Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Stories About Your Grandparents?

I had good grandparents. My parental grandmother would play checkers, and Chinse checkers with me. Old grandma was easy to beat, till the time she looked at the board, and cleaned me out in nothin' flat.

She must have thought I was old enough to learn to lose.

They drank a lot of beer and smoked a lot of cigarettes. That’s about all I remember about them.

I pulled a well pump and fixed it last weekend with my soon to be 87 year old Grandad. He’s still going strong and works around the ranch almost every day. Hasn’t missed a year in elk and deer camp in CO since 1955. Didn’t get his bull last year but went up the mountain and hunted every day.
Grandmom will be 85 in Feb. She’s slowing down but still writes the historical column for the newspaper every week, quilts at the church, and is secretary and treasurer for the local historical society and museum. She has lots of great stories about growing up in the depression.

I’m a blessed man to have them and get to spend time with them.

One side, never really knew my grandma. Died when I was 2. Grandpa took care of my aunt who had MD until she got to be too much and put her in a home. Other side, wish I didnt know. Was proud of him and looked up to him, until I got old enough to know all he gave a schit about was money. Honestly, they all really didnt feel like relatives. Got to know the ones I wish I didnt, and didnt the ones I wish I would.

Never knew either of my Granddads, both were gone by the time I was born.
I got vague memories of my Mom's Mom. She died when I was 6 or 7.
Paternal grandmother died my senior year. She was somewhat of a tomboy, sled riding and outdoor stuff into her late 70s.
She had a really nice house in Hornerstown, and I'd spend a week or two there every summer gardening and cutting grass.
Nice neighborhood back then. Now it's a near ghetto. I wonder what that house is like now.
7mm

I had some good ones. I thought as much of my paternal grandparents as if they'd been my parents. My paternal grandfather was probably the best man I've ever known, and my paternal grandmother was the best granny anyone could ever have. They've been dead since 1978 and 1985, but I still miss them.

My maternal grandparents were very good people as well, he was a Baptist preacher. But they lived some distance away, and I didn't see them as often as I did the other set.

All but 1 grandmother died before I was old enough to remember them. My dad's dad was a blacksmith, a heavy drinker, and a child beater. He had 2 hobbies: drinking and fighting, and fighting and drinking. The day after Dad graduated from high school, he left home and didn't return for 4 years.
After a miserable childhood, Dad could have gone 2 ways. He could have become like his father or he could decide to be everything he dad wasn't. He chose the latter.

Mine used to fight and scrap everyday.
Get all wound up with a series of "you go to hell"...."no you go to hell"......"no bitch, I dont wanna go to your home".....usually over something stupid like the way the canteloupe was sliced.

Constant digs, mind fuggin each other, ....one settin up the other to be embarrassed or made to look like a fool in front of other relatives.

That what I remember most, lol

My Great Grandfather started a Brethren country church where all the relatives and friends on my Dad's side went. My grandfather had an Indian in the 30's doing 90 when most cars were doing 30. My Grandma on Dad's side was incapacitated by strokes and diabetes but was a funny lady. You never knew what she might say next. We all got a kick out of her. She made the best of things as she could. They were and are a fun group. 8 sisters and brothers on that side and lots of cousins.

On Mom's side there were 7 brothers and sisters. Smaller families, but still fun. Grandma would usually have homemade pies on Sundays, and Grampa spent lots of time outside chewing Redman. They had a tree I liked climbing and was up in it most of the time or across the street at the gas station getting a strawberry Crush. They lived in a small town, having moved off the farm that my uncle bought from them. Their was a car dealer, grocery store, hardware, and a drug store with an old fashioned soda fountain in it. Even a furniture store. Those stores phased out over the years. Now there's just bars.

Lots of color in the family. My grandfather went to prison for killing a guy by stabbing him while playing poker in a saloon. My dad always said the guy wouldn't have died if he had gotten proper medical treatment. I had to remind dad that the guy wouldn't have needed proper medical treatment if Grampa hadn't stabbed him...

Was subjugated to watching Lawrence Welk at one set of em.
Gawd I hated having to go over their......
Scars that dont heal type of schitt.....

The other set lived in Delaware while in the AirForce, Maine, and retired in Florida.
And Gramp Morrison had cool things like 2 Chinese type 56 AK,s he brought back from Vietnam that I got to shoot when I was 9.

Lawrence Welk?? and youre complaining?

That's a pretty big deal here on the campfire MISTER.

The type 56,s had more influence in my life , than fugging Lawrence Welk....




Alex, I will take cool Gramp Morrison with the type 56,s in trunk of his lead sled for 1000 please.

Do know who sang Rawhide?

My great grandmother and her daughter ambushed a man, pulled him off a wagon as he passed by, and literally beat him in unconsciousness.

