Your Grandfather

My grandfather was a lifelong alcoholic and serial cheater.

He cheated on my grandmother, and when my mom was a teenager, she saw him at a restaurant kissing on his secretary. After my grandmother divorced him, he married a really sweet woman whom I loved. She got cancer and was dying in the hospital while he was drunkenly cheating on her with yet another one of his secretaries. One night, that woman called my dying step grandmother in the hospital and told she was fucking my grandfather.

After my step grandmother died, my grandfather married that cunt secretary of his. They lived a life of alcoholism and mutual bitterness (think George and Martha from "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf") until she died. He died several years later.

So my grandfather wasn't exactly the model grandpa.

Mine dropped out of 9th grade to help provide for his family. He was the second boy of 10. He enlisted in Korea and sent money back every week too. Ended up driving a truck. He saved up money for years to open his own trucking business and it was successful. My grandmother stayed home and kept his business books.

They only had one kid, my mom. My grandaddy taught her to be independent but would get mad when she questioned him. He saved up for her to go to college (the first of her cousins to go). Her first job was working at his trucking company. He told her she wasn't cut out for it because she kept challenging him. It's a family joke that he fired her.

In his retirement, he would sit at his kitchen table drinking coffee and smoking while flipping between CNN, Fox News, the local news, and Judge Judy.

I think about him and miss him everyday.

Mine used to love Elizabeth Montgomery until she kissed a black man in a movie

My nonno loved tending to his tomato plants and garden. He also liked playing bocce ball in an alley behind his house and playing cards with the other old Italian men in his neighborhood.

He walked me to and from kindergarten every day and would stop and get me a fudgesicle at the corner mom and pop store when I asked or penny candy.

He smoked a pipe and wore plaid shirts. He would dunk hunks of crusty homemade bread into homemade wine and give them to me and my cousins to eat.

His would answer the phone "yellow" instead of "hello". His English wasn't great.

He called me and my cousins "gidrul" which means cucumber in Italian (correct spelling cetriolo).

I've told the ghastly story of how he died many times here on DL so I'll refrain this time in an effort to keep the thread lighthearted and pleasant.

Two of his fingers were cut off in a hay machine by the barn, and my great grandmother made my father bury the fingers where the hay machine was so that my grandfather would not have phantom pain (or some similar reason).

My grandfather abandoned his family after my father, the youngest, was born. He would turn up at my grandmother's when he was sick or down and out. He died at 80 late on a cold night when the 30-something woman he brought home knocked him down the outside steps from the second floor when she opened his stuck door.

My other grandfather became depressed and quit working when his children were in their teens. He died sitting in his chair.

Both were alcoholic. I didn't know them.

My Italian grandfather born in Chicago in 1900 dropped out of the 3rd grade to become a tailor. He was so good that he became Al Capone's tailor and would tell stories of when Capone came in for a fitting they would lock my grandfather and Capone in a fitting room while two armed thugs stood outside the door. He died in 1998

Mine asked my mom if my sister was retarded or just spoiled

Didn't know my paternal one; died in '36 at age 57.

My grandfather on my dad's side died before I was born. My grandfather on my mom's side was divorced from my grandmother, so I was closer to my step grandfather, who was a lovely soul. He worked for years as a serviceman for our city's utility company. When our family would visit he and my grandmother, he would do things like teach me to paint or play the banjo. Sometimes he'd put on his old 78 RPM records for me to listen to. He and my grandmother loved to watch Lawrence Welk on Sunday nights.

He loved all living things and wouldn't even swat a fly. If he saw a spider in the house, he'd put it on a piece of newspaper, then take it outside and set it loose.

He was such a sweetheart. He's been gone for decades now, but I still think about him.

They were both drunks who deserted their families and died before I was born. My parents rarely spoke about their fathers but I could tell there was a lot of pain there.

@r10, Sounds like the perfect grandpa 🙂

R12 He really was.

To R12, I was going to post the same thing. That Grandfather sounds perfect.

My paternal grandfather died in 1955 so I never met him.

My maternal grandfather was a pervert who had his driver's license even though he was partly blind and deaf.

