storeroom where he learned about dress materials. Eventually, he became head of the storeroom or piece goods room, as it was called in the dress industry.

He worked long hours not only because the job required long hours but because he really knew nothing but work. He had come out of abject poverty in the ghetto of Warsaw where even children had to work to help the family survive.

A few years later, just before he and my mother were married in 1919, my father and a friend scraped together enough money to open a small dress contracting business. They made the dresses sold by design and sales companies. My father ran the factory, the piece goods room, and did the bookkeeping. His partner converted the designers’ sketches into patterns. How my father, with only an eighth-grade education, learned those skills still amazes me. But he did his job and did it well.

Years later, he was offered a job as production manager for a large and successful dress company directing the contracting companies similar to the one he had run. Suddenly he was thrust into a world of glamour. His new co-workers were among the great dress designers in America and their sophisticated customers.

How that man, with little social education and even less academic education, learned to function in a world of sophistication and glamour still boggles my mind. His accomplishments were unusual; he was an uncommon man.

Despite his advancements, he never lost touch with his original partner nor with the factory people he had worked with. He was a quiet, humble man who treated the wardrobe mistress with the same respect as he did the company’s best customer. Yet he carried himself with great dignity and enjoyed his successes.

Years ago, I would meet people who had worked with my father and always I heard stories of how he had quietly helped this person or that person.

My father, A.J., as he was known in business, was a generous man in thought and deed. On this Father’s Day, I remember him with deep affection and respect.

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Herman C. Larkins, former Elyria councilman.

One of the things my father hammered to me and my four brothers was work – “get your own money” was his refrain.

The other thing that dad said to all of us – his sons – was buy yourself a home, and we all did. His lessons gave me objectives that maybe I would not have had. My dad’s dad was born in 1879. His parents were slaves, and the same with my grandmother’s parents. It was important to them to acquire something, and land was the most valuable thing they ever had. It became a part of you and a part of your character to own something.

One of the things dad gave us was advice about how to measure your life, and one of them was acquire some land.

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Beth Pongracz Maiden, communications officer at Community Foundation of Lorain County, daughter of Lou Pongracz.

My dad, Lou Pongracz, would come home from a long day working at the Elyria post office to two wound-up kids, my brother Andrew and myself, anxious to see him. He always took time right after work to pull us in a sled or a wagon around our Eastern Heights neighborhood, and obeyed our commands to “Run, Dad, run!” My dad was an older parent, but we never knew that. He always had countless time and energy for us. My brother and I actually have trouble keeping up with him today, and he just turned a young 85.

Lectures and words of advice were my English-teacher mom’s department, and while I learned so much from her, my dad really taught by example. Family is everything to him, and he has always demonstrated that by killing mice when my husband was at work, fixing flat tires, picking up a group of teenagers in downtown Cleveland at 1 a.m. who didn’t know the trains stopped running at midnight, and just by being at the other end of the phone. He taught me to be reliable, to be someone to count on and to always follow through when I’ve committed to something.

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Terri Frederick, public relations officer for the Lorain Public Library System, daughter of Mario Columbaro.

When your father is an elementary school principal, it helps to be good in school.

Unfortunately for Terri Frederick, math was never her strong suit.

“I was terrible in math as a kid, but no matter how busy he was, I can’t tell you how many mornings he helped me with my math homework and helped me understand it,” she said.

Frederick said her father was a kind and gentle person who always had time for his children – students and blood-related, alike.

He was the first principal of Avon East Elementary, and also led Eastview and Westview in Avon Lake while refereeing for school football and basketball games in Lorain.

“A lot of kids said they always wished he were their father,” Frederick said.

One thing he did very well is make those around him feel good about themselves. No matter what problem Frederick was having, she said she always had her father to turn to.

“He was very reaffirming,” she said. “When I would lack confidence with a class I was taking, or worried I wasn’t going to find a job, he always had a kind word. Near my graduation in college, I was mildly upset and hysterical that I wasn’t going to find a job, and he just put things in perspective and said, ‘No matter what happens I’ll be there for you.’ ”

Her father died in 2003, but Frederick still remembers advice he gave her and her two brothers and sister.

“One thing he always instructed us on is to treat other people the way we’d want them to treat us,” she said. “He also always said to always believe in yourself and to be true to yourself.”

Frederick said she’ll always remember her father standing in line for hours to get tickets for The Beatles when they played at Cleveland Municipal Stadium in the mid-1960s. It was shortly after her mother died, when Frederick was only 10, so the time spent at the concert meant more than just seeing the band.

“He was kind of a mother-father figure,” she said. “He was wonderful.”

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Kevin Brubaker, Elyria councilman, president of Little League East and a regional training manager for Western-Southern Life, son of Gary Brubaker.

Gary Brubaker was a tough taskmaster. He had an honor code for his family, and he continues to follow it rigorously.

“My dad always figured that you are going to screw up, you are going to make mistakes, but we’ll deal with it. But don’t lie about it – he cannot stand lying to this day,” said his son, Kevin Brubaker.

Of course, there’s a great example to go along with that lesson: Once when Kevin and his younger brother had gone swimming in a neighbor’s pool in violation of family rules, his dad came home and saw them in the driveway – dripping wet, trying to dry off discreetly.

Kevin had prepared for just such an encounter, telling his younger brother to say that they’d been down the street running through a sprinkler. That’s exactly what his younger brother did, which is why he ended up  in trouble and Kevin – who knew not to try to carry out the ruse after seeing his Dad’s reaction – decided to tell the truth.

So while Kevin was outside playing, his younger brother was inside and in trouble.

