[timoteus]

And what is the story?

 

[fractus2]

I met this gentleman when I was at a conference in Mississippi several years back. On one day we all went to the Navy Home there to shoot the **** with the veterans. The Navy Home is mainly for those aging veterans (they take all services, you might as well call it an armed forces home) who are past a certain age or disabled. I was starting to leave when a man walked up to me and asked me if I wanted a tour. Told him that would be great and off we went. Stopped at the lounge, the laundry, the post office, then he took me into the library and opened this book on WWII. There was a painting of a night battle between a U.S. and Japanese ship and they were side by side throwing broadsides at each other. He said "that was my ship", pointing to the U.S. destroyer. He described the battle in detail and said that the ships were so close that the gun elevation could not be trained low enough to get a fatal waterline shot, but were just shooting holes through superstructures. He was a snipe (engineer) and he and his friend did a lookie-loo topside during the battle and his friend caught some shrapnel in the butt for it.

He then opened another book which turned out to be "Tin Can Sailor", written by one of the officers who served aboard the Sterret. He flipped the pages and showed me where he was mentioned.

I've since read the book and the story of the Sterret during their Pacific campaign it's a very engrossing story.

It was a very fascinating day and he is one of the most interesting persons that I've met.

 

[chadbang]

A few years ago I wrote a film script for a guy named Hamish McAlpine. I didn't know it at the time but, in addition to wanting to produce films (he hadn't at that point), he also manufactured audio vacuum tube (I wish I knew what brand) and is the head of a company called Tartan Video, which I guess is well known in England for putting classic films onto DVD. Anyway, I only found out most of this stuff later, but I knew from our time together that he was quite a flamboyant character and a fascinating guy.

 

[andrzejpw]

Steven Rudich, a CS professor at CMU. This guy is simply amazing: the stories he tells are very interesting. Oh, and he's a martial artist. And a magician. And were not even talking about his academic accomplishments. . .

the sad part is, he'll be blind in a few years

 

[JMT]

My father.

We had a tenuous relationship as I was growing up, and it got even worse after my mother passed away and I started going through the rebellious teenage years. I never really knew him, nor did he know me. But since I married and had children, our relationship has evolved and matured. I find his stories about his youth fascinating, especially those stories of the time he spent interned at the Tule Lake concentration camp. He holds no bitterness for what happened, and I admire him greatly for that. He is an outstanding grandfather and slowly we have developed a true father/son relationship. My only regret is that we didn't do it sooner.

 

[Born2bwire]

A British gentleman named Brian Knight. I met him at a smallbore state match in Kankakee two years ago. The man was a pilot for the RAF, was a test pilot, and was an Olympic athlete. The guy's full of stories with an excellent sense of wit. One of my favorites is about when he did his first solo flight when training for the RAF. His instructor, whom they called Jasper because of his long waxed moustache that was reminiscent of vaudeville villians, promptly left the plane after an instructional flight and told Knight to take off and do a single circuit solo. They were training in biplanes, probably Tiger Moths, and Knight quickly took off, did the circuit, and came in for his landing. As he puts it, "I did a perfect three-point landing, twenty feet up in the air." As a result he hit the ground with a strong jolt and had to give it another go. Well the problem arose that the hit of the landing knocked off one of the wheels of his landing gear. Lacking radios to communicate with the pilots, the ground crew set off a flare that told him to cancel the approach and continue to circle. In the meantime, Jasper grabbed a mechanic and a wheel and took off in another trainer. Unfortunately after taking off, Jasper's plane lost a wheel themselves. Pulling up alongside Knight, the mechanic was waving his hands and pointing to the wheel in his hands. Knight looks at the wheel, then the broken landing gear on Jasper's plane, gets out his signal lantern and signals "Pretty damn good trick sir! But how do you get it back on?" Jasper eventually figured out what was going on and they both had to do crash landings.

I also remember that Mr. Knight was deaf in one ear as a result of "losing an argument with a 20mm cannon shell." But he never told his superiors lest he be dismissed and would fake it out on physicals. After the war he was a test pilot and did jet flights. At this stage in development, scientists were unaware of the effects of the huge lack of pressure and severe cold of high altitude flight. As a result, when Knight was doing a test run, the glass in his cockpit shattered. After doing a landing (probably another crash landing) he had to undergo medical attention. After he recovered and had tests run, the doctors came in and told him the unfortunate news that he had gone deaf in one ear.

Needless to say there are many more stories that I heard from him. One of which is when he and his copilot crashed their plane into a cow. But I think I've probably taken up enough space as it is.

