Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have... As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat. Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. (Not to mention hitchhiking to town as a young kid!) We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors. We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times we learned to solve the problem. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. No cell phones. Unthinkable. We played dodgeball and sometimes the ball would really hurt. We got cut and broke bones and broke teeth, and there were no law suits from these accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame, but us. Remember accidents? We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it. We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda but we were never overweight...we were always outside playing. We shared one grape soda with four friends, from one bottle and no one died from this. We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, video games at all, 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, Personal Computers, Internet chat rooms ...We had friends. We went outside and found them. We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rung the bell or just walked in and talked to them. Imagine such a thing. Without asking parent! By ourselves! Out there in the cold cruel world! Without a guardian. How did we do it? We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live inside us forever. Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't, had to learn to deal with disappointment.....Some students weren't as smart as others so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade.....Horrors. Tests were not adjusted for any reason. Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected. No one to hide behind. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law, imagine that! This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years has been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all. ...AND YOU'RE ONE OF THEM! Congratulations!

OK, air force dude. Is that you Trace?

Yeah, and in the middle ages we had cholera. AND WE LIKED IT!

i hate this retarded shit that always comes in form of forward email. my sister sent me this piece of crap last week. insta-delete. you can bet its some inflated, small-town, middle america op/ed columnist jerking this kind of shit off.

Your enlightened ways have brought us such nice things as aids, law suits, condoms for kiddies, ripping fully formed babies out of the womb an hour before birth, crushing it's skull in while it cries, and calling it legal, made it illegal to have a picture of santa claus, prayer in schools, but OK to teach my kids it is OK to like other boys!!!

I wanted to be the first to call bullshit. :( Damn duties... I loved this part: <<As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat. Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets.>> Because dying young makes you TOUGH, dammit. Oh, wait.

Hey, I rode in lots of truck beds as a kid. if you were too stupid to keep your ass seated the whole time, then maybe it was a good thing you fell out of the back of the truck. We do live in a sick world. The world is not better then it was even 20 years ago. I could go out and play for hours at a time, and no one cared. Now if I don't hear or see my children for longer then 1 minute when they are outside, I am freaking scared. I don't think it has gotten any better. And the lawsuits and the lack of common decency and letting the tv or computer occupy your kids versus telling them to go out and play, and the panic attacks over every scratch and bruise are making our children fat, dumb, lazy, and afraid of doing something that might take a little effort, or might cause momentary discomfort. Imagine if Neil Armstrong was afraid of the unkown? Or Buzz Aldren? Or Wilbur Wright? If they were raised today, they would have had the fear of god pounded into their heads about a little runny nose!

"if you were too stupid to keep your ass seated the whole time, then maybe it was a good thing you fell out of the back of the truck." Any idiot knows that A)children arent the best judges of safety and B)the dangers riding in the back of a pick-up truck is not limited to standing up while the truck is moving. It doesnt take much to toss a seated adult, muchless 40lb child out of a pick up truck.

crap patrick, you have to argue everything with me dont you??? Dammit boy, I spent a lot of my summers as a youth working on a farm on the Ark/Ok border. We piled all of us up in the back of trucks for 18 years, and these roads had the worste ruts (not pot holes mind you, but ruts from creaks flowing over the road. And no one, (and no, the brightest were not in that truck) no one ever fell out.

look man, you make some incredibly stupid statements. just because no one fell out in your experience doesnt make it safe. fine, enjoy the lower tier of natural selection. my step-dad and grandfather had trucks too. i've had my fair share of rides in the back. I never fell out, but that doesnt mean its safe. Thats not to say id never let my girl ride in the back of one either...it depends on the scenario, who is driving, where they are going and how fast they'll be going. But your nostalgia doesnt negate the fact that its generally an unsafe practice boy.

Again the difference between you and me is this: You think the governemnt should be involved in every aspect of your life. they should be allowed to tell you what you can spend your money on and how to raise your children. Because in your humble opinion, general mankind, which has survived thousands of years, cannot exist without the US Government's guidance. That is where you and I part ways. I say let them scrape a knee here and bruise a cheek there. In the long run, they will be better off for it.

I thought you were pro choice? Or do you think man is more qualified to decide wether an unborn child should live or die then to decide wether or not he lets his kid ride in the back of a truck? or wether or not to buy a SUV? Which is it? Pro choice or No Choice?