Henry just old enough to get drafted in WWI. He was a very large man, and he spent the entirety of the war being carted up to the line, being fitted for a gas mask, found to have too large a head to fit in one, and being carted back to the rear. After the War, he married and survived the Great Crash by scavenging. He would set off every day with a rucksack and return every night with it full. No one questioned him. Once he returned home with a 300 lb sow pig on his back. In 1923 he brought the family to America and settled in Cincinnati. His first job was as a landscaper for D.J. O'Connor, the founder of Formica. By 1926, Henry was a millionaire, having introduced a system of home and apartment building previously unseen in the city. He was building a home inside Music Hall for the Home Show-- completely wired, plumbed, and landscaped. By 1949 we were responsible for just under 50% of all new home starts in Cincinnati. I remember him as this man-mountain in his big easy chair. All the other grandkids were scared to death of him, but I used to climb up on his belly and bump heads with him and let him teach me German. He died when I was 3.

One story pretty well summed up what I know of him. Dad said he and his Dad were sharing a beer at a bar over in Westwood. The town bully showed up and started pestering a nebbish little man that was trying to mind his own business. The bully was being particulaly mean and obnoxious. Grandpa went over to the bully.

"You are a bad man," he said to the bully in his thick accent. "Und I vill kill you." Henry then gripped the man by the throat and lifted him off the floor at arm's length and held him there until the other patrons were able to pry him off, but not before he'd succeeded in rendering the man unconscious. The bully eventually revived and left in a hurry. Grandpa went back to drinking his beer.

"Pop, you almost killed that man!" My Dad exclaimed.

"I knew you would pull me off." said Grandpa. "He won't be back."

Sure enough the bully was never seen on the hill again.


Whitey was born in Brecksville, Ohio at the turn of the last century. They paid the doctor by giving him a pig. At age 4, he went for a walk in the cornfield during a family picnic and got lost. They had to go up in the top floor of the house, and direct the rescue party to him. It was from that second-story window that Whitey was able to sled after the 1910 blizzard. At age 10, he dove off a bridge on a dare into an icy creek. I've seen the bridge. He should have died. At age 12, he contracted appendicitis from eating green apples. The doc did an emergency appendectomy on the dining room table and saved him. The appendix ruptured in the doctor's hand.

Whitey nearly made WWI. He was in camp when the war ended. He attended Ohio State University and earned a degree in Electrical Engineering. He and Curtis LeMay were good friend and frat brothers. Whitey became a consulting engineer, traveling all over Ohio and the surrounding states. Mom attended more than one school a year until she was in high school. In 1939, he took a permanent position working for D. J. O'Connor at Formica and became an Executive Vice President in 1949.

When Whitey's only daughter decided to marry my Dad, Whitey mentioned it to his boss. D.J. O'Connor's eyes brightened and he pronounced Grandpa Henry as the best man who had ever worked for him.

Grandpa Whitey was my main man growing up. About his biggest disappoint in life was that I did not take up golf. He was an avid golfer, but we did all sorts of other stuff together. My favorite was fishing. Grandpa was the most universally beloved man I've ever known. He could make anyone laugh. He always knew the right thing to say.

One day, well after he retired, he said something strange to me.

"I have to say that of all the things I've done in life," he began. "Firing people was probably the most rewarding."

WT?. . .

"When anyone came to me for dismissal," he went on "They were usually as sad as anyone could be. Their soul was wholly corrupt. They were broken. They knew it was coming and they could not avoid it. All they could feel was shame and self-loathing. I always took it upon myself to make them know that what I was doing was only ending that misery. They had the rest of their life ahead of them, and they could now do whatever it was that made them happy." He then went on to say that many of these men had come back to him later and told him this had been the turning point in their lives, and they owed their subsequent success to Grandpa's intervention. I've met a couple of these guys. Sure enough, everybody loved Whitey. I also have to say that even though Whitey died when I was 18, his strange admission has done me a lot of good over the years. I've had to change jobs a number of times over the years, and most of them were layoffs. Whitey's words have stuck with me, and they have saved me a lot of unnecessary heartache.

My grandfather is on the right with his hat by his leg. It is 1941 and he is at Quantico standing next to the target he shot that qualified him for the FBI's "Possible Club". He was an FBI special agent from the late 30's thru the mid 60's.
I've got that target and the revolver he shot it with along with the "Possible" medal and letter from Hoover congratulating him.

His wife, my grandmother was more like a mother to me than my own mother and is the one who pretty much raised me. She was an amazing woman. She passed away last year at the age of 99.

Growing up (after he retired from FBI), they would take me and my cousin on a 2 month trip every summer to go fishing in NM, CO and AZ. We did that through most of elementary and junior high. One year, they took us to Six Flags in Dallas and I remember thinking that it was so cool that my 76 yr old grandfather rode every roller coaster there and the "Cliffhanger".

He taught me how to drive, how to shoot, how to be a man and how to be a husband. What I would give for a 5 minute conversation with him now. Gotta stop, allergies are messing up my eyes now.

No......
But I did hear the blues brothers sing it in the movie.

Sorry Slumlord, I can sympathize to a degree as my parents were pretty much the same way. thus one of the reasons why I was pretty much raised by my grandparents. I had some family members that could be described as "colorful personalities" and some that were just plain pieces of [bleep]. I was fortunate to have my grandparents though.

Cool story Shaman, thanks for sharing