Father by Son

MY FATHER'S HOUSE by Philip B. Kunhardt Jr. 239 pages. Random House. $5.95.

In the mind of an admiring son. a father has no first and last name. He is simply "my father." Few boys, however, maintain that specialized vision into their manhood. Their fathers' frailties, their faults and even their humdrum similarity to every father anywhere soon begin to blur the individual image. But for Philip Kunhardt, in this recollection of his years with Father, the memories of the boy needed no later adjustment by the grown man. Indeed, Kunhardt, now 42, still remembers his father with such unalloyed love that nowhere in the book does he think to refer to him by name.

Philip B. Kunhardt Sr. did have a certain natural head start on gaining any son's affections. He could pack endless snowballs with his bare hands; he could be blindfolded, spun around a hundred times and still point unerringly north; and he could throw the perfect football pass for the special secret "zombie play." It also helped that he was willing to undertake immediately any worthy big idea, such as going 90 miles to the beach on bikes; against such enthusiasm for grand adventure, Mother could hardly insist on being too sensible.

Beyond these invaluable assets, Kunhardt Sr. seems miraculously to have maintained a complete involvement in the doings of his four children without being at all mawkish about it. He kept a stuffed folder on each one, including curls from the first haircut, report cards, notes to and from family members.

Author Kunhardt, who is an assistant managing editor of LIFE, decided to write about his father while recuperating from a heart attack li years ago. Six years earlier, his father had died of such a heart attack. With this brutally physical reminder of a shared mortality, Kunhardt realized that with the passing of time, the memory and the image of his father were slipping away from him. His need was not so much to understand as to rediscover the essence of the man.

In the end, as a friend had observed, "my father's love for me, as your father's for you, has left me able to take up cycles of my own and to start them in my children." In this old-fashioned and wonderfully sentimental book, Kunhardt has evoked the sources of his own knowledge of and affection for life.

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