OT: WOYM Thread

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  • 21&500
    Bolt Spit-Baller
    • Sep 2018
    • 10380
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    #97
    Happy mother's day to any and all here
    and to all the dudes here, HMD alive or not all the same.
    .005 Brock Bowers, TE/HB/SR Georgia
    .037 Braden Fiske, DT Florida St.
    .069 Mike Sainristil, CB Michigan
    .105 Brenden Rice, WR USC
    .110 Mason McCormick, OG/OC S. Dakota St.
    .140 Zak Zinter, OG Michigan
    .181 Nehemiah Pritchett, CB Auburn
    .225 Ainias Smith, WR Texas A&M
    .253 Carson Steele, RB UCLA

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    • Velo
      Ride!
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      #98
      Originally posted by 21&500 View Post
      Happy mother's day to any and all here
      and to all the dudes here, HMD alive or not all the same.
      My mother worked for the mob and didn't know it.

      When I was growing up my mother had a box of mementos, and in this box was a big black & white photo that was so big it had to be folded to fit in the box. It was an FBI surveillance photo, in it a young woman and man are holding hands walking down the street in Downtown Oakland. The picture was taken from behind and you can only see their backs. The man and the woman are my mom and dad, when they were courting, before they got married in 1949.

      My mother at the time was working as a secretary for an office in Oakland, and the office was a front for the mob, so the story goes, as my mother used to tell it. I don't know exactly what her duties were, but she had no idea she was working for the mob.(Her nickname in high school was "Dopey Doran," her maiden name being Doran.) After a period of surveillance, the FBI figured out my mother was clueless and my father was not mobbed up. The FBI busted the gangsters and in the interview with my mother gave her that photo, which I still have today.

      My mother lived from 1926 to 1991 and gave birth to four children. My brother and I live in the Sacramento area; my sis lives outside of Bozeman, MT, up the highway from Yellowstone.

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      • johnnywyoming
        Eeyore is Joey's #1 fan
        • Jun 2013
        • 114
        • Oregon
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        #99
        Thinking about my father on Memorial Day weekend… a veteran’s story.

        The only son of a Boston, Irish, Catholic couple, at seventeen my father found himself in the seminary dutifully following his mother’s dream to have a priest in the family. The study of Catholicism, ethics, math, and especially Latin was second nature to him. During the seventh year in the seminary doubts about his faith began to surface disturbing his sleep and affecting his studies. Torn between honoring mom’s wishes and his personal beliefs he was exploring the best options to let her down gracefully. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese provided the answer.

        Once again at home in Boston and before joining the Army Air Corps, he dated a girl whose mother dubbed him “the Monk”. His education and ease of mathematics landed him a spot in the Eighth Air Force as a bombardier. Imagine that, going from saving souls to blowing them to bits! In London, he fell for a girl who died during a German bombing raid.

        In early 1943, returning from a bombing run targeting a Nazi submarine base on the French coast his B-24 nicknamed “Bat Outa Hell” ran out of fuel and crashed. He was in the head, and opening the door he stepped into a farmer’s field. Only three of the crew survived. In May 1943, he shipped home on the Queen Mary. The ship was abuzz with Churchill aboard on his way to meet with FDR. My father ended up recuperating at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver where my mother was a nurse… she outranked him as a First Lieutenant. He was a Second Lieutenant. They married in the Officer’s Club. After recovery, he trained other flyboys as bombardiers in Texas but he could no longer go up in the non-pressurized bombers due to the head injury sustained in the crash.

        For the rest of his life, he taught Latin, Greek, and Algebra in private schools. In Los Angeles, he once taught Melissa Gilbert of Little House fame as well as other future stars and children of movie stars. I still have a get-well card Gilbert sent to him when he was sick with the flu. He passed away in 1994 with Alzheimer’s. The phrase I use in my signature is his…
        Thank God for morons. Without them who would the rest of us have to blame things on?

