When I was a kid, I couldn't imagine either of my parents having a life of their own before I or my brother were born. It can sometimes be hard to imagine your parent having the time of their life in their single days. That's what 'dad lore' is: the crazy adventures fathers had before meeting our mothers.
Father's Day was a month ago already, but that doesn't mean that we can't celebrate dads anymore. That's why we're bringing you the best 'dad lore' stories from this thread. One user asked, "What's the best piece of dad lore you've ever heard?" and over a thousand people came to share their stories. From the origins of the family dog to suspicious tales when dads were (gasp!) dating other women, this thread had it all.
#1
One time when I was really little my dad went to his plugs house to do a transaction or whatever. While he was there the guy had a new dog, small cocker spaniel that he was severely mistreating. All you had to do was look at it and it would fall on itself and pee all over itself it was really sad. Anyways my dad got his weed, stood up, picked up the dog and said "I'm taking your dog a*****e" and just left with it, and we had a new dog.My dad and his friend were driving around. Pulled up to another car at a red light which my mom and her friend in it. The guys hit on the girls and convinced them to stop for a drink. They pair up with my dad talking to my mom. His opening line was that he was a virgem. (Virgo in Portuguese but to my 20 year old Scottish mom it sounded like virgin.) she was like “ok, cool, good for you. “ still laughed about it 20 years later.This is a story about my grandfather who served in the Pacific theatre in WWII-
As I was told, he was on patrol when an ambush occurred. While running back to his companions, a grenade landed at his feet. He picked it up and threw it back at the Japanese soldier who had thrown it, who in turn picked it up and threw it back. They played this game of "catch" for a few tosses before they both realized the grenade hadn't been primed. Grandfather looked at the soldier, the soldier looked at him, and they both shrugged in that "Do we really have to do this?" sort of way.
So the next toss, the soldier pulls the pin and just lobs the grenade way out of the way of either of them, and they both just go their separate ways.
Cut to a few nights later, I guess the soldier had been found dead -- grandpa recognized him from a photo in his wallet that a serviceman had nabbed. Grandfather was able to steal the wallet back, and years later he was able to return it to the family based on stuff he found inside.My dad used to be in a band, and grew up in Belfast. June 1978 he and his band were recording in Wizard Studios, and a guy from the band recording next door came in and said: "Hey, we need some guys to do some hand claps on our song." So my dad and his mates go and clap their hands for this other band for a bit, then go back to recording.
And that is the story of how my dad's hand clapping is in the song Teenage Kicks by The Undertones.My dad was once dating a girl who was into golf. She took him to a major tournament (don’t know which one) to watch it with her and her dad.
She was obsessed with one of the golfers there so she and her dad woke up early to go around and follow the golfer. My dad sleeps in and then isn’t interested in the golf so he goes to the nearby beach.
There was a man there with windsurfing boards and he decides to give one to my dad for free because everyone is at the golf. He windsurfs for a couple hours and then returns to the golf around hole 15.
He meets up with his girlfriend and her dad and lies and says he walked around the holes and watched a few different people and everything goes fine.
He returns to home and then a few nights later goes to her house for dinner. He sits down with a plate of lasagna for dinner and there watching the golf re-runs and the commentator pans out and does a full zoom around and sees my dad wind surfing, zooms in on his face and says “there’s a lad who’s not very interested in the golf”
My dad was dumped on the spot.On their first date, my dad accidentally fed my mom and himself dog food. Expired dog food. This is how I realized whose intelligence I inherited.My dad is pretty pedestrian.
My ex father in law, though, hooboy. I think that man is a Time Lord or a cat on account of he has had the most insane life and should be dead.
He grew up rough with a alcoholic father and a stepmother that didn't want him after his mother abandoned all of them. He ends up enlisting in the Navy where he spent nearly 30 years, in which he both survived a helicopter crash into the Indian Ocean and got to have lunch with President Reagan aboard the ship he was on. He is stationed all over the world, ends up in Texas where he divorces my ex mother in law, carries on a whole other career, all while saving his Navy money and pension. Then he goes itinerate for awhile, like on the movie Nomad, and finally decides to land in Minnesota where he pays as much for a house as I paid for my car to be closer to my ex wife while she was in college. While there he suffers a massive heart attack that essentially kills half his heart. Then he develops endocarditis, is read his last rites, and ends up surviving that and carrying on like nothing. He was then involved in a wreck so bad that they had to take bone from other parts of his body to reconstruct his face. A few years later, he moves back to his hometown, and ends up having another heart attack, which kills another quarter of his heart, but he survives just fine, AND had to have a massive tumor removed from his pancreas.
