Shocking Stories About Your Golden Era Relatives

[Monsoon]

We had a bootlegger in my family as well, my grandfather's oldest brother. His cover was driving a taxicab, but his real business was meeting the boats from Canada in little out-of-the-way coves.

Same with my Grandfather. He was a gentleman when I always knew him, but when he was around 16-17 years old, he was running booze out of Canada for his uncle with a friend. Seems like he was a wild one. I think his buddy was the class clown who later became a priest.

His second wife (my step-grandmother?) had a colorful family. I think some of the ladies were we working as part of the "oldest profession" after WW2 (and no, they were bakers, tho you could call them tarts).

 

[2jakes]

Can you imagine what our "golden era relatives" would make of this if they were
to read what we have posted ? :eeek:

 

[Nobert]

My great-grandmother (based on family legend, I never met her) was apparently every negative aspect of hard-scrabble New England meanness. Mean both in the sense of being small and petty, as well as being unkind. She never wanted to have kids, and used to brag that she successfully terminated all her pregnancies save one: my grandfather, whom she never forgave for having the selfish, thoughtless temerity to get born and ruin her life. Into his adulthood she referred to him as "Moonface," (the men in my family tend toward round faces), and "The abortion that didn't take." At the same time, she dominated him, on her visits to the family my father remembers her making him drink his milk and such. My Grandfather, not surprisingly, grew into a self-loathing man who chain-smoked and chewed Alka-Seltzer tablets straight. He died at the age of 50, by putting a gun to his own head and pulling the trigger. My father, who was the only son of five kids, had to become "the man of the household," effectively ending his childhood at the age of ten.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Can you imagine what our "golden era relatives" would make of this if they were
to read what we have posted ? :eeek:

They didn't need to read it, they saw it all around them.

There was a family of kids living across the street from my grandparents at one point -- no parents, just kids. The oldest was a girl of about fifteen, and she took care of the whole string of younger brothers and sisters. My grandmother didn't gild the story -- "the old man was a good-for-nothing drunk, and the mother run off with a sailor. Figured the kids could fend for themselves, so away she went."

No euphemisms, no "troubled family in crisis," no beating around the bush. A spade was not called a hand-powered earth-removal instrument in our neighborhood.

 

[2jakes]

They didn't need to read it, they saw it all around them.

There was a family of kids living across the street from my grandparents at one point -- no parents, just kids. The oldest was a girl of about fifteen, and she took care of the whole string of younger brothers and sisters. My grandmother didn't gild the story -- "the old man was a good-for-nothing drunk, and the mother run off with a sailor. Figured the kids could fend for themselves, so away she went."

No euphemisms, no "troubled family in crisis," no beating around the bush. A spade was not called a hand-powered earth-removal instrument in our neighborhood.

So why was it called the "Golden Era"...[huh]

"Cold Era" sounds more like it ...

 

[LizzieMaine]

Personally, I think of it as the Golden Era of Seeing Things As They Were. The people of that generation were nothing if not realists. We do them a grave disservice by imagining that time as some kind of magazine-ad idealization.

 

[sheeplady]

My grandfather and at least two of my great uncles (maternal side of the family) ran booze during prohibition. My grandfather was the mechanic for the "operation." They ran it in all sorts of vehicles, but my grandfather's job was to keep the cars going and do the occasional run.

My grandfather and one great uncle got out of the bootleg business after the thirties, but one great uncle who married into the family stayed in until the 1950s. Apparently he was the shifty type. The Feds came and tore up my great-grandmother's house and burnt their barn in the late 1950s looking for whiskey and other assorted spirits when they came to arrest him. At the time, my grandmother and grandfather had living with them two of their adult daughters (including their husbands and children) and three adult sons. So it was a packed house, with 9 adults and four kids. I believe that my great-aunt who's husband was running the operation was heavily pregnant at the time, my other great aunt may have been pregnant too- and they both had two young kids.