Gary Brubaker, now 67, who retired from General Motors in 1998 and lives in Tucson, Ariz., also set a great example for his family, which consists of three sons and a daughter. He coached all of the children in Little League baseball, and served as president of Little League North. Kevin, who is president of Little League East, said he uses some of the same philosophies in coaching and running the league that his father employed back in the 1970s.

“He was big into athletics and helping others, and with the things I’ve done in the last few years, I’d have to say he enlightened me and influenced me to be involved in the community as well,” Kevin Brubaker said.

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Dayle Noll, president and CEO North Ridgeville Chamber of Commerce.

As for so many families, Sundays in the summer were special for Dayle Noll.

“It was the only day my parents had off from their restaurant business in Vermilion. In his younger years, my dad worked on the Great Lakes ore freighters, so boating was in his blood,” she said. “He eventually bought his own pleasure boat, which the family enjoyed immensely on Sundays. A Father’s Day tradition when I was in college was we’d get up and attend 6 a.m. Mass at St. Mary’s in Vermilion, play nine holes of golf, and head out to Lake Erie on the boat for a day of cruising and fishing. Then we’d come home for a family cook-out.”

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Robert Gilchrist, Lorain service director, son of James Gilchrist.

“He taught me how to be a good provider,” said Robert Gilchrist of his father, James.

His dad passed away a few years ago, but his lessons of organization and providing for your family found purchase with his youngest child.

“I remember him saying, ‘Do it or else’ a lot,” Robert Gilchrist said with a laugh.

His father was 40 years old, a widower who’d remarried, when Robert came along. With two daughters from his first marriage and three from his second, providing for his family wasn’t easy.

James Gilchrist wanted to buy a home. At that time, steering minorities into certain neighborhoods in an effort to segregate the population was still commonplace.

“No one would sell him a house, so he went out and got his Realtor’s license and he sold himself a house,” Robert Gilchrist said.

His father was the first African-American real estate broker in Lorain County. A favorite memory is sitting in his father’s office, listening to his dad talk about the stock market.

“I was fascinated by this stuff I thought was so over my head, but he taught me the value of saving and the value of money as it relates to providing for my family.”

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Jennifer Coughlin Kennedy, director of marketing and communications for Community Health Partners in Lorain, daughter of Marty Coughlin.

You can count on my father, Marty Coughlin, to be the life of the party.

His wit and humor light up a room. His energy and spirit are contagious. My dad has taught me how to have fun and enjoy life.

My dad finds joy in hobbies like golfing, boating and fishing. Although, one may argue, he is searching for peace and quiet after raising five kids (four of them girls).

For many years, my dad was there when I needed a ride, money, when I went off to college, got married and started a family of my own. Now, I say thank you for the lessons, laughter, support and, of course, my allowance. I love you, Dad.

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Geoffrey Andrews, Oberlin Schools superintendent, son of George Andrews.

Geoffrey Andrews can always count on his dad, George Andrews.

When he needed someone to fill in as a high school math teacher last year, the elder Andrews – a math professor at Oberlin College from 1962 to 1997 – did the job gratis along with a buddy.

Andrews said his father, 76, has always been there for him and his three siblings, Erik, Elise and Chris.

“He’s every inch a gentleman and paragon of virtue,” Andrews said.

“One good story that came to mind is this: When I was 10 our baseball team had a game in Litchfield. In those days, we would all meet at the home field in Oberlin and travel in several cars to the away field.

“Well, for this one game no other parent showed up to drive, so Dad took 22 of us in his VW van off to Litchfield (my mom was probably attending Erik’s home game that night).

“Anyway, we were just leaving Oberlin when a mother pulled up behind us, flashed her lights, and pulled us over. She had two boys on our team, and she wanted them to get to the game, along with their two younger brothers – so she asked my dad if her FOUR kids could catch a ride with him. She wasn’t going because she was ‘too busy.’

“Most parents would have asked her if she was out of her mind, but Dad never batted an eye… he just put four more kids into the van, and off we went to Litchfield, piled on top of each other, singing songs and laughing (obviously this was far before seat belt laws).

“I’m sure when we got to Litchfield we looked like clowns in the circus getting out of the car (26 people!).

“But we played a good game and enjoyed ourselves. Several parents came to watch, but the funny thing is that when the game was over, the kids had had such a good time on the way over that they still wanted to pile into the van together for the trip home. Better sense prevailed and I think we only had a dozen or so for the ride home, but I’ll never forget that game or that ride.”

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Lorne J. Elbert Jr., Elyria developer and business owner, son of Lorne J. Elbert Sr.

My father started out as a meat-cutter at a market in Oberlin. He worked at Lear Romec for 20 years, retiring in 1962.

He would have been a great accountant.

My father never had the opportunity to go to college, but he was very good at handling money, so he came to work for me from 1962 to 1972.

I remember once when he came to me – he was concerned about the money – and said, “Can I talk to you?”

He asked, “How much is enough?”

I said, “Dad, I don’t know what you mean,” but I did.

Just the mere thought of all the property and all the money I was dealing with was overwhelming for my father.

He always taught us, “If you want something, you’ve got to be able to pay for it.” He never used credit.

He could care less if you drove a Cadillac and he had an old Chevy. He knew his Chevy was paid for.

My dad, Lorne J. Elbert, was born in 1912 and married my mom, Frances, in 1935.

They had six kids – me and three other boys and two girls.

He was a great sportsman, sang in a barbershop quartet and helped found Elyria Catholic High School.

He and my mother were brokenhearted when I quit high school.

He never wanted anything anyone else had and he never wanted to be anyone else.

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