I have always liked listening to my grandfathers stories. Although they were exaggerations.
My favorite was the one where when he was my age, he had to walk to school, 15 miles a day, barefoot, in three feet of snow, uphill both ways. And he liked it.
Or he was so poor when he was growing up, that they couldn’t afford a dog, so they tied a leash on a tumble weed.
What were some stories that you will always remember from your grandparents?
My maternal grandfather was the only grandfather I ever knew. He had lost the pinky finger off his right hand while chopping fish – sliced it clean off. As a child this missing digit fascinated and terrified me. I finally got up the courage one day to ask what had happened to it.
“I stuck my hand in a trash can and a rat bit it off!” he replied, and thus scared me for life. I still have a phobia about trash cans. Years later my mother told me the truth and I know he was only being cheeky, but still.
My granddaddy was an interesting character – he bought me a swingset when I was a tot. He could be rough-and-tumble though. He was once dancing with a girl in a club when her boyfriend comes stomping up, none too pleased. They get in a brawl and my grandfather bit his ear clean off. Years later he goes into a movie house and sits behind a man missing an ear. He leans forward and taps the guy on the shoulder and asked what happened.
“Some sunvabitch bit it off in a fight!” the guy snarls. My grandfather got up and quietly left.
.:Nichol:.
My grandpa lost his left eye when he was 7 and running with scissors. No kidding, that’s really how he lost it. He had a glass eye in its place and would sometimes take it out and show it to us grandkids, the nerve wiggling in the back of the socket the whole time.
My grandmother lost much of her hearing due to a childhood illness, and was both colorblind and legally blind (she could see somewhat with very thick glasses). She met my grandfather at a school for the blind.
Grandpa was sweet as pie to us, but my dad tells the story of when he was a little boy walking with his father and a completely blind friend of his father’s, who walked with a stick. A couple of thugs decided to try to mug them, and my dad watched as my grandpa and his buddy commenced to beat the crap out of the would-be muggers, then calmly picked up my dad and kept on walking. Ha.
You know what RandMcnally? I think it’s an International Grandfather Conspiracy. I remember a friend’s grandpa telling me the same story when I was ten, with the addition he had to warm his feet in fresh cow pats and was greatful for it.Even then I suspected it was a case of ‘Lets feed Johnny Foreigner Tall Tales of Harsh New Zealand Life’.
For the longest time, I believed my grandfather was in the “little boys army.”
Truthfully speaking, even to this day, whenever he tells a story, I have to ask my grandmother if he’s telling the truth or not. He has lived a fairly eventful life, so I can never tell.
My father’s parents traveled around the world three different times on tramp steamers. Somewhere, I still have hand tinted postcards that they would send back from India and the far East. While visiting the subcontinent, my grandfather met Tenzing Norgay, the sherpa who summited Mount Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary. He expressed amazement at how Norgay could speak several different languages but could not write his own name. He would also mention how, at a border crossing, the Hindu guards would pinch the Muslim day workers’ chapatis (flat breads) into pieces to “make sure they were not smuggling any jewels inside of them.”
He also talked of the days when he was a lead engineer for the installation of telephonic communications circuits during the construction of the San Francisco bay bridge. He had photos of just the towers standing in the water without any cables or roadway slung between them. It was with admiration that he talked about how the riveters’ helpers would fling red-hot iron rivets in between each other for dozens of yards, landing into conical scoops that they held, in order to supply the rivet guns from the forges on the decks below.
He would rarely talk about his role in World War I. He was poisoned with mustard (chlorine) gas while in battle at the Argonne forest in France. For the rest of his life he would wheeze terribly, and have only a purple heart to show for it. He never mentioned how he single-handedly overran a German machine gun nest and shot nine different enemy soldiers with his weapon. What he would talk about was how important is was to be able to sleep through the shelling and barrages.
He spoke of how, one morning, he awoke to find the pup tent directly next to his gone with nothing but a small crater remaining. He had slept through the fatal explosion without losing a wink. Soldiers who could not remain asleep quickly went into shell shock or worse. Before becoming a captain, he was a forward artillery spotter for the big guns. I can still remember using his field glasses as a child and wondering what the graduated reticule below the primary objective was for. He had more than one horse shot out from under him. I still have his brown woolen Army saddle blanket, complete with the bullet holes and a fused cannon ball embroidered into it.
