Family Stories You Did Not Hear About Until Adulthood That Blew Your Mind.....

[Hardrock69]

Ok. So I happened to think of this as a somewhat original idea for a thread after my Mom blew my mind yesterday.


Was over there doing the turkey day thing. We are all holding up fairly well, considering the circumstances.

Anyway, some years ago, my Mom told me something I had never heard before.

She was engaged to another guy before she met my Dad.

I was like "WTF??? Do tell!".

Mom met Dad in about 1954-55 time frame. They were married in June 1956. Another great thing about my parents. Married for 55 years. Till death did they part.

Anyway, my Mom had a girlfriend in college who was going out with some guy. Dude was from NYC and was going to college in Wichita....we'll just call him "Paul".

Mom's girlfriend breaks up with the guy..... Mom starts going out with him. They get engaged. But Paul had a full scholarship to some Ivy League college....super smart straight A guy and all the major schools wanted him. He wanted Mom to go with him, but she was determined to get her degree before leaving town, and decided against it. So Paul left.....eventually got in touch with Mom to tell her he had married someone else, etc.


So.....last night Mom adds something to the story I had never heard before......and what I found out really blew my mind.

Paul was going home for the summer (this was 1952), and invited his girlfriend (my Mom's friend) to go to NYC for the summer for vacation, and said she could bring her sister. Sister could not go, Mom got invited and went.

So they get there. Paul's family lived in Brooklyn. Mom and her friend were staying at the YWCA for 2 bucks a night.


First day they go to Paul's home and they are hanging out for awhile. Paul tells his Dad that he is going to take them to see a friend of his. Mom said Paul and his Dad traded a look that was pretty significant, though Mom had no idea what it meant until decades later.

They go to a modest 3 story brownstone in Brooklyn and ring the doorbell. Door is answered by a nice lady who is Paul's friend's mother apparently. She invites them in, says Paul's friend is up on the third floor in the rec room.

They go up there, and Paul's friend and a couple of other young people are playing billiards. At the end of the room, in a chair is an older man, in his 50s. Paul immediately brought his girlfriend and my Mom over to him and introduced them. Mom said he asked where they were from, and was told "Kansas", to which he replied "Where's Kansas?".

Mom said he absolutely gave her the creeps. She knew immediately she was in the presence of a man who seemed to have a lot of power, with eyes that just had that look of someone who was extremely dangerous.

So.....Mom and her friend spent the rest of the summer in New York City, then went back to Wichita.

Then things happened in the order my Mom mentioned to me some years ago...girlfriend broke up with Paul, Mom got engaged to him, then he left town, never to return.

She eventually went to another major University in the South....where she met my Dad, and the rest is history.

So....Mom told me last night that back in the late 80s-early 90s she happened to be watching cable, and there was a documentary on about John Gotti...the Dapper Don. They were giving a bunch of background history on the Five Families in NYC.....showing images of some of the major players....and Mom said she suddenly recognized one of the photos.....it was that man she had met in 1952 that gave her the chills....and suddenly she remembered the look Paul had given his Dad when he said he was going to his friend's house.

Seems his friend's Dad was a "Godfather".

Mom said when she saw that it really blew her mind.

Needless to say, when she told me this last night if tripped me out.

She said though that she could not recall the man's name, but that his first name began with the letter C, and that she would recognize the name if she heard it, and would surely recognize a photo of the man.

So I walked right over to the computer, Googled Brooklyn Crime Families Mafia 1952, and came up with Carmine Persico....I asked her if that sounded right and she said no......so then I found someone else, found a photo of him, and just asked her to come have a look....she did and said it really looked like him, but a younger version.

It was a mugshot from the 1930s of Carlo Gambino.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/Carlo_Gambino.jpg/200px-Carlo_Gambino.jpg

And when I told her who it was, she said that was him........


She had begun the conversation by asking me if she had ever told me how she met a "Godfather".

Says on Gambino's Wikipedia page that he lived modestly in a row house in Brooklyn and had 3 sons and a daughter. He was born in 1902, so in 1952 he would have been 50, and that put him in the right age range for the man my Mom met.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Gambino

So I asked my Mom....."You didn't do him any favors did you?" And she laughed and said "OH NO!". And I said "Good for you....because once you do a favor for someone in the Mob...you are going to be in their debt for life!"

Every now and then Mom springs a story on me I have never heard before, but this one really takes the cake.

Along the lines of my Mom being engaged to a man BEFORE my Dad, Mom had told me 10 years ago or so that her Mom, my Grandma, had been been engaged to a man in the early 1920s before she met my Grandpa, that it was a relationship based on money (gee...Grandma was a golddigger?), and the guy was a staunch Catholic and was an asshole, which amazed me, because it explained to me why in the 1960s anyone would mention Catholics to my Grandma she would get pretty pissed off and would start cussing about them, lol.

