Stories your parents have told you - Or your grandpa's old war stories

[OJ 473]

Have your parents/grandparents ever told you a great story great enough to share with your friends? I'm interested to hear any funny stories passed down from your old folks who have most likely lived in a different time.

This one is from my Dad.
My dad worked as a bouncer for a night club in the 80's and saw a lot of crazy shit. One such incident involved a man named Frankie. Frankie and his friends had gotten really drunk and decided it would be really fun to tear Frankie's clothes off. Frankie sat giggling in a corner like a little girl, completely naked, until someone sent him home. Frankie ran home in the nude only to come back and have his new clothes torn off again.

 

[melty]

My grandfather told me that there were Injuns living in the woods near his house and they might attack me if I wandered too far.

 

[OJ 473]

My grandfather told me that there were Injuns living in the woods near his house and they might attack me if I wandered too far.

Well, did they?

 

[OJ 473]

There's another story from my mom where her pervert boss brought in a prostitute who could bounce quarters on her stomach while smoking out of her vagina. Her boss called her "talented."

 

[GentlemanFaggot]

My grandpa was too young to enlist in WWII when it started.

Partway through though, he wanted to lie about his age and enlist. Around that time, his brother, who was overseas in service, came back due to injury.

My grandpa shared this fact with him and he told him that if he was going to do that, he was going to break both of his legs right now.

Grandpa did eventually join the air cadets, which he was old enough to, but the war ended before he would have gotten enlisted.

All we know about his brother is that he was a tailgunner and his plane crash-landed in occupied France. He survived, but as soon as he climbed out of his wreck, a scared kid pointed a shotgun at him. He couldn't speak French, so just walked away and the kid didn't shoot him.

Now clearly, there's a bigger story there, being an English Canadian stranded in occupied France, but that's all I know. He got back to friendly territory one way or another.

His brother drank heavily after the war and got hit by a car while stumbling onto the road at night only a few years later.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

My grandparents were both up in Alaska (Papa was stationed up there when he was in the army, and same with Grandma's father) when they met in the church parking lot--because Papa almost ran over Grandma backing up. They married a few months later in late-August of 1963.

And yes, they were up there when the Great M9.2 Alaska Earthquake happened.

With my parents, when they were teenagers (well, Dad had graduated high school by this point), Dad wanted to play a prank on Mom by hiding in the back of her car and jumping out when she got in, but Papa caught him before she could walk out of the door. He was mad at Dad for a few years for that (either before or after my parents married).

I gotta remember some more, I know Papa has a lot of interesting stories he told me.

 

[ForgedBlades]

My grandfather fathered a love child with some bartender when he was in his 60s.

Apparently he paid her off to keep quiet about it, because it would have ruined a lot of things in his life if it got out. The woman and her kid moved to Alabama or something shortly after the girl was born.

My dad was the only one who knew about it, until my grandfather died five years ago. The woman somehow found out about his passing, and then made this huge fuss about getting access to the will to see if he had left the daughter anything (he didn't). By then, rumors started flying and the truth came out. Thankfully, my grandmother was so far gone with dementia at that point that she couldn't really comprehend the situation.

So yeah, I have an aunt somewhere ten years my junior.

 

[MerriedxReldnahc]

I got to tell this story earlier today when a friend brought up that a Mexican bullfighter just had his rectum fucking destroyed by a bull's horn.
My mom's godmother's father happened to be a bullfighter as well when he was younger. She still has memories of him having velvet paintings of bullfighters all over the house (he also had a secret drawer where he kept Fritos. He shared Fritos with no one but my mom.). Anyway, at some point of his career he had an unfortunate run-in with a bull horn piercing him in the lower stomach. Had the horn pierced him any lower this would have been a much more tragic story. It doesn't end there, because as the bull threw its head back with my great- godgrandpa still attached, the horn ripped all the way up his stomach and chest, practically to his neck.
His scar was apparently something nightmarish, but he loved to show it to people and tell them the story. I really wish I had a picture, this guy sounded like the baddest motherfucker alive.

 

[Bogs]

My uncle relayed a story when he first came to Ireland (my mom had moved over), and he went drinking with my dad. Having no form of ID, and being underage, my uncle didn't have much hope of drinking that night. He relayed this information to my dad; my dad said no worries, and dug into his pocket and pulled out his keys and gave them to my uncle. The keychain had a picture of an ugly woman smoking a cigarette with a caption that read "smoking is glamorous." My uncle appreciated the humor, but asked my dad how the fuck this was ever going to get him into a pub. My dad said just show that to any bouncer and you'll get in.
When they got to the pub, my uncle nervously gave the bouncer the keychain. He laughed and let him in.

 

[Wallace]

My uncle was in the Korean war. While there, he nearly got hit by an enemy mortar shell. After the dust settled, he looked back and found the shell's casing. On the inside was written, "Made by *company that uncle used to work for* in *uncle's hometown*."

Oddly enough, uncle has been a life-long Republican, and is still very pro-war.

 

[omori]

Great (great?) uncle was a pilot in wwII I believe (lied about his age during enlistment), had his plane shotdown and ejected getting himself stuck in a tree. Got shot at by german soldiers and was hit in the neck so he played dead until they left. He got himself free and crawled his way to the nearest allied base. He just barely got recognized by the French government recently.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

Had a relative who turned 18 in May 1944 and was immediately drafted into the Army in World War II. He didn't even arrive in Europe until after the end of the Battle of the Bulge, so he saw next to no action, though he said he was shot at in Luxembourg and Germany. Nothing really all that exciting there.