My mother’s parents would occasionally mention the Nazi occupation of Denmark. They talked about a dentist Uncle bicycling back into town and being shot dead for no reason except reprisal for a German officer being killed elsewhere that day. They would speak proudly about another relative who transported Jews to Sweden on his fishing boat. By day, he appeared to collaborate with the Nazis in order to gain crucial information about schedules and troop movements. By night he would navigate the lethal waters of the North Sea.
At any time, some young buck trying to make his mark with the resistance movement might have shot him dead to earn his stripes by killing a Nazi collaborator. It is difficult to imagine the courage that was required to lead a double life that could have resulted in either an unexpected bullet or a train ride to the ovens. My mother’s parents also mention with no little pride about how an entire Danish village was ordered to deliver up all of their Jewish population for transportation to the death camps in the morning.
As day broke, the Nazis were stunned to find the entire village’s population lined up at the train station. Winston Churchill extolled the Danish resistance as, “a model for any country, large or small.” For the rest of her life, my Bedstemor (Grandmother) would light a candle each year to mourn the loss of her daughter, Hannah. She was an Aunt that I would never know because influenza was able to ravage a destitute occupied nation that could have easily suppressed such an epidemic in peacetime.
My Bedstemor fondly remembered going to see Borge Rosenbaum perform in Copenhagen’s cabarets. This is long before he would gain international acclaim as the only comedian to have the longest running one-man show in all of Broadway’s history. This delightful man was better known to Americans as Victor Borge. Back in occupied Denmark, Borge was unable to resist needling such a tempting target as the Nazis and was soon told how uncomfortable things would become if he continued to do so.
I can still remember my Bedstemor’s raucous laughter when my lover and I brought her to see Victor Borge one last time. She translated the infrequent Danish idiom for us as we all laughed ourselves to tears at the antics of this master clown prince of comedy. A decade later I would meet her and my mother in Denmark for a white Christmas so that we could visit all of the places where she grew up and share so many of her favorite foods. At some of the city’s intersections there remained squat and ugly concrete domes. These were Nazi machine gun pill boxes, left as a reminder that all Denmark must be vigilant against repression of any sort.
We sat at a table along Strøget, the wonderful and ancient pedestrian mall in the heart of Copenhagen. Over big bottles of Tuborg Grøn lager (no glasses, thank you) she reminisced about how drivers of the beer wagons that delivered kegs to the taverns could have all the beer they could drink during working hours. With a huge grin, she joked about how the horse knew the entire route by heart and had no need for the nodding driver to guide it to the next stop. A slap on the rump brought the beer wagon to its next destination, free of any interference by the man holding the reins.
Those are some of the best memories my grandparents shared with me. Enjoy.
Here’s a story that was told to me by one of my father’s “cousins,” whom I think was really a first cousin once removed, since she was quite a bit older than he.
In the waning years of the 19th century, a young woman in the family fell in love with a sailor. Of course the family disapproved, sailors being the scum of the earth and all, so while he was away at sea they got her set up to marry a more suitable man. The wedding day arrived, and as she was looking out her upstairs window, who does she see walking down the street but her sailor. A little while later, her uncle saw her taking her big suitcase down the front stairs. “Where are you going with that?” he asked. “Oh, I’m taking it down to the train station.” she responded. “No, that’s too heavy for you,” Uncle said, assuming that she was just getting prepared for her honeymoon trip. “Let me take it for you.” So her uncle took the suitcase to the station, and the young woman and her sailor escaped on the next train.
“What happened then??” was my breathless query when I first heard this story in my mid-teens. “They got married, of course,” Dad’s cousin said. End of story. I couldn’t believe it! What did the family say when they discovered the bride was missing? Did she ever come back? Did the family ever accept the sailor, or were they outcasts? She either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me the answer, so I have been left to imagine all the possible endings…
My grandmother called Burger King “Whopper Burger” and when she would goe there, she’d order a Big Mac. She called KFC the Colonel’s, like she new the guy. Maybe she did, who knows?
