This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

Up next to listeners' story from Mark Walter about his father, whom he knew only a short time,

but dedicated his life too. During this piece, she'll be hearing the music of his father,

Cy Walter. Let's get into the story.

I was 11 years old when my father died of cancer in

1968, and he was only 52 and had had cancer for some 15 years.

But I wasn't aware of that. I was a child.

My mother and father made the difficult choice not to tell we

children of his illness and he worked what were late night nocturnal hours and they

decided that it would be better for him to live separate from us and he moved into

an apartment on 73rd Street and between second and thirdrd and this was in Manhattan on the Upper East

Sun it allowed him to sleep late because he would be working from 6 in the evening

until you know one or two or three or four in the morning and it also allowed him

the privacy and an ability to deal with being ill.

So my relationship with my father was a very loving parent.

Well, as I grew older and he lived apart from us, I would visit him frequently.

Remember very happy times doing so, getting my hair cut with him wandering

through the neighborhood where everyone seemed to know him he was very much a

beloved figure in that sense and he was very kind and I'll give you a wonderful

memory about that my mother and father Kam and Si had had a rule that I was not to ride my bike from

87th Street to 73rd Street. I was about eight years old at the time, and it was a rational

...