 

[stuartr]

Sergei Sergeevich Davydov. My Russian professor at Middlebury. He is among the best current scholars on Pushkin and Nabokov. His ancestor was a famous Russian poet and friend of Pushkin. His father was a White Russian dissident and prisoner of the gulag. He grew up in the Czech republic. When he was a young boy, Krushchev came to visit his city, and since he was among the only kids to speak Russian well, he was assigned to greet Krushchev and give him flowers. He spoke to him and Krushchev asked him why he spoke Russian so well. He said his father was Russian. "Who is he?" Krushchev asked. "You have him in jail." Sergei said. "That's not right, we'll do something about that" said Krushchev. Sergey gave Krushchev a pair of new sunglasses that he had gotten from friends in the west...Krushchev took them, and was seen in the papers wearing them a few weeks later. Within a few months, Sergey received an invitation to go to a special school in the Crimea and his father was released from the gulag. As a result of this meeting, he received special treatment and the opportunity to go to Yale to get his PhD in literature. To this day he has a love-hate relationship with Communist Russia. On the one hand, they are responsible for his education, but on the other, they were repressive and put his father in the gulag in the first place. He is an unbelievable man, and his stories are incredibly interesting. One of the most fascinating people I have ever met.

 

[mbriant]

Peter Worthington, co-founder, former editor, and now columnist at the Toronto Sun newspaper. We worked together for several years at a magazine. As a young reporter, he can be seen standing in the background of the famous photo and video of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot. He's been on a Mt. Everest expedition. Always a friend to the underdog, he's used his celebrity and personal wealth to help all sorts of causes and injustices. He was instrumental in helping the wrongly accused Hurricane Carter get released from prison. During the cold war, Russia deported him from his newspaper's Moscow bureau as an accused spy.

Despite being a multi-millionaire, he rides a bike to work every day.

 

[bangraman]

My oldest uncle (now deceased). Worked on various aircraft prototypes (probably more advanced than the stuff the Germans were cooking up, let alone the Brits or the Yanks who were well behind in aeronautical expertise), was a wizard engineer and designer. One of my inspirations to become a semi-engineer myself.


He often said in hindsight he was glad that the Japanese didn't have anywhere near the manufacturing capacity of the US and were reduced to effectively begging for pots and pans at the end. Seeing what we had on (and off) the drawing board, I would agree.


However another very interesting family member I know is my second oldest uncle who wasn't the sharpest tool in the box and nearly become a Kamikaze pilot...

 

[MERTON]

i wanna hear about that cow crash!! hahahahaha!!! these people are nuts!

 

[timoteus]

There are a few people I could mention but I finally settled on this person.

A friend of mine that is a horticulturist, plant breeder, or experimenter, whichever you choose to call it. He develops new varieties of tree fruit and has been doing this for probably 50 or 60 years. He works with peaches, plums, and nectarines. And my favorite white flesh peaches and nectarines. He even plays with weird stuff like crossing plums with apricots (pluots) and crossing pomegranates and plums (I don't know what you call that but they taste great).

He holds many patents and you have probably bought some of his varieties at the store. But his best work never makes it to market and is developed strictly for taste. They are too delicate to ship and/or have a short shelf life. They taste so good that anything from the store just can't compete. I am fortunate that I get to sample these once in a while.

The amount of knowledge he has boggles my mind. All self taught and he has many techniques that he has developed over the years. His ability to be at the top of the game his whole life is a true testament to his perseverance and skills.

He is probably a wealthy man but he is also very unassuming. He lives in a trailer on his acreage and drives a beat down car. I like to think of him as a modern day Gregor Mendel or Luther Burbank. I have a tremendous amount of respect for him for living his life on his own terms, carving out a niche for himself and being the best at what he does.

We need more stories! Post, post, post!

 

[dhwilkin]

Not sure... I just know it's not me.

 

[timoteus]

Quote:

Originally posted by JMT ...especially those stories of the time he spent interned at the Tule Lake concentration camp. He holds no bitterness for what happened, and I admire him greatly for that.

Reading this and also your comments about the internment in a thread a couple of weeks ago reminds me of this story about my grandfather.

When the war broke out my grandfather, at the request of his japanese-american neighbors, bought their farms at fair market value when others were buying at pennies on the dollar. He worked and took care of the land and fruit trees until the war was over and then sold the land back to the previous owners for the original price. He also remodeled some buildings on his land so returning families had a place to stay until they could get back on their feet and get reestablished. My mom and aunts and uncles still have reunions with some of these families from time to time.

A good and decent story from a time of many bad stories.

 

[stuartr]

Quote:

Originally posted by timoteus Reading this and also your comments about the internment in a thread a couple of weeks ago reminds me of this story about my grandfather. When the war broke out my grandfather, at the request of his japanese-american neighbors, bought their farms at fair market value when others were buying at pennies on the dollar. He worked and took care of the land and fruit trees until the war was over and then sold the land back to the previous owners for the original price. He also remodeled some buildings on his land so returning families had a place to stay until they could get back on their feet and get reestablished. My mom and aunts and uncles still have reunions with some of these families from time to time. A good and decent story from a time of many bad stories.

It really makes me happy to hear this. That was among the most shameful periods of our history, and I am glad that some people had the integrity to do the right thing. You must be very proud of your grandfather. I know I am, and I don't even know him.

 

[Outdoor Man]

Pit Schubert & Nelson Mandela.

Peter.