So sitting here, typing this out, I figured this is a sort of original thread idea.

Did your parents spring any stories on you in their later years about something fantastical that happened to them when they were younger? Or something about someone you had met or were related to that you found hard to believe? Something they had never told you before?

[Sensible Shoes]

I have a couple of doozies -

1. My adoptive father told me after my adoptive mother died that he'd had an affair with one of their "group" and that when I was born that woman became my godmother. All must have been forgiven, huh?

2. the ultimate "I didn't know story" -

I DID know I was adopted. Or I should say, I THOUGHT I was adopted.

But I didn't know when my adoptive mother died that I was a gray market baby, and that my adoption had never been finalized. So I had been living for 19 years under a false name, and my biological parents could have returned at any point and taken me away. How did it happen? Well gosh golly, my dad had notes on the whole thing including my biological mother's name and all kinds of background info on both my biological mother and father. Well it seems the woman got pregnant in HS and married the guy. That wasn't me, that baby died at birth. So she took off, (why be married to the guy if there is no baby?) and got hooked up with another guy, who turned out to be my father. She got pregnant, and went home to her parents. But she wasn't divorced and in NYS the law says the husband is the father of the child, above the biological father. So I could not be put up for adoption without the husband's consent, which he would not give unless she gave him a divorce without alimony. Which SHE wouldn't do.

So I just got placed. And the divorce war never got resolved, so I simply stayed with this family and everybody hoped it would all just stay under the radar. Which it did, until my adoptive mother died and Social Security refused to pay my student benefits because (surprise) the records showed my parents had no children! So I had to sign for my own adoption in court at age 19 with a name I'd never seen before!

The kick in the ass was, THEN THEY SEALED THE RECORDS! I was so pissed. I took the notes my father had, and years later found my biological family, and got to meet my father once before he died. My mother and sisters and I are still in touch.

(Then I did genealogy on the birth family and found LOTS of skeletons but that's for another day.)

[Nitro Express]

We were watching White Christmas a few years back and my mom said if people only knew what a real asshole Bing Crosby was in real life. I responded I suppose you met Bing Crosby and she goes she knew him and he was a horrible man.

She then went into telling me how she worked for a man that owned race horses and would travel to various horse races. she was a smart lady and very astute in the ways of the world. She always used to say she learned a lot about life hanging around various race tracks.

Bing owned a ranch in the Elko, Nevada area and his sons worked the ranch. My mom was friends with Bing's sons and said they were really nice people. Then one day Bing came to the ranch and she said he treated his kids like shit. She said he was the most verbally abusing asshole she had ever seen. His kids were scared to death of him. She just said the man was so horrible she is amazed nobody killed him. He was that bad I guess.

[SunisinuS]

Wow SS just Wow.

Well you just keep those sensible shoes and your knickers in their proper places and realize you have a home with us ok?

:baby:

I could tell you my story but it just begins with my Birth and then Death Death Death...ad nauseum.

[Nitro Express]

My cousin who was an experienced police officer always said look into a persons eyes and you can tell what they are. He said they can put on all the BS they want but if you look into their eyes they are like crystal balls telling you exactly what that person is. Over the years I have found it to be very true. Your mom saw a killer in those eyes and we also have that sense of discernment. Animals have it. Horses and dogs can sense a person's intentions.

Cool story! Obviously the family had mob ties and was letting Gambino check out the young lady to see if she was worth marrying into the family. Good thing your mom didn't marry him.

[SunisinuS]

My Father was a great guy, Educated, Kind, but Mom and Him still believed in spanking. So one thanksgiving my brothers and I were sitting around and talking family. My oldest brother was 17 years older than I am. So 17 yrs old when I was pooped out.

I started to tell a story about how, when I was 13 my Dad was going to give me a spanking, so the ritual played out, I waited in my room where I was told to go until he got home. I stuffed some newspaper in my pants to kinda soften the blow without giving it away, and when he got home I took the strap. I had already decided that this was the last one ever.

Right afterwords, I collected my thoughts and walked into my parents bedroom where they were both on the bed. I explained to them in no uncertain terms that that was the last one. Sorry, I said. My dad was 6'4 and I said, next time you try it, I will climb up on top your your shoulders and rip your head off. Understood I said?

So my oldest brother, who basically never even shared the same household with me, told me: "When I was 13 I did the exact same thing....(laughing). Except when Dad was done spanking me, I walked into their bedroom as they were both on the bed and told him if he ever tried it again I would kill him". Lol his added feature was that he grabbed a Kitchen Meat Knife off the counter before he walked in and brandished it.

