I never knew my father.  As a kid, I imagined him to be a brave soldier fighting enemies across the ocean (this was the late 1960s and the Vietnam War was in full force) or a firefighter who spent his days saving kittens and grandmothers from horrendous fires.  But when I was older, my mother told me that my father had been a member of a notorious motorcycle gang in Philadelphia and that . . . well . . . she wasn’t sure exactly who he was. That’s the free-love mentality of the 1960s for you, and paternity validation remains a mystery to this day. Later, my formative years were…