Crazy things your parents said

"A$$, Grass, or Gas nobody rides for free" was a popular bumper sticker in the 70's. My shagged out 70's van had a "if this van's a rockin, don't come a knockin." sticker.

My dad was wonderful but not so when I was a kid. He had war caused trauma as he witnessed and experienced terrible things but he never spoke about that nor did he show emotions. It came as a surprise to us when someone interviewed him about the war and then told us gruesome stories of what dad had been through. We never knew….

There were some issues in the house that were unexplainable at the time of occurrence, and were discovered after he passed. One day when he had been drinking heavily, he went into an unexplained rage at a TV news story and threw a napkin holder through the safety glass on the TV set. The next day he beat all three of us trying to find out who broke the TV. Things got real ugly when my two younger brothers told him he had done it. I bolted out of the house before I got questioned and didn't come home that night.

The TV was tuned to one of those hour long shows like 60 Minutes that talked up a popular story. This was about the "horrors of war" and showed footage of fried people during the fire bombing of Tokyo during WWII. I would later find out that he was the co-pilot on some of those missions.