Neither of us were ever spanked again or even threatened with it.

:laser:

[Nitro Express]

My dad never laid a hand on me but when he yelled it shook the whole house. It was scary as hell. My mom was the one you didn't fuck with. I got cocky and stood up to her and literally got clobbered. I never pulled that shit again.

The worst beating I got was when I ran away from home and when they found me, my mom was furious. I got the belt good for that one.

[lesfunk]

I know a guy who fucked Barbara Eden....

[SunisinuS]

I know a guy who fucked Barbara Eden....

Did she pop his Genie Bubble? She seems like she would be a good lay.

[Hardrock69]

Wow. Dude was lucky. Barbara Eden.....hey Jeannie....I gots a wish for ya....drool......

Well, maybe not these days, lol.

I learned early on not to give my Mom any lip.

One night she was verbally punishing me for something, and I acted like I was scratching my finger.....my MIDDLE finger.....next thing I know, I was picking myself up off the floor with my head ringing. She slapped me so fast and so hard I did not see it coming, and I was looking right at her.

Never tried that again. :D


Never thought I personally had met any Mob people. Until I moved to Nashville and was talking to a producer I know.

Back in 1984, I was running lights for a couple of touring club bands. We played from Texas to Georgia and back. There was this guy (fake name: Roger) who owned a bunch of clubs in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Roger owned 3 or 4 live music clubs, and all the strip clubs in town. He was a really cool guy....liked us a lot, said anytime you are just heading through town let me know and I will give you a pot of jumbalai or get you a place to crash or something. He was as good as his word.....a couple of times after that we were travelling through town on the way to a gig somewhere else, and he would feed us, let us crash at his house, whatever.

Fast fwd 20 years. 2004, I am talking to my producer friend. In the mid-80s he played in a band in the Louisiana area, and our conversation got around to that time period. I told him about "Roger" and asked if he knew him. He said "Are you kidding? He was the biggest Mob guy in Louisiana outside of New Orleans!".
"Roger" was not Italian, was maybe in his early 30s, was really a cool guy. Guess you could say he was a member of the "Southern Mafia", but not so much the old-style NY Italian Five Families kinda mob.

Damn Sunisinus.....good for you! I can't recall the last time I got the belt....but I am pretty sure it was before I was age 9. Never had to stand up to my Dad like that. My Dad was the kind of guy he would have gotten pretty pissed off if I had talked back to him like that, but then, he was a very 'moral' kinda guy in a non-religious way, and if I HAD stood up to him, he would have stopped corporal punishment at that point.

His punishment with the belt between the ages of 5 and 9 were not common, and only on a few occasions out of all of them, was it excessive for what I had done.
But he put the fear of God in me quick.....he DID teach me right from wrong at an early age....even if it was not quite so much learning that lesson, but just being afraid of getting an ass-whipping, lol.

About a year ago he expressed serious regret at how he had punished me as a child. He had plenty of time to reflect on his life in the last few years, and he felt guilty about it all.

I said "Dad, don't even have regrets like that. You taught me right from wrong, and the belt was a fast way for you to teach me the law. I do not regret it....certainly it did not happen often enough to bother me as an adult. You have said before how proud you are of me.....well, thanks to you, I became someone you would be proud of. So shut the hell up, lol".

Nothing was left unsaid between me and my Dad. Wish everyone could say that. I had all the time we needed to say everything we needed to say. Just lucky I guess.

[twonabomber]

"Roger" was not Italian, was maybe in his early 30s, was really a cool guy. Guess you could say he was a member of the "Southern Mafia", but not so much the old-style NY Italian Five Families kinda mob.


that's kinda funny. i had an uncle who wasn't Italian, and i'd always hear that he was "connected." he was Polish, but married to my grandmother's sister and that side (dad's) of the family is Italian. HUGE opulent house, nice big cars, the works.

i knew my uncle was some kind of engineer or designer. then, when he died last year, i read in the obit that he worked for AM General, designed a couple buses and worked on the military Humvee's suspension. kinda got pissed over that one, i would have loved to talk to him about that.

my dad has mentioned various family members being connected too, not really anyone i ever remember meeting. one day my dad, my aunt, and i were sitting around after dinner and my aunt said that when my grandmother was younger (maybe teens?) that she had seen something (a body in a car was mentioned) and was sent away for her protection for a while. not far, maybe to Sandusky from Toledo. my aunt said she'd ask my grandmother about it now and then and she wouldn't talk about it at all.

i remember very little about my grandfather, he died before i was two. my aunt says we were like best friends. my grandparents lived by the port, he'd walk me a couple blocks over to watch the trains. the one thing i didn't know is that i tried to climb into the coffin with him during his funeral.

mom used to tell people about leaving me on one street corner while she ran across the street to put something in the mailbox...she turns around to come back and i'm standin' there pissin' in the street. :D

[bb64]

My Mom told me a story of when I was 2-ish...I was upset about something at home and wanted to run away,so they tied a knapsack onto a stick and put a few things in it that I said I would need, lol, I proceeded to walk down the street(while my dad was hopping back fences to watch me) and I got one block and stopped at the next street and started to cry. My dad came up and said "What's wrong, I thought you were running away" and I told him that I wasn't allowed to cross the street!!!...I went home with him,lol.

