As families everywhere focus on Dad this Father’s Day we are happy to introduce you to Palos Verdes-based author Cort Casady and his new book Not Your Father’s America: An Adventure Raising Triplets in a Country Being Changed by Greed.
Casady, who calls PV a magical place to live and write says he and Barbara, his wife of 40 years, can’t imagine a better place to call home. PV Magazine reached out to the author to learn more about his career and his life in Palos Verdes.
PV Magazine: After a long career in television and film, how did you come to write a parenting memoir?
Cort Casady: When the world began to shut down in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, My wife, Barbara, and I found ourselves sequestered in our home on Academy Hill. And we thanked our lucky stars.
We live at the end of a cul-de-sac in a house with a lovely yard, towering palm trees, a pool, a hot tub, and a view of city lights to the East, surrounded by kind neighbors. Not a terrible place to be stuck when the world was closing down.
We felt very fortunate. Throughout the pandemic and to this day, we are blessed to have walkable streets – we do a two-mile walk that includes six cul-de-sacs on the hill – and a wooded bridle path nearby that reaches all the way from PV Drive North up to Chadwick Academy.
I started writing my memoir, Not Your Father’s America, in earnest during the pandemic.
We had moved to the Hill in 2018, after living in Manhattan Beach for 12 years and raising our triplet sons there. In the aftermath of the move, several files, including journals and notes taken over the years, seemed to surface like bones in an archaeological dig.
As Barbara and I read through them, we found anecdotes, scenes, quotes, and descriptions of memorable moments that captured the time when we were raising our boys. We shared the material with the kids at a family gathering, along with much laughter, and it was then I realized I might have the makings of an entertaining and unusual book. More importantly, for the first time in 20 years, I had the time to write a book, so that’s what I did for the better part of two years.
Not Your Father’s America: An Adventure Raising Triplets in a Country Being Changed by Greed combines two narratives: one is an account of the emotional struggle to start a family, the shock of having triplets, and the challenge of raising them; the other is timely, and I think useful, commentary about changes taking place in the America the triplets are inheriting.
We had been happily married for nearly 10 years before we decided to start a family. We thought all we’d have to do was stop using birth control to get pregnant. We had no idea the struggle we would face and we had no idea we would lose a baby girl born too soon.
When Barbara finally got pregnant and safely delivered triplets, we had no choice but to dive in overwhelmed and outnumbered, to face the exhausting and unrelenting demands of caring for three babies at once while trying to stay self-employed. Somehow, we did it. We survived, and our sons have prospered. Today they are all college graduates, 28 years old and successful professionals. Braden works for a private equity firm in San Francisco, Carter works for Stanford University as a research engineer and Jackson is a Los Angeles based artist.
Cort Casady has won two Emmy Awards and three NAACP Image Awards for his work as a television and documentary writer-producer. His numerous TV credits include creating television’s first weekly environmental series and helping to format and launch Star Search with Ed McMahon. He has served as Supervising Producer of the AFI Life Achievement Tributes for 19 years and is the author of Not Your Father’s America: An Adventure Raising Triplets in a Country Being Changed by Greed.
