Unexpected Revelations or Do you know anyone who has/had a secret life?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

Geez, mine sounds so plain compared to these other ones.

When I was newly dating my first real girlfriend, I was at my parents’ house and was about ready to tell them I was dating a girl. I had told my mom I met “someone” and she kept asking about “him.” Well, we had the news on while we were talking, and something came up about a gay pride rally and my dad muttered something about “those damned queers.”

Well, I made up a boyfriend. I never told my parents that I was dating a woman (dated her for about 9 months). At one point, my mom asked when I was going to bring my boyfriend over for dinner. Luckily, I had a guy friend who was game to play along. I ended up having to make up stories about my relationship with him. Usually, I tried not to talk about my relationship, but my mom was nosy and so I made up a couple stories just to placate her. I ended up not being able to handle the charade, so I told my mom we broke up and that I wasn’t dating any one.

My dad has since softened his stance on homosexuality. My sister had an openly gay best friend and she was actively involved in her high schools Straight-Gay Alliance. But I still never told my parents that I like girls and boys and that I’ve seriously dated women before.

82

Oh, and I totally forgot about the grandparents of another childhood friend. As soon as they both turned 18, in their senior year of high school, they eloped and didn’t tell anyone, and went back to live at their respective parents’ houses, and eventually had a wedding some months later, after they had graduated high school. Why? So they wouldn’t feel guilty about having premarital sex.

My friend didn’t find out until she was in her teens, when her grandparents made some slip regarding their anniversary date.

83

Taking a chance here that no one I know reads this…

About two or three years ago I found out my brother has a daughter who must be about 22 or 23 now. He and his girlfriend went to Chicago for the summer, had the baby, and put it up for adoption. They broke up at some point after that, and then the ex developed cancer that led to a quick death.

This was told to me at a party by the woman who had cared for the dying ex in her last days. I was shocked. No one in my family knows this. All I could say was “now I know why he drank so much back then”. Upside: bro is now happily married with a 2-year-old son.

84

At work? Kee-rist, can’t you at least keep your child porn at home?

Joe

85

You’d think so. We had to let some go not only because he downloaded porn at work, but kept doing it after he was reprimanded.

86

No, it’s fairly common to find porn (not usually child porn, though), indications of an affair, or similar embarrassing things when cleaning out someones desk at work.

Safer than keeping it at home, where there is a snoopy wife and inquisitive children.

87

My parents got married very young and moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958. One of their friends in NY knew a couple who had early moved from NY to LA and told my parents to look them up. The couples became friends and were still friends when I was a kid in the mid to late 60’s. My sister and I called the husband Uncle Lou.

Some time around 1968, Lou died. He was killed while holding up a liquor store. :eek: It turned out that he had a second life where he was part of a criminal gang. His wife and young daughter had no clue. This was actually his second wife. His first wife abruptly left him before I was born and cut off contact with everyone. That all made sense after his death. She must have discovered something.

His second wife was fairly religious and he Mother was extremely devout. They were in a state of shock enough over all of this when they discovered a locked box among his things. When they opened it they found a stash of pornographic photographs. Given the era, this was hugely shocking to them. To make matters worse, he had made drawings on the pictures in crayons like of penises over the heads and in the crotches of the women in the pictures. The two of them spent the next few hours burning the pictures.

I didn’t find out about all of this until I was an adult and was reminiscing with my Mom over something unrelated and it reminded me of Uncle Lou. I asked her, “so what ever happened to Uncle Lou?” She said, “Oh my god do I have a story for you.”

88

It still counts as an unexpected revelation, though.

89

I had completely forgotten about this, but my parents did that too They ran off and got married, then went back to their parents’ houses until my mom started showing.

When grandma confronted my mom, she confessed that they were already married.

Grandma told me this story years ago, and my mom doesn’t even know I know.

90

Well, I have a couple – one involves my own family, the other involves a neighbour.

My father’s first wife (my mother is my father’s second wife; he became a widower after his first wife, Eloísa, died of septicaemia) couldn’t have children. However, I happen to know that I have a half-brother somewhat older than myself. My father had him with another woman while he was still married to his first wife.

I want to meet him very much; I have been told that he looks a lot like myself. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find him yet. I only know that he lives somewhere in or around Barcelona, that he has the surname of his mother, and that my father arranged for all of his education to be paid for (it seems that he is now a doctor like my father was).

The one involving my neighbour has more criminal overtones. My neighbour has two sons; they were her pride, the apple of her eyes. The elder one went to Madrid to study physics. After a brilliant stint in University he came back to my home town with his diploma, his Ph.D. and excellent degrees, applied for a job as a teacher of physics in the newly-opened faculty of computer science there, and began a very promising career there, a star teacher, becoming a member of the directing team of the faculty, with very good prospects of becoming Dean or something. Life was beautiful!

