Two days before Thanksgiving in 1964, Tim Allen attended his father’s funeral as a then 11-year-old boy (Timothy Alan Dick). A few days earlier, a drunk driver swerved across I-70, went through a median and landed on top of the Dick family car driving home from a Colorado football game.

Although Gerald Dick’s wife and several other children were in the car and two older brothers were injured, the 40-year-old father of six was the only fatality in the automobile accident, dying “in my mother’s lap,” Allen would later say.

“He was a great dad, love of my life,” he recalled in a 2025 interview.

Allen had been at a friend’s house that day. And soon after being told about his father’s death, he remembers being told by an uncle, “No, there’ll be no crying. I don’t want your grandma upset.

See Full Page