He collects old weapons of war including sabers and guns, bikes more miles than I even want to drive, is a huge hit with the ladies in his hometown, and lives all single pringle with his dog who just adores him.
Even though things didn't work out between his daughter and I, I will ALWAYS respect that mans will to live, though I think he is running out of regenerations.Late 70s, in Toronto (York) my Dad heard that the bad boy in the neighborhood had broken his girlfriend’s arm because she wouldn’t do what he wanted.
My Dad had no idea who she was.
But being the guy my Dad was, found the bad boy. Let him know if he ever laid a hand on her again, he would kill him. Though my dad was a nerd and loved DND, he was still the hockey star and a big “scary” guy. Buddy never laid a hand on her again.
My Dad would later give the said girlfriend a ride home in the rain, while she was walking home from rollarskating. Marry her and have me 20 years later. .My grandmothers brother, my great-uncle, flew the hump from India to China. One night, when they were somewhere in China, a bunch of them got drunk & stole a train.
Note that they did not ROB the train. They STOLE the damn thing.The second time my dad was struck by lightening, he didn't even fall down.Not dad lore, but grandfather lore:
My grandfather grew up in Germany during WWII as a young boy. His entire family was about as anti-Nazi as you could be without getting thrown into jail.
One day, members of the Nazi Party came around the village and began hanging up large propaganda banners that said “we are protecting the futures of our children”. My grandfather, in his infinite wisdom, had an idea…
That night, when the village was asleep, he went around with a bucket of paint, changing the first letter of the word “Children” from a K to an R.
In German, the word for children is “kinder”. My witty grandfather, however, also knew the word for cattle, which is “Rinder”.
The next morning, the village woke up to see that all of the banners put up by the Nazis now read, “we are protecting the futures of our cattle”.
What a f*****g legend.Some time in the '70s, my dad went to see Tom Waits play in some dive bar in Downtown Denver. A drunken, passed-out man was in the doorway, who my dad realized was William S Burroughs. So he had to step over Burroughs to get in to see Tom Waits. Legend.It's short, but my Grandpa claimed to have invented casual friday because one day he didn't feel like wearing a tie to work and soon after it caught on. Legend.I don't know all the details, the family kept it kinda hush hush, but apparently my dad and his 3 brothers kidnapped their sister back from the Jehovah's Witness. Apparently she kinda started distancing herself from the family and eventually stopped responding at all. They went and found her and just brought her back home in the middle of the night one night haha.My dad is a doctor. Used to get called into the police station in the middle of the night to do DUI assessments usually check blood or urine for alcohol / d***s. A woman arrived visibly drunk. She opted for urine test instead of bloods. She must have been here before because she knew a male police officer could not accompany her to oversee the sample collection. She goes in to the bathroom alone and emerges with the crystal clearest urine sample you have ever seen. My dad challenged her on this, accusing her of filling the collection bottle from the sink because he was absolutely certain he was holding a sample of water. She denied it, insisting it’s urine. So in the biggest power play I’ve ever heard he called her bluff and drank the ‘urine’ sample. She had her jaw on the floor but knew she was caught out. My dad was pretty smug recounting this story until I pointed out she could just as easily have filled it from the toilet bowl, to his horror. She eventually pled guilty to the DUI but not before trying to fight it on the basis of my dad “interfering with the sample”. Did drag it out to the steps of court but ultimately got nowhere they had made her produce another sample as the first one was deemed contaminated before my dad ever got his hands or lips on it.My dad was a punk, and a political activist in his younger days. In Britain, there is a tradition of people going to Stonehenge for the Summer Solstice, and at various times the government has tried to put a stop to it, for various reasons.
To protest this, some people decided to climb up onto the top of some of the stones when the police started arresting people for refusing to leave, I believe it was quite an unplanned spur of the moment thing.
There is a photo that made the news of my dad say smiling up there with two others, while police surrounded the stone from the ground. One of the others was a man, and one was a woman. The man eventually decided there was no other option but to come down eventually, and climbed down and got arrested. My dad really didn't want to get arrested but he told me 'I was looking down at the pigs (police) and they were looking up at me, and I decided I had to get down. The lady that was up there with me was the most insane person I have ever met, and it got to the point I'd rather get arrested then have to keep listening to the crazy s**t that came out of her mouth.'
