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I recently found this in some very old GMail, written by my sister:

Dear Kids,

I wanted to take a few minutes and tell you a little bit about POP POP Sid.

I Dad was someone who always said Go For It

He always said make a decision Set the wheels in motion and never look back

He said come in make yourself at home what can I get you

He mixed up whiskey sours in the blender and got all the ladies a little tipsy

He believed in letting all the kids have wine at the table

He hated censorship

He said any country that expelled its Jews never amounted to anything.

He said if you wake up early the day is yours.

He got up He washed the car did the lawn, tinkered in the garage and then he made us pancakes and begged everyone to come down and have some.

He loved to dance to the Big Band Sounds.

He read, listened to the radio and watched TV all at the same time.

He brought me 45 records He usually brought me a gift each night.

He never got home until 8 during the week and 11 on Fri night.

He loved to swim. He taught me to swim in the ocean. We went about twice a summer.

He taught me to ride a bike after the eye doctor said absolutely not.

He taught me to play chess and beat me in a few moves every time.

He read every book I ever mentioned to him and remembered as much about it as I did.

He rode the bus with me to the Port Authority when his back hurt too much to drive me there when I went to Israel.

He loved Edie Gourmet and Ella Fitzgerald.

He liked Pete Seeger, Peter Paul and Mary and The Smothers Brothers.

He was a liberal but he believed in the death penalty.

He loved people a lot. He liked to have big parties with family and neighbors when everyone had a great time.

His biggest pleasure in life was to make someone welcome and comfortable in his home

He had back surgery at age 43 and afterwards walked with a limp.

He stopped smoking after his first heart attack.

He inspired me because he got up everyday and worked hard but always offered his customers, his family and friends a smile a funny story or a discussion. He rarely got angry.

He liked to get all the kids involved in a softball game in our backyard. There were four bases. The cellar door, and three trees. It was a lot of fun.

He brought Exodus to shul and read it on Rosh HaShannah

He built our back porch paneled our basement put down tiles in the bathroom and hallway

He would initiate gymnastics practice on the living room floor. Head stands and cartwheels where required.

He made spaghetti and meatballs on Sun.

He read silly stories to me over and over and also my most favorite book Heidi.

He had a workshop in the basement and he made me a dollhouse and pointed the rooms the same colors as the rooms of our house. He took me in the motor boat when we went up to the Pocono mountains I put on a life jacket just the two of us I was about three.

He loved to bounce the babies high up to the ceiling over his six foot head. Calm loving and loved Dad.

It's inspired me to write some stuff about what I remember.

I don't remember that much about my Dad at all. Dad died in November 1976, when he was 45 and I was 9 years old. I ... did not take it very well. I have blocked out most of the preceding and following couple of years; I have very few memories of being a kid.

I do remember this about Dad, from what Fran mentioned:

Myself drinking wine at the table. It was pretty much limited to Shabbat and holidays, but it was so normal it was expected. We always had the super-sweet Manischewitz Concord Grape wine, so getting kids to drink it was no problem at all ... At nursery and later at Hebrew school, when there was occasion to, we were usually served grape juice, but at home we got the Manischewitz.
Dad washing the car. I remember this pretty well, but not as a morning thing like Fran wrote -- much more commonly in the afternoon.
Dad reading, listening to radio and watching TV at the same time. I'm positive I remember him listening to one ballgame on the radio and watching another on the TV.
Sometimes rather than reading he'd do hooked rugs. He took that up after his back surgery I think. I remember one of his rugs was a grandfather clock, at least 4 or 5 feet long. I'm not sure what happened to it. I took up hooked rugs too, not sure if I did that before he died or after. I still have two of the rugs I did. One rug was an array of apples, one of the apples with a worm crawling out of it.
Dad loved to swim at the pool, at the ocean, at a lake ... wherever he could! Dad taught me to swim when I was about 6 or 7 I think. I remember him saying "swim to me" and walking backwards in the pool .... I remember being a little mad when I realized what he was doing, too. :) While at the pool he also loved playing volleyball.
Dad taught me to ride a bike too.
Dad tried to teach me to play chess too, and I guess I absorbed it well enough to play though I was never a champion. I remember his chess set with an almost tactile memory. It was plastic and the board was heavy cardboard. The rooks on the set had a guy riding an elephant.
I was off and running with reading very, very early. Dad had a big library of books on shelves in the basement, at least it seemed big to me at a time. Some of them I bounced off hard - I remember he had "The Bell Jar" and "The Ox-Bow Incident", neither of which I could get into. He had some science fiction though. I am sure I started reading Asimov and Heinlein because he had them in the library.
Not everything in Dad's library was appropriate to be read by kids. In addition to the hard books above, there was a fair amount of pornographic novels. No illustrations but damn seedy text. "The Skin Book", "The Vertical Smile", "Gwen, in Green", "A Girl Possessed" are a few that stick in my head. He also had a Playboy subscription which I guess did not get cancelled right away when he died; I clearly remember "Quietly Kathy", which Google tells me was Kathryn Morrison, May 1978.
Dad also had a very large set of National Geographic magazines, some on the shelves and most boxed. When it came time to get rid of them in the 80s, I tried to bring them to the library but they didn't want them.
I barely remember my sister going on her Israel trip.
I never rode the bus with Dad, but during his last year, after his heart attack, he used to take long walks several miles long. I remember walking with him to Channel on the White Horse Pike, and a different time I remember walking with him to Fran's apartment on Zane Ave in Collingswood.
I don't really remember him with his music, but I do remember the LP records he left. Some of them I loved a lot - the Alan Sherman records, Sing Along With Mitch ... I remember the "console" -- a record player with built in speakers, the size of a kitchen sideboard.
I remember a few of the parties.
I definitely remember his back surgery. He slept on the couch in the living room for a while -- probably a month or less but it seemed like a long time to me. I was 7 that year. I don't really remember the limp.
I do remember him stopping smoking. Fran wrote "after his first heart attack" -- in fact Dad only had one heart attack. 15 months later he had open heart surgery and he died on the table.
"Rarely got angry" - I definitely remember that about him.
I didn't know he built the back porch, but I remember what it looked like very well. Concrete tiles for about 8 feet square. The back door to the garage and the back door to the house (kitchen) were about 5 feet apart, and they both opened onto this porch. A picnic table and a Weber kettle charcoal grill were nearby. In later years the grass used to grow through the gaps in the tiles.
I do remember him doing the paneling to the family room, and he had an actual bar there. I don't think it was a wet bar. The paneling was neat at the time. I also have memories of a few different rugs in that room, while the rug in the living room (a room we seldom used) never changed.
I played a lot in the partly finished basement. In my early teens I even kept my TRS-80 down there for a while. There was also a big heavy electric adding machine that I can still hear.
I don't remember him making spaghetti & meatballs, but I do remember breakfasts. Eggs and pancakes were two things he did great.
Memory from being VERY little - I remember him carrying me up the stairs after we came home from somewhere (probably South Philly where Mom's family lived). I liked him carrying me so much that I sometimes pretended to fall asleep in the car hoping he'd carry me again. Other times when I was awake, he'd sometimes carry me on his shoulders.
Dad liked working in the gardens. There was a strip garden with marigolds on one side fence; he grew corn one year on the side of the garage; he had another big vegetable plot at the back fence. There were bushes on the side of the garage too, as well as bushes in front of the house; he tried to keep them well trimmed all the time. We had an electric hedge trimmer that my brother Steve got badly cut by once. We also had an electric,not gas mower, and an electric snowblower. I guess Dad didn't like gas powered lawn stuff?