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        • Velo
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          Originally posted by johnnywyoming View Post
          Thinking about my father on Memorial Day weekend… a veteran’s story.

          The only son of a Boston, Irish, Catholic couple, at seventeen my father found himself in the seminary dutifully following his mother’s dream to have a priest in the family. The study of Catholicism, ethics, math, and especially Latin was second nature to him. During the seventh year in the seminary doubts about his faith began to surface disturbing his sleep and affecting his studies. Torn between honoring mom’s wishes and his personal beliefs he was exploring the best options to let her down gracefully. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese provided the answer.

          Once again at home in Boston and before joining the Army Air Corps, he dated a girl whose mother dubbed him “the Monk”. His education and ease of mathematics landed him a spot in the Eighth Air Force as a bombardier. Imagine that, going from saving souls to blowing them to bits! In London, he fell for a girl who died during a German bombing raid.

          In early 1943, returning from a bombing run targeting a Nazi submarine base on the French coast his B-24 nicknamed “Bat Outa Hell” ran out of fuel and crashed. He was in the head, and opening the door he stepped into a farmer’s field. Only three of the crew survived. In May 1943, he shipped home on the Queen Mary. The ship was abuzz with Churchill aboard on his way to meet with FDR. My father ended up recuperating at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver where my mother was a nurse… she outranked him as a First Lieutenant. He was a Second Lieutenant. They married in the Officer’s Club. After recovery, he trained other flyboys as bombardiers in Texas but he could no longer go up in the non-pressurized bombers due to the head injury sustained in the crash.

          For the rest of his life, he taught Latin, Greek, and Algebra in private schools. In Los Angeles, he once taught Melissa Gilbert of Little House fame as well as other future stars and children of movie stars. I still have a get-well card Gilbert sent to him when he was sick with the flu. He passed away in 1994 with Alzheimer’s. The phrase I use in my signature is his…
          Great story. I love these kinds of stories.

          I've told the story of my father here before. I knew very little about my father when he died in 1973 when I was 15. He struggled with alcoholism and PTSD and was a hard man. I only knew that he had been a prisoner of war in WWII and that he had served in the Canadian army, not the U.S. army, though I wasn't sure why because we are not Canadian. I also knew he had been captured in battle against the Germans, not at D-Day or at Dunkirk, but at a place called Dieppe, which is also on the coast of France. Almost everything I know about my father I have pieced together in the 50 years since his death, from talking to his youngest brother, other family members, my mother, newspaper stories, documents he left behind or that I found online or at Ancestry, numerous books, searching through his service records, visiting the site in France where he was captured and the POW camp in Germany (now Poland) where he was imprisoned, talking to the children of other Canadian veterans, etc.

          My dad was born in England in 1917, the son of an American serving in the British army; his mother was an English woman my grandfather had married while stationed in Manchester. My grandfather had crossed the Atlantic to enlist in the British army to get into the fight against the Germans after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, two years before the U.S. joined the war.

          My father spent his early years in England but grew up primarily in the U.S. During the Great Depression as a teen-ager he had to leave school to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps so he could send money home to help support his family, my grandfather being unable to find steady work. In 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, he enlisted in the U.S Army. But early in WWII, this country was determined to stay out of the war. When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, and Hitler turned his attention to invading England, my father's home country, he decided he had to get into the fighting and wanted to help defend England against a cross-channel invasion by the Germans. Canada, which was an outpost of the British Empire of those days, had declared war on Germany and was sending troops over to help repel the expected invasion. My dad "deserted" the U.S. Army and fled to Windsor to enlist in the Canadian Army.

