I am eternally grateful that my father was no nonsense. He got the “bum” out of us very early.
No one ever came into our house to do anything: carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, insulation, siding [when he was 80!], painting, wallpapering, excavation, cement work and barbering. I never went to an actual barber until I was in college.
Once, before I was born, a horse got away from some stables that were at the end of our block - in North Philadelphia, believe it or not - and was essentially terrorizing the local populace. My father was the only one in the neighborhood who had ever been around farm animals. He raced out of the house, grabbed the rearing horse’s reins, gave him a cuff across the snout and calmed him down.
Forty years later, at his wake, I overheard a guy saying “Remember the time that Jay’s father calmed that runaway horse down?”