Recently home for a visit, I collected a bunch of stories about our family.
My grandmother was a war bride from WWII. She met my grandpa because of her friend. Her friend was supposed to go on a date with an American guy who was an ambulance driver (my grandfather). He showed up to pick her up where she roomed with my grandma. Grandma’s friend got nervous at the last second and said, “I don’t want to go. He looks cute, why don’t you go out with him?” So my grandma went out with him, fell in love and they wanted to get married. Her priest told her not to do it because she might not get claimed. Apparently the wives could not come over with the husbands. Instead they had to be sent for, then claimed off the boat in order to enter the country. Some women were never claimed and had to go right back to England. When my grandmother came over she was nervous for a while that she was not going to be claimed and that my grandpa had left her. Someone finally nudged her and said, “They are calling you!” They had been asking for ‘Elizabeth’ (her full first name) when my grandmother was expecting them to call ‘Betty’ which she always goes by. Once they were together again my grandmother learned that grandpa didn’t have any money really and was taking her hitchhiking up to Plattsburgh. She was annoyed. They hitchhiked as far as Nyack, then got money from grandpa’s aunt Mary for a bus the rest of the way.
Something I didn’t know was that grandma traveled to England with my dad when he was a baby. At the time grandpa owned a bar and had gotten into drinking and spending a lot of time away from home. Grandma wanted to stay with her family in England and not come back here at all. Her family told her that she had to go back to her husband, so she did. Some time after she returned, grandpa decided to sell the bar and buy a gas station. He kept the gas station even into my lifetime.
We heard a good story about how grandpa was afraid of mice. My dad and his mom both used to play tricks on him regarding this. Dad and some kids caught a mouse and tied a string to its leg so they could hold it. When grandpa was working underneath a car on a roller-board, my dad tossed the mouse under the car near grandpa. He was basically freaking out trying to get out from under the car and kept hitting his head on the underside of it and the kids were all laughing at him. He came out and cursed them out and they all ran off. Grandma used to trick him as well by taking a mouse in a paper bag to grandpa (or getting my dad to do it) and making him think it was lunch or something.
When my dad was very very little he liked to touch fur. Grandma must have had a coat that was fur or like fur. So once when he was out somewhere he started playing with a lady’s coat because he thought it was his mom. He noticed it was not mom and got scared and ran away to find mom.
Dad has a memory of the schoolhouse across the field from his house. It had two rooms and he went to school there. The teacher used to make naughty kids sit underneath her desk near her feet. Dad would pop his head out and wave at the kids in the schoolroom to make them laugh. Then he was usually moved to the corner and had to wear a dunce hat.
When my dad was 19 or 20 he and a friend raised spiders. A couple spiders had webs somewhere and he and his friend would catch flies and bugs and toss them into the web for their own spider to eat. They each tried to raise the biggest spider.