Jerry Weinman, 1935-2025

Below is my eulogy for my incredible father, who died on April 9, 2025, four days shy of his 90th birthday.

A moment like this is when my dad would ask if I had a handkerchief, at which point I’d say, “Dad, no one under the age of 70 carries a handkerchief.”

Fine, you win. I need one now.

January 2025. We were in the kitchen, Dad in a chair, me squatting before him with a pair of scissors.

“I suppose you’re going to want a tip for this,” he said.

His hands were too shaky to shave on his own, and his pacemaker prevented anything electric. I gave him a sneak peek on my phone. “You might want to hold on to your day job,” he said.

I held the blade of the scissors close to his neck. “By the way,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to ask about my inheritance.”

We had spent 50 years trying to make each other laugh. My father was the one who taught me about language, and treating every word with care—how every great sentence should follow a rhythm in your head. He taught me to know my audience. What he might not have known was my primary audience was usually him.

“What’s this for?” he’d ask as I started reading something over the phone. “OK, keep going. I like it.”

March 1987. My Grandpa Mack had died. We were at a cemetery on Long Island. It was my first funeral, and Dad could see I was struggling.

“You see this place?” he said, waving his hand across the landscape. “Everyone’s dying to get in.”

We liked corny jokes and smartly crafted jokes, and inappropriate jokes. One of my dad’s favorites was about a golfer who meets a woman on the course. They play 18 holes and sparks fly, so they go back to his place, at which point he realizes that she… is a he.

“Son of a bitch,” the man says. “You were playing from the red tees.”

I could tell you about his contradictions: a Jew who escaped the Holocaust at age 3, grew up Orthodox in Washington Heights, then raised three kids who went on to marry Catholics. A progressive whose wife prepared every meal because he couldn’t manage more than toast. A deep thinker who claimed his true gift was an ability to detect toupees and lesbians. A sentimental and affectionate father whose angry voice could boom throughout the house. I didn’t learn how to be a father because mine was perfect. I learned that you could be temperamental and vulnerable and make plenty of missteps, but if your kids could always see the love in your heart, the rest would work itself out.

July 2001. We were aligned on most things – our love of salty snacks and Seinfeld, our disdain for pretension, and clumsy Rangers defensemen. Music was the exception. My dad loved Sinatra and Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. He’d turn it up in the car and wonder why I wasn’t smitten. “One of these days I’m going to teach you about good music,” he’d say.

He made only occasional progress. On my wedding day. I played golf, and things ran late. I rushed back to the house where I was staying with my parents, but the door was locked and my dad wouldn’t let me in. “Here, get changed next door,” he said, grabbing all my wedding clothes and jamming them in my chest.

What the hell, I thought, but later that night, it all made sense. Dad popped up on stage and performed a song he and my friend Kyle Tucker had rehearsed for hours behind closed doors. The song was “It Was So Easy,” and we’d play it for years after—in the car on the way to doctors’ visits, and by his hospital bed.

But that night at our wedding, Dad not only sang. At one point, he pulled out a harmonica and the room erupted.

“I didn’t know you knew how to play the harmonica,” I said.

“I don’t,” he said. “I was hoping no one noticed.”

*Dad singing “It Was So Easy” with Kyle Tucker on our wedding night, July 21, 2001.*

March 2025. The end was predictably miserable. Hospital, rehab, hospice. When my dad was awake, he could still charm—“he’s taken a turn for the nurse,” he would joke. But mostly, it was a parade of overextended aides and underattentive doctors.

Only one expert always came through.

“Go home, Mom,” we’d say, yet home for Mom was wherever she could hold Dad’s hand.

When I was a kid, I thought my parents’ marriage was the weird one. They’d yell and slam doors, occasionally retreat to different bedrooms. I sometimes wondered if it was going to last.

By their 50th anniversary I figured they had a chance. Now they were 63 years deep and still in love, Dad in a bed in rehab, Mom chasing after a nurse with a question.

“Where’s Mom?” he’d ask.

“She found someone else,” I said.

“Well,” he shrugged. “We gave it a shot.”

February 1997. He was always working on something. He wrote TV commercials, radio spots, and print ads. He had ideas for skits and T-shirts, and for a time sold a line of tennis clothes featuring a logo of a frog. He wrote dozens of screenplays, his best a comedy about a mixed-race gangster who aspired to be the “Jackie Robinson of the Mafia.”

He would tinker on his own sentences for hours, and eventually turn his attention to yours. “Read that last part again,” he’d say. “I liked it.”

He was incapable of sugarcoating. At hockey games, he’d cup his hands from the crowd and yell out instructions, then later draw diagrams on napkins to explain what he meant. He didn’t always tell me I played a good game, but when he did, I figured I must have.

Our strongest connection was around words. I could always make Dad laugh, and with time, I relished crafting sentences that he wanted me to read back.

In my first year out of college, I was living at home and stringing for the local paper. Back then, I’d cover a game at night, send my story to the edit desk, then stumble home and crawl into bed after everyone was asleep. One morning, I woke up to the newspaper dropped on my bed and dad hovering over me.

