Big Daddy

But mostly he's happy to have these people around him, happy to belong and to have someone to take care of—a team or a son, or his brother and sister. They all amount to family. His mother remembers that Cecil would do a lot of the cooking for the family. She would prepare the meals on weekends, and then from her office at La Brea Dodge in downtown Los Angeles, she would call in the final instructions. Cecil would move about the stove, the phone cradled on his shoulder. Cooking by long distance, and he was glad to do it. "He was a loving son," she says.

These days he is pulling people even closer together, and his own marvelous son was a local call this happy summer. All that's long distance are those home runs, one after another.