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We hope you have a fabulous New Year’s Eve tonight — and if you’re out celebrating, make sure you look up your options for a safe ride home.

To close out the year, we’ve got a personal remembrance of Donald Moffat, an actor whose name you may not have recognized when his obituary appeared recently, but whose face you might know from dozens of movies.

For Kevin McKenna, a deputy business editor, Mr. Moffat wasn’t simply another character actor. He was a working dad and, despite coming from England, someone who helped make up the fabric of Southern California life. Here’s Kevin:

I had known Donald and his family for decades, since his daughter Lynn and I were high school debate partners in Southern California.

Donald’s westward odyssey began almost on a whim. “We said, Let’s go for the summer,” his wife, the actress and director Gwen Arner, recalled. It was 1969, and Donald had a part in a French farce at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. They rented a house in Manhattan Beach. “And at the end of the summer,” she said, “we decided to stay.” They bought a home in Hermosa Beach that they never gave up, the surf audible from its windows.