I think spunky fell on his head (from the back of a pickup) and ate some lead (licked from his crib) and that's why he makes these idiotic arguments. Here's the argument, summed up: It used to be dangerous, and that was good. Now it's too dangerous, because liberals have tried to make it not dangerous, and that scares me, so it's bad. Car accidents kill more children than child abductions and abuse so, guess what, we regulate driving. Do you advocate strict laws against child endagerment, abuse, and abduction, spunk? I know you do. And, we argue against you because, sometimes, your spouting is so fucking stoopid, we can't help ourselves.

what are you talking about? i didnt say anything about the government. i thought we were talking about the safety of riding in the back of pickup trucks. and what on earth told you in any way shape or form, im not pro choice in my last post? of course i support the freedom to have an abortion. So bruised cheeks and scrapped knees are what you would call 'character building'? How silly. "Yes honey, the reason you lost your left arm was because daddy thought it would build character for you to ride in the back of a pick up truck. he wasnt worried that you might fall out over a bump or get hit by another vehicle and be launched into that telephone pole. No. Daddy thought perhaps it would build character." Like i said, enjoy the lower tier of natural selection. You sound you came from the Bobby Knight school of parenting.

*sigh* I've always been inclined to believe that things never get better OR worse as time passes. Just different. AIDS? That's scary. Teaching roomfulls of little kids that ducking under a desk will somehow save you in the event of a nuclear blast? That's sick. Before it became somewhat okay to be gay, thousands of men and women lived fake lives in sham marriages not really fooling anyone. Was that better? Abortions have existed as long as pregnancy has. About 60 years ago it was called "a coathanger and some brandy". not better or worse, just different...

so, spunky, are you telling me that you would feel totally okay letting your girls ride in the back cab of a pickup truck? i call bullshit on that.

When I was about 5 years old my father traded his GTO (a classic and a beauty) for a truck. He used this truck until my mother got him a new one for fathers day (I was around 13 at the time), but my grandfather loved the truck so the year my Mom gave my Dad the new truck for father's day my parents gave the old truck to my grandfather for father's day. I loved this truck as well, sentimental value. When my grandfather passed away, my grandmother gave the truck to me. Legally all paperwork was in my parent's name because I didn't have the money to put it in my name (pregnant and going through a possible divorce). So I don't have the truck in my possesion at this moment. I can assure all of you that I have ridden in the back of said truck on many occasions, on some freeways or desert roads at high speeds. Believe it or not Hayley has also ridden in the back of said truck, when we lived in Cali. Smartest thing? No. Necessary at the time. I don't think this thing is all about whether or not it is safe to ride in the back of a truck. That is just one example. The point was simply that we did do things differently 50 years ago, and the laws have changed. It isn't about what is safe or what isn't but it is about whether or not it is the GOVERNMENT'S business to tell us what to do in these regards. It isn't about whether or not carseats make children safer, but whether or not it is for Uncle Sam to tell us we MUST do things this way or pay. It isn't about whether or not abortion is right or wrong but is it the governments job to say whether or not women can have them. Although for the most part I am anti-abortion, for my own reasons, I am not about to tell ANY woman whether or not she can or should have one. That isn't my place and it isn't the governments place either. This whole thing got twisted. It isn't necessarily about character building as much as it is about how much control the government has over things that were once considered a parents or friends job to decide. It also speaks to the fact that things were once simpler and safer and all of these new rules and regs don't make the world any safer. No it isn't necessarily safe to let kids ride in the back of pick ups, but once it was safe to let your kids go out and play and now it isn't. Now we have to be paranoid all of the time. Sometimes a simpler time can seem wistful and welcoming. There weren't as many fears. That can be nice.