The feds came in with axes and pry bars. They dragged out my grandmother's wood cookstove into the yard piece by piece, cracking it and smashing it, telling the family that there could be money in it. They pulled up floor boards all over the house and destroyed the plaster on the inside, banging holes into it and cracking the lath and plaster. They even tore up some of the stair treads. They took all the items they could from inside the house and dumped them on the front yard, yanking out the dresser drawers, dumping out clothes, throwing out china, and even using axes on some of the furniture looking for "hidden drawers." This was supposedly looking for money and spirits. I think my great uncle wasn't very good at his job, since they lived with their in-laws and the feds didn't find anything as far as a great wad of cash. Also, someone had it in for him.

My grandmother got word from a neighbor that something was happening at the house. She somehow got a ride, bringing my mother along with her. (I think possibly a neighbor of my great-grandparents came and got her, but my mother doesn't remember how she got there. My grandfather had the car, somehow they got to the farm from the nearby village.) I am not sure how old my mother was at the time, but she says she got there to find her grandmother (my great-grandmother), in the front yard screaming in Polish at the federal agents (which likely had local law enforcement with them). The stuff was on the front yard and apparently my grandmother turned to my mother and said, "They're going to burn Grandpa's barn. They're going to burn down the barn!" Almost at that second (or so the story goes according to my young and impressionable mother) they lit the barn on fire where they said they "found" the still.

The family denies that the still was on their property, instead on another's property. My mother said the barn was burnt down to make a lesson out of them, not to destroy any stills, as my great-grandparents wouldn't have allowed that to happen in their own home or barn. There may have been alcohol stored in the barn. Thankfully it was daytime and not milking time either- all the cows were in the pasture.

The great-uncle went to prison for quite a while (at least several years). My great-grandparents moved from that farm because it was left destroyed and no barn. If my great-uncle who was living there at the time hadn't confirmed this story, I wouldn't have believed it.

That's the best story I've got. I've only heard this story once, when my mother was in a strange mood.

 

[2jakes]

Personally, I think of it as the Golden Era of Seeing Things As They Were. The people of that generation were nothing if not realists. We do them a grave disservice by imagining that time as some kind of magazine-ad idealization.

I had a great loving relation with my grandma. I asked her how it was
during the "depression times" in the '30s. I was asking about how they made it as far as food.
Did she know hunger & such.She said that it was very tough, but that was the way it was for
everyone in the neighborhood. She said that the rich folks probably felt it worse that lost it
all. My grandma was a person of strong character & very strict with the girls. But yet she
spoiled me like gangbusters. I still remember her bringing me breakfast in a tray when I
would wake up in the morning. I didn't like the milk unless she would put sugar in it.She did.
She always told the others...I Love my "junior" because he listens & minds me. Which I
did because I loved her. Was I spoiled probably...but I never threw tantrums at all. That was
not in me. I miss her so much.Especially when she would sing me a lullaby in her native
language as I fell asleep. Gosh, I'd give anything to hear her voice & warm embrace again.

 

[tonyb]

I've heard similar observations from other folks, 2jakes. When everybody you're likely to run into is broke, there's no stigma attached to it. Contrast that with all the status signifiers kids grow up surrounded by these days.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My grandmother used to say the same thing about the formerly-well-off, and then she'd add "...and they deserved every bit of it."

Her views likely had something to do with the experiences of her mother -- who had made the mistake of letting a slick-talking operator -- the son of a prosperous local hotel operator --have his way with her when she was seventeen. She got pregnant, he was forced to marry her, and only then did he find out that he was a shiftless, abusive playboy drunk. She had two kids, and decided she'd had enough of him. In 1917 she kicked him out of the house, got a divorce, and took a job in a shoe factory to support the family, where she worked for many years after, even after remarrying in the mid-twenties. The playboy, meanwhile, playboyed himself thru several later marriages, spent all his father's money, and was found dead in a gutter in 1950. The only name for him ever used around our family was "That Patterson SOB."

I loved my grandmother very much. She was the most profound influence I ever had, and it was her absolute refusal to take the s-word from anybody that I admired the most.

 

[2jakes]

My grandmother used to say the same thing about the formerly-well-off, and then she'd add "...and they deserved every bit of it."