I can't tell you the number of times I screamed " Grandpa!! There's a car in front of you!! Don't hit the tree!! Be careful, there's a child!!"

Fun times riding with grandpa.

Paternal: died of cancer in 1931, making my grandmother a widow and forcing my Dad to quit school and go to work at 15 because they were dirt poor during the gDepression. He didn’t get his HS diploma until he was in the Army in WWII and his undergrad degree on the GI Bill until the 1950’s.

Maternal: died in the 1919 influenza epidemic, making my other grandmother a widow at 30. He sold cars and died with a lot of insurance, money my grandmother invested well and they sailed through the Depression. My mom had a Ford convertible “just like President Roosevelt’s” in high school.

I knew both of my grandmothers but that’s about all I know about my grandfathers. I have a portrait photo of my maternal grandfather, for who I’m named, and he looks juts like me.

One of mine died a decade before I was born; the other died when I was 3. So I didn't really know either of them.

My grandfather was born in 1865; his grandfather was born in 1794, 5 years before George Washington died.

R18 How old are you?

My grandfather was actually my great uncle (married my grandmother after her husband/his brother died).

By the time I was sentient, he was on the road to dementia, but a great , fun character. A health food nut decades before organic food was trendy; a tinkerer, rock hound, hunter and gun nut; an inventor who built his own car (the body made of wood); had a bomb shelter. A was a big sweetheart.

We spent summers with the grandparents in their tiny town in the middle of nowhere and when we go older and started mingling with the local teenagers we found out he was known around town as Crazy Irv.

^Lord, one double G&T and my typing is all "oh dear!"

Not one of them had decent candy, so I won’t be sharing their life histories.

Mean ol son of a bitch. Didn’t leave me nuthin

R19 61

Both my grandfathers were hillbilly losers who couldn't hold a job. So they spent most of their pointless lives in trailers on 'disability'.

I did have a great-grandfather who appears to have been an amateur photographer, and this renewed my faith in my DNA. Even though they were poor, there are numerous self-portraits of him and his huge brood in the 1920s. Most eem to be those cameras on a timer.

In 1943 during WW2 he enlisted in the Army- even though he was 58.

My grandfather's prized possession was an antique mantel clock that had belonged to HIS grandfather. He would point it out to every visitor. He would insist that everyone "hush" and silently count the chimes on the hour. When my last uncle passed away, the clock came to me. I was able to research and found the clock to have been manufactured in1865. 159 years old, it is still working and chiming hourly. Ebay estimates it is now worth well over One Hundred and Twenty dollars. Apparently, they made thousands of 'em. {Grace Adler "Gah"} I still treasure it.

@r26, I haven't thought of this in a looong time...

"My grandfather's clock was too tall for the shelf

So it stood ninety years on the floor

It was taller by half than the old man himself

But it weighed not a pennyweight more

.

It was bought on the morn on the day that he was born

It was always his treasure and pride

But it stopped, short, never to go again

When the old man died"

My grandfather was murdered by German soldiers as they invaded his town in Poland. They caught him while he tried to save a child. The fuckers shot the little girl in front of him, and then shot him. I never knew my grandfather, but I know enough to be proud of him.

One of my grandpas was Native American and owned a seafood restaurant in Grand Isle. The other was an immigrant farmer and steel worker originally from Slovakia.

Old dirty motherfucker

He smoked half a carton a day, was a weekend alcoholic. Loved Hoover, the president. Was never happy, died of lung cancer (anyone shocked?) and when he died my grandmother blossomed. The end.

My maternal grandfather was the youngest and only boy. His father died when he was young so he was brought up in a family of women, cossetted and cooed over. He grew up charming and loved attention from women. He was also very good looking. A cross between a young Vincent Price and Errol Flynn. He joined the navy out of school and was in the South Pacific during WWII. He married my grandmother before he left because shexwas gorgeous and he didnt want to chance her meeting someone else. She got knocked up immediately. She was 16. Too long to go into but I've discussed his second wife, the glamorous Spanish dancer he met overseas, here before.