"It isn't about whether or not abortion is right or wrong but is it the governments job to say whether or not women can have them." in the example of abortion, there are laws saying women can have them as protection from those looking to pass laws saying they cant. in the case of trucks, car seats, seat belts, helmets etc.....like i said...enjoy being on the lower end of natural selection if you choose not to wear a helmet, seatbelt etc. in teh case of children, the laws are enacted as protection devices due to the insane amount of idiotic parents needlessly endangering the lives of their own children. children deserve the protection because they arent always able to speak for themselves. if you subject your child to a ride in the back of a pick up truck, i think you should be cited just like a a parent who neglects to put their child in a car seat.

i have to agree with a lot of that essay. people are such safety freaks anymore. i never wore a helmet, played outside all day when i was 8, got hurt a lot but never made a huge deal about it, never worried about the perverts -- we knew who they were. i spent hour after hour jumping off 3 story scaffolding into a small pile of sand at a construction site, climbing trees up to where the trunk was as big as a broomstick and then see how much i could sway back and forth, repeatedly riding my bmx bike down this ridiculously long stairway in downtown tacoma, climbing the arch of this bridge and smoking cigarettes at the top. today, i'm freaked about my daughter walking 2 blocks to the bus stop by herself. what the fuck happened?

I liked this one: We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors. Fuck I hardly ever drink water from a bottle. Then again, Christchurch sits on artisian wells and the water is pure and clear.

Dave, that was exactly my point. I climbed trees, and fences. I ran the neighborhood talking and playing with other kids, but I won't let my own kids play outside, out of my eyesite from the kitchen window. Patty, when Hayley was in the back of Grandpa's truck, she was restrained and we drove 1 block from the storage unit to our apartment. She was not in any more danger than she would have been if she were in a booster seat in the back of a convertible Jeep Wrangler with the top down. There was a 25mph speed limit and there were responsible adults in the back with her. Get a grip. It was me who rode in the back of the truck (and other trucks) on the main roads in the desert or on the city streets in Cali. My children, in spite of their age, are still in car seats and booster seats even though they are not required for their age. Why do I put Hayley in a booster seat still? Because it is recommended for her weight. By those same guidelines I would have been in a booster seat after I gave birth to Hayley. Do I personally wear my seatbelts and safety helmets religiously. Yes. I also insist that anyone in my vehicle or with me do the exact same thing. I am not saying that using the devices is wrong. Again, it goes back to whether or not the government should tell us we HAVE to do it. Oh, and the abortion laws did not always protect the women as they were illegal for a period of time, and many don't protect the babies that would live outside of the womb (and they are the ones who can't speak for themselves). So if you want freedom of choice, vote pro-choice, but if you want to protect the innocent babies and children then oppose partial birth abortions and give the mother some way to give the baby away without penalty.

I have to say that right now I would not put the girls in the back of a truck. But that is because I can't get them to sit still on a couch for 10 seconds. They need RESTRAINTS! But fuckitall, it is still not the gov's job to tell me how to be a parent. Bypass all those laws and come up with some way to certify if you can birth or not, if you want to do that.

Oh, and I do not trust any stats from anyone anymore. The only ones who have those studies done have a prescribed result they are looking for. And why do you always attack some one's intelligence when you disagree with them? When I asked if you are pro choice or no choice, that could not be explained anyway else. It's good to give the common person the right to choose wether a baby lives or dies, but not alright for them to decide if thier needs justify a SUV? What, are you the guru of all opinions, and have knowledge of everything, therefore anyone who does not agree with

Yeah, that about sums it up.

"It's good to give the common person the right to choose wether a baby lives or dies, but not alright for them to decide if thier needs justify a SUV?" trace, this is an illogical comparison. SUVs endanger lives of others, other people than those behind the wheel of one. you can argue that a baby being born does not endanger the lives of anyone. further...laws are created...to protect the law abiding public. for example....a mother doesnt buckle her child up.. they get into an accident. mother and daughter have no health insurance and the baby ends up needed 100,000 worth of surgery. they end up being a burden on the state and federal system. a common complaint from right wing fuckos like yourself is the amount of people sucking off the states teat. laws are enacted to reduce the amount of people committing these simple infractions, to avoid undue burden on the state. its the same logic that has been applied to the smoking issue. smoking put undue burden on the state and federal healthcare system. this is why people have won law suits and the tobacco companies paid out. im no different than you eri, dave. i rode in the back of pick up trucks. i climbed trees, did shit on a skateboards and bikes with no helmet or pads that you make you cringe. in CA you can be cited for not making your child, under 16 i think, for not wearing a helmet while riding a bike. I think thats a bit absurd. the danger in riding bikes is no posed by the bike itself, but by cars. the onus is on the cars not the bike so proofing the bike rider, while perhaps a wise precaution, in my mind is not a legal matter.

