Louis Roney: Top of the line

• When I was a small boy, I learned the rule: Never hit a girl. I have followed that rule scrupulously and find it a necessity among all worthy people.

• Robert Browning philosophized, “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be.” It is gratifying to say, “Right on, Bob!”

• Vivien Leigh, the British late-comer who walked away with the movie role of Scarlet O’Hara in “Gone With The Wind,” may have been the most interestingly beautiful woman I ever saw in person. She and Laurence Olivier were together a long time, and then made it legal in what was one of the most talented and handsome histrionic couples ever.

• Like most American dads, mine was undoubtedly thanked inadequately during his days on Earth. I am often asked, “What kind of a man was your father?” Thinking of my dad, my mind immediately goes to the “superlative department,” although he probably didn’t hear much about that talk in his lifetime.

My father was a true intellectual, a teacher of Latin, Greek and several modern languages — and a fine sportsman. In his youth, he was a champion fencer in foil, sabre and epée. Later, at Rollins College, he enjoyed coaching a fencing team that won national renown. I remember a match at Harvard when dad’s Rollins team won handily over my alma mater! Dad was a very kind person, but I doubt he ever received the gratitude he deserved as a father. He was a man whom I never heard use any words of profanity or even vulgarity. When I asked him why he never said ugly words that are all too often used, he said, “There are other words that express things much more accurately without resorting to profanity.”

Dad was a first lieutenant in the Army in World War I, and managed somehow to join me as a naval officer in World War II when he was far over age. He was a strong patriot who told me, “Any time our country is at war, I want to be in the U.S. military somewhere.” Once during WWII I was on a destroyer escort sailing down Long Island Sound. Suddenly a seaman called me to say that my father was on the ship passing us in the other direction. Through megaphones, we quickly transmitted greetings to each other.

Our family had moved to Winter Park in the early 1930s when my dad was a language professor at Rollins. When my parents decided to build a house on Palmer Avenue in Winter Park, my father sat down and drew complete plans for the house. The builder afterward told me that dad’s plans were as professional as any he had ever used.

Dad had a way of dismissing perplexing challenges with the customary phrase, “That’s a snap.” When I once showed him a difficult problem I had been assigned in integral calculus at Harvard, he pronounced it “a snap” and proceeded to prove it by solving it in a couple of minutes.

In his late years, dad suffered from advanced macular degeneration. “Malheureusement,” I have inherited that same partial blindness from him. I wish that I had inherited his brains instead!