Badass/Interesting Family Members

[Silverdream]

Similiar to the manly fucking tales section. This time it's about family members.

I'll start.

Badass#1 Uncle Birdy. He has 9 and a half fingers and is sort of crazy. He makes wooden shit with his bare hands.

Badass#2 Archie. Although he's dead now, he lived to be 96. He was not only a veteran of WWII, but a freemason and pretty damn Scottish.

[mgb519]

I had a great grandfather who lived to 110 and was splitting rails on the day he died. Or maybe it was a generation above that.

[Tzan]

My step father's father was in WWII.
He was on a small patrol boat in the English Channel one day.
It got attacked by a Stuka.
He got hit with one 20mm shell through the gutz.
In the front, out the back without exploding... until it hit the ship.
He ended up in the water and was soon rescued. He spent months in the hospital and had a fist sized scoop of himself missing on his back where the shell exited.

[Tuefish]

My grandpa on my mother's side was a WWII vet, and lived to be 100.
My grandpa on my dad's side was an inventor and an engineer for nasa during the apollo missions, he was also a microbiologist and a korea vet, he died of liver cancer from messing around with chemicals that they didn't understand.
He passed his hat and his pipe down to my dad, who passed it down to me.

[stubby]

One of my granddads was also a Freemason (Scottish Rite) and a WWII vet. Hopefully this doesn't mean I'm related to Silva somehow. Following the war, he made his fortune off his patented feats of engineering, particularly the chip ship chip chute. It revolutionized the naval transport of wood chips by loading them into a kind of multi-stage deck gun.

The other granddad was an Allied codebreaker whose last public act was to help found the NSA. After that nobody knows exactly what he was doing because he kept his mouth shut. Although stories sometimes got out about how he was helping my various uncles outwit congressional investigations (google "red rayhawk" for instance).

My mom and dad met while stealing a cannon from a military school a couple miles away. It was my dad's job to distract the police by calling in dozens of false reports beforehand about kids stealing cannons, until the police got tired of coming out to investigate. It was my mom's job to build low-noise replacement cannon wheels and switch them out with the non-functional antique ones on the cannon, without anybody noticing.

Later the two of them used the cannon to blow all the windows out at once on the hippie house across the street, when those bastard hippies tried to protest the war by filling the cannon barrel with lime jello. Little did the hippies realize (hippies are bad at guns) that the cannon is a rear-loading model, making it easy to load the back end up with gunpowder. The hippies ended up with a house covered in burnt jello and a much smaller number of intact doors and windows.

I went to visit the cannon when I was in college, decades later; it's still there, now a local landmark.

[Arkbrik]

An ancestor on my mother's side was a Finn barbarian warlord. He fought for Charles XII against the Russians, and after the Swedes were defeated he fought his way clear, hiked north through the Russian wilderness and founded a village, where my grandfather eventually grew up.

[Killer Karetsu]

An ancestor on my mother's side was a Finn barbarian warlord. He fought for Charles XII against the Russians, and after the Swedes were defeated he fought his way clear, hiked north through the Russian wilderness and founded a village, where my grandfather eventually grew up.

Awesome.
I'm related to the guy who started the finnish "Club war" or "Cudgel war". He was the leader of the peasants who fought a bloody war against the finnish and swedish warlords.

[Tzan]

(tales of awesome)

Nice!

All my blood relatives are fairly boring.
So here is one from my step father.

This sounds unbelievable even to me. But I have lived with the guy and he never lied to me, never told a tall tale and seems not very creative. I'm still not sure I believe it.

So... He was in Germany after the war and was in a Sherman tank, he was never in the war.
He was positioned at one end of a bridge over a river, on the other side was a german tank being operated by some russians. For whatever reason the tank started across the bridge. They fired at the treads and disabled that one so the tank turned to the side a bit and went over the rail into the river.

The higher ups split up the crew and he ended up as a jeep driver for an officer in France.

That all seems crazy enough, but there is a little more.

After a while they sent him to Tibet where we had a listening post to watch China. He was working security. They were on the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. But there were bandits that would sneak up at night and kill any guy that was sleeping in his foxhole, then steal his stuff to sell. Nothing really happened when he was there.



Oh I did something neat once.
I rode a bicycle from Boston MA to Portland Oregon, took 2 months.

[piltogg]

Grandpa. Piltogg.

[OneEye589]

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

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

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

[Pwnerade]

My Great-Grandfather got a Purple Heart in Italy in WW2. He was standing behind a tank when it ran over a mine. He also had a shell from an anti-tank gun go into the ground right where he was standing, but it exploded underground and he was unhurt. He also helped liberate concentration camps.

[Silent-sigfig]

One grandpa was a Piltogg who spent the war in a russain prison camp.
the other was a U.S. navy sailor whose ship never left port.

My great uncle worked with the american ambassador to cuba in the 50s. my 101-year-old great aunt was a spy.

[Silverdream]

One grandpa was a Piltogg who spent the war in a russain prison camp.
the other was a U.S. navy sailor whose ship never left port.

My great uncle worked with the american ambassador to cuba in the 50s. my 101-year-old great aunt was a spy.

Wait. So you're black and jewish, but your Grandpa was a Piltogg?

[Keldoclock]

Grandfather on father's side died before I was born, underage tank gunner in WWII.

Father was involved in Cuban Missile Crisis.

[501stCadians]

Aside from my ancestor being in Woodrow Wilson's cabinet, my only other ancestors of note are two brothers(great-great uncles) on my father's side, who were partisans in WWII in Croatia. On died when the Germans hunted him down with German Shepards, and the other guy was traumatized whenever he saw one from then on(unfortunately for him, the one time he came to Canada was when the family kept a German Shepard named Star.). That's about it.