          His Canadian regiment was shipped to England in the summer of 1940 and while training there he met an English woman who would eventually become his wife. The RAF defeated the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, so the invasion never came. The Canadian 2nd Army kind of languished for a few years, training extensively, while guarding the South Coast. My father's regiment underwent extensive commando training. He became a sergeant and married his English sweetheart in Sept. 1941. In the summer of '42, the British high command decided to use Canadian troops to conduct a large-scale command raid at Dieppe, which is in Normandy on the North Coast of France. It's a long story, but the raid was called off initially after a squadron of German Focke-Wulf 190s discovered the raiding force as it was about to depart in the Solent, the strip of water between the Isle of Wight and the English coast. They dive-bombed the ships.

          Gen. Bernard Montgomery, who is charge of forces stationed in Britain, called off the raid, because he figured the Germans had figured out where the troops were going. But Churchill was desperate for some action in France, in part to appease Stalin's demand for a 2nd front in the West to relieve pressure on the Red Army in Russia. After the fall of Tobruk, in North Africa, in June 1942, Churchill sent Montgomery to North Africa to deal with Rommel. With Montgomery out of the picture, Churchill and Louis Mountbatten, who headed British Combined Operations, decided to remount the Dieppe Raid, hoping the Germans wouldn't be expecting it.

          On Aug 18 1942 my father's regiment was told to report to the docks, but they weren't told why. The troops thought it was going to be another training exercise, and had not fully kitted out. When the ship was underway, they were told they were going to raid Dieppe, as they had trained for that spring. They hadn't told the troops in advance in order to maintain secrecy. It's another long story, but the Germans had reinforced Dieppe after the raiding party had been discovered a few weeks earlier. They were on full alert and were ready. My father's regiment had been assigned the frontal assault on the port and town of Dieppe. When their landing craft hit the beach at dawn the next morning, the Germans poured machine gun and mortar fire into them and wiped out my father's regiment on the beach. The Luftwaffe dive-bombed the landing craft and strafed my father's regiment on the beach. Their retreat was cut off. Two-thirds of the raiding force was killed or captured. My father was taken prisoner.

          My dad was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Eastern Germany (now in Poland) near Auschwitz. His wife in England had been pregnant at the time he was captured, and gave birth to his daughter in Feb. 1943, while he was a POW - my half sister. She is almost 80 now and lives on the South Coast of England directly across from Dieppe. My father suffered a series of atrocities while a POW, mainly the "death march" in brutal winter conditions at the end of the war. He was liberated by the British on April 28 1945.

          My mother is not his English wife - long story - and my father kept his English wife and child a secret from us, his U.S. children. We did not find out about them until after his death. 1973, while my father was in the hospital dying of an alcoholic's disease, he slipped into delirium. One day while I was visiting him he was hallucinating. The hospital staff had strapped his hands to his bed. When I was in the room with him he kept shouting, "Look. Look! They're going to kill us!" He was terrified. He was trying to point with his strapped right hand to something in the distance, and he kept shouting. "Look. Look! They're going to kill us!" I knew that he was re-living his capture on the beach at Dieppe. I knew then I would never forget what I was witnessing and it is still vivid in my memory.

          Decades later when I was 60, in 2017, my U.S. sister and I went to Dieppe for the 75th anniversary of the raid. We spent time in England with our English half-sister and her family, but we couldn't convince our English sis to come to Dieppe with us. She said it would be too emotional for her. There was a large commemoration in Dieppe for the 75th anniversary. During the raid German combat photographers had extensively photographed everything. The raid was a huge disaster for the Allies, but it was a big propaganda coup for the Germans. At the 2017 commemoration there were big boards with photos of the raid pinned to them. There my sister found a photo of my father being taken prisoner by the Germans, which I have linked below. The pic has subsequently appeared on the Web in various places, and it is in a couple of books about Dieppe and Allied POWs in WWII. My father is the one with his hands raised and "Canada" on his shoulder.

          1nH5qhy-QdlPyI9mOns2TcSrKSR-tVZYppdp9nCOJAY.png?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=e0bee528249394947a4ab9f1e5e0062d7860df24.png

          Here is also a video about the Dieppe Raid, narrated by Alex Trebek, who was Canadian.