So yeah, in the end he came down and the police tackled him and bought him in. He ended up on a list due to that, and did his best to not get arrested again from then on.My dad and his twin brother went north to Alaska after graduating high school. This was in the early 70s and they were looking for adventure I guess. Money got short and they decided to sneak onto the military base and impersonate soldiers. I don’t think they could have pulled it off if they hadn’t grown up as Air Force brats to begin with.
They got some uniforms and proceeded to hit the mess hall daily, eating on the governments’ dime, working out at the gym, and hitting on the few women that were around at the time.
It went well for a couple of weeks, until my dad was caught red handed with the general’s daughter, who was half naked in the back of a van. His brother was supposed to be looking out, but was taking a leak at the time, supposedly.
My dad has been in some scrapes, but said it was the worst beating he ever got. The MP’s didn’t charge them, they just roughed them up and sent them packing.When my dad was a small child, like 4 - 6 years old, he found and tamed a baby fox in the woods near his house. He brought it home and his parents said he could keep it if he trained it and took care of it himself. They lived in very rural Newfoundland, and with farm animals, so the biggest concern was that he’d kill the chickens. I guess he got trained well enough not to kill any livestock at their house, but often the neighbours down the way reported foxes killing their chickens. They threatened to shoot the fox if they ever saw it, and sure enough one day he didn’t return home, and my dad always suspected it was them. That was after several years together though, and my dad thought of that fox as one of his favourite pets in his entire life.
He shared that with me in his final months. My advice to anyone with an ailing parent is to talk to them about their favourite memories. I had no idea my dad had lived such an interesting life (particularly from the ages of 4 - 14) until it was too late to hear it all.My uncle told me this story years after my dad had passed away.
My dad grew up in a farm town in western PA in the 60s. Being a teenager in the middle of nowhere in the 60s he was known to partake in a bit of libations here and there.
One night he got home and was visibly toasted. According to my uncle he sat in a chair facing out the front window and just stared into mostly darkness for a good few minutes. Mind you this was in full view of the whole family. So my PopPop asked him, "Jim, why don't you go to bed?" And my father replied "I'm waiting until the cows come home."
My PopPop thought he was being a smartass and told him to go to bed. Then he looked out the window and saw a herd of cows crossing the road into the yard.My step dad, who is long since passed away, was in the military during Vietnam and about a decade after. On his last mission, his helicopter was shot down and he was the only survivor out of 11. After the crash he looked down at himself and saw his stomach was split open and all his guts had fallen out. He pushed them all back inside and used his belt to hold everything together until help arrived. He ended up with some digestive issues from it and had to have his spleen completely removed, but otherwise ended up physically okay. The PTSD destroyed him, but he did his best to not let it affect me and my mom and he was the best father figure I could have ever asked for. He got an honorable discharge and a purple heart from it.
He told me plenty of stories, some totally badass and others really sad, but this is the one that really stands out about how strong and capable he was as a person. He died 19 years ago and I miss him every single day.When my dad was young, he was a local-level competitive dirt bike racer (he might have raced with a 3-wheeler, can't quite remember). When he was dating my mom, my mom's father's repair company sponsored his races. It was a tiny unofficial sponsorship but my dad still asked for some kind of logo or signage to show off. Well the repair shop my grandfather owned was really just his garage and had no official name, so he gave my dad a small washing machine agitator and tried to convince him to strap it to his helmet like a unicorn. They ended up bolting it to the back of the bike where now a days you would bolt a visibility flag.My dad raced drag cars (he still has his Chevelle) and he also worked pit crew for NASCAR drivers. He skipped his prom to work pit crew.
One time another team's crew chief comes up to his crew and asks if they'd like a gig, because apparently the whole other crew was stranded at the wrong airport and couldn't get new tickets in time for the race. So my dad, age 17, and his crew hop on a plane and get put up at a hotel, one room for all of them. My dad had to sleep in the bathtub.
After the race the head of the pit crew got mad drunk and started throwing fireworks from the hotel balcony down into the pool. The people in the pool were also drunk and were cheering and hollering. When the cops finally showed up nobody snitched on what room the fireworks came from. When the cops left, they started up with the fireworks again.
Then there was the time he and his friends from the garage (now my honorary uncles) surfed a flash flood on car hoods. My dad got up to some wild, fun stuff when he was young and I love hearing about it. But the sleeping in the bathtub always gets me for some reason.My dad fought with the Ariel Sharon brigade during the Israeli Yom Kippur war in the Suez Canal.
