Remembering My Crazy Great-Great Grandpa

Come and listen to a story about a man named ... my great-great grandpa.

He was an Irish-guy from Brooklyn, living in the nineteenth century when the borough was its own city, and he was a nut.

My great-great-grandpa managed, somehow, to get the money together to buy some property on the Coney Island Boardwalk. He rented out his space to vendors who paid him rent. Only they didn't always pay on time. So he got a cudgel. And he'd walk around his property with the cudgel, asking for the rent money, and if they didn't have his money ... they got the cudgel. I'm not sure if it was the vendors property or the vendors themselves that got the cudgel but, uh, "stuff" went down. 

My great-great-grandpa, being Irish, also liked to drink. A LOT. One day he and his brother were in a bar and got into a dispute that ended in a violent knife fight. His brother was killed, and I don't know what my great-great-grandpa did to the other guy but he decided it would be a good idea to get out of town ... so he got on a ship and hid out in the Old Country (Ireland), Michael Corleone-style, for two years.

After two years it appears no one was looking to kill him anymore, so my great-great-grandpa got on a ship, headed back to Brooklyn. On the trip he met two women. Again, I ain't sure what went down with these two ladies on the ship but, when the ship pulled into port in Brooklyn, he began walking down the gangway with them, one broad with an arm around him on one side, another broad on the other side. Then my great-great-grandpa looked down the gangway and saw his wife and kids ... and he pushed the two women away, telling them to get lost, and he happily reunited with his family.

In his later years, ruffian that he was, my great-great-grandpa decided to get some stability for himself and his family. So he got an engineering degree and ended up working, for the rest of his life, managing the steam in a burlap factory in Lower Manhattan -- actually, on the same street where I work now. 

And then he died and generations later I slunk out into the world.

So that was my great-great-grandpa. When my mom told me all about him, my instant reaction was "I didn't know I was descended from someone so cool."

They don't make men like him anymore ... and that's probably a good thing.