My (maternal) grandmother’s parents were married while sitting in their buggy outside the preacher’s house. There had been an ice storm and it was too dangerous for them to walk inside to the house, so the preacher came outside and married them.
My granny was one of 9 kids, 8 of whom made it to adulthood. The one that died was the baby before her, he died of meningitis. One month after his death, my great-grandmother turns up pregnant with my granny. She always told my granny that she was her most welcome baby because she was so upset over the little boy’s death.
Turns out this great-grandmother of mine was illegitimate. Back in the 1880s, this was a very big deal and so she was always very ashamed of it. According to my granny, this great-great- grandmother knew who the father of the baby was. So her brothers paid him a little visit one day and had a little chat …
He disappeared soon after that.
They either killed him or informed him that he was going to leave town (I suspect the latter although there are some good places in southern Illinois/western Kentucky to dump a body …).
I can’t stand my paternal grandparents, but I miss my late maternal grandfather a lot.
He had a pretty tough life, but he could always make his life, even the roughest parts, sound like a grand adventure. I won’t go into all the stories now, as there’s too many of them, but he was raised by his aunt, and when the Depression hit, he saved as much money as he could, bought a bicycle and left the rest of the money to his aunt and set off. He didn’t want his aunt worrying about another mouth to feed. He worked for food and cycled his way from Sydney to Cairns, then back again via the outback. He had so many experiences, I could sit at his feet in rapt attention for hours-long visits. 
I hope you’re breathing easier wherever you are Pa.
my grampa would tell me exactly how the dinasour statues came to be in the Calgary zoo…
"Once upon a time the was a dinosaur named Winney. Winney was a big dinosaur with a looooong neck and a huuuge body. Since he was such a big dinosaur, it took alot to feed him. He ate aLOT.
One day while Winney was eating, it started to snow. Winney ahd never seen snow before, and he thought it was vrery cool… until it snowed so much that he was begining to get cold.
It snowed… and snowed, and snowed and snowed and snowed. It snowed so much that Winney had a very hard time finding the grass and leaves he ate. So, he decided to go get a drink of water at the neighborhood pond. Maybe, he thought, by the time I’m done having a drink, it’l will have stopped snowing.
When he got to the pond, he was amazed to see that the pond was frozen solid! it was frozen SO much, that he could step on it. And for a while, he had fun slipping and sliding around on the ice. But, then he got cold.
He decided to start walking, looking for food. Maybe, he thought, that would warm him up. But instead, it just snowed some more, and got colder and colder.
After a little bit of time walking and searching for food, Winney came upon some other dinosaur freinds of his. They were smaller, but they liked the same food as him, and they had the same problems finding it as he did. So, he suggested that maybe they go looking together. With more bodies, they would be able to look faster.
So, they started to walk. And they walked and walked and walked, finding nothing, until they finally came upon a sign. It said “calgary” , with an arrow pointing right, and “calgary zoo” with an arrow pointing left. They talked about it for a while, and they decided to check out Calgaray. So, they headed right. They eventually came upon a town that had alot of food, but it was all in stores, covered in plastic wrappings and cardboard boxes. It was fine for the creatures called “people” that inhabited the town called “calgary”, but it wasn’t very edible for the dinosaurs. So, resigned, they turned back and started walking until they came again to the sign. Since goign right to Calgary was such a dissiapointment, they decided to go Left to “Calgary Zoo”.
They got there, and boy were they surprise! There weren’t any buildings with plastic covered food or cardboard boxes. There was exactly the food they needed, and the people there were very kind. They understood that they couldn’t get to thier food… they said something about an “ice age”. The people took in the dinosaurs and fed them, and took care of them, and the dinosaurs were happy.
But, eventually, as theses things happen, the dinosaurs began to get old, and die, until eventually it was jsut old Winney left, and then he died, too. They had lived a happy life, but still, the people that had taken care of them were sad. And so, in order for them to remember and honour the dinosaurs that had been such an important part of thier life, they decided to put up statues of the dinosaurs, statues that are still there today, many years later, so that people can remember.
And that, is how dinosaurs came to be at the Calgary Zoo.