But because he arrived on the scene so late, he got stuck as a guard at a POW camp until around the end of 1946. This is where it got interesting. His stories about it were borderline to surreal. Essentially, the German prisoners ran the place with about the only thing they weren't allowed to do being carrying weapons. The de-mobilization ("de-mob" he called it) had simply not left enough American troops around to do everything that was needed. They had French speaking Germans driving trucks (the locals near [I think, not 100% sure on location] Rheims where the camp was were simply found to be too irresponsible, or so he claimed), English speaking Germans running the switchboard and working as file clerks and typists, in addition to all the other stuff like maintaining the fences, doing all the cooking, all the cleaning, etc. The inmates were literally running the asylum.

He claimed they only ever had one escapee, despite that fact that it would have been easy to do so. The guy later had a letter smuggled back to his friends still in the camp telling them to stay where they were, that Berlin was horrible.

Another story I remember: One day the camp was visited by an upper-crust Brit aristocrat officer. The camp commander was some sort of career Army backwoods Georgian shit-kicker with an extremely thick accent. The two officers literally could not understand each other, so the commander's German secretary had to "translate" from Posh dialect into Redneck and back. One of those stories that amuses me far more than I guess it should.

He passed away in 2012. Wish I'd had the foresight to get him on camera and record all this stuff. It is certainly nothing I've read in any history book.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

I don't have war stories, but my great-grandfather and his fleet, who was in the Navy during WWII, left Pearl Harbor the day before the attack. He unfortunately never would talk about it when asked, so that's all we know about his time in the Navy.

 

[Lackadaisy]

According to my grandfather, our family name was traded to a criminal in Sicily for a pig back in his grandfather's day. Apparently, the pig was pretty tasty and my family took the name of the Greek ruins we were raising pigs around.

 

[GentlemanFaggot]

I'll tell another of my grandpa's stories.

He worked as a custodian at a hospital, specifically, his job was to clean up after operations and in potentially contaminated medical wards. This meant cleaning up a lot of blood.

He told me about one time when he was cleaning up after an amputation and...suffice to say, against procedure even back then, the limb was just lying on a table, and it was a mess even for his job. Then he heard moaning coming from inside a closet and opened it up, finding a doctor and a nurse making out, almost unaware of what a fucking disgusting mess it was outside, or perhaps knowing and not caring.

More impressive, and significantly more appropriate for him to be telling me this story when I was a kid, he had to go for testing because he was working in wards with contagious patients. His blood test one time revealed that he tested positive for polio and tuberculosis but didn't show any symptoms and never did. I thought this was bullshit, but I did see on some medical record of his that this was recorded, and my family generally has a good immune system, so I guess it happened.

He also told me about the only time he got disgusted on the job. There was this ancient black man who was a patient and he claimed that he was a slave in the South US when he was a child. He showed him his back and it was basically a mountain of old scars and whip marks. He said it was more uncomfortable to look at than anything else he saw in the hospital.

 

[DumbDosh]

My grandpa fought in WW2 as a paratrooper.

I don't remember all the specifics of this because I got told about this when I was young but apparently a nazi killed one of my grandpa's friends so my grandpa hunted down that nazi, cut his balls off and took his swastika medal.

I totally believed it when it was told to me, but if I was told when I was older I would be a little skeptical. However, my mom gave me some stuff my dad and grandpa used to own, including the actual swastika medal he took off that nazi soldier.

So now I have a swastika medal that I can't get rid of, because it would be completely disrespectful to my grandpa, and if anybody comes across it I have to explain about the nazi who really pissed off my grandpa.

 

[AnOminous]

His blood test one time revealed that he tested positive for polio and tuberculosis but didn't show any symptoms and never did. I thought this was bullshit, but I did see on some medical record of his that this was recorded, and my family generally has a good immune system, so I guess it happened.

The TB test, if it's the skin test, just shows whether you have antibodies to TB. If you've been exposed to it, you may show the skin response (it rapidly swells up), even if you've never had the actual disease.

 

[GentlemanFaggot]

The TB test, if it's the skin test, just shows whether you have antibodies to TB. If you've been exposed to it, you may show the skin response (it rapidly swells up), even if you've never had the actual disease.

That might explain it.

Though I was more freaked out about the polio part.

 

[FatFuckingClown]

My stepmom moved from the Philippines to Los Angeles in 1978.

Somewhere around 1984, she was in her house cutting a green bell pepper in her kitchen at around 5 P.M., (she always says this when she tells the story, it's really specific), when she heard her door swing open. (This was Eagle Rock in the eighties, everyone had their doors unlocked.)

She thought it could have been her first husband, who was a night security guard at the local mall. Thinking it was odd that he would have come home so early, she was about to turn around and ask him, when all of a sudden, she gets grabbed and slammed into the counter. She remembers that he was telling her not to scream, that "his breath smelled like death, actual death", and that if she didn't say that she loved Satan that "it'd be much worse for her."

Then, miraculously, her husband actually did come home early (for an upset stomach/diarrhea, Filipino food will do this to you from time to time) in full uniform, with his fucking baton, and he charged the guy. Guy somehow gets away, stepmom is shaken to the core, bruised, but otherwise okay, they go to the police to report it.

They took the report, life goes on as much as it can.

A year later, they catch him. His name was Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker.

 

[Meat_Puppet]

Years ago my brother and I would spend the summer in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with our grandparents. We had rope swings that led out to the water, trails that went on for miles, and our own canoe. As a kid this was absolutely perfect, but as we got older we both would rather blow shit up and get high the entire time. One day our grandpa caught up with us hanging out at the bonfire smoking and he asked us to pass the hit. Sure as fuck he got high with us and started telling us about the serial killer John Norman Collins and how he years ago used to stalk around near our cabin. At the time it scared me to the point I had to go sober up and was clean till the minute I got home. It was years later I found out his story was crap, but man that put some fucking fear into me.