great stories your grandparents told you (1 Viewer)

[billygannon]

My grandfather fought on Vinegar Hill.

 

[clonan attack]

this thread has made me realise i know very little about my great grandparents besides the fact they fought on opposite sides in the War

 

[nlgbbbblth]

My paternal grandparents died before I was born. I think I've seen one photograph of them ever.

My maternal grandmother died when my mum was 11. Her father (my grandfather) brought up five young children (my mum was the eldest) on his own while running a pub in Bandon. Not very exciting but he did a good job of it and was named Michael Collins. He died of cancer a couple of weeks before my Leaving Cert in 1989.

 

[Janer]

My Irish grandad worked in Jamesons and of course got free whiskey...he also made life hell for my grandma and she left him in the mid 70's and he cried to the Sunday World and it was on the front page "Annie come home"

 

[jane]

Wowee, it's really interesting to see the difference between what you lot's grandfolks' lives were like and a yank's one. No black and tans in my family history, but lots of dodgy shit. You forget that pretty much everyone who has grandparents and great grandparents would have stories from that era.

My paternal grandfather a Sicilian goatherder, and his da was killed in WWI, in 1917, only they didn't find out until 1922. Anyhoo, he and his ma and his brother travelled up to Naples and got a boat (though we now think that she may have sent them on ahead of her) to New York, where the streets were going to be paved with gold, sure. He wanted nothing more in the whole universe than to be an American citizen and have a son born on the 4th of July. My da was born on 2 July 1933, and my uncle on the 6th of July 1935. I think he fought in WWII, too, for the Yanks.

Anyhoo, he and my grandmother got divorced, and no one knows how many times he remarried, or how many children he made. We know that one wife and daughter were hookers. He moved to Arizona, where he worked for the Pima County Sheriff's department, and was killed when someone made sure his car went off a cliff. The crime is still unsolved, and we know very little about his life in the years right before he died.

My dad's ma started this: http://www.hotopera.com/HOT-HIST.html. In order to truly convey the spirit of my late grandmother, it really requires doing an impersonation of her in person, or watch Livia Soprano. But she was a bit of a 'storyteller'. She was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal once, and she told a rather unusual life story that didn't match up, not just to reality, but to itself. In one sentence, she said that he parents were poor Italian immigrants (true), and then, later in the article she said that her father sang with the Metropolitan Opera and her mother was a Russian ballerina. Her furniture, in true 'Talian nonna style, was always covered in plastic. She once told me that she went out to some event and Tony Bennett picked her up from her apartment in a limo. It wouldn't totally shock me if this was true, but then, you never knew with her.

When she died, I realised just how stereotypical my family on my father's side was. It was at once chilling and hilarious. My cousin Patricia and I had loads of bets going on all sorts of stuff on the day of the funeral: who was going to faint first, who would throw herself on the coffin, etc etc.

My mom's parents were kind of interesting, I think, but in a different way. Just as crooked, maybe, but not always. My grandfather spent six months in jail once for jury tampering, but then later, he was president of the American Merchant Marine Institute, and a congressional watchdog, and spoke out against John McCone for government twats taking so many kickbacks. I just found this rather interesting quote from his testimony, which I am going to use to my advantage, like.

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]"Ralph E. Casey of the General Accounting Office, a watchdog arm of the Congress, testified in 1946 that McCone and his associates in the California Shipbuilding Company made $44,000,000 on an investment of $100,000.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]"I daresay," Casey remarked, "that at no time in the history of American business, whether in wartime or in peacetime, have so few men made so much money with so little risk and all at the expense of the taxpayers, not only of this generation but of generations to come." [/FONT]​

 

[Kid Lovebeach]

only ever met him once but my paternal grandfather made fake id's for jews in holland during WWII.
all my da can remember from the war is starving and kicking a nazi in the shin (i think the last bits a lie to make him sound tough.)