Her views likely had something to do with the experiences of her mother -- who had made the mistake of letting a slick-talking operator -- the son of a prosperous local hotel operator --have his way with her when she was seventeen. She got pregnant, he was forced to marry her, and only then did he find out that he was a shiftless, abusive playboy drunk. She had two kids, and decided she'd had enough of him. In 1917 she kicked him out of the house, got a divorce, and took a job in a shoe factory to support the family, where she worked for many years after, even after remarrying in the mid-twenties. The playboy, meanwhile, playboyed himself thru several later marriages, spent all his father's money, and was found dead in a gutter in 1950. The only name for him ever used around our family was "That Patterson SOB."

I loved my grandmother very much. She was the most profound influence I ever had, and it was her absolute refusal to take the s-word from anybody that I admired the most.

I liked walking with Grandma, her steps were short like mine,
She doesn't say "now hurry up", she always takes her time.
I liked to walk with Grandma, her eyes see things like mine do.
Most people have to hurry, they do not stop to see.
I'm glad that God made Grandma
Unrushed and young like me !

 

[Monsoon]

My dad grew up in the Depression and World War 2. They were so poor, "they didn't have a pot to **** in or a window to throw it out of."

Seriously, they were poor. They ate, but most days, what was on the table was what food they had in the house and no more.

I have my grandmothers bank book from the 1920's. Sometimes, the deposits were a few cents. She grew up in the boondocks of Vermont, a stones throw from the Canadian border. She didn't see an orange until she was 16. Her mom died and her oldest sister, who lost a leg to polio, raised everyone else with their dad.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

I think you just describe the plot of "From Here to Eternity." That is not a "the only thing," that's a pretty interesting story.

Unfortunately, my Dad never elaborated though it was way before he met and married my Mom.

 

[Stearmen]

Grandmothers are known for springing surprises on the grandkids. My own grandmother was someone who insisted on a very strict moral code in the family. She wasn't a delicate flower -- when roused she could, and did, swear like a longshoreman -- but when it came to sexual matters It Just Wasn't Discussed. She'd been told after she had my mother that another baby would likely kill her, so for the next forty-one years, she and my grandfather slept in separate beds and there was no physical intimacy. I never even saw them hold hands. They loved each other very much -- he was faithful to her all that time, right up to the day he died -- but the physical element was completely deleted from their relationship.

In that atmosphere, sex was not discussed in our family. Ever. By anyone. Except for one thing -- we were expected to remain chaste until marriage, and we all did, because she impressed that so strongly upon my mother, me, and my cousin. We wouldn't have considered anything different because she raised us all that way.

One day when I was about twelve years old, I was sitting in her kitchen looking at her scrapbook, and found a little clipping about her wedding in December of 1933. A few pages later I came to another clipping announcing the birth of my uncle in June of 1934. I thought about this for a moment. She was standing there doing the washing, so I looked over and asked "Hey, was Uncle Earle a preemie?"

She shot me a look I'd never seen before. "No," she said, wiping the soap off her hands on her apron. "He was gigantic, in fact, like to tore me in half."

I thought about that for a minute. "You and Papa got married in December," I said, very slowly. "And Earle was born in June. That's -- um -- only six months..."

Before I could finish the sentence she turned away from me and slammed the handle to turn the washing machine back on. I could see the back of her neck was flaming red. I put away the scrapbook, and excused myself from the room. I never raised the question to her again.

Several years later, I was sitting alone in that same kitchen with my grandfather, and he was in a storytelling mood. I asked him the same question I'd asked my grandmother -- "If you were married in December, how could Earle be born six months later?" He took a pull on his pipe and started laughing, very quietly, not wanting her to hear him. He looked over at me and winked. "I knocked her up. She'd kill me if she knew I told you, but I done it on purpose. I wasn't gonna let her get away if I could help it."

I never let on to her that I'd talked to him about it. I never told my mother, either, until this past summer -- figuring she must've figured it out herself, but astonishingly, the matter had never even occured to her. Such things, in our family, Just Weren't Discussed.

