The world is rich with the things he left behind.
Follow this authorMegan McArdle's opinions
FollowI grew up on fact-filled tours of New York City and debates over the Sunday political shows, in which he graciously humored a teenager’s passionately garbled ideas about the world. After I left home, there were marathon phone calls, during which he taught me most of what I know about infrastructure and urban policy, and the way that government actually works.
You see, the supreme irony of my life as a libertarian columnist is that Dad was a lobbyist. He spent a decade working for the New York City government at various levels, eventually becoming commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. After that, he spent most of the next three decades running a trade association for the heavy contractors who built most of the infrastructure in the tri-state area. Whenever I wrote something particularly salty about lobbyists, I usually got a humorous note: “You do know what paid for college, right? — Love, Me.”
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He was not cynical about his profession, because he believed his members were, as his note said, building a better America. We would drive around the cities he knew well — New York, Boston, D.C. — and he would narrate their histories as told by their roads, bridges and famous buildings, their water treatment plants and sewers. Of course, we also talked of much else, because his interests were wide and his mind, like his office, overflowed with information neatly labeled and filed away.
I still remember the time when I, a college student fresh from learning T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” opened our front door and said, “Let us go then, you and I … .”
Not missing a beat, my father continued:
“When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
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The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels.”
I don’t know why I was surprised; he was inordinately fond of wordplay and puns, and also of that particular era of poetry, which included his favorite poet, William Butler Yeats. And what he liked, he remembered.
When people reached out to commiserate on his passing, they all said the same thing: “He was a brilliant man. I learned so much from him.” As a young child, I got into........