The EnvisionAir Podcast | Personal Wellness, Self Development and Growth Mindset · Nicole Ng Yuen

❤️ COMMUNITY: Hugging the Ghost of My Father: A Journey of Self-Discovery | Zack Rogow, Author & Playwright

·52 min·3 clips

A Yale dictionary example unexpectedly quotes one of Lee Rogow’s stories and includes his name.

1. The EnvisionAir Podcast episode centers on Zack Rogow’s memoir, "Hugging My Father's Ghost," and the question of how to know a father who died when his son was three. 2. Host Nicole introduces Rogow as an author, poet, playwright, translator, and educator, and his memoir matters because it uses unpublished family material. 3. The episode asks what it means to rebuild a parent through memory, archives, and imagined conversations. 4. Rogow says he grew up in Manhattan in the 1950s and 60s with parents who met at NYU in Greenwich Village in the 1930s. 5. He places his parents in the context of the Great Depression, World War II, and what is often called the “greatest generation.” 6. He explains that his father, Lee Rogow, kept a World War II journal and served in the U.S. Navy after avoiding the draft. 7. Rogow says the Navy used a “90 Day Wonders” program for people with little military experience after Pearl Harbor in 1941. 8. He describes his mother, Mickey Rogow, as glamorous, boisterous, politically active, and deeply engaged with the arts. 9. He says she wore a Dior black skirt in France in 1948 and later wore men’s clothes in a Marlena Dietrich style. 10. He adds that she was the first woman to wear a bikini on Fire Island and had it made by a seamstress. 11. One striking thread is the emotional cost of losing his father in an airplane crash when Rogow was three years old. 12. Rogow says the family did not fit the conformity expected of 1950s American households. 13. He remembers not having the stable, reliable parent who was always on time and always there. 14. He recalls a Fire Island father-son softball game that he could not play in because he did not have a father. 15. He says those moments made him feel like an outsider, but they also gave him freedom to define masculinity for himself. 16. At Yale, he says he felt distant from his father because the literature being taught reflected an Anglo-Saxon world that did not include his family. 17. The Yale library story about “shibboleth” becomes a turning point when he finds a dictionary example quoting one of his father’s stories. 18. Rogow says that discovery let him feel part of the literary world and connected to Yale despite class and cultural differences. 19. The conversation is reflective and intimate, with Nicole sharing her own grief and Rogow responding in a measured, personal way. 20. Readers drawn to memoir, family history, and literary recovery stories will fit this episode, while listeners wanting a fast commercial writing guide may skip it.

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