The other day I e-mailed my dad to say hi and to ask him about an old family story. He was in the Army in the early '60s and got in a fistfight. Now, my dad is a preacher’s kid and is so stable he makes Mr. Rogers look excitable, so after so many years it finally occurred to me to wonder how he came to be in a fistfight in the first place. What was it about? How did it start? What did he do to the other guy?
Turns out he was dating a black woman (!) at the time, a WAC, and one day as he was leaving the PX another guy jumped him, calling him a very rude name that rhymes with “trigger lover.” :eek: My dad just wanted to defend himself, so he wasn’t really hitting back, and then some other guys ran up and pulled them apart.
I was astonished by this because…well, I wouldn’t describe my dad as racist, but he has been known to make fairly patronizing remarks about blacks. He grew up in Chicago in the '40s and '50s, and I suspect most of the black people he knew were fairly…unsophisticated people, train conductors and cleaning women and such. (The house he grew up in is now in the middle of a pretty nice, middle-class, almost entirely black neighborhood.) His parents grew up in rural Tennessee in the teens, '20s and '30s, and I can only imagine what experiences they may have had and what impressions they passed on to their five children.
So anyway, I had no idea my dad would ever even consider dating a black woman, let alone that he actually did. For some reason this news really impresses me. I am also amazed that I am learning new things about my dad now (he’s 65 and I’m 39). Jeez, Dad, anything else you want to tell me?
Have you ever learned anything startling (good or bad) about your parents?
Only a few weeks ago my mother (whom I live with temporarilly since I moved to the Isle of Man) arranged a re-union with her teenage friends. They had arranged a meal, on the day of the meal they found out I was off work and suggested I tag along. I was hungry so I said yes (I figured the meal would counteract the discomfort of being with 5 women over 50 whom I’ve never met, and one man, my step-dad).
During that meal my mum and friends got quite tipsy and remenissed about all the rebelious things they’d done when they were teenagers. I can’t remember the details but they involved offering (and possibly taking) of illegal drugs, casual sex with virtual strangers, lecherous middle aged male advances (on my mother and/or one of her friends)
I also remember each and every friend speaking starry-eyed about my dad who they implied was a corruptor and a rebelion. He’s a respectable man (I mean I respect him and look up to him) with a PHd now and a rather large (by british standards) house with a huge garden. I also deeply respect my mother who is not quite as succesful as my dad, but has done pretty well for a teenage tearaway.
After my mother died, my sister and I were going through some cardboard boxes of legal papers, letters and such.
We found a bundle of dozens of letters, written to her over a 35-year period, from a man in a distant city. He never signed his name, he just closed with “Love, H”. The letters spoke of how much he enjoyed their last meeting, how he was looking forward to her next trip up-state, and so forth. The writer was clearly educated and well off financially. The letters stopped a few years prior to her death at age 73!
During the period of time these letters covered she went through two husbands and one long term live in bf.
It was infurating, because even though we searched very thoroughly, they were careful and we could gain no hint of who the mystery man was. Every letter was post marked at Tallahassee, Fl. and Mom lived in Miami. She was a legal secretary and travelled to Tallahessee several times a year on business.
Sis and I had some fun trying to guess if one or both of us was “H”'s love child. We have agreed that the first one of us that gets to hell will look Mom up and chew her out for leaving such intriguing information without any hint of who “H” was!
Wow. What an intrigue! One can assume that since the letters stopped before she passed on that he died.
You may be able to send a couple envelopes to the post office of the zip code involved, explain the mystery and ask the post master to ask his older employees if the hand writing looks familiar.
Or, you could just publish them along with your mom’s life story and wait for the mula to come rolling in off the NYT’s best seller list.
I was amazed to find out several years ago that my dad (whom I have always known as a teetotaler) apparently used to have a pretty serious drinking problem. He used to drive around with bottles of whiskey stashed under the seat of the car…that kind of thing. He stopped drinking when I was young, as far as I can tell about 30 years ago. I certainly would have been old enough to remember some of these details but I don’t, which makes me think I kind of blocked them.
It did explain a lot about our relationship and indeed about the whole family dynamic. A lot of things suddenly made sense.
Wow, John Carter of Mars, that is some interesting mystery!
I have learned surprising little snippets about my dad over the years. (He died some years ago so I usually hear stuff from relatives.) Sometimes it’s stuff I should have known, but never caught on or remembered being told.