He was on a dune with two of his squad members when an Egyptian plane showed up and started shooting towards them. They all lied down on the sand to take cover, my father was the only one who ever got up.My husband’s grandfather was a real “Big Fish,” type of guy who was always telling stories about his heyday.
He was a southern democrat to the day he died. Back in the 60s/70s, he was a city councilman in his small town. During one meeting, he got into an altercation of sorts with another councilman. The city was sending vehicles out of the county to be serviced. He said that made no sense, as there were perfectly fine mechanics right in town.
The altercation got very heated, to the point where he up and punched the lights out of the other guy. I mean PUNCHED HIM GOOD.
My husband told me that some 20+ years later, he was with his grandparents in the local Wal-Mart. They saw the other councilman and they had to immediately leave.
He apparently got the better of that guy, but I don’t know what happened with the vehicles.My dad's friend came and stayed with us for a few days one time. (He lived in a different city.) They were drinking a lot of whiskey and reminiscing about the good old days. "Remember when I had to bail you out of that Tibetan prison?" "Yeah, the Chinese had the place wiretapped and the god damn monk wouldn't stop talking s**t about them.".More my parents as a unit, but it did involve my paternal grandmother.
My parents had been coworkers before my dad asked my mom out. They're out driving on their date before a bee flies into the car, freaks out my mom, and causes my dad to wreck the car. They were both fine but were taken to the hospital as a just in case.
While at the hospital, my Dad's parents are called to let them know what happened. About ten minutes later, my tiny, Five foot nothing, very Italian Grandmother comes bursting into the waiting room and yells at the top of her lungs "Were they wearing clean underwear???" The entire hospital room falls over laughing and my mom is informed of exactly what she's in for. My parents made it more than forty years before my dad died, so I guess it worked out.The first emergency response call my father attended:
After earning a Bachelor's and teaching 8th grade history for a year, my dad decided to instead join California Department of Forestry, which was the state's fire service at the time (now Cal Fire). Firefighters weren't always medical responders, and when it became a part of the job, my dad was appointed to take the lead on medical responses. This was entirely due to the fact that he took a First Aid class in college to fulfill a health requirement for his Liberal Arts degree, and not based on any experience or extensive training.
The first call the team attended to is an unresponsive elderly person in nursing home. My dad began CPR. Fun fact: Vomiting is a common response from a person receiving CPR. Another fun fact: Mouth barriers weren't a thing before the AIDS epidemic.
You see where this is going.
Old guy (still unresponsive) vomited into my dad's mouth. Not knowing what to do nor expecting this, my dad turned his head and also threw up. The other person assisting him with CPR must have been a sympathetic vomitter, as were the other surrounding firefighters. It was vomit-palooza and the old guy didn't make it.
This is probably the most lighthearted of firefighter stories I've heard. The next one after that was when he and other firefighters had to play IRL whack-a-mole, only it was whack-flaming-rabbits, with shovels, on a rural road, to prevent the spread of a fire from one side of the road to the other via escaping bunnies engulfed in flame.My dad was born in 37, his brother in 38, in Belgium from a jewish family. When the war broke out, They hid him and his brother in 2 different catholic families. Those families pretended they where theirs, everyone pretended they believed it. They where even written down in the churches register with boggus date of birth and they got baptised (for real). The moms where sisters so until the end of the war my father and my uncle believed they were cousins.
At some point, near the end of the war, 2 russians deserters trying to get as far as possible from the war walked in the village asking for help. Since it's was the war, every help was welcome and they became farmhand. One of the first thing they did was to gather a bunch of scraps and a pressure cooker, build a still and make vodka from potato peels. One night they got blind drunk and my father, because he was a little s**t, stole the gun of one of the soldiers who rightfully became extremely angry.
Once the war was over, his father came back to take them (his mother didn't make it)
Because my father was the type of guy who would embelish the stories, i asked my uncle if it was true, he confirmed everything, including the angry soldier. I asked about the gun and he said "i don't know" with a smile. In his language it means "i know but i won't tell" and my father smiled back
When i got older, he actually showed me the gun (it's a Tokarev TT33). When my father died, i asked my mom where was the gun and she answered "somewhere" (the situation with this gun is very illegal in my country) I pretty sure it's still somewhere in the house.
