#and this is excluding the lyman spitzer lore. bc no one outside of infrared astronomers and really old toledoans know who the spitzers are

[wellsbering]

i really wish i could have gotten my grandpa to write an autobiography (or even funnier, start a podcast) because every time i visited him he had a new wild story about his life such as:

- during wwii (he was 8 when it ended), he and his friend would walk to a factory where the military police had put german POWs to work making stuff for the US war effort, and stand outside and make fun of them. the nazis were on the second floor but there was this little gap in the window for ventilation and my grandpa and his friend would just stand underneath it and taunt them until one day one of the nazis got annoyed and threw some little piece of metal at my grandpa and it nearly hit his ear, so he joked that he could've gotten a purple heart if it hit him

- he went to catholic school in the era where teachers were still allowed to hit the students when they got in trouble, which he did A Lot. the nuns would hold out their hand and tell the student to place their hand there and then hit the student with a ruler. one time my grandpa moved his hands away quickly enough for the nun to slap her own hand, which did not go over well with her (but it did with the rest of the class)

- when there was a baseball game downtown he and his friends would volunteer as batboys to make some extra cash and meet the players. apparently mickey mantle was an asshole

- shortly after wwii, he knew someone (a neighbor or a relative, i can't remember) who had served in italy and fell in love with a woman there, but since he didn't know italian, he would bring her letters to my grandpa's mom so she could translate. she said she wanted to come to america and marry him, but she needed money, so he sent over the money. then she wrote back that her mother wanted to come too, so he sent more money. finally when she said oh thank you but HER mother wants to come too my grandpa's family was like my guy. this girl is scamming you please stop sending her money

- his aunt and grandma went to visit relatives in sicily after the war. sicily, of course, was hit extremely hard by wwii, so there were a lot of food shortages. but while they were there they bought a giant wheel of cheese. it was supposed to be shipped to them in the states on a cargo ship (rather than the passenger ship they returned on), so after they got back they waited like a month for this really great italian cheese to arrive. and when it finally did, they pried open the crate (this was the 40s, so no cardboard boxes, it was all wooden crates that were nailed shut) and instead of cheese, there was just a pile of sawdust. someone stole the cheese and replaced it with sawdust so the dock workers would think it was still in there

- speaking of ill-fated shipments from sicily, at some point after his grandparents arrived in the states (c. 1915?) their family mailed them an olive sapling to plant at their new home. unfortunately it turned out that american midwestern winters are very bad for olive trees. they did not get a single olive from it

- he once decided to dye a sweater blue using a big pot & spoon his family regularly used for cooking, and he thought he'd rinsed out the dye, but when his family sat down for dinner that night they were greeted by the sight of blue mashed potatoes. his parents were dumbstruck. his brother adamantly refused to eat the cursed potatoes. my grandpa might've gotten away with it except that the rest of the table got extremely suspicious when he just started eating the blue potatoes like nothing was wrong

- he had a friend who knew danny thomas's (of st. jude's hospital, marlo thomas's dad, and the best joke on the golden girls fame) brother, who had a problem with gambling and alcohol and kept asking danny for money (since he was. you know. rich and famous). at some point this dude went to his brother's house, asked to see him, and the maid/housekeeper/whoever opened the door recognized him and just shut the door in face bc she was tired of him asking for money

- as a kid he would go to his grandparents' house and stomp on grapes in the basement to make wine. apparently they were just so used to always having wine in italy (even the kids had wine at dinner) that, even when my grandpa's mom was a kid during prohibition, the family just kept making wine in the basement. once their neighbor asked for some, they gave it to him, and then shortly afterwards the cops showed up and went down in the basement and smashed up all the equipment. in response, my grandpa's grandparents simply bought new equipment and went back to making wine again (and presumably, this time, did not tell their neighbors)

- his relatives owned an italian restaurant in toledo and when louis prima stopped there on tour, my grandma (who did not work in the restaurant, and in fact was not even italian) made him spaghetti and got free tickets to his show

- paul lynde also came to the restaurant once (or maybe it was a different one? there were two italian restaurants) and was a dick

- he once walked into the bathroom at his high school and there was a whole doo-wop group rehearsing in there. no word on if they sounded good or not

- he once traded in his old car (a ford with no paint on it, just metal that he polished with steel wool, and with an oldsmobile engine instead of the original) at a ford dealership, got home, and then got a call the next day from the dealership owner who was mad they couldn't sell the car. since. it had an oldsmobile engine and no paint. my grandpa was just kinda like. ok. what do you want me to do about it lmao we already signed all the papers, it's legally yours now. sorry! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

- he was in the printers' union for decades and at one point the union workers were getting so overworked by the union leadership that they threatened to form their own union within a union. my grandpa gave a talk at their national meeting to try to get both sides to reconcile, which he summarized to me as basically "come on guys. this is stupid"

- part of his role in the union was negotiating on behalf of workers during disputes with their employer. he once had to stop a business owner from unjustly firing his own son

- another time some secretaries were threatening to strike because their boss was so awful, and upon finding out that the boss tried to coerce one of the women to sleep with him, my grandpa stormed up to him and threatened to physically fight him

- after he retired he was out playing golf or shooting guns or something with some guy who kept talking about how annoying and useless unions are, and when they got back to their cars he complimented my grandpa's car and he responded "thanks. i bought it with my Union Pension :)"

- when i was a little kid he had a red corvette for a year or so. i found out years later that it had every possible added feature a 1999 corvette could have, because the original owner was really rich. the reason he was rich was because he was none other than pasquale "pat" giammarco, the founder of marco's pizza