Who was your childhood hero other than your father?

Frank Lloyd Wright and Spider-Man.

Yes and Yes.

Either Grandfather would have fit that bill quite nicely.

My grandmother and my Aunt Carol. Both were immensely important to me as a child.

If I’m completely honest: Peter Pan and Bilbo Baggins.

Both were very small people who used their smallness and cleverness to save the day. I was a very small child – smallest and youngest in my class – and thought myself very clever.

I still have a cake on Bilbo’s birthday every year.
And I still maintain that if growing up means it will be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I’ll never grow up, never grow up, never grow u-up! Not me.

Clutch Cargo and also the Thunderbirds. All my uncles I once held up as super fun super cool uncles I realized when I grew up a bit were drunk assholes in real life.

My father was NEVER my hero. He was my antagonist, my master. A total a$$hole who never should have married my mother and should never have had 2 children, much less eight.
My big brother was my hero. The guy who I could go to when I needed someone to talk to. He was, and is, very special.

Weird AL Yankovic.

Pippi Longstocking, the strongest girl in the world.

Wow, definitely not my father. Probably Spiderman, if I’m really honest.

Karl Marx.
My father was a drinker, and a fiend.

Captain Kangaroo

My father was a bag of shit that is dead and deserved it…

But if you want to know the strongest person I know that is my sister without a doubt. My sister is a tank that plows thorough problems like butter. Nothing phases her. She just punches problems in the dick and moves on.

Arthur C. Clarke, of course.

Tarzan
Starsky
Tonibell (our local ice cream man who tried to sound italian when we all knew he was Tony Bell who lived around the corner, that was fine though coz his ice cream was fucking lush)

Two uncles, one on my dad’s side, one on my mom’s.

Uncle “Spizzy”, my dad’s big brother, was a newspaperman who encouraged me to write at a very early age—and that’s what I made my career.

Uncle Abe, my mom’s oldest brother by 20 years, treated me like the son he never had. Since he lived in the same town, unlike Spizzy, Abe was my second father.

Many decades after both uncles have passed, I still miss them both keenly.

Dan Dare from the Eagle comic.

Eddy Merckx.

True living legend.

^ Indeed he is, would love to have seen him up against LeMond, Indurain, Froome, Contador, Quintana,,but hey, timing is every….....................thing.

The on bike drama between him and Laurent Fignon was riveting.

Actually, while I worshiped Merckx it was Fignon I emulated:

Attitude, riding posture, wire rimmed glasses, ponytail….

I have to admit that Superman (the ‘50s TV one, George Reeves) was a huge pre-teen hero.

I truly thought if I willed it hard enough I too could fly, which proved to be painfully untrue when I tried it once by jumping off a balcony, my cape a bath towel. The key word there was once!

Ellie Arroway, the fictional protagonist of Carl Sagan’s Contact. Carl Sagan, for that matter.

@SecondHandStoke Watching the footage from the days of Merckx, was before my time so that’s all I got, it’s astounding to see the quality of bikes & the downhill speeds they reached despite not wearing a helmet worthy of the name, true pioneers.

Obviously, from the posts above, not everyone’s father was their hero…including me. I loved my father, but he was/is a selfish man who lashed out all too often in anger (not physically, but verbally). To this day, I still can’t handle people getting angry with me. My mother was not at all like that, but neither did she intervene in any way.

My heroes were the people in my life (not family) who showed me kindness and caring…