A Man Named Charles, A Song Named Fraulein A Father's Day tribute from the Fortinberry sisters

We lost our dad young. We loved him completely. This Father's Day, we both wanted to write about him — so we both did. Here's what we each had to say.

✦

From Margaret

Our dad was something else.

He was a Marine who could cuss in three sentences and apologize in the fourth. He was a Baptist who knew which Waco bars stayed open the latest. He was a businessman with a service station in Houston who never gouged a customer in his life, and a hunter who once swam into a brackish canal with a rope in his mouth to retrieve a wild boar somebody else shot. He cooked everything he killed and most things he didn't. He wore overalls and Hawaiian shirts and Velcro flip-flops with cowboy boots and could not be embarrassed by either of his daughters, no matter how hard we tried.

He bit a hole in his own tongue at the Cadillac Bar in Laredo the first time he ever went out with our future best friends and just kept eating. He took our mom on a "second honeymoon" to Mexico, got lost in the Monterrey traffic, hated the mole sauce, bought her an Alexandrite ring for $25 in the town square, and drove like hell back to Texas to make it to cocktail hour with their friends. He always made it to cocktail hour with their friends.

He was an only child of older parents who taught him to cook and respect a gun and tell the truth. He had a scoutmaster named Johnnie Johnson who showed him how to make a Dutch oven cobbler at twelve years old, and the man cooked like that for the rest of his life. He believed there were two kinds of people: those who got a "case of the laybacks" at the beach, and those who hadn't yet. He drank Pearl on ice with lime "to pace himself".

He made our Halloween costumes by hand. He was Kermit the Frog the year Margaret was Miss Piggy and Sarah was Big Bird. He was the Old Sow the year we were the little pigs, and Margaret was finally too old to go along with it. He didn't care. He made the costumes anyway. He invented soup and sandwiches built from foam board. He could not be told that something was too much trouble.

He never minded that he had girls. He took us hunting starting at age seven. We got our first bucks at nine. We processed deer with him. We sat in deer blinds for hours. We came home filthy from his garage where he ran Family Car Care, and he never once told us to clean up before he hugged us.

His favorite song was "Fraulein" by Bobby Helms. He sang it to our mom on a pier in Waco on the last night she was supposed to be engaged to somebody else. She broke off the engagement the next week. They were married for thirty years.

Fraulein played at our wedding receptions. And years later when we started a boot company together — two sisters trying to figure out what to name it — we didn't have to think about it for long. We named it Fraulein because we wanted to carry him with us into whatever came next.

He's been gone a long time now. We were so young when we lost him. But our mom decided in those first days that we would not wallow. That would not have honored him. A man so full of life deserves to be remembered with laughter, not silence.

So today, on Father's Day, we're not writing about loss. We're writing about him. About the way he showed up. About the kind of father he was. About the man who taught two little girls that women can do anything, that food is love, that a good story is its own reward, and that you should always — always — show up for the people you love.

✦

From Sarah

Charles Fortinberry.

If you've followed along with our story, you already know that name carries a lot of weight around here. And this time of year — Father's Day — it carries even more.

Our dad died at 46. We were 17 and 14. It's the kind of loss that reshapes you, the kind that never fully leaves. But here's what we've come to understand over the years: he poured more love into us in that short amount of time than most people receive in a lifetime. And that's not grief talking. That's just the truth.

Our dad was many things. He was the "unofficial" track coach to both of us and practically every friend we had — the kind of coach who showed up not because he had to, but because he genuinely couldn't imagine being anywhere else. He ran with us. He rooted for us from the bleachers and the infield. He never missed a meet if he could help it — and he almost always could help it, because being there for us was simply his priority.

He took us hunting and fishing from the time we could walk. We're pretty sure we both spent our first birthdays at the deer lease. November and December babies — it made for a lot of birthday celebrations out in the field, and honestly, we wouldn't trade a single one of them. There's something about growing up that way, learning to be still and patient and present in the outdoors, that sticks with you. It stuck with us.

He was a man who knew how to do things. He could cook. He could fix things. He could make you feel like the most important person in the room without trying. He was funny — genuinely, disarmingly funny — and kind to his core. The kind of person who was always rooting for the underdog, who picked up a few "strays" along the way that came to consider him their best friend. If you knew Charles Fortinberry, you have a story about him. That's just who he was.

When we were young, he opened his own business — not for the usual reasons people give, but specifically so he could be more present with us. So he wouldn't miss the softball games, the dance recitals, the track meets. He made that choice deliberately, and we felt it every single day. Time with our family, all of us together, was the thing he valued most. He and our mom rarely went out without us. Looking back, that wasn't a sacrifice to him — it was exactly where he wanted to be.

We think we inherited that entrepreneurial spirit from him. And we know we inherited his belief that showing up matters more than almost anything else.

They say you look for your parents in the people you love. We think that's true. Margaret and I both found "daddy qualities" in our husbands — the kindness, the humor, the selflessness. The way a good man makes the people around him feel seen and safe and valued. Dad showed us what that looked like long before we knew to look for it.

So many adventures. So many memories we'll pass down to our kids, and their kids. A legacy not of things, but of time and love and showing up.

Happy Father's Day, Daddy. We miss you every single day — but we carry you with us in everything we do.

✦

From both of us

If you still have your dad, call him today. Tell him something specific you love about him. Tell him a memory. Make him laugh.

If you don't, we are with you. Father's Day is heavy when you're missing someone. The grief doesn't go away — it just changes shape over the years. But it can sit alongside joy. We have learned that. The remembering can be a kind of love too.

To the dads who showed up. To the dads who tried. To the dads who are gone but never forgotten. To the dads whose songs we are still singing.

We see you. We honor you. We thank you.

— Margaret & Sarah

Daughters of Charles Fortinberry