She’s still around! She plays tennis with her 97 year old second husband.
:eek:
:eek::eek:
Considering how large my extended family is, I should have plenty of stories like this. But I don’t. Some of my family members are really pretty strange, but as far as I know there aren’t any stories like these. And if there are, they’re pretty well swept under the rug.
My late grandma, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, was once caught trying to shoplift food from a Safeway. A store clerk tried to detain and question her and she beat the poor bastard senseless with a can of soup. The guy had to be hospitalized, and Granny B. got sent (back) to the state hospital in Austin.
When she was on her meds, she was the pefect picture of a sweet old Texas grandma. When she stopped taking them…voices telling her to commit crimes, invisible animals breaking into her house and stealing things, nocturnal visits from Errol Flynn and/or the Devil; the bizarre episodes when her mental illness was in full swing could fill a book.
My mom’s dad was a drunk and an asshole. He chased my granny, mom, and uncle out of the house and out of his life at gun point when mom was barely 5. What we know of his life after that is sketchy, though granny remained on good terms with his uncle (who was a great guy from all accounts, and certainly helped granny, mom, and my uncle out in several tight spots) and he passed on any big news. Mom’s dad died back in the late 80s - drank himself to death.
Anyway, there’s a story that back in the 60s, he showed up in a north Florida town and took a hotel room for a week. He had with him a young woman from parts unknown who appeared to speak no English. Well, he “went out for a drink” and left her alone in the room, unable to communicate with anyone, penniless. True to form, he was gone for several days, and by the time he turned back up, she’d hung herself. No one knows who she was, why she was with him, or why she hung herself rather than leave. He wasn’t charged with anything and simply left town again. I am not even sure if he had her buried.
My granddad was a small-time booze runner during prohibition. Not the tommy-gun toting kind of booze runner, more of a “Hey, can we borrow you and your little truck?” kind of booze runner. He used to cross the border into Canada and go up Highway 2 (the 401 expressway didn’t exist), often going all the way to Quebec, which was the first Province to repeal Canadian prohibition laws. That’s how we got to have family friends up there, which ultimately resulted in my dad meeting my mom.
He was no arch criminal or anything. He didn’t go super-regularly, but did go often enough to be on a first-name basis with some of the border guys. He said the border guards showed no particular interest in what he was up to. He’d come back with some dorky cargo to half-heartedly hide the booze, like sacks of potatoes, but you could easily hear bottles jingling around as he pulled up to the border. The border guards would go :rolleyes: and ask, “Now, Chuck. You aren’t bringing anything back you’re not supposed to, are you?” and would pretty much wave him through.
By all accounts, he had no connections to organized crime (that’s why he never came back with big casks of whiskey or anything), it was a bunch of friends, family, and a huge ton of his church fellowship, would go talk to my great grandfather: “Hey, Robert. Is that boy of yours going to visit his friends in Canada anytime soon?” and everyone would place their order for a bottle or two through my great grandfather, and my granddad would go shopping.
EmAnJ, was he an alcoholic already or did he become one as a result of the shooting?
And completely unrelated: JoseArcadio! I loved that book.
Filling pages …wow.
My dad impregnated his girlfriend when he was a senior in high school. I have a half-brother somewhere.
My paternal grandmother’s oldest brother, Matthew, was married to a woman whose name no one now alive can remember (offhand). This was in the 1920s, and this is the Italian side of the family. They had a “boarder” (today we would say they rented a room), and somehow Wife got involved with him. She got on the back of Boarder’s motorcycle, carrying her infant daughter Antoinette, and rode off, leaving her other children, Rose, Frank and Leonard, standing in the doorway. Those children went to an orphanage. Matthew later “imported” a woman from Italy to marry, and they had three more children.
Orphanages. Shudder. My paternal grandfather was raised in an orphanage as well.
Also, my mom’s sister had a baby when she was a teenager, but she gave it up for adoption and that really is the end of the story. My mom was married and living out of state at the time, so she only knows what they told her, which was very little.
Wait, he drowned after taking apart his Ark? Perhaps he should have finished the job.
