It’s a damn shame that my father died decades before TV’s hit show “Shark Tank” came along.

There’s no telling what sort of deal he could have made by submitting his prototype for solving that age-old question, “Does a bear (bleep) in the woods?”

Answer: The bear certainly can if it’s equipped with my old man’s bathroom breakthrough, “The Camper Crapper.”

Or maybe “The Crampper.”

He never really settled on a name.

I’d all but forgotten about my father’s creation until I found it in a garage awhile back. I hauled it out of its custom plywood sarcophagus and snapped a photograph. At least, I did as soon as I stopped laughing and could breathe again.

As I recall, my dad made this back in the 1960s to alleviate his mother’s fear of going camping. A citified Chicagoan, she was coming out for a visit and the thought of having to “go” in the woods scared the (bleep) out of her.

In which case, she would have been more than glad to have her son’s handy-dandy invention nearby.

My old man, rest his soul, left the world back in the 1980s.

Genius, however, lives forever.

---

---