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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Heaven: Stories my grandparents told me
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ce
Shipmate
# 1957
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
There is a story about my grandparents. At this time they lived in Ashland, Virginia. The train tracks in Ashland ran down the middle of the main street--not across it, but along the length of it.
Moo
They still do:Ashland
ce
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ce
Posts: 376 | From: Middlesex, U.K. | Registered: Dec 2001
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daisymay
St Elmo's Fire
# 1480
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Posted
Did you notice the number on that train engine? ![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
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London
Flickr fotos
Posts: 11224 | From: London - originally Dundee, Blairgowrie etc... | Registered: Oct 2001
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Sine Nomine*
Ship's backstabbing bastard
# 3631
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Posted
Ok, here's one Episcopalians, especially Southern ones, will appreciate. From another of my great-great grandfather's memoirs. (We're a family who believes in writing things down.)
It was in 1860, I believe, that my grandfather who lived about twelve miles from what is now Sewanee, gathered up all his numerous family to attend the laying of the cornerstone of what was intended to be the first building of the University of the South.
The trip was made by wagon and horseback through the mountains and we camped out one night on the way. I was about ten years old and remembered being scared by the screaming of a wildcat during the night.
We arrived at the site of the university the next day. There were certainly enought startling events to excite an ignorant country boy who was then getting his first glance into the means used to open the vast reservoir of history and knowledge which had so far been sealed to him.
The first thing I noticed was a great throng of country people, more than I had ever seen before or since, gathered there on the mountaintop of almost unbroken forest. They had come on foot, horseback, and in wagons as we had. They had come prepared to enjoy the day, bringing provisions which included liquor.
I saw fighting on a large scale. The combatants were so numerous that no one had the least idea what the row was about. I saw the least regard for the ceremonies that were being conducted around the cornerstone not over two-hundred yards away.
Around the cornerstone was assembled a large number of better dressed and more orderly people. There were the church dignitaries dressed in their caps and gowns, who, I suppose, were calling on God to bless the building to be erected.
I could not hear much of what was being said. I was more impressed with the caps and gowns worn by the clergy. I had never seen any of our preachers or men dressed like women before.
I remember that lone block of marble lying there in the mountain. There was nothing there except the railroad track. It was built during the Civil War by the Union Soldiers.
After the war Bishop Quintard got up the funds to start building operations for the university. I was the first person to enter the freshman class at the university. I knew and admired Dr. Quintard and Dr. Knight very much.
Later this week-end I will tell you the tale of the beautiful and mysterious Maude St. Pierre.
--Sine
Posts: 10696 | Registered: Dec 2002
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Laura
General nuisance
# 10
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Posted
I wish I could tell you the best story, the story of ninety-year old Uncle W and the eighteen home health care specialists, but that has to wait until my grandmother has passed on. I can't besmirch the family name in public like that.
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Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. - Erich Fromm
Posts: 16883 | From: East Coast, USA | Registered: Apr 2001
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Mili
Shipmate
# 3254
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Posted
My father's parents were missionaries in Ethiopia in the 1950s and '60s. There was no hospital in the village where they lived, so when my father was due to be born in 1953 they had to travel to a hospital in Addis Ababa.
Ethiopia was an independent country, unlike many African countries that were, or had been ruled by Europeans, so a local offical advised my grandparents that some people might take offence if they had locals carry my grandmother to the hospital. So as the area was unaccessible for cars my heavily pregnant grandmother rode a mule to hospital.
Posts: 1015 | From: Melbourne, Australia | Registered: Aug 2002
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John Donne
Renaissance Man
# 220
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Posted
A story from and about my dear Grandmother who is 96:
She was born in Cyprus at a time when the liberation from the oppression of the Ottoman Empire was barely a generation old, a time during which the people suffered greatly from starvation and persecution. Poverty was still widespread. But her family was quite well off: her father was a grocer and owned a stables in the centre of Lemasso (the land prolly worth millions now). Her mother was one of 6 daughters, whose father married each one off with a house and contents (as was the custom in those days), and she lived in a street made up of all the houses of her aunties.
Her mother was a very generous woman, and one day my gran got her nose out of joint because she would make mountains of food and invite the poor people to her house and give it away (probably saw one batch too many of tasty kourabiedes being carried off ![[Biased]](wink.gif) ).
So when her father got home she went to him and dobbed her mother in: 'Baba, mum takes all the food and gives it away to the poor people!', expecting approval I imagine.
'Judas! Betrayer!' he said, and gave her a good hiding.
