Which of your relatives has the strangest life story?

I suppose that would be me, what with some of the things I’ve been through… like in Vietnam almost being captured twice.

I doubt it qualifies as “strange,” but my grandparents met in a forced-labor camp in Germany during the war (we aren’t Jewish. Not sure it matters, but just to avoid confusion, I thought I’d mention it). My grandmother’s English isn’t very.. accurate, so I’m not sure who it was or what his ranking was, but a man working in the camp found her attractive, and took her out of the camp to work as a housekeeper and nanny in his home. She doesn’t like to speak about it, but she has mentioned that she was abused and raped in that house. Later, she and my grandfather found each other in the DP camp, and went on to get married and have children in Germany before coming to the United States. Again, probably not “strange,” but inspirational and probably uncommon.

I don’t know about “strange,” but my Uncle Spizzy had one of the most interesting backgrounds of all my relatives. He was the first and best-known Jewish Affairs reporter for the New York Times in the ‘40s through ‘60s. I have an album filled with photos of him with famous national and international public figures including David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, first and fourth prime ministers of Israel, respectively. He was a fascinating man who encouraged me to be a writer.

My grandfather lied about his age to enlist for World War One. He was also involved in World War Two. Between the wars he lived in the US and worked for the Government. After WW2, he and his wife and son (my father) were sent back to Austria (by the US Government, who employed him) to help with the cleanup and reconstruction.

After my grandfather died, my father discovered that among his possessions were no less than four German passports (I don’t remember how many total), all with different identities and slightly different physical descriptions of the bearer (the only thing consistent was the eye color). We are not entirely sure, but suspect he may have been a spy. We assume it was for the US Government. ;)

There’s also a rumour that my grandfather’s stamp collection was part of the seed collection for the US Postal Museum.

My great-uncle was an actor who worked with Ron Howard’s parents. He babysat Ron Howard when he was really wee—before he was Opie, even. My great-uncle also lived across the hall from Jack Kerouak’s mother. He claims he stepped over Jack a few times, who was sleeping in the hallway.

My grandfather left Scotland to go to the Yukon Gold Rush. He landed in Alaska with no money; the Mounties at the top of Chilkoot Pass would not let anyone into the Yukon without a year’s supplies. To earn his stake, my grandfather hired himself out as a human pack mule carrying supplies up the pass for other miners.

He stayed in the Yukon until 1915, when he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. While he was away at WW I, his first wife divorced him. He returned to North America in 1921, eventually settling in North Hollywood as a plasterer on movie sets.

My paternal grandfather rarely spoke of his childhood and would never tell anyone who his birth father was. We tried to get the information from my grandmother when my grandfather passed away, but she told us it was something they just don’t talk about. The secret died with my grandmother.

My grandfather was also known as the town perv. I guess he had a habit of flashing women. :/ (He was a great grandfather though. The sweetest.)

One of my maternal grandmother’s brother was fairly strange. Maybe he had bipolar disorder. We know it runs in the family. He was always considered the black sheep of the family. He lead the life he was supposed to in Chicago, but one day he left and moved to New York, and there he lived as a woman. I don’t think the sex change operations were available then, but the thinking is that if there were, he would have had one. I don’t know if anyone in the family ever saw him again.

My Grandmother used to grow pot in her back yard in the 60s. They lived just outside of San Francisco. She was actually the supplier for my aunt. She had two husbands and who knows how many lovers after the second husband left. There always seemed to be one or another.

The story, as I first heard it, was that she was once a lover of Henry Miller’s. My aunt said that it wasn’t quite that scandalous, although it might have been scandalous enough. In any case, what my aunt told me was that she went skinny dipping with him, off the shore of Big Sur.

My maternal grandfather ran away from home at 11 and worked for the B.C. Forestry Service. When his father tried to get him back home so he go to school they ended up in a physical altercation and he knocked his father out.

He tried to enlist for WWII three different times when he was 14. He finally doctored his birth certificate and successfully joined the RCAF. In amidst all this he met my grandmother, lied to her about how old he was, and married her. She was six years older than him. He went off for basic training and left behind his pregnant wife. When she had my mother he got two week’s leave and then he was off to England. He was a tail-gunner. On his fifteenth mission they were off course, some think on purpose, over Belgium. They were shot down and everyone on board died. They were carrying something in that plane that has rendered the land it crashed on toxic for 60+ years.

He was 18 when he died. My mom was nine months old.

My now deceased great aunt.

She died in 1983 just a few days before her 98th birthday.

