"The great-grandmothers of my family take the cake. 1. My father's mother and her sister were kids living in the Princeton neighborhood. One morning, as their mother was backing out of the driveway to take them to school, she was distracted and nearly ran over the neighbor. Who was the neighbor? None other than ALBERT EINSTEIN. As my paternal great-aunt told the story, he was fascinated by the garbage truck doing its usual rounds."
"For example, she owned a driver's license despite never driving a car. But the story my maternal great-aunt tells is that one morning, as they were all seated at the breakfast table, J was reading a newspaper with a headline along the lines of, 'Police still unable to locate Irish mob boss.' J simply huffed and said aloud, 'Well, they never asked me,' and then snapped the paper closed and never mentioned it again."
"My grandfather was a notorious wildcatter. That is someone who (back in the day) would buy land cheap and drill for oil on it in Texas. Sometimes, he would strike oil and become rich overnight. Other times, he would lose every penny he had drilling on land that was nothing but dirt. He made and lost millions and millions of dollars."
One branch of the family recalls a childhood encounter in Princeton where a neighbor, Albert Einstein, stood on the sidewalk watching a garbage truck as a mother nearly backed into him. Another branch in Chicago traces a first-generation Irish American great-grandmother with indirect ties to the Irish mob; she owned a driver's license yet never drove and once reacted to a missing mob boss headline by saying, 'Well, they never asked me.' A separate relative in Texas worked as a wildcatter, buying land to drill for oil and alternately making and losing vast sums. His descendants lived on a ranch and depended on his wealth.
Read at BuzzFeed
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]