Well… Actually, it wasn’t.

A few years after this very successful guy came back to my town, one of the physics teachers of the faculty went to a congress, and there he met, by chance, with the professor from the University in Madrid who had been the Ph. D. tutor for my neighbour’s son. The teacher said: “Oh, Professor Such-And-Such! We have one of your Ph.D. students as a teacher with us!” “Oh, yes? Who is he?” “His name is This-and-That”. To which the Madrid professor said: “Uh… Who? I have never heard of him…”

They began pulling the thread… And everything unravelled. It transpired that this extremely successful man… HAD BEEN UNABLE TO PASS EVEN THE FIRST SEMESTER OF HIS PHYSICS COURSES IN MADRID.

But he didn’t want to tell his parents, so… He lied. He faked his reports… And he stayed in Madrid.

And he kept faking reports, and digging himself deeper and deeper.

He ended up faking his achieving his diploma, and faked the diploma itself. He ended up being pretty good at it.

He faked his papers about having done a Ph.D. under famed professor Such-and-Such. I guess that as time passed he became bolder.

And then he risked it all and applied for the position as a teacher. He gambled that, because it was a faculty that was just opened and was in a hurry to fill up the positions, they would not check everything thoroughly. He was right – They had a look at his (very well faked) documents, had a look at his (very well faked) list of published literature, DID NOT DOUBLE CHECK that the published literature or the Ph.D. thesis ACTUALLY EXISTED (this was a grievous fault on the faculty’s part)… The rest is history.

When everything exploded, it made the newspapers. The scandal was unbelievable, the credibility of the university in question was tarnished beyond belief, and my poor neighbour took a terrible hit to her sanity. She is still not all there.

You may ask: “How on EARTH was he able to teach, write exams, grade them…?” Simple: As for teaching, he based himself extensively on what the other (legitimate) teachers were doing. As for writing exams, he began by taking questions from other universities’ examinations, and later, from past years’ examinations. As for grading the exams, he managed to cajole other teachers into doing his work. He was a terrible physics student, but a fantastic conman.

91

For the teaching and grading, it’s actually quite common to just drop it on the graduate students. For the exams, I don’t remember the story so I don’t know how long ago it was, but nowadays there is an UNED branch which posts all the exams online, and Physics is one of the majors UNED offers (in Spain, as JoseB well knows, it is normal to practice for upcoming exams by trying to solve old ones; I’ve practiced on exams that were older than me because that’s how long that teacher had been teaching the course).

92

When my grandma was a teenager she was raped by a relative. The baby was raised as her sibling.

Apparently at some point my mom and all her siblings found out that she wasn’t their aunt but their half-sister. Thing was, I never saw this woman until after my grandma passed away. Everyone else knew, but one day this woman shows up at a family gathering and I’m like, who is that? And then I was told the story all nonchalantly. And now she shows up all the time at family events and she’s treated just like another aunt. I kinda want to ask my mom how they all found out because she wasn’t around at Grandma’s funeral and all the stuff that goes on with an estate. I don’t know if they found out then and Mom just managed to keep her shit together and not tell us kids, or if they all knew way before and decided that now that Grandma was dead it was okay for her to come around.

93

Three stories

  1. One of my friend’s mother was raped as a teenager/young adult and my friend has a half sister out there somewhere. Her mom refuses to talk about it, and probably knows very little since the child was put up for adoption. I don’t recall how my friend found out, but I know that there has ever been that one, first, conversation about it and no information since.
  2. My maternal grandmother, C, divorced my grandfather, E, and several years later remarried a fantastic man, A. C and E’s children were all adults by then. My mom and her siblings always referred to A as “Uncle” and my siblings, cousins and I just assumed that “Uncle” was less awkward than calling him step-dad or whatever. A few years ago, at a family dinner, the topic of my grandmother and A came up and someone mentioned them calling him “Uncle A”. My mom and aunt replied, “because he is our uncle!”

Jaws dropped around the table. A had been married to E’s sister, but she had passed away. He had stayed in contact with the family over the years and sometime after the divorce struck up a relationship with C. So he really was my mom’s uncle, and that’s how they knew him first.

The funny thing in all this is that my mom and aunt thought we knew all this. It was never a secret, but somehow they just thought we knew that E had two sisters and one brother and we never did (we knew the brother only). Turns out both sisters were long-dead, both had had kids, and my mom has fond memories of all of her cousins, including rich “Ian Smith” who lives in London, England and has now become the family joke because us kids like to pretend that there’s no way this man exists and his name is so generic we could never look into it, etc. If I ever meet the man, I might just faint - it will be like meeting Santa Claus or something!