          Attached Files
          Last edited by Velo; 05-30-2022, 06:34 PM.

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          • Topcat
            AKA "Pollcat"
            • Jan 2019
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            Well, I don't have any gripping war stories to tell about my dad, who was a Navy Seabee, stationed in Guam during WWII. He was mostly helping build airstrips and putting up quonset huts, though he did say he had to guard some Japanese prisoners one time. One time, I noticed a scar on the bridge of his nose and asked him what happened. "Jap shrapnel," Dad replied as he guzzled some beer. Immediately, my mom piped up: "That was not! It was from a BAR FIGHT!!!" Dad: "Shhhh!" Anyways, he did was he was called to do, did his best, overcame growing up in an orphanage in New York City, got a college education on the G.I. Bill, and raised a family of six kids. Remembering Dad and all the dads on Memorial Day.

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            • Velo
              Ride!
              • Aug 2019
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              Originally posted by Topcat View Post
              Well, I don't have any gripping war stories to tell about my dad, who was a Navy Seabee, stationed in Guam during WWII. He was mostly helping build airstrips and putting up quonset huts, though he did say he had to guard some Japanese prisoners one time. One time, I noticed a scar on the bridge of his nose and asked him what happened. "Jap shrapnel," Dad replied as he guzzled some beer. Immediately, my mom piped up: "That was not! It was from a BAR FIGHT!!!" Dad: "Shhhh!" Anyways, he did was he was called to do, did his best, overcame growing up in an orphanage in New York City, got a college education on the G.I. Bill, and raised a family of six kids. Remembering Dad and all the dads on Memorial Day.
              My grandfather, who fought in the British army in WWI, came home after the war with a finger missing. The story he like to tell was that a German sniper shot it off. What really happened is that he cut the finger opening a ration can and it became gangrenous and had to be amputated.

              My father had a scar on his belly. The story he liked to tell is that he was bayoneted by a Kraut (a sort of derogatory term for a German soldier) in WWII. But it was actually an appendectomy scar.

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              • Topcat
                AKA "Pollcat"
                • Jan 2019
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                Originally posted by Velo View Post

                My grandfather, who fought in the British army in WWI, came home after the war with a finger missing. The story he like to tell was that a German sniper shot it off. What really happened is that he cut the finger opening a ration can and it became gangrenous and had to be amputated.

                My father had a scar on his belly. The story he liked to tell is that he was bayoneted by a Kraut (a sort of derogatory term for a German soldier) in WWII. But it was actually an appendectomy scar.
                LOL...yep...similar to the good old "fish story"...wait a few years, and the fish gets bigger...and bigger...

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                • Velo
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                  My softball team secured the No. 1 seed in the playoffs tonight with a 13-7 win. The playoffs start next week.

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                  • richpjr
                    Registered Charger Fan
                    • Jun 2013
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                    My son got promoted to a Captain in the Air Force on Thursday and then graduated medical school on Friday (Air Force scholarship).

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                    • Bolt-O
                      Administrator
                      • Jun 2013
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                      Originally posted by richpjr View Post
                      My son got promoted to a Captain in the Air Force on Thursday and then graduated medical school on Friday (Air Force scholarship).
                      Nice... No student debt, and service to the country!

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                      • FoutsFan
                        Registered Charger Fan
                        • Feb 2019
                        • 2487
                        • Birmingham AL
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                        My son joined the Army National Guard during his Sophomore year in college, he is now finishing OCS school and graduated college this May. He is transferring out here to Alabama once his OCS school is completed this summer. Very proud of him, he is following in his grandfathers footsteps (who he is named after), his grandfather (my dad) was a helicopter mechanic in Vietnam.

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                        • Velo
                          Ride!
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                          Originally posted by richpjr View Post
                          My son got promoted to a Captain in the Air Force on Thursday and then graduated medical school on Friday (Air Force scholarship).
                          Fantastic!

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