Father’s Day is coming up this week, and so is my dad’s 85th birthday. I sure wish he were going to be here to celebrate both occasions, but he’s been gone for 20 years.

Digging through a bunch of old photos of him the other day, I came across one from Father’s Day 1964. I was startled. It was a photo of our entire family — me, my four brothers and mom dutifully facing the camera, posing the way conventional people do. Except for dad. He is facing backwards. Why was he facing backwards? Simply because it looked funny, I guess. Or maybe he was showing off a new haircut. There was no other reason.

The photo startled me because I hadn’t ever remembered seeing it before — and because for all these years, I thought that I had been the one in our family who invented posing in weird ways for photos.

But as I looked through other old photos, I realized that shticky poses were a regular part of my dad’s style. I found a picture of him from a charity golf tournament standing with three other guys in his foursome. As is the custom, the other three players are holding golf clubs. But my dad? He’s holding a rake.

In another, he’s clutching one of those gadgets for retrieving golf balls from water hazards. In yet another, he’s positioned himself in such a way that his face is blocked by an overhanging tree limb.

The more I looked at the old snapshots, the more I got a real glimpse of the man who was my father. He was a big guy — 6-foot-6 in his stocking feet, unless he was wearing stocking lifts and I didn’t know it. So he often encouraged photo takers to purposely frame their shots of him so his head was partially cropped out. As a result, I have lots of pictures of him from the neck down.

It would be incorrect to say that my dad was never serious, because he was. He was a smart and respected businessman, and active in community organizations and charities. But he also seemed to have an instinct for whimsy — and making people happy.

I remember strolling around our small town with him and watching the smiles spread across the faces of people as he’d approach. He always had a ready grin, a new joke or a funny observation: “Maybe I’m seeing things, but wasn’t that traffic light red just a moment ago?”

I noticed that he mostly focused on people who were elderly or infirm or just lonely. They needed a laugh, and he would give them one. As I think about it, that’s not a bad example for a father to set.

Pat Cashman is a writer, actor and public speaker.