  1. This is a non-story (which I’m sure I’ve posted before).

Same grandmother, C, and her first husband, E, before they got married. E went off to England for WWII, but they wrote letters back and forth throughout. Despite the divorce following E’s adultery, C had kept some of the letters from E. When my grandmother died, we found these letters and started reading them. Several of them from E were apologetic - I’m so sorry for what I’ve done to you. I can’t believe I let myself be tempted in that way, I don’t know how you can ever forgive me. If you family every finds out - if anyone ever finds out - they’ll kill me. I’m such a horrible person etc. etc.

Due to the still raw funeral-related emotions, these letters prompted a family fight about how my grandfather must have been cheating on C even before he married her, and how awful, etc. We weren’t sure if we wanted to keep reading them and wondered why C would have kept them.

My aunt collected the letters and brought them home to read that night, and came back the next morning to announce that she knew what E had done.

He had had sex with C. In 1942, before marriage, in very, very Catholic Québec. One of the biggest sins imaginable, really!

94

My family history included the story of my father having a daughter 10 years before he married my mother and had me. So, I knew I had a half-sister out in the universe. Never investigated who she was.
A year ago, SHE FOUND ME !!
She had been adopted, and always wanted to find her birth parents. In June, she found her mother, and her mother’s 2 daughters. Found my father’s name in her birth mother’s address book, found my father’s obituary, it had my name listed, Googled me and found me through the music school I teach at.
She e-mailed me, and we’ve been playing catch-up ever since. We really LIKE each other.
PLUS, she was living in Kansas in 1979, and used to go to a big music festival in the town she lived in. Knew the local guitar builder, and her then husband worked at the guitar factory.
GUESS WHERE MY BAND PLAYED IN 1979?
GUESS WHICH GUITAR BUILDER I HUNG WITH WHEN I WAS THERE?
She and her 4 kids danced to my music 30 years before we knew we were brother and sister.

David

95

veromi.net is a good site for finding people, their ages, possible relatives and towns where they’ve lived.

96

My ex-husband’s brother married a British woman when he was in the military and stationed overseas. After a few years when his military stint was over, he faked her death, collected a few hundred thousand in life insurance, and moved back to California. Where he married another woman, fathered a couple of kids, and then vanished. At which time he moved to Oregon or Washington (I forget which), and moved in with a new girlfriend. That lasted another couple of years, and he vanished again, along with her car and her savings.

Then the girlfriend happened to see him on TV as a contestant on a game show, and said, “Hey, that’s the bastard who left me and stole my BMW!” So she called the police or FBI or whoever one calls in such a circumstance, and it then came to light that he had two wives in two countries, and several kids scattered all over two continents, and a big ol’ case of insurance fraud, and oops, a car with a trunk full of cocaine that he had stolen from a few dealers in L.A. (stolen the coke, not the car, as I understand it. Not that it makes much difference, at that point.)

He did about 20 years in prison, for all of that. I thought he was lucky, in that one of the wives, or the girlfriend, or the freaking drug dealers he was stealing from didn’t kill him.

97

A few years ago, one of the more popular professors in my department retired suddenly. No one said anything about it for quite a while, until the local paper got a hold of the story.

It turns out that this professor was wanted by at least three states for child molestation, and that he’d already served at least one sentence for that crime before he came to my university, which the university was unaware of when they hired him. When the police confiscated his home and school computers, they found gobs of kiddie porn on them. He fled to Central America, where he lived under an assumed name. He was arrested and brought back to the United States a few months later. While he was gone, he was on America’s Most Wanted.

He’s currently doing time in Ohio. It’s not clear if he’ll be tried in the other two states, or if they’re happy with the sentence he’s currently serving.

No one had a clue about any of this until he retired and the police came around looking for him.

98

I’m having a hard time believing this, i mean pregnant women were not required to stop going to the grocery store, kids would have pregnent moms and aunts and sisters.

I believe the reason working women couldn’t be married was that their place was in the home. Wives and mothers should be taking care of their families. For a women at the time a job was what you did when young, and its basic purpose was to expose you to potential husbands.

99

Everything came to light in 1998. It was a BIG story in the newspapers in my home town, and dragged for quite a while. I don’t know if it made the national newspapers for more than a day or two, though.

100

Indeed. Several years ago, about 2 weeks after I took over as a manager of a department, we got a complaint about a guy looking at porn at his desk at night. We thought it was an intern, so I had IT scan his computer. It was fine.

The guy sitting one desk over, however. Eeeewww. He was looking at some nasty stuff.

Turns out it was the guy’s second offense for porn at work in less than 2 months. He wasn’t allowed in the office the next morning and HR started termination procedures. While cleaning out his desk HR founds one full cabinet of porn DVDs, much of it kiddie porn. Also found a video camera. And lots of video camera mini-cassette tapes. One can only imagine what was on those tapes…

The guy was about 28, had just gotten married, and his wife was due to have a baby in about a month. It was also about 2 months before bonus time. Nice time to get yourself fired.