One of the russian soldier went back to russia, the other one married one of the farmgirl. My family is still in touch with the families that "adopted" my father and my uncle. My uncle asked that a tree was planted for them at Yad Vashem but i don't know if there is actually one.My dad will randomly drop things into conversations about things he got to do that he doesn't normally talk about. He got to see Johnny Cash live and he saw the original Star Wars trilogy when they came out and he isn't really a Star Wars guy. He was also a chaplain at Dollywood for a while.My grandpa attended West Point, and part of that was PT under the hot sun. Well he noticed there was a different group sitting around while him and the others were running.
He applied and was accepted. However he noticed another group who got to sit in the shade. Turns out it was the fencing team. Which my grandpa joined to be in the shade.
His fencing coach was French and would say something at the start of every match to the effect of "I fight for you my dear". My grandpa picked up the habit of saying the same thing, and loudly announced it before his match. What he did not know is the base commander's daughter was in the otherwise male audience.
That's how my grandpa got the role of dating/ driving her to all the fancy parties.My dad and my uncle Jay put on ape costumes and got arrested for smooshing bananas all over their (soon to be married) buddy's car as a prank. In their mug shots they're wearing ape costumes. This was in the 70s. They were both in the army at the time.My dad was a fishing guide on the weekends in the late 70s for extra money. He had a 21-foot Glastron. One story that stands out is they were coming in from off the lake, and that night, at the last minute, my dad and the fisherman saw a canoe without lights directly in front of them while they were moving at a high rate of speed.
There were two guys, one on either end of the canoe. Luckily, they were lined up perfectly in the center of the canoe. He ran over the canoe, which was chopped in half. Then they turned around and rescued the two guys from the split and sunk canoe.Tonally a little different from the rest of the comments, but it's one of my favorite stories about my dad.
So, apparently, back in his hey day my dad was a bit of a ladies man. Was introduced to my mom via mutual friend and was immediately smitten.
He asks her out and tells her to pick her favorite place to go, and he'll treat her. She picks sushi.
Also important to note is how much of a traditional "tough guy" my dad is. Tradesman, drives a truck, goes shooting for fun, has played nearly every sport under the sun, and in keeping with all that, a "meat and potatoes" kind of man.
He HATES raw fish.
But he was so excited to take my mom out, he agrees and spends an evening downing sashimi (my mom's favorite) with what I can only imagine is a very convincing smile on his face.
I guess it worked out though bc they're still married to this day.In the 80s my dad was in charge of a warehouse that would occasionally receive late night deliveries. One night a driver shows up super late drunk as a skunk. My dad unloads his truck and notices that there is a mistake on his paperwork and that my dad can basically steal a pallet and noone would notice. So he steals a pallet of what ends up being some kind of microchip and gets ~50k which he then buys a "bar of gold" that has been sitting in a secret safety deposit box. He told my brother and me the gold is ours this one time he got in big trouble with my mom.There was a story that one of the guys from the local pub found a hack to get a cheap pizza and a free lift home. The story goes that after a night of drinking at the pub, the individual would walk to the local pizza shop that was near. Then order a pizza delivered to his home. He’d then ask the driver drive for a lift home which he kindly obliged. Apparently it became a regular thing. I mentioned this to my father in law once. He told me it was true because the guy was him. He said he use to play darts at the pub once a week and after a number of drinks had the genius idea of hitting up the local pizza delivery guys.My dad grew up in South Texas in the 70s and 80s. Him and his friends would go across the border and drink on the weekends. As a result, he learned Spanish. But he was only in Mexico when he was drunk so he learned Spanish drunk and can still only speak Spanish when he's drunk.My Dad had been dating the literal girl next door since he was 13. She thought they were gonna get married one day. Then one day my Dad met my Mum (she was a junior and he was a senior) and the next day he literally got up from the lunch table he was at with his longtime girlfriend and asked my Mum out. My Mum didn’t know he had a girlfriend so she said yes. Then he returned to the table and promptly broke up with the girl. She was devastated. My parents just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in May.
