As fathers and children everywhere break out the grills or head for the hills this Father's Day weekend, local newsmakers and notables share their favorite fatherhood memories.

"My father loved to drive," recalls Washington Mayor Kenneth Westcott. "Every Sunday, we'd take a drive somewhere."

Whether south to Waynesburg or east into the Allegheny Mountains, Mr. Westcott said the best part about traveling on the road every weekend with his father, mother, and four brothers was not knowing the destination.

"My father worked all the time it seemed like," said Mr. Westcott of his father, Frank, a steelworker who died 23 years ago at the age of 60. "The automobile was my father's saving grace."

Nowadays, county Commissioner J. Bracken Burns builds up Washington County to anyone who will listen, but he actually worked as a carpenter's assistant to his father Don when he was a young man during weekends, summers and college breaks.

"There was an incident one day when we were working together," he recalls.

His father was removing the roof from a small porch when it broke and he fell backwards two stories onto concrete steps below.

"The next thing I know, I look up and hear him calling my name," Mr. Burns said. "It was a pretty dramatic moment."

He was barely moving with his face ashen. Mr. Burns feared the worst for his father, but after a few moments, the elder Mr. Burns said, "We're knocking off for the day," got up, and headed home.

"That was it, no doctor or anything," Mr. Burns recalls.

His father died years ago, but Mr. Burns said he only recently realized that his father must have been holding on to the roof section to insure that it didn't drop on his son.

"He held onto it until he was able to look down to see where I was," said Mr. Burns. "So, I'm belatedly thanking him."

Washington Treasurer and mayoral candidate L. Anthony "Sonny" Spossey learned his skills as a barber from his father, Louis.

He and his father worked together every day for 40 years, and had breakfast together on Sunday mornings.

Every day was like Father's Day, he said.

"It was no more special than any other day," Mr. Spossey said. "Every day was special because I had the honor of being with him."

The elder Mr. Spossey loved politics, and worked as a barber for 60 years, quitting just 10 days before his death at 89.

"Until he was 80 years old I wasn't able to keep up with him," said Mr. Spossey, 69, who has been in the profession since 1955. "He was too good a role model. He was a special person."

Some of the fondest memories of being a father have come because of the women in their lives, according to county Commissioner Larry Maggi and state Sen. J. Barry Stout, D-Bentleyville, who describe their most unforgettable and emotional memories of Father's Day.

He always spends Father's Day with his dad Carl, but Mr. Maggi recalled Father's Day in 1985, when his then-wife Ceridwen was succumbing to cancer. She and the couple's daughter, Vronwyn, then just five years old, arranged a pizza party for him at her room in Montefiore Hospital.

"It was so touching," he recalled. "That always sticks out in my mind."

With so much on his plate, Mr. Maggi said he wasn't even aware that it was Father's Day.

"It was a tough time," said Mr. Maggi, who eventually remarried. "It was emotional, but it was also reassuring and uplifting."

Breaking down in tears, Mr. Stout said he was never more proud of his five daughters and son than during his wife Lenore's ordeal with breast cancer two years ago. Surgery and treatment were successful, he said, thanks to the family pitching in together.

"The best Father's Day gift for me was them getting together to support her," he said of his children, who are all grown. "I was so happy and proud to have raised six children who would take care of their mother that way."

Another proud father, Louis Waller Sr., said he remembers a time when he was lecturing his three children about doing right in the community, when his then-teenage son, Louis Waller Jr., got up enough nerve to ask his father some pointed questions.

"He said, 'Have you ever come to jail to pick us up?' I said nope. Then he said, 'Have you ever come to the magistrate's office to pick us up?' And I said nope." It made him realize that he had good kids and perhaps he was being a little too tough with them.

The civil rights activist and local Republican party leader also recalls his own father, Louis T. Waller, a "late-blooming" Christian according to Mr. Waller, who found religion in mid-life and pursued it with zeal.

"I felt good about what he was doing, so I always obeyed him," Mr. Waller said. "I was so proud of him. I think I'm a better person for it."

Still, it wasn't easy refraining from card games, and not being able to use dice, even for board games. And it wasn't fun, Mr. Waller said, to sit down during lightning storms, "because the Lord was working."

It would be hard to imagine the county's President Judge Debbie O'Dell Seneca sitting still at anyone's orders, but she surely would for her father, 86-year-old John O'Dell, whom the judge adores.

"I feel very blessed that he's still with me," she said.

In a family of baseball fans, including her mother Margaret, Judge O'Dell Seneca most fondly remembers her days as a child when her parents took her to Pirate games at Forbes Field.

"They packed us all up in the car," she recalls. "My mother would bring a whole chest of food."

A huge Roberto Clemente fan, Judge O'Dell Seneca would occasionally get the chance to sit behind him during games, and has a bobblehead signed by the star.

When your dad lets his grandchildren paint his toenails at a slumber party and bury him in sand on the beach, you know he's loved, observed county Commissioner Diana Irey. She was emotional talking about her father.

"When I think about my father and what I've watched him do with my children..." her voice trailed off as tears welled in her eyes.

Her father, Cleo Clark, has helped his daughter with everything from working election polls to baby sitting to going on vacation together as a family.

"He's my biggest fan of what I do serving the public," Mrs. Irey said of her dad. "It's always the best feeling to know your parents are proud of you."

First Published: June 15, 2007, 12:15 p.m.