For instance, I found out that he went to a girl’s private school up until the time his dad died. The reason for this was that my grandfather (my dad’s father) was a gardener on a posh Hollywood estate. They lived in the “gardener’s house” on the estate and my dad played with all the rich kids. Anyway, their employer was a generous fellow, and so offered to pay for private schooling for his employees’ kids. And I guess the private school was a girl’s school. Apparently a few boys went there too, my dad being one of them.
When my grandfather died suddenly, of course the rest of the family left the posh Hollywood estate and went elsewhere.
I also found out that my dad literally had to beg to be let into the Army for WWII (by the way, I’m old, but not that old—I was a “late in life” child). My dad was always sort of a klutzy fellow, with bad eyesight (in fact, blind in one eye) and bad skin. The Army doctor did not want to accept my dad because of many things, mostly, I think, his flat feet and probably the bad eyesight and a few other problems.
But I believe that my dad’s personal doctor wrote a note and was able to persuade the Army to let my dad in. Some strings were pulled or pleas were made, anyway. He served stateside, as a Prisoner of War guard. He was not allowed to be sent to the tropics, because he had really bad acne and the doctors said that the tropical weather would have been utterly miserable for him. My dad said that the Army was one of the best times of his life and he was very proud to be a soldier.
I was really proud when I found out about the lengths he went to in order to serve our country in that war. He did a good job and he said that the prisoners he guarded were often good sorts—they hadn’t wanted to be in the war in the first place and were relieved to be prisoners because they were fed well. (In fact, he told a story of one prisoner who escaped but then returned because he was hungry!)
In a college class I had to interview somebody, and I chose my Dad. I couldn’t believe the stuff I didn’t know. One of the more interesting tidbits involved his career. He’s a college professor with his doctorate, something that has always seemed natural to me. What I didn’t know is that he’d been planning to go in construction. However, he often drew during his breaks, and his coworkers said he was good and should go to school for that. And he did, and stayed with it.
I also found out a few years ago that he was a batboy when a Negro League baseball team came to his dinky hometown and played an exhibition game with the local high school team.
I found out quite by accident when I was 16 that my mother used to be a nun; when she was out of town my dad and I went to see Dead Man Walking and were talking about nuns later in the car and he said something along the lines of “…like your mother.” Huh?
She wouldn’t tell me a damned thing about it either - said it was none of my business. I’d known she’d gone to Catholic school and later taught in Catholic schools, and that we’d gone to visit a convent in Pittsburgh where she’d known many older nuns, but I assumed she’d known them from when she taught up there or whatever. I mean, she knew lots of nuns here in town from volunteering at the Sisters of Mercy hospital, in a totally non-religious way. A nun! We’re not even Catholic! My parents have both been Presbyterian all my life! (Although I guess that makes more sense than continuing to be Catholic after you skip out on the whole nun thing.) No idea if she was whole-hog nun or a lay sister or something. But nobody ever mentioned it - her sister or brothers, her parents, nobody. Guess they assumed I knew!
Both of my grandmothers had children out of wedlock by other men before they married my grandfathers. Perfectly acceptable now, of course, but something that was simply Not Done in 1930s rural Minnesota.
My Dad was about 45 when he found out that his father was his mother’s second husband.
She was widowed when her first husband died suddenly. They had no children. Later she met my Grandfather and they began dating. When my Grandfather proposed to her, he made her promise that she would never mention her first husband again, because he didn’t want to be second best. She agreed and stuck by her word except on one occasion - a relative was going to hospital to have a routine procedure similar to the one that took her first husband’s life. She was very, very worried about it, and blurted out to her 10 year old daughter that she’d been married before and how she lost her husband. Then she never mentioned it again.
Her daughter carried this secret for fourty years. She had convinced herself that her mother only told her because that first husband was her real father, not the man who raised her. I don’t know why, but when she was 50 she finally spoke about it to some of her siblings but they were all too scared to raise the matter with my Grandfather, and by this stage my Grandmother was very ill and would be unable to communicate for the rest of her life. I bit the bullet and called Grandfather and asked him straight out if it was true that Grandma had been married before, and he laughed. He was very open with me about it, told me what had happens and why it was a secret and after that finally produced his marriage certificate (I’d been after a copy for years for my family tree but he was always vague about it, as it contained the details of Grandma’s first husband).
Turns out my aunt had nothing to worry about. Her parents were married more than 12 months before she was born. Her mother’s first husband had been dead for a few years by the time she was born.