My Dad still feels awful about what he did. But apparently it turned out ok. She became a scientist and had her own family.Uncle lore: My parents eloped and moved to Key West from 1958 to 1964. My dad’s very handsome (and eligible bachelor) brother came for a visit - and stayed for 6 months! ? He loved the sun, sand, water, and the beautiful Miami girls partying in the Keys. Fortunately, he and my mom got along well
One night, my dad and uncle met an older man while drinking at a bar. He was very funny and interesting, and as the night went on, he took a shine to my uncle. My uncle declined his offer to go to his place for “some drinks.” He was the Pulitzer-Prizewinning playwright Tennessee Williams (*The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,* etc.) My mom always regretted not going out with them that night!I went to a friend's HS graduation party once, and they pulled out some shrooms and offered them to me. I've never tried d***s before and wanted some, but I drove myself there and had to drive back, so I opted not to. They partook and seemed to have a good time while we were walking around her town, shooting the s**t for a while.
I came back home later that night and mentioned it to my parents (no idea why because my parents definitely didn't want me doing d***s, but I didn't expect to get in trouble for it, and I didn't get in trouble) and my dad said 'good, those things are inedible without peanut butter or something on them anyway."
....bro how do YOU know that?The smiths were banned in our house because Morrissey was a d**k to him [my dad] when they were doing a gig at a bar he worked at.When my grandfather was a kid his parents were going through a nasty divorce (his dad would beat his mother and his siblings constantly). His dad caught his mom at the store one day, took all of the kids except the one who was at the store with his mom, and hightailed it across country to California. With it being the 60s they had no contact with their mother for 3 years.
Grandpa turns 14, and decides he’s sick of getting beat. He steals his older brother’s ID, and a small TV out of his dad’s room which he sells at a p**n shop down the road for a fraction of what it’s worth. He then hitch hikes across the United States, and almost makes it back to Ohio, before being arrested in Illinois for getting into a fight with someone who was trying to rob him. Once he tells the cops his true identity, they contact Cleveland PD who confirms he’s a missing child that disappeared 3 years before, and thankfully are able to get him back to his mother. His other 3 siblings weren’t brought back until 4 years later, when the oldest kid stole his father’s car in the middle of the night.My dad had a class field trip to a keychain making factory when he was a youngin. They showed them the big grinder where they make the letters, and gave each kid a block to make their own. My dad leaned too far in and the machine ate the top nub of his finger right off. If he pinched the middle part that remained, it would stop the bleeding and build up. So he used his finger like a squirt gun and scared some other kids.Before he retired, my dad walked 5km one way, to and from work every weekday, which gave him a very high metabolism, so he would often be seen having close to half a loaf of bread, all toasted with butter, as a mid day snack on the weekends.My dad and his friends were going to the University of Florida in the 60’s. A friend of theirs had an old shack in the swamp and they told some guys there were some women who wanted to party with them and gave them directions to the shack. My dad’s brother was waiting behind the shack with a shotgun and when the guys pulled up to meet the women they were instead greeted by the sound of multiple shotgun blasts and my uncle screaming “nobody’s gonna touch my daughters”. The guys nearly s**t themselves and fled for their lives. My dad and two of his friends were expelled from UF soon after, the guys didn’t think it was too funny and told administrators.
Florida men.My family is from Wisconsin. One year my parents decided to go on a vacation to Australia and New Zealand. While they were there deciding to go on a hike on a popular mountain range in New Zealand. While hiking my dad hears someone yell his first name. Thinking that there was no way that anyone on the opposite side of the world could possibly know him, he didn’t even look and just kept walking. Then the person yelled his first AND last name, which is not a common last name at all. My dad turns around and sees our next door neighbor! Our neighbors from a small town in Wisconsin just happened to go on vacation at the same time of year, to the same country, and decided to go hiking up the same mountain at the same time as my parents. The insane level of coincidence almost made me convinced we’re all living in the matrix.I have so many of these from my great-grandfather, some of which I know to be true and some of which is lore that I choose to believe.
One story is that, when he was drafted in WWII, he went for his medical evaluation and was just chatting casually with the doctor. Doctor asked how many kids he has, Papa responds, "7." The doctor was surprised and said they couldn't send a man with 7 young kids to war, so he ended up not having to go.
Another more famous one is about how Papa came to only have half a pinkie on his left hand. Growing up, he told all of us kids that it was because he liked to sop up leftover pancake syrup with that finger and had worn it down. As an adult, I discovered it was actually because my uncle had accidentally hit his hand with a sledgehammer in their blacksmith shop like 40 years earlier.
Prior to being a blacksmith, Papa and Grandma ran a farm in rural North Georgia. They had all the usual animals, pigs, cows, chickens, and for a reason that no one has been able to adequately explain to me, two parrots. When I asked my grandmother where her parents got the parrots and why, she gave me a look like those were questions she'd never considered before.
