INQUISITR.COM / Entertainment

Tina Fey Gives Touching Tribute To Late Father

By Niki Cruz
Published on: 10:12 PST, Oct 27, 2015

Tina Fey’s father Donald H. Fey passed away on October 18. The SNL alum’s father passed away at Bryn Mawr Hospital in Pennsylvania of heart failure. To memorialize him, Fey used her wit and candor to remember her father, telling local paper Philly.com all about her father and the type of man he was.

Mr. Fey, who was a war veteran, a retired firefighter, and a fundraising writer, was 82 years old when he passed. The site describes him as a professional writer for over 30 years, mostly working in fundraising development. He helped develop hospitals, schools, and public service agencies, while raising over $500 million for different facilities.

Of her father, Tina Fey said, “He was a great dad and a talented artist and writer, but I also think of him as a Great American – he served his country in Korea, he served his city as a fireman, he took his kids regularly to art museums and historical sites.”

The comedian continued, finding humor in her loss, to incorporate it into her remembrance, “When he taught me how to play baseball he would say to me, ‘If you throw like a girl again, we’re going in.’ (I took it in the spirit it was intended.) He read poetry and history and newspapers. He was an informed patriot. The Republican Party should have tried to clone him. ”

Tina Fey’s brother Peter, Donald’s son, said of their father, “He was a great painter, and we read two of his poems at the funeral service. He was very dapper, loved learning, and showed us how to expand our horizons and how to live a life properly.”

In addition to his work as a firefighter and a fundraising writer, Mr. Fey was also a director of development communications at Thomas Jefferson University. He retired from the college in 1992.

Fey is survived by his two children, and his wife Jeanne.

In her 2011 memoir Bossypants, Tina Fey covered large ground about her parents and the kind of childhood she had growing up. Of her parents, she had said that they were always supportive of her career, even though they had reason to worry, given that a career in comedy wasn’t exactly the most stable. Fey told Terry Gross about her parents’ support.

“To their credit, they never said, ‘You like entertainment. Are you sure you don’t want to be an entertainment lawyer? [They understood] me wanting to pursue this before I had commitments, before I had a family. And I think they knew that neither my brother nor I would ever come back to them destitute.”

Tina has also noted that she grew up in a Republican household and was expected to vote Republican despite her politics leaning towards the left. Of the politics discussion, in 2008, Fey said that her mother’s only instruction on voting was “You just go in and pull the big Republican lever.” She called it the welcome into her adulthood. She joked that her mother told her she didn’t even have to read the candidates name, just to pull the Republican lever.

As a mother herself, she has been very open about the choices she’s made for her children. As the Inquisitr reported, she advocated for breast feeding, and also spoke about missing her baby after returning to work. Her solution to all mothers that miss their children after maternity leave is to cry. She admitted that she full-on sobbed in her office for a good ten minutes.

[Photo by Kevin Winter / Getty Images]

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