The Miracle On Ice.
I had a rich uncle die and leave me money.
Unfortunately, he was only modestly wealthy (mostly in farmland) and the old, old will was directed to distribute the proceeds to his three sisters and their families. All three sisters died long ago (my grandmother in the 1970s, the last shortly thereafter) and all had had several children, many of whom had several children themselves.
So my share was something like 1/260th of the total, a couple of hundred dollars.
I spent it well, and now get to begin stories with “A rich uncle died and left me money…” which may be more valuable.
IIRC there was a thread a few years back along these lines…except it was focused on the details of WWII.
Was a pretty interesting thread…maybe somebody more able and less lazy than me can link to it.
The Cubs winning their Division. If they win the World Series, I’ll seriously question what planet I’m living on.
How about Ed Gein from Wisconsin - I don’t want to google him (because I want to sleep tonight!) - but if I am recalling correctly he was a murderer and a grave re-digger (if that is a word) who I believe was said to have made home decor (lampshades, etc…) from victim’s corpses as well a “holiday sausage” which he gave as gifts to neighbors. Now that is out there! Don’t think David Lynch or even the Coen Bros could have come up with that one.
Wisconsin also had Dahmer…
My cousin is into scuba diving. On one trip to the Caribbean, her group was in the water exploring when they came upon what seemed to be a freshly sunken boat.
When they looked at the name, it turned out to be their own boat. It sank just after they got in the water. They had to bob around for a while before being rescued.
I wouldn’t have believed the story if it hadn’t been my cousin telling it to me.
That Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day, fifty years to the day after 7/4/1776.
I mean, if I’d been an editor and an author had that as an epilogue, or finale, or some kind of major plot point, I’d have had the writer take it out. Who’s going to believe a coincidence like that?
Tom Clancy said that 9/11 was less believable than his own story. In Debt of Honor, the pilot was acting on his own, with little planning, and it was an act of personal revenge.
With 9/11 there were a lot of people involved, with months of planning, study and research. Not once did anyone slip up and give the conspiracy away. That’s what Clancy found amazing.
Woody Allen’s marriage to Soon-Yi, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow.
I actually have another one in my family. My great-great-(great? I’m not really sure)grandparents got married in spite of one being Catholic, and one being Jewish. My Jewish g-g-g-mother’s family disowned her, which was just as well, as far as I’m concerned, because they were a Southern family who’d been in the US for a long time, and may have been slaveholders, but she went from wealthy to a three-room shack that her immigrant husband could provide.
Anyway, then he got ex-communicated for nun-napping. His best friend had a daughter who joined a convent, and after about six months (she was only about 16) wanted to leave, but they wouldn’t let her; she snuck a letter out by passing it to someone during Sunday mass, and her father and my ggg-father stole a rowboat to get to the convent, jimmied the door, and barged in and hauled his daughter out. I like to think, over his shoulder, or something.
They both got excommunicated. I think stealing the boat figured in as much as the breaking into the convent.
So my ggg-father decided to thumb his nose at the church and converted to Judaism. He and my ggg-mother moved to New York City, and started moving in circles with recent immigrants, even though she was from a Sephardic family, and didn’t speak Yiddish, and he wasn’t even Jewish by birth.
Fast forward to the Depression, they had a granddaughter, who would be my grandmother, and had an Irish last name, who was working at the 5 & Dime in a building that housed a newspaper in its upper floors. She had the job because no one knew she was Jewish. She was 21, but still lived at home, because of the Depression. After work, she took a bus to the second nearest kosher butcher and grocer so her boss wouldn’t see her go into the closest one.
My grandfather was a reporter at the paper, and watched what he thought was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen walk to work every morning, and one day, he sent a cub reporter down after her to find out her name. He kept trying to meet her, but she was trying not to get caught flirting with someone obviously Jewish looking, because she didn’t want to get fired.
He finally caught up with her at the second-closest kosher butcher, and walked her home (I like to imagine he carried all her stuff). She told him she was worried about getting fired if her boss found out she was Jewish (she had light brown hair and blue eyes). He said if she was married, she wouldn’t need to worry about a job at the 5 & Dime. They got married like four months later, and were married for more than 50 years until he died.
What I never asked, and I never can, and wish I had was how he knew she was Jewish, but apparently he did. Or maybe he just figured it out from her first name, and that’s why he pursued her.
They had a son who married into a Holocaust survivor family, and there are some incredible stories there, too.
And it’s longevity, and the fact that they have adopted children.
Actually for me it’s just like The Onion.
I mean even trivial things like: “Yeah I said some childish things about Ted, but he started it!” (paraphrased, but only slightly) is exactly the kind of headline I’d expect to see there, let alone “build a wall – make mexico pay for it” or “black people: what have you got to lose?”
Well, there is the fact that the first Native American to greet the pilgrims did so in English. His name was Samoset. His English wasn’t so good, so he went and got a different Native American, Squanto, whose English was better because he had been taken to England. As a slave.
What editor would allow that in a novel?
That’s not too implausible at all.
I don’t know how many of you remember Baghdad Bob from the first Iraqi war, but that man was his own SNL skit.
The Football War, a 100-hour war between El Salvador and Honduras that began over a soccer match.
In my own personal life, my great-grandmother’s father had to flee from Tennessee to Arkansas because he and his brother murdered their brother-in-law. I never did find out why, but it sounds like a novel.
Oh, another story in my own family tree. On the other side of my family, I was researching my grandmother’s family, and I got very confused because her mother’s parents were not married, instead, her father was married to her mother’s sister. But apparently, he was maintaining two separate households, with two sisters, and when his first wife died, he married my grandmother’s grandmother. I asked my grandmother about it, and she didn’t know anything about it, but she asked her older brother and he told her the whole story. Needless to say, she was upset.
And that people continue to be so fascinated by it almost 4 decades later. 
And if they do, Back to the Future II’s prediction was only a year off. 