“I loved this,” he said.

Bigger stuff would follow — magazines, books, appearances on morning TV — but if you asked me my most rewarding moment as a writer, it might have been then.

*Watching Will in a hockey game, everyone preparing for his post-game analysis.*

Some stats: 89 years, 361 days, one wife, three kids, three dogs, two cats, at least one gerbil that escaped its cage at 73 Old Post Road and might still be kicking around.

Roughly 50,000 “small pieces” of cake at birthdays, followed by another 50,000 pieces because the first piece was never enough. Dad ran the New York Marathon in 1983 at age 48 in 4 hours, 20 minutes. He made one career eagle, at Mohansic. He wrote one commercial, for Eastern Airlines, that ran during the Super Bowl. He wrote another one for Chevrolet that led to the regrettable acquisition of one blue Camaro.

He got 87 years in this country after he and his parents were forced out of their first. If they didn’t want him, he’d make another place better instead, fleeing Germany first for Amsterdam, and then across an ocean to New York. My dad was not the greatest American I knew, but he might have been the most American: an immigrant who arrived with little and learned to love baseball and popular standards, who scratched out a few years at City College and served in the Army, then enjoyed a successful career and family. Dad’s patriotism wasn’t blind to injustice and hypocrisy, yet even in his most disheartened moments, he never lost sight of the opportunity this country afforded him. It’s here that he found the love of his life; where he welcomed my brother, sister, and me; and eventually the six extraordinary grandchildren he adored: Caleb, Madison, Savannah, Elodie, Charlie, and Will.

Speaking for Lisa, our greatest move as parents was giving our boys a home within walking distance of all their grandparents. They knew my dad not in some abstract way, but as someone who drove them to school and tied their skates, who had pillow fights with them before bed and would steal the cake off their plates if they weren’t paying attention. Dad was there to marvel at how far Charlie could hit a golf ball, and to see Will curl away from forecheckers under pressure. He said he’d pay for goals and assists, and as he lay in his hospital bed, he relished hearing his grandson tell him a midseason burst was now bleeding him dry. But with all of these kids, he was proudest of their hearts and minds, which was apparent in the love they showed him until the end.

Those of you here who remember my dad should consider yourselves fortunate. But even if you never met Jerry Weinman, you know him. He’s there in the rest of us, when we laugh at bad jokes, when we cry at movies, when we curse after leaving a ball in the bunker. He’s in Jenny’s voice when she sings in the car, in Josh’s soft hands at the net. He’ll be in every word I ever write, even the ones he’ll never read.

Eulogy from my sister, Jenny Holmes

I want to thank you all for coming. I was not sure I was going to speak today as I am sandwiched in birth order by two prolific writers. So I will make my speech short. We weren't necessarily the Waltons growing up at 73 Old Post Rd. My father was quick to anger and just as quick to admit his wrongdoings. Of his three children, I am the most like him. He always found jobs for us to do around the house. Raking leaves, shoveling snow. I somehow always got out of those as the boys like to recall. He even used to have my cousin Robert come for the weekend from Great Neck and put him to work.

I'm pretty sure he wasn't even on the payroll. Every Friday, Mom and I huddled around the small black and white TV upstairs to watch Dallas, while Dad held court downstairs with the color set, watching the Rangers. That arrangement wasn't up for debate - it just was. The unspoken rule: sports trump soaps. He never had to lay it out in so many words. We all just knew - the good TV, the prime-time slot, the volume turned up to a satisfying roar? That belonged to him. Dad was particular! - he showed me how to make a bed with hospital corners, set the table properly, and clean walls with Fantastic. Good table manners were a non negotiable.

*Dad with his granddaughters Madison and Savannah.*

And then along came Billy. Although both from Rye, we had completely different upbringings. He was raised in a large Irish catholic rowdy family and was going to marry his only daughter. Gert, as they called him when he was young, was raised in an Orthodox family that came here from Germany, escaping the Nazis. Dad didn't know what to make of Billy initially. Billy baked bread, gardened and had a mean slapshot back in the day. He was not your conventional choice for your only daughter to marry. But there was a common respect and admiration between the two of them. And Dad learned to love Billy as much as I did. Dad and Billy didn't always agree politically, but that never stopped them from talking for hours - somehow, it never got too heated. Dad loved our girls and our girls loved him. They endured endless movie viewings that he suggested, and listened to his music they learned to love. He used to love to go to their games and loudly critique the coach from the sidelines. Those were good times! But the love of Dad's life was always Mom. The man scored big with Sandy Warner 63 years ago when he married her. My Mom took exquisite care of Dad well before he was ever sick. But once heart failure and dementia set in, they were each other's world. She organized all his medications, planned every doctor's visit and always remembered everything needed for his care.

Growing up, I never truly realized how much of my personality mirrored my father's. It's only with time and self-awareness that I've come to see the little habits, tendencies, and even quirks that we share. I found and still to this day find myself trying to straighten up, clear clutter, and tidy my world. Because like I said — I am the most like my Dad.