This thread is for people to share small stories about their families. My paternal grandfather, for all of his days, had scares on his right hand. He was born in 1916 and in 1918 his uncle was on Christmas leave from the western front in France. Being Scotland in 1918 with the German U-boat blockade there were shortages of just about everything but his uncle , my great grandfather's older brother, was home on Xmas leave. Naturally, they got to drinking Scotch as that is what Scotsmen do when they are on leave from wars and my grandfather's uncle had a few to many. His unvle was wearing the only good clotges he had including the only shoes he had which meant Army issue WW1 trench boats which had metal spikes so soldiers could get traction in the mud of the trench warfare in France. My grandfather's uncle accidentally stepped on his right hand in 1918 resulting in a badly scared hand and several fingernails which did not grow right. He died at age 87 but he always had those scares on his right hand from 1918.
My mother's paternal grandfather made a lot of money in the fluorescent lighting business in the 1920's and 1930's. When prohibition was repealed his company had the contravt to make neon signs for Budweiser in the upper midwest so he had a good income all through the depression . They even had a chauffeured Duensenburg when my grandfather was growing up. In 1943 he had just graduated high school and because he was in JROTC they let hom onto a fighter pilot program. It took two years to train a pilot so in 1945 he went on his fight comvat mussion over Japan but he never saw a sibgle ebemy plane becayse by then Japan had no air force and even if he did they had no fuel for it. Right after the second atom bomb dropped and the war was over. He was a pilot with just one combat mission when there were tons of experienced pilots and he had no hope of getting a job as a pilot. He took a job in the American occupation of Japan when everyone else was getting put because he didn't know what else to do. He said the occupation of Japan was the best duty ever, he was assigned to over see a bakery which made bread for the American occupation forces but that the Japanese major domo saw to everything so that they would do a brief formal inspection then the major domo would have food, sake, and women waiting for them and that was how they would spend the rest of the day. To the victor goes the spoils.
Great thread idea, but wouldn't this kind of thing get a better response if it weren't in the red room?
My cousin's father-in-law was economically misguided and extended and deepened the Great Depression, but fortunately the Supreme Court struck down most of his nonsense so the US could start a strong recover by 1940. He had a heart attack and died before he could nuke Japan, so his replacement did it. My cousin got divorced from his ne'er-do-well offspring, thank goodness, removing the stain of having a Democrat in the family. They had a Nazi in the family but they were proud of him for not fingering Admiral Doenitz for war crimes.
I think Dinner should tell us how Ramen and Volpone tag teamed his mom last Thursday to liven this thread up. There, now it's a red room thread
I guess this counts as one. This is more about my brother than anything. When he was four, maybe five years old we were watching some movie on TV. One of the women started undressing, she got down to her bra and panties. My brother then started crying, my mom asked him why he was crying. He said his "dinky" hard and it wouldn't go back down. He then stood up and pointed to his crotch, and yeah since he was in his onsies pajamas, he had a little tent going. I started laughing, got yelled at and sent to my room. Needless to say my mom had no idea how to deal with it and told him to just wait and would go back down.
I ruined bacon for my brother by telling him it came from pigs. Charlotte's Web was his favorite movie when he was three and he hadn't made the connection about why Wilbur was so fearful of his life
When Grandpa and Grandma were first married, they lived in an apartment. Grandpa was a pretty fair artist before he became bed-ridden in his last years, and during this period he had a habit of sitting down at the kitchen table with a glass of milk and drawing. Well, one day Grandma was cleaning up while he had a pretty good picture going, and she knocked over his glass and spilled it. He got mad, and she was so upset she began bawling. Some of her family lived in the same building, and they came rushing down to see what was the matter. When Grandpa saw how upset Grandma was and how many people had been alarmed by such a trivial matter, he started laughing and said, "There's no use crying over spilled milk!" Grandma was actually engaged to another man when Grandpa met her. He started wooing her and took her up in a plane and that, as she says, was that. I think I've mentioned already the time Dad was working on a farm at night. Being the Southwest, there were irrigation channels, and a flash flood had struck. Dad saw a lump of something drifting along and discovered it was a skunk. He was sure it would spray him, but he knew in his heart what he had to do. So he pulled it out . . . and got sprayed. Dad had a few jobs over the years -- he actually met Mom while installing windows at her family's home -- but he wound up in a particular workplace that combined, shall we say, three of the more stressful occupational areas. There was a period I well remember when it seemed our home phone rang late at night, every night, for months on end, with work needing his input on one thing or another. And he would often be impatient with us, because work had pounded the necessity of efficiency into him so. (Thankfully he's much more relaxed in retirement.) All of this is to say that he was under a lot of stress already when a certain coworker was dropped in his lap. This man had had a deteriorating attitude for a while. Someone would give him a task and come back later to check his progress, only for him to claim he'd never been given the task. That sort of thing. When he got to Dad, he was on his last warning. All Dad would have to do would be to file one more warning against him and he'd never have to see the man again. But Dad stuck with it, he monitored the man, and after some weeks he went to his supervisor and said, "This is not the man we hired." So they worked together to get the man to a doctor, and when a diagnosis of some sort of progressive mental illness came back, they worked together to file all the paperwork necessary so that he could retire early and get something to keep him and his wife alive -- I'm fuzzy on the technical details, but that's what it boiled down to.
Not yet. When I was a kid I watched, "A Private Little War" and didn't think it was a justification for the Vietnam War. Now it's Red Room material.