I just remembered a story my Mother told me about the 1930s. Seems a young women came up pregnant, she was dating two brothers, so her father went to their house with his double barrel shotgun. Holding the barrel with the butt on the ground he said, "one of you is going to make and honest women out of my daughter, I don't care which one of you, I'm not leaving until you do!" The younger brother stepped up, and they were married for over 50 years, and by all accounts happily. Funny thing, every one is sure the younger brother never slept with her until after the wedding.

 

[Shangas]

Personally, I think of it as the Golden Era of Seeing Things As They Were. The people of that generation were nothing if not realists. We do them a grave disservice by imagining that time as some kind of magazine-ad idealization.

Every family has skeletons and such, in the closet. Mine's no exception.

One story which my uncle told me involved my grandfather, and the Chinese Resistance, ca. 1930s.

During the Sino-Japanese War, it was common for foreign Chinese communities to raise money and send it back to China to fund the war against the Japanese.

My grandfather was involved in such activities in the 1930s and 40s. And he helped a lot of fundraisers who sent money back to China.

When the Japanese were knocking on his door in the early 1940s, story goes that one of these fund-raisers gave my grandfather three gold ingots to hide. He feared if the Japanese found them, they'd put two-and-two together and shoot him dead on the spot. My grandfather apparently agreed to hide the gold bars until the war was over.

When the war WAS over, my grandfather tried to find this guy. Apparently, gold or no gold, he died anyway. So my grandfather tried to do the right thing, and track down his next-of-kin. He gave the three gold bars to the dead man's son.

...Who promptly squandered his entire inheritance, and died penniless.

To this day, my uncle (now 80), still wonders how our family fortunes might have changed, if grandfather had held onto the gold, instead of throwing it away to a wastrel of a son.

 

[Zombie_61]

...Every family has a lot of stuff going on.

Some more than others. With regards to my family, I wouldn't know where to begin. And if I did, I'd likely take up an entire page.

 

[rocketeer]

Funny thing family history, some never tell, others have conflicting ideas that none of us understand.

Just going by family smalltalk I think my dad was with Mosleys Blackshirts but saw through them in the end.

Anyone got a Nazi in their past?
J

 

[Fading Fast]

Can you imagine what our "golden era relatives" would make of this if they were
to read what we have posted ? :eeek:

They absolutely knew all this stuff was going on. To Lizzie's point, there was no one who was a straighter shooter than my grandmother - they had looked into the abyss of abject poverty and were left with no illusions about life. Part of what frightened me about my grandmother is I felt how hard life had been to her and how she always felt that danger and poverty were right at the edges. And, yes, she called them as she saw them.

That said, they didn't air their dirty laundry with glee the way many do today. My grandmother didn't think a child born out of wedlock or a relative with a drinking problem was a great disgrace - and when she was finally on her feet financially, she helped many people in those and similar situations (for years after she died, people told me how my grandmother had helped them personally) - but she would have been horrified about the way many today advertise - scream from the mountaintop - their issues.

She was a complete realist, had a big heart that had been beaten up early, but also believe in decorum. It is the lack of the later that would, IMHO, most shock my grandmother if she was alive today.

 

[emigran]

My Grandmother was a tough cookie... She became the manager and head buyer for a major department store. She wore slacks to work... she was one of 16 siblings (only 9 survived ). Her sister, Aunt Grace, was a real looker as a young woman and was bejeweled and courted by "UncleTony" who was in "Olive Oil"... think Genco from the Godfather... when we were kids Uncle Tony would often come in to my Grandmother's apartment with a couple of men ( in suits) and we had to stay out of the kitchen while they were there... Without explanation Uncle Tony died and we went to the funeral where there were a lot of dark suits and hats... I can still remember... I was about 6-7.

 

[2jakes]

Some more than others. With regards to my family, I wouldn't know where to begin. And if I did, I'd likely take up an entire page.

You can take up the entire space on my page, I don't mind.

I'll ask the ladies to please kindly go to the parlor if they wish Thank You...