She was born at home on a farm in Indiana in 1885.

She was a 7 month preemie and weighed 2 lbs.

She was wrapped in cotton and placed in a cigar box and that is how she spent the first weeks of her life.

She was a miracle baby, given the times and lack of medical care and she was a strong woman her entire life, mowing her own yard with a push mower until she was 95 years old, and, she walked 2 miles a day, rain or shine, until she was 97 years old!

She died of kidney failure after a brief ( 6 months) of feeling unwell.

She attributed her longevity to eating red meat 3 times a day as a farm girl! lol

There is just no predicting, and it’s true, it’s ALL in the genes!

@Coloma what a cool story.

I think it’d be my husband’s grandpa.

First of all, he’s from a family of huge, corn-fed boys from rural Illinois – he’s 88 now, you do the math.

He’s the middle son of… four? I think four. Back when they were all in their teens and 20s, they were crazy. Drinking, fighting sons of guns.

Uncle Marty was the worst – he’d get plastered, then go out. There’s a story that he was going out to cause some trouble, and Grandpa told him “You get outta that car, you’re not going anywhere.” Marty told him off, so Grandpa picked up the car and turned it on its side.

The cops used to call Grandpa to drag his brothers out of the bars and bring them home, because they couldn’t deal with them.

Then Grandpa went to the War. He stormed Normandy, made it through, and talks about marching through Paris and the people threw flowers from the roofs over them like a ticker-tape parade.

He was injured several times – frostbite, shrapnel – but a Purple Heart was a “pussy medal” and he wasn’t no pussy. He went back.

He’s the only one in his unit to come home alive. And now there’s no one to vouch for his involvement or his injuries, so he can’t get full Veteran’s benefits. He’s still fighting the frostbite.

Now he wages wars with the neighborhood dogs. He just had a heart attack, and the doctor’s can’t understand how a 6’5, 260 lb man is still kicking with his heart. But he’s doing it.

Grandpa’s awesome.

All of them do. All of them do. Way back to when.

@Coloma, what a GREAT aunt!

My maternal grandmother. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was a preteen and the father abandoned the family to go look for work, this was the during the Great Depression and they lived in rural New Mexico. My grandma and her two siblings were then rotated from relative to relative because no one had enough to spare to give to 3 extra kids for very long. Her father married her to man when she was 17 to pay off a gambling debt but she got divorced soon after because that man butchered a woman at a carnival and was sent to prison.

My grandfather was an iron-worker, and worked on the Bay Bridge, and the Golden Gate Bridge. He played baseball in the St. Louis Cardinal system, and knew Dizzy and Daffy Dean. He married, and when his wife died in childbirth, he gave his daughter (my Mother) to relatives to raise, and he became a train hobo, and did that for most of the next 40 years.
Occasionally, he would see my Mom. For a while, they lived in a water tower.
He once passed out from drinking while walking across a bridge in Pheonix. As he passed out, a runaway bull was rushing towards him, and jumped off the bridge just as he collapsed. A photographer for a local paper snapped the picture, and captioned it for the front page “The Man Who Butted A Bull Off The Bridge”.
When my Mom finally tracked him down, she had him put in Napa State Mental Hospital for a month or two, while she set up a place for him to live (he wasn’t insane, and was quite upset about being put there). He lived with his sister for the next 20 years.
Due to a head injury, in his last years his memory was faulty. He could remember what brand cigarettes someone he hasn’t seen in 50 years smoked, but he couldn’t remember who was sitting next to him. More than once, in the middle of a conversation with my Mom, he would say “I miss my daughter, Doris. I wish she would call me” to which my Mom would answer “I am right here, Dad.” and he would light up, and be happy for 5 minutes before saying the same thing.

Mr. Fiance’s great-grandfather was the first police officer killed in the line of duty in my hometown. He was found shot in the trainyard, and his killer has never been found. There’s a bridge named after him a few kilometers south of the city.

My maternal grandfather was married and had two children. He was having an affair with a woman 11 years younger, left his wife, married my grandmother and had two more kids. This was kept secret until my mother was grown. My favourite photo of my grandparents together has a fabulous detail – he’s wearing a ring, she isn’t. The hussy!

The same grandparents have a strange but sweet death story, as well. I mentioned it in another thread when I first came to Fluther, but this seems like a good time to repost it.

