Father’s Day Lunch Draws Record Crowd, Raises $1.9 Million
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NEW YORK — It felt like the old days at the Father of the Year Awards luncheon Thursday.
The menswear industry showed up in force at the Sheraton Times Square hotel to honor Macy’s chief Jeff Gennette and his husband Geoff Welch, Tony Award-winning actor Matthew Broderick and New York Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay, who were named Fathers of the Year at the 81st annual event.
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Dan Orwig, head of the Father’s Day/Mother’s Day Council and president of Peerless Clothing, said that up until now, the largest crowd to ever attend a Father’s Day lunch was 710 people. Thursday’s event drew 907. It also marked the biggest fundraiser in the group’s history, bringing in more than $1.9 million for Save the Children, surpassing the $1.3 million raised previously.
The luncheon was hosted by former NFL player and cohost of “CBS Mornings” Nate Burleson, who kept the crowd groaning with a number of bad dad jokes. (Why do ducks have feathers? To cover their duck quacks.)
But it’s the tear-jerk moments that always draw the crowds. It started with Marine Corps veteran Tomy Parker, whose stepdaughter Nissa wrote the essay that won him the Ashok C. Sani “All-Star” Dad award from the Sani Family Foundation and Men’s Health magazine.
Parker lost both legs and all the fingers on his left hand after stepping on an explosive device in Afghanistan in 2010. The injury, which left him wheelchair-bound, also led him to lose his will to live. For a decade, his stepdaughter said, he was an active drug addict, but after meeting her mother, he turned his life around and now spends his life as a motivational public speaker, adaptive athlete and auctioneer. “He thinks he’s just a regular man,” she said, “but what he doesn’t know is that he is the definition of extraordinary.”
In receiving his award, Parker said: “After I got injured, I honestly believed that I would eventually die alone. I let my ravenous drug addiction dictate every action in my life for almost a decade. I let it turn me into somebody that had no place in society, let alone somebody that should be a father.”
But by marrying and stepping into the stepfather role for his wife’s two children, it make him “want to mold myself into a man that I would be proud for my daughter marry, a man that I would be proud to call my son, most importantly, a man that I would have wanted to raise me.”
Next up was Broderick, whose father James had received a Father of the Year award of his own in 1977. Matthew Broderick’s 20-year-old son James — dressed in a Thom Browne suit and tie that his dad tied for him in the lobby of the hotel — was there to hand his dad the trophy. Although the younger Broderick admitted he was intimidated by the size of the crowd and having to follow Parker to the stage, James Broderick, whose mother is Sarah Jessica Parker, showed that speaking well in public runs in the family.
He said when he was growing up, he often accompanied his father to Broadway, and Matthew Broderick always made sure to wave to him in the audience at the end of the show before the curtain dropped. He also fondly remembered their trips to Shea Stadium and Citi Field to see the Mets. But now the pressure is on, he said, for him to one day get the same award as his father and grandfather.
“Take your time,” Matthew Broderick said. “You’re 20.”
Matthew Broderick continued on, telling a story about his dad, who rushed to pick him up at school when he was five or six after he had suffered an asthma attack. “He picked me up on his shoulders and basically walked me through Greenwich Village feeding me Milk Duds, which he thought would cure asthma. But I guess it did, I’m here.”
He also recalled his reaction when his son James was born and he first saw him “under a heating lamp [in the hospital], like a sandwich at a deli. It changes your life in an instant.” And he offered up advice to all the fathers out there: “Get pizza, get lots of pizza.”
The third honoree was Kay, who said he first became a father at the age of 52 — “I started late in life” — so when he’s walking down the street with his 10-year-old daughter Callie and his son 8-year-old son Charlie, people often comment how cute his grandchildren are.
But having kids when he was older made him more determined to be the best dad he could be. “If you’re going to do something this late, you better do it right,” he said. “If you’re going to have children, you might as well put your whole life and soul into it. I have several jobs, but this is the one that matters the most.”
He also credited his wife, Jodi, for giving up her career as a broadcaster to be a mother to their kids.
The event ended with Gennette and Welch’s daughter Jude presenting her dads with the honor. The couple has been together for more than 30 years and married legally for a decade and as the years go by, they’re “slowly morphing into each other,” she said, pointing to their endless curiousity, their love of movies and their hyper-involvement in her “drama.
“I deeply love my parents,” she said. “But more than love, I like them. I think of them as friends.”
Welch said that although he and Gennette had always hoped to have a family, it was more of a dream than a reality for two gay men in the 1990s. But they were lucky enough to find a surrogate who managed to get pregnant after 11 attempts and give birth to Jude. He said they were afraid the surrogate wouldn’t want to give her up, but it turned out the surrogate was afraid that they wouldn’t take her. But they both knew it would work out when, just after Jude’s birth, she started to cry and the surrogate woke them, saying, “Hey boys, get up, your baby’s crying.”
Over the years, Gennette’s high-powered job at Macy’s meant Welch stepped up to be the primary caretaker for Jude, a role he embraced. “I thought, maybe I’ll go back to work and restart my business in six months or a year,” Welch said. “But when that time came around, I didn’t want to stop doing what we were doing because it took us so long to get to this point.”
They were also worried about how it would impact Jude for them to live in four different cities as Gennette worked his way up the ladder at Macy’s. “But she tells us now that she thought it was a big adventure,” Welch said.
And now that she’s graduated from college, her fathers said they’re proud and excited to see what her next chapter will be.
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