Father's Day

Heather Cox Richardson· Host0:08

June 21st, 2026. I spent so much time in my friend Mike's house growing up that I knew his parents as Mama and Papa. His father, Kenneth Edward Nybo, was born in 1924 in New York City, but spent his summers in Maine, where he knew my mother and my aunt, and where he met and secretly married my aunt's friend Helen Bryant just before he shipped overseas to be in the Tank Corps with Patton's Third Army in World War II. Papa's war was not an easy one, although he came home without visible wounds. After the war, he went to the University of Maine on the G.I. Bill, spurred by Helen, who had never been to college herself, but made it clear she expected him to live up to her faith in him by making it through school. After college, he went to work for the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., insisting on the simplest solutions, the ones that worked, even when the rest of the team scoffed that they were too easy. For years, while Helen and their two sons were in Maine for the summer, he commuted between there and Washington, driving back and forth on the weekends, because even though it was a 12-hour drive, nothing mattered more than driving down Carter's Lane at the end of it. Papa was away a lot, but when he was home, he always had time for us kids.