In the early to mid-1960s, my father, Raymond Daniel McCarthy, spent many Friday nights candlepin bowling at lanes located near the intersection of Main and Pleasant streets. Dad bowled in a league made up of Easthampton mill workers. He was a shipping clerk who worked for Hampden Specialty Products, located on Pleasant Street in Northampton’s neighboring town.

On a lot of those Friday nights, after he tossed his last ball toward the pin boy manning his lane, dad met a friend he referred to as Mr. John. He was John Emerson, the business manager of the Mary Burnham School for Girls on Elm Street.

What did my factory worker father, who graduated from St. Michael’s Catholic High School in Hamp — and who never went to college — have in common with Mr. John, who was a Phillips Exeter Academy and Dartmouth College alum?

I know they were both history buffs. And they both enjoyed having a few pops at the now defunct Rahar’s Inn kitty corner from The Hampshire Bookstore. I have no idea how these two men ended up getting to know one another. John Emerson’s game wasn’t candlepin bowling; it was golf. Which was a game I started playing a lot of circa the early ’60s. But dad never drove a dimpled white ball, nor did he ever sink a putt. Thinking back, I can’t recall my father ever paying a visit to the prep school at which his friend was an executive, despite my working there for three summers, mowing lawns and doing other maintenance jobs.

The school then was located across Elm Street from the Smith College campus. It later merged with another women’s private school, and became the Stonleigh- Burnham School, loacated in Greenfield.

One of those summers when I worked at MBS, Smith got all kinds of national attention when the film version of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” was filmed there. The movie, directed by Mike Nichols, and starring Elizabeth Taylor, also had a scene filmed at a road house in Southhampton, The Red Basket. Which, coincidently, was where my father met my mother in 1946. Fast forward to 1977, The Red Basket was where my now wife and I chose to hold our wedding reception.

We did not know at that time that it was the same place where my mom and dad had first connected.

Undoubtedly, Dad and Mr. John talked about the filming on some of those Friday nights at Rahar’s. Maybe they even met on the campus, each there to watch a movie being made. But that’s just a guess. I so wish my father was alive today, so I could ask him these questions I have about his friendship with John Emerson. Alas, that is not to be, nor ever will be. Dad died at the age of 69 in 1986. His friend lived to be 97 years old; he passed in 2012.

R.I.P. Ray McCarthy. R.I.P. Mr. John. Two friends, so very different from each other. And so very much alike, in their ways.

Terrence McCarthy, an Easthampton native, is a writer who now lives in North Carolina.