re: Tell us an interesting family story

I've shared a few stories in related threads, but these are a couple that I've remembered and didn't talk about it.

One of my great-grandfathers married and had children later in life (mid-40's). Before that, he traveled around the country and had a variety of jobs. He left home at age 16. He worked as a lumberman in the Pacific northwest; worked on a ranch in Wyoming; served in the Army during World War I; railroad worker in Pennsylvania; was a Canadian Mountie for a few years; was a policeman in Cincinnati; and a few other interesting jobs. He finally settled down in Oregon.

During World War II, my grandmother worked for Pacific Telegraph and Telephone in Portland, Oregon. She worked in a division that was contracted by the Army to receive incoming messages from overseas and decode them. I don't know what the full details of her job were, but I know she had to learn morse code. Anyway, when Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration and agreed to surrender, she was working when the message first came in. Her boss, who was an Army Major, locked the building and said no one could leave until the message was confirmed and an official announcement was made. She said a few hours later, the official word came in, and then broadcast on the radio. She was always kind of proud that she may have been one of the first civilians state-side to know Japan had surrendered and that the war was over.

well, to tell an old family secret, my grandmother was Dutch

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My sister (Sissy) beat up Stormy Daniels at Calloways because Stormy threw a drink on her.

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Can we have more details into this? A friend is asking.

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Can we have more details into this? A friend is asking.

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and my friend would like to know if there was mud or warm oil involved in this altercation

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and my friend would like to know if there was mud or warm oil involved in this altercation

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Hair pulling and fisticuffs. Nothing exciting because it was broken up before my sister could do some real damage.

Donnie, the owner, kept the tape for years in case Stormy sued but eventually lost track of it.

He regrets it now...could have been big bucks from TMZ.

My great uncle jumped off the Huey P Long in 1961. He survived and told authorities he was mugged and thrown off. A few years later he shot himself while at work.

Other than that, Alexander Verdin is my fifth great grandfather. He and his brother came from France and married Indian women, and their ancestors essentially formed their own tribe - the Houma.

I also had an uncle that was a Merchant Marine captain during WW2. His ship was torpedoed in the Florida Straits in 1942. The surviving crew got into the four lifeboats but the lifeboats were separated the next night.

A few days later a sub chaser locates my uncle's lifeboat and takes them to Havana. The next day the Port Captain orders my uncle to a meeting. At the meeting, my uncle is given the keys to a car and introduced to a Cuban police officer who will act as his driver. My uncle's orders were to go and find his crew and bring them back to Havana.

My uncle protested that he had no idea where his crew were. The Port Captain told him not to worry, the driver knew where they were. The driver proceeds to take my uncle to every town and village on the northeastern coast of Cuba and search every whore house in each town.

Sure enough, that's where all the crew were hiding. As they were all in the Seamen's International Union and got combat pay whenever they were out of port jurisdiction, they all just sailed and rowed ashore and shacked up with the girls for as long as they could. They were making the big money every day they were out and certainly weren't going to get torpedoed. It took my uncle over six weeks but he got them all back.

However, as he was married before the war started, he kept this entire story to himself until the 1980's, when one night at a family party the passage of time and a few young Scotches got the better of him. His wife - my aunt - did exactly as he had feared all those years. He tried to tell her that he had not done anything wrong but she blew up and didn't talk to him for a week. I can still hear her yelling, "Goddamn it ____, don't you lie to me. I KNOW what happened in those places!"

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We used to play Uno together.

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me and you?

My grandfather was in the Navy in WW2. They were in the Med and hadn’t been resupplied for some time. They were down to soda pops and ice cream.

After a couple of days of that he went into a diabetic shock. Turns out he was diabetic and didn’t know it until then.

He went to the Sea Island Naval Hospital in GA to recover. While there he met a Navy nurse from Alabama. My grandmother.

They got married and settled in Ouachita Parish after the war.

P.S.

One of his shipmates was Wellington Mara. We’ve got correspondence still from the two of them. As well as pictures of the two of them at the Polo Grounds.