Maybe he took it apart while it was floating.
How ya’ doin’ bro’?
My Mom gave up a baby for adoption when she was 13. Pretty sure it was a girl.
My uncle on my mother’s side was kind of the black sheep of the family. A fun and likable guy but not exactly responsible. He went through 3 marriages and I have no idea how many girlfriends, and he was an alcoholic, which is what eventually killed him.
He flitted from job to job, maintenance guy, car salesman, I don’t know what else. He ran up huge credit card debts and then went bankrupt (when you could still do that). Throughout all of that he somehow managed to always have a nice house and live a comfortable lifestyle, so I guess he may have been involved in some shady things, but I can’t say that for sure.
Okay, everybody knows someone like that, but here’s the story. In the seventies he and his second wife went off to live in Germany. He had been in the Army, was stationed there shortly after WWII, and had always wanted to go back. He lived there for a few years.
I’m not sure what kind of work he did while he was there, but he apparently lived comfortably enough. My grandmother, his mother, flew there to visit and he showed her around Germany as well as Switzerland and France.
When he finally came back to the U.S. he had a car he had purchased in Europe shipped here. One day he showed up at my parent’s house tearfully begging for help. It seems that he had never actually paid for the car, or at least he had started payments and then stopped when he got back here, I’m not really sure. Apparently if he didn’t pay off the car he would have gone to prison for grand theft.
My parents, who were in no way wealthy, cosigned a loan so that he could get the money to pay off the car. He swore that he would make the payments and they’d never hear another thing about it.
I’m not sure if he ever made any payments or not, but at some point my parents had to start making the payments so they wouldn’t lose their house. After a few months of this my grandmother paid it off and gave my parents the amount they had paid out of pocket. She told my mother not to tell him that she had done this. She thought that he might eventually pay back my mother (who would then give it to her) but that he probably wouldn’t pay it back if he knew that she had paid it.
He died a few years back and, as far as I know, he went to his grave believing that my parents had paid for that car and he never made any attempt to pay them back.
I don’t know if this qualifies, since I’ll gladly tell anyone that comes along… 
My granddad on my mom’s side (very German) was a very religious man. He also believed that his side of the family was related to the Hapsburgs (a very important royal family). He got big into geneology, looking for the proof that he was related to kings. Eventually he found the link - except that we’re related through some sort of extramarital affair/bastard lineage, some sort of court courtesan or just-plain-ho, I’m not sure which. Grandpa was mortified. I find it immensely amusing.
My uncle kidnapped a '70s television icon and was jailed for it. We have the Enquirer blurb in a scrapbook somewhere.
You’re not going to leave us hanging are you? C’mon, who was it?
My dad was married before he met my mother. His first wife divorced him; apparently, he didn’t want the divorce, and he took it all pretty hard. Not long after the divorce, she died in a car accident, meaning that my dad got custody of their son. My dad was pretty hard on him; he ran away from home before I was in the second grade, and I saw my half-brother only sporadically after that. He died in prison of AIDS years ago. I’ve never seen a picture of my dad’s first wife, and I don’t know what her name is.
I have a cousin, let’s call her W, who married a guy, N. Some years back, N’s brother was arrested for the murder of his wife, and that’s the tip of the iceberg. Apparently, this is how it happened: N’s brother and his wife were arguing at home, and he pushed her down the stairs. She was very badly injured by the fall, unconscious but still breathing. He apparently considered things for a minute, then went outside, got a length of pipe, came back in, and “finished her off.” In typical farmer fashion, he then did the chores, fed the animals and such, then called the police to report the “accident.”
And that’s where it gets interesting. What they’d been arguing about, it seems, was that W, my cousin, was having an affair with N’s brother (the murderer). So, my cousin was fooling around with her husband’s brother, the brother’s wife finds out about it, and that leads to her murder. My cousin had to testify about all this in court.
We don’t talk about it much, because W and N are still together.
Susan Day.
And the reason this is an* embarrassing* family story: Because if you’re going to hold one of the Partridge Family hostage, it better be Danny Bonaduce.
Was that Skidmore?
He was one already.