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<p>Enjoying your rock-em, sock-em Sundays full of pro football heroics?</p><p>For real heroics, you ought to take a trip back to a time when the guys wearing helmets on Sunday were in the Prince Valiant comic strip, not on your big-screen TV. Now there was excitement, particularly when it was read aloud to the kids by a dad fulfilling his mission to keep the little ones entertained in the living room while Mom (bless her) toiled over dinner out in the kitchen.</p><p>If somewhere in this universe there is ever a museum for long-vanished rituals, I&#8217;d like to join the nominating committee.</p><p>&#8220;Mr. Mooney, what is your suggestion for an activity we don&#8217;t do anymore?&#8221;</p><p>&#8220;I nominate fathers doing voices as they read the newspaper comic strips to the children on Sunday morning.&#8221;</p><p>&#8220;Brilliant!&#8221;</p><p>Folks, once there was a time when Sunday papers came wrapped in color comic sections called &#8220;funnies.&#8221; Politics, communism, scandal, crime &#8211; all that was consigned to the inside. What you saw before anything else, whether the paper beckoned to you from a corner store news rack or was handed to you by a delivery boy with a coaster wagon, was Joe Palooka, or Dick Tracy, or Blondie and Dagwood.</p><p>Yes, we had our priorities straight.</p><p>I mean those comic supplements were big! We used to get Philadelphia&#8217;s Sunday Bulletin. It had not one but three- six- or eight-page splashy comic sections, plus a thick tabloid booklet of comics for good measure.</p><p>Of course you could spread the funnies out on the floor and read them yourself if you wanted. It was more fun, though, if Dad appointed himself the emcee of a Sunday morning trip through your favorites. You&#8217;d climb onto the arm of his favorite chair, or scrunch into the seat beside him (if a sibling hadn&#8217;t claimed that spot already) and away you&#8217;d go.</p><p>A good dad was a master of voices. He could do the steely resolve of ace pilot &#8220;Steve Canyon,&#8221; the screech of Maggie as she tossed a rolling pin at husband Jiggs and the chortle of a villainous scientist in &#8220;Flash Gordon.&#8221; They&#8217;d all sound the way you thought they should sound. There must have been some kind of training that men were required to take before getting married in those days.</p><p>&#8220;Mr. Mooney the Elder, we need a bit more of a hillbilly twang in your &#8216;Lil Abner&#8217; voice, if you don&#8217;t mind.&#8221;</p><p>&#8220;Certainly, sir. I don&#8217;t want to let my children down.&#8221;</p><p>Well, it must have been something like that. Not every comic got the royal parental treatment, though. I never requested, nor did I ever hear read to me, an installment of the very dull (in my view) &#8220;Mary Worth.&#8221; And I thought &#8220;Smokey Stover&#8221; was just silly.</p><p>&#8220;Prince Valiant&#8221; was a real challenge for a parent. Val himself needed to sound heroic, while King Arthur had to seem godlike. Dads universally, I believe, struggled to voice the beautiful Princess Aleta without the kids hooting. But the panoply of exotic bad guys in &#8220;Dick Tracy&#8221; gave Dad the chance to show what he was made of.</p><p>Do any families still do this? Probably not. Gender roles have changed, and I guess kids have other things to do than pile onto Dad and see if he can do a convincing &#8220;Beetle Bailey.&#8221;</p><p>But there&#8217;s an even bigger cause: today&#8217;s scrawny Sunday comics are barely a shadow of their old selves.</p><p>And that&#8217;s not very funny.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Remember When </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/web1_TOM_MOONEY-2.jpg</photo0><caption0>Remember When </caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>Tom Mooney</p><p>Remember When</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history columnist. Reach him at tommooney42@gmail.com.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Remember When: Listening to Dad read the comics in a variety of voices