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My maternal grandparents passed away 10 years ago. Gramps had Alzheimer’s and Nanny was his caregiver; as far as we knew, she was healthy. They lived about an hour’s drive from my hometown, and my mom would go there once a week to help out around the house, take them shopping, to appointments, etc. They also talked on the phone every few days.
One day, about 3 or 4 days after my mom had made her weekly visit, she got a phone call from Gramps. He seemed very confused and said he didn’t know where Lillian (Nanny) was. My mom quickly realized that he hadn’t taken his meds that day, and possibly not for a couple of days. She hopped in the car and drove there as fast as she could.
When she arrived, she found the kitchen a mess, with spilled food on the counter and the old-fashioned coffee percolator smashed on the stove. After looking around the house, she found her mom conscious but unable to move on the spare bedroom floor, in a place where Gramps wouldn’t have seen her if he had just peeked in the door.
It turned out that Nanny had had a stroke two or three days before, and Gramps had been trying to take care of himself but forgot to take his meds and therefore was just confused and didn’t know what to do. They were both hospitalized; Gramps was put in the same room mostly because my mom couldn’t stay and take care of him 24/7, having responsibilities at home.
To make a very long story a little less long, they were in hospital for about 3 weeks. Nanny got better, Gramps got better. Nanny got pneumonia, Gramps got pneumonia. She improved, he improved. Eventually, Nanny passed away early on a Saturday morning. We planned the visitation at the funeral home for Sunday evening. My dad went to visit Gramps in the hospital on Sunday afternoon, and in a moment of lucidity (he had been in and out of it this whole time), Gramps asked my dad, “Is Lillian gone?” When my dad said yes, Gramps said, matter-of-factly, “Well, I can’t live without her.”
Later that evening we got a call from the hospital while we were at the visitation. Gramps had passed away, almost exactly 36 hours after Nanny; about 6 hours after he discovered that the love of his life was gone.

I’m not one to believe in the supernatural or anything like that, but sometimes there’s more going on that what we can see. Love knows no bounds. I’m convinced that Nanny was calling to him, and that he was just running a little late, as usual.

@Seelix It’s enough that it’s beautiful and touching.

My maternal grandmother once entered a beauty contest, and she went all the way to the finals. She came in runner-up to a then-unknown Shirley Jones, who would later go on to play the mother in The Partridge Family!

Also, my paternal grandfather apparently had a fantastic singing voice, and sang on the radio around where I live when he was younger. This isn’t such a huge deal, but it inspires me ‘cause I’ve always been interested in music :]

@Seelix That’s one of the most touching stories I have ever heard. Thank you for sharing :)

@Coloma my grandmother (the one that married the hard-headed redhead I described above) was born in 1918 at the peak of the Spanish flu. She contracted it when she was 2 weeks old and was extremely sick. My great-grandparents wrapped her in flannel, put her in a cigar box and parked her by the stove. They rubbed motor oil on her head believing that it would help. For a weeks she just barely clung to life but she eventually got better.

Sadly, she didn’t live long past when my grandfather died. She was working the trolleys and contracted TB. She passed the TB on to my mother. They both went away to a sanitarium for treatment. My mother got better but my grandmother did not. She died when my mom was 11.

My great-great grandfather who I never met immigrated over from Germany right before WWII. He and my great-great grandmother didn’t like the way things were going down over there, and didn’t agree with the politics/actions that were taking place. My great-great grandfather was a scientist, but the US government thought that he might be a spy, so they monitored him and his family, and took away his radio. When the war was over they stopped monitoring him and being suspicious of his motives, and he eventually helped NASA develop parts that were part of the first space shuttle, I think. My mom said that he had an award type thing for his work.

@tranquilsea

Yes, amazing the species has made it this far isn’t it? lol
My mother had TB too, but survived, after 2 yrs. in a sanitarium.

@Coloma yes, especially when you research major plagues. I’ve seen it posited that the Dark Ages where largely brought on by massive die-offs during the plagues as whole villages succumbed.

@tranquilsea

Bring out your dead! haha
Sewage was also a big issue. I can’t imagine walking around in raw sewage and dead things in the streets. :-/

@Coloma no kidding. There is a documentary called The Big Stink which is about London before the epic dig that created their sewage system. What is really interesting is how hard it was for the scientists/doctors involved to convince the politicians that the outbreaks of cholera were due to sewage in streets near their drinking water sources

I never met him but my great-grandfather is somewhat of a family legend….
He was a detective and hunted as a hobby….I’ve actually been to his house and there was a stag head there….
Everyone says he was a real gentleman and never hit a woman in his life,and that he never used to swear,at all. He was a real cat lover and he owned quite a bit of land in which he grew fruit trees and stuff.