A few years back I learned my Grandma had flesh eating disease early in her life. This was shortly after Lucien Buchard got it in his leg. The news somehow found out about it and interviewed her! I never saw it though. But she had gotten it in the bridge of her nose when she was in her early 20’s and just married to Grandpa. The only way you can tell something is different is because her nose just seems to cut off flat to her face between her eyes. I never thought anything of it, I just thought that was her nose. But she’s lucky to be alive it could easily have eaten into her brain and then I wouldn’t be here (this was before my Dad was born)
My Mom was engaged once before to someone other than my father. I also learned they (Mom and Dad) had an off again on again relationship for around 4 years before he finally popped the question and they got married. Part of the on again off again thing would have been a result of Dad being in the navy. Otherwise they would never have met, as they were born and lived on opposite sides of the country.
One of my Dad’s on/off friend’s he’s known since high school when she was my aunt’s friend. Apparently they had the hots for each other and nearly got it on behind the bleachers when they were teens. :eek: Not too long after Dad joined up with the navy. He’s been in love with her for years but she is married and has two sons (both of whom I crushed on majorly at one time) and almost left her husband for my Dad after he divorced my mom! This is stuff he’s told me at various times… a lot recently, don’t ask me why. It’s like I’m his sounding board for women troubles.
I learned after she had passed away that my mother’s mother was previously married and had two sons. She divorced her abusive first husband and married my grandfather. They got custody of one of her sons, and later my grandfather adopted him and gave him a new last name. All this was done in a time when divorce was something to be ashamed of and covered up. For all of her shortcomings, she certainly was bold enough to do the right thing when it mattered most. Regarding her shortcomings, I also learned that my mother left home and got married at 17 to escape from her controlling, domineering mother.
I know stuff about my dad, but it’s not very pretty, so I won’t go into that here.
My friend’s dad grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, and throughout his childhood he always felt a bit like a Cinderella - like his parents didn’t like him as much as his brothers and sisters. He was treated like a servant when at home, and though his siblings had received a private education and university, he’d been sent to a state school and forced to leave at 16, to go and get a job and bring home his salary. He’d always thought it was because he was stupid or unworthy.
Anyway, about two years ago he had to get his birth certificate for a passport. He’d never had to use it before, and the original was lost, so he had to go to the public records office. He nearly keeled over when he received the copy: he didn’t recognise his father’s name; the people he thought were his parents were actually his aunt and uncle; the woman he thought was his aunt was actually his mother; his brothers and sisters were actually his cousins.
His biological mother was only 15 when he was born - so he deduced that his mother had become pregnant out of wedlock, and her parents had persuaded her already-married sister to take him in as her own. The two girls would have had to go into hiding for months until the child had been delivered. And when the child arrived, the aunt and uncle resented him being imposed on them, and treated him accordingly.
A tragic story, made worse because all of the participants were dead by the time the identities came out, so he could never learn the actual truth.
I knew my father had to get permission to join the Marine Corps at 17. It never occurred to me that he dropped out of high school to join. I didn’t find out until several years ago long after his death. He was in a hurry to join because he didn’t want WWII to be over before he got in. They dropped the bomb while he was in Boot Camp. He did get his GED when he got back home and was always able to provide for us. He didn’t want to advertise this fact in his life so we wouldn’t get the idea to drop out ourselves.
I’ve made a few interesting discoveries of the years.
The story I had been told was that my Grandma left my Grandad, took my mum and Aunty and moved to England. Without telling my Grandad where she had gone. She then met another man and got re-married. This was before I was born, so both men were in my life from the start, so I called them both Grandad.
The truth however is slightly different. My Grandma met husband 2 while still living in Northern Ireland with my Grandad. She left my Grandad and moved to England to be with husband 2.
2)When writing my family tree for a school project, I discovered that no one knows who my Grandma’s father is (Including my Grandma). My Great Gran had her out of wed-lock, and brought her up herself, and never told her who her father was.
3)On my dad’s side of the family, I found out that 6 out of my 7 auntys were pregnant on their wedding day. As was my Grandma. (The aunty who wasn’t pregnant on her wedding day has never had any children.)
Yes. I did learn something about my father just before his death and though it was years ago, still can’t get over it (more exactly about not having been aware of it and not having ever talked with him about this) . Perhaps I’ll post about it someday, but I don’t feel like doing so right now. I know, it doesn’t make for an interesting post, but I couldn’t help myself.
