When is Father's Day? Britt Kennerly’s column returns to that question by looking back at the father she lost and the things she never had the chance to ask. FLORIDA TODAY revisited the piece a year after it was first shared, bringing her Father’s Day reflection back into view.
Kennerly wrote that she never got to tell her father goodbye, and she opened the column with this line: “To my daddy on Father’s Day, because we never talked about any of this. And because I didn’t get to tell you goodbye, and there was so much more to say.” She also wrote, “It sometimes hits me, Daddy: There was so much we never talked about.”
Britt Kennerly and Kentucky
The column moves through the life she says her father rarely discussed. She said he left Kentucky for Florida in his early 20s to work at the Hollywood Hotel, then was drafted into World War II after he returned to Kentucky. It also recalls that he flew on his way to battle in Italy and North Africa, details that sit beside the quieter family memory of a man who kept much of his past to himself.
Kennerly said there was so much she and her father never talked about, and that gap is the force behind the column’s return. She described a father who did not join any veteran groups and never talked about his World War II service, even as she remembered him pressing money into her hand while she watched him from a plane on the runway in Louisville and Cincinnati.
World War II and silence
The column also reaches back to family life before the war. Kennerly wrote that in the 1920s and 1930s, her father’s parents moved again and again as farmers, and she said that in the 1940s he kept tinted, glossy pictures of Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable and other pin-up girls in a big envelope. Those details turn the piece into a record of habits, work, war and silence, not just a memory of Father’s Day.
What remains with the reader is the unfinished conversation. Kennerly wanted to know about her father’s childhood, his dreams and his war service, but she said they never talked about any of it. The column leaves one practical, unresolved point at its center: what happened in his World War II experience that made him never want to fly again.