Those are just a few of my favorites. He was the best, wittiest person I've ever known, and he had a heck of an interesting life.My dad was a tough old dude. I remember as a kid when he needed knee replacement surgery, he had a consult where the doc asked if he’d ever broken any bones and he said nope.
Cut to after the procedure- the dr was like: why didn’t you tell me you broke your leg previously? Dad- oh, was it broken? I did hurt my leg many years back but I just walked on it until it felt better. ?.Dad was on the SWAT team when I was a kid in the 80's. He told me about a hostage situation in the middle of winter at 3am where a guy barricaded himself in his house with his wife and kids. My dad and his spotter needed a place to post up but since it was downtown the adjacent roof was too high of an angle so they went to the 2nd floor to unfortunately commandeer some poor tenant's window. He knocks on the door and an elderly lady with curlers in her hair and pink nightgown answers the door to two gentleman who look like GI Joe on steroids. They explain the situation and ask to use her window facing the street. She doesn't say a word just leads them to the bedroom that contains her husband watching Sanford and Son reruns in a bed that fills most of the tiny room and leaves the narrowest of walking space around it. As dad and his partner are shuffling their way around this bed the lady crawls back into bed next to her husband. They fling the window open and this blast of cold air fills the room and the couple just pull the covers up to their chins. Having no room to pull up a chair dad and his partner have to sit on the edge of the bed that is just big enough for the husband and wife. After an hour or so the hostage taker comes out of the house brandishing what looks like a gun towards the team on the street. Looking through the scope dad can tell it's a bed post. He jumps on the radio, 'NO GUN! NO GUN! NO GUN!' and prevented the guy from suicide by cop. The couple continue to watch tv during this whole situation and couldn't give less of a s**t about what was going on. Dad just kind of thought it was this funny surreal moment.My dad has a few pictures with him and Christopher Lee. I didn't think much of it at first as he grew up in England and has pictures of him with lots of celebrities. I also have similar from going to cons and various events. But when going through his pictures after he died, I saw pictures of him with General Horatius Murray, bunch of him in uniform on a ship, and lots of other memorabilia.
My dad taught me how to shoot a rifle when I was six. When we moved to Florida we'd go to the range on occasion. Once when I was about 15 we went to the range. I'd been shooting for a few years and gotten pretty good at the 150yd targets. Good enough that I figured that I was WAY better than my old dad was. "Bet you can't do that," I said.
He said something like, "You little s**t," then took the Winchester Model 70 (.270) and fired off 5 rounds in about 6 seconds and made it look like I was shooting drunk while on a unicycle.
My dad and I didn't get along well but this was one moment I was in awe.When my dad was a resident in a hospital in Flushing, Queens in the 70s, he was driving his sky blue Chevy Malibu to work and listening to Cold as Ice by Foreigner, when a 9yo boy with an impressive Afro rode his bike straight into the side of his car.
My dad was worried he had a concussion, so he insisted on giving the kid a ride to the hospital so he could get a scan and have a family member pick him up.
After the scan the kid's 19yo brother arrived, dressed in drag (Marilyn Monroe).
The nurses, custodians and other support staff burst into laughter as soon as he walked in. My dad was polite, and the guy thanked him, before taking his brother's hand and heading out. But he stopped at the exit, turned around, snatched off his blonde wig and shouted in a deep baritone "FUUUUUUCK YOU, you jealous bitches!" before departing.My dad was working communications for the AF in Afghanistan in what was supposed to be a "safe zone"
While he's typing on his laptop a bullet pierces the laptop and my dad said his nose was about a foot away.
Apparently It was an ambush and my dad's laptop caught the bullet that gave his guys time to prepare for defense.
My dad said he'd never pissed his pants harder in his life.My dad is in his 70's and comes from a large family - 14 brothers and sisters. Money was very tight so on Christmas they wouldn't get very much and ended up sharing a lot of the gifts. He never really talked about the gifts he got but loved to tell us about Krampus. Apparently on Christmas eve, after the kids have gone to sleep, they would dress in all black and "Kidnap" the child that misbehaved the most then take them into the woods. They would then tie them up to a tree and put coal all around their feet.
The kids would wake up in the morning and have to figure out which kid was missing and then go free them. When he talks about this, he makes it sound like a fond memory. He said that he was tied up only once and it was very cold and scary. I guess it was a good way to get the kids to behave throughout the year.