Posts: 13667 | From: Perth, W.A. | Registered: May 2001
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Rowen
Shipmate
# 1194
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Posted
When my father was very young, back in the UK, he went to a village cricket match. He was put out that "naughty men" stood in front of him, and blocked his view. In a piercing child's voice he asked his father to tell the men to go away and not annoy him again. Before his father could speak, the King of England turned around and apologised most profusely, and moved away with his party....
Both my father and my grandfather loved telling that story.
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"May I live this day… compassionate of heart" (John O’Donoghue)...
Posts: 4897 | From: Somewhere cold in Victoria, Australia | Registered: Aug 2001
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Michal
Shipmate
# 5337
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Posted
My grandmother, daughter of a poor tenant farmer in Mississippi, left home at 15 to go to work in Memphis in order to help support the family and escape her new step-mother. Her Memphis stories were a hoot.
She worked for a cold cream factory, where several different types of cold cream were packed into jars with different labels. Her job was to scrape the cold cream from a large wooden barrel with a wooden paddle into whatever set of jars was on the tray--no matter what the label said. I guess in 1928 the FDA wasn't very picky about these things. She said the worst part was when you got to "scraping the bottom of the barrel" because it would make your back ache so, and you had to keep pace because you were paid by the jar.
However, there were the good times to be had. When she went out in the evenings, she and her girlfriends at the rooming-house would put rouge on their knees, just below where their stocking were rolled up, "because if the wind blew your skirt up a bit the boys could see your pretty pink knees."
[ 27. December 2003, 08:55: Message edited by: Michal ]
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Living Christ, you are risen from the dead! Love reigns! NZ Prayer Book, 1989.
Posts: 170 | From: Water and Dunes | Registered: Dec 2003
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Eigon
Shipmate
# 4917
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Posted
This is one of my gran's earliest memories, sometime around 1906, in Manchester.
Her dad was a bookie in the days that gambling was illegal except, I think, in very restricted circumstances. So, he would go off to the race course on race days. In the evening, my gran and her brother would be playing on the hearthrug and her mother would be sitting by the side of the fire. When her father came in, he would look down at his wife. They would never say a word, but she would hold out her apron, and he would shower gold sovereigns into it.
Of course, on other evenings, he came back without his watch and tie-pin because he'd had to pawn them, but that image of the gold sovereigns raining down in the firelight was just wonderful.
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Laugh hard. Run fast. Be kind.
Posts: 3710 | From: Hay-on-Wye, town of books | Registered: Aug 2003
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
Speaking of horses, my grandfather was trained up to be a jockey when he was a boy. He hated it because they kept him on a special diet to keep him small and thin and supervised him to make sure he kept to the rules. It was a hard life, and growing too big and heavy was the only way he was going to get out of being a jockey: his father had decided that that was what his son would do and wasn't a man to change his mind easily.
Somehow my grandfather managed to sneak out and eat as much as he could on the rare occasions when he got the chance. He was punished for this when they found out and they starved him even more to make him lose the extra weight but after a while time and age worked their trick and the trainers realized that it was a lost cause. His father was furious but got him a job as an assistant to the Leopardstown vet: he helped to treat injured racehorses.
In due course he moved on from that into a different line of work, and eventually got married. But by now there wasn't much he didn't know about horses, and it stood him in good stead at the bookies. And my mother told me that he used to do so well that every year he would take the family away to the seaside for a few days in the summer, all paid for out of his winnings over the year. So some good did come out of it.
Posts: 25445 | Registered: May 2001
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daisymay
St Elmo's Fire
# 1480
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Posted
Story told me by same granny whose father was a dentist and a drinker with an intelligent horse.
Her older sister (18yr old) was getting married the next day. This is before the end of the 19th century. She went out with her fiance that evening and came back home late. Their father had locked the door. So my great-aunt threw stones up at granny's window and begged her to come down and unlock the door, but granny was too scared and before she got up the courage to open it, their father had heard the noise. He opened the door, brought his daughter in, told her off for staying out late and whipped her with the riding crop.
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London
Flickr fotos
Posts: 11224 | From: London - originally Dundee, Blairgowrie etc... | Registered: Oct 2001
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Shrinking Violet
Shipmate
# 4587
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Posted
I love to hear stories from one of my grandparents in particular, my Oma. She has had a fascinating life.
I hear stories about:
1) how she grew up as an orphan and was told at the age of 14 she had to go out and work because she had to support a brother she didn't know she had.
2) how she fought in the war as a sergeant in England manning the anti-aircraft guns
3) her engagement to an alcoholic English captain who she subsequently dumped and got together with my Opa who was also fighting in the war.
4) her migration to Australia....
and the list goes on....
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Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.
Posts: 430 | From: Ghana | Registered: Jun 2003
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