[Hardrock69]

I ran away from home when I was 5. Not on purpose. I saw a rainbow, and my Mom had been telling me there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so when I saw it I headed out.
It looked like it ended in a park that was a couple of miles away, and so as I was walking along this busy street I would stop in at some business and ask for directions to get to the park.

Then I came across a back yard where a bunch of kids were playing and I got sidetracked. The kids' mom came out and asked me my address and last name. Next thing I know my Dad was there to pick me up. Yes, I got an ass-whipping for that one, lol.

[Terry]

When I was 18, my father informed me that he had been engaged to be married prior to meeting my mother. The woman he was engaged to bore his child, a daughter. She was born about 2 years before I was. Inbetween her birth and my father meeting my mother, my father and my half-sister's mom split up and put my half-sister up for adoption.

Right after THAT bombshell, my father told me that he and my mother married only because he got her pregnant (with me) and it was 'the right thing to do'.

Right after THAT bombshell, my father informed me he and my mother were getting a divorce.

It was essentially like "you were an unwanted pregnancy, I'm leaving your mother...and by the way, you have a half-sister two years older than you". It was all stated so matter-of-factly by him as well...very cold...


My half-sister turned out to be a really good person, though.

[Sensible Shoes]

Sorry Terry. Know what that all feels like.

[Hardrock69]

God Damn Terry. Makes my initial story look like nothing! That's an awful lotta crap to lay on someone at once! :(

[Terry]

It kind of fucked me up for several years after he told me that...just existential-wise, you know?

After a while, though, rather than dwell on how I ended up being put on this Earth, I just accepted the fact that I was here and that the here and now was more important than how it started.

For a long time I felt guilty because I just plain disliked the dude. Had thoughts along the lines of wondering what that said about me as a person inasmuch as I don't like my old man...like, what kind of child doesn't like their parent? It all comes down to mutual respect. We haven't really spoken for ten years, and in the last five years of those this estrangement has bothered me less and less, mostly because we have nothing to say to each other, really.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has people in their family where communication exists solely because they ARE family; so little in common that you wouldn't choose to associate with them if they WEREN'T family.

He remarried in the 1990s to a woman two years older than me and now I have a step brother and step sister in their early teens.

Strange.

[Sensible Shoes]

Been there, done that. I finally broke off communication in the early 80's. I have bouts of feeling guilty about that, but it just couldn't be fixed.

[Hardrock69]

Ha.....I just showed my Mom two things.

One, a photo of Carlo Gambino that was later in life than the one I showed her originally

http://2media.nowpublic.net/images//93/1d/931de894e468fac73f103d3177063cd7.jpg

She said it was definitely him.

Then I showed her a Google street view of his home, and she said it looked different than it used to, but was similar to the house she was at.

So I identified him as THE guy she met in 1952.

How wild.

[Sensible Shoes]

That is wild! She's lucky not to have gotten any more involved than that one visit.

[Sensible Shoes]

(Then I did genealogy on the birth family and found LOTS of skeletons but that's for another day.)

I promised this for another day - so why not.

My birthmother's father (my grandfather) was a piece of work. He beat my grandmother, drank himself to death and had the family moving out of apartments every couple of months under the cover of darkness because he couldn't hold a job. This is all typical fuckstick behavior some of us see in our families, but this guy went a bit further:

1. He originally married a woman near Philadelphia and had a son. He left them, and then married my grandmother without the benefit of a divorce from the first wife.
BIGAMIST! The kids knew about the marriage thingy, but did not know they had an older half brother, I dug that one up.

2. He deserted from the Army, only to join the Navy sometime later. I'm sure they would have been so thrilled to have him had they known.

Colorful life, haven't I?

[Northern Girl]

When I was about 8, I found out that I was really not delivered from heaven by a pretty stork but was cut out of my mommy with a knife! Oh, the horror!

And then when I was 14, the principal of my school informed me I wasn't really a princess like my parents always told me! :nono:

[Hardrock69]

Lol. Well, that is ok, Your Highness. We won't tell anyone. :hee: