Dad had a prominent client who was taking a theater group to New York.

She and Dad were talking one day, and she mentioned the trip.

Dad said he had not heard about it.

She told him, “We’re taking Braniff.”

“WHAT? Don’t you dare call me in the middle of the night if something happens.”

Right on cue, the call came in the middle of the night. Braniff had canceled the charter for operational reasons.

Dad somehow found a spare American Airlines aircraft. The tour departed as scheduled.

Just not on Braniff.

He maintained relationships. If he had a free afternoon, he would make the rounds just to schmooze people. Fixing things was what he did day in and day out.

Years later, after he opened his travel agency, the relationships were still there.

He would call the American office and say, “You do know I’m a travel agent now, right? You’d better act fast, or I will.”

One day, my mother called me and asked me to come into the living room. On top of the closed grand piano sat a funeral-sized flower arrangement of Asiatic and Oriental lilies with greenery trailing over the edges of the piano. Breathtaking.

Mother handed me a card.

The card was signed “June and Johnny.”

“Nice.”

She finally spoke. “Do you know any other June and Johnny?”

I laughed so hard I fell to the floor.

Dad’s fixer instinct was not limited to business contacts, important people, or clients.

One of our housekeepers had a daughter who was in college on a four-year scholarship. She needed one final semester to graduate.

Dad didn’t throw money around.

He went to the university and tried to persuade them to extend the scholarship through that last semester.

It was a religious university, so he thought he could use that for leverage.

They refused.

Dad was furious.

He pulled out his checkbook and said, “I’ll show you Christian charity. Maybe it’ll rub off.” Then he paid for her entire final semester himself.

When he got home, he went ballistic.

The injustice mattered more than the dent in his bank account.

Nobody knew how the tuition had been paid because we kept our mouths shut. It was private.

Sometimes, the gratitude came back in spectacular ways.

Sometimes nobody outside the family ever knew he had done anything at all.

None of that mattered to him.