Tuesday night’s season premiere of the hit PBS series “Finding Your Roots” with Henry Louis Gates Jr. kicked the season off by profiling celebrities Stephen King, Gloria Reuben and Courtney Vance, all of whom knew virtually nothing about their fathers and/or their father’s family. The first part of the program revealed to viewers a variety of circumstances that took the fathers out of the lives of each celebrity along with the hope of uncovering their family lineage. For Stephen King, he was just a young boy when his dad left the house for a pack cigarettes – never returning. Gloria Reuben was one of her father’s children from a second marriage. Her father was 73 years of age when Gloria was born and he passed away when she was quite young. For Courtney Vance, his father had been given away as a child and had always been in Courtney’s life until he committed suicide when Courtney was 30 years of age.

I suspected I would be able to relate to the many emotions everyone in this particular episode encountered based off of my own experience with my natural father and my step-father. And boy could I relate.
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