there is a fine line between ensuring a child's safety to the best of your ability and sheltering or overprotecting them. in my opinion, the latter can be nearly as debilitating as say losing an arm from falling out of the back of a truck. i actually like this part of that post: "We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, video games at all, 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, Personal Computers, Internet chat rooms... We had friends. We went outside and found them. We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rung the bell or just walked in and talked to them." it rings true to me. do neighborhood kids go outside and meet each other and play on the playgrounds anymore? i don't know, i'm not a parent, i'm out of touch with this sort of thing. i also liked this part: "Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't, had to learn to deal with disappointment..... Some students weren't as smart as others so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade..... Horrors. Tests were not adjusted for any reason."

i was thinking the very same thing the other day sarah when i was looking around my hood to see if i saw kids playing. you don't. we used to have a neighborhood call. a noise we made at the top of our lungs that kids 3 blocks away could hear, that meant to regroup at any particular fort we had the time. since my suburban neighborhood was surrounded by woods we had plenty of places to play army, hide, ride bikes, creeks and so forth. i remember my mother's calls to dinner, or my buddies parents' calls. But i live in a city now. its a different landscape. i do have the railroad tracks and the la river very near my house but i would be leary of letting my kid roam by herself or with friends due to the fact that they are established gang territories and kids do get hurt. so id opt to walk or ride with her in areas like that. living in a city, outdoor play must be delegated to city parks or your personal yard more often. also I live on a somewhat busy street. since buses operate on my street they wont put in speed bumps like all the blocks around me. this also allows assfucks in bitchin cameros and japanese crotch rocket motorcycles to speed like mad on my street. for this reason my cats are indoor cats and my kid wont be allow to play in front as a young child unsupervised. of course i dont want to over protect my child. i also dont want her scared of her environs nor do i want to stifle her desire to explore. i dont want her to fear potential dangers as much as i want her to be smart about them. theres a fine balance in it all. i dont deny we live in over reactive times....you just gotta find balance of some sort i think.

Let me just state for the record that I was not taking issue with the aforementioned sentiments as a whole. I just found this to be a little hypocritical: "if you were too stupid to keep your ass seated the whole time, then maybe it was a good thing you fell out of the back of the truck." unfortunately, some parents need to have repercussions other than the death of their children to prevent them from doing certain things. sad but true. i think i have strep. my throat hurts like mad.

ripping fully formed babies out of the womb an hour before birth, crushing it's skull in while it cries, and calling it legal HAHAHAHA. oh my god, was that ever melodramatic.

Kids in my neighbhourhood still play. They're little bastards though. They've got a tin car that they race in up and down the road, which gives driver's a fright when they come speeding down the racetrack corner and see all these little kids pushing someone along.

HEY AGATHA!! THATS THE WAY IT WAS AND WEEEEEEEEEE LOVED IT! er wait a minute....

i live in a suburb. If it wasn't 30 below outside, there would be kids crawling around my communal backyard all afternoon. But now they have street hockey. There's lots of kids playing. If you don't want your kids to watch too much tv, or spend hours on a Playstation, just don't buy these things. Don't get cable. And i will say to it's credit that if a kids spending 5 hours a night on the internet, at least he's reading ;)

i think abortion should be required. i think children should be steralized if they fail to pass any class starting with 7th grade. if you drop out of school, steralized. if you are convicted of any crime, steralized. if you beat your child, your child is steralized and your head is put through a hole into a box full of starving rats for one hour. per offense.

if you can't spell sterilized....

bbwwwawaaaaahahahahahahaha!

i know how to spell sterilized.

I am all for mandatory sterilization. Can we put my sister first on the list? She is going on and on about trying to have another child. This time she just knows it will be a girl. She still won't get her lazy ass out of bed to take care of her son. Thank God she doesn't have him back. Last thing this world needs is for her to even attempt procreation again!

I'm not for forced sterilization, but I'll make an exception for Eri's sister. Jesus!

has anyone bothered to express this outright to her? it seems like an appropriate time for brutal bluntness with her.

We have expressed many things to her. The sad part is that you can be as blunt as hell and she still doesn't fucking understand what you are saying. We will make fun at the stupidity of her comments in front of her (Spunky's really good at it) in front of everyone and EVERYONE is laughing their asses off at her right in front of her and she doesn't get that either. It's beyond pathetic. When she was pulling this shit over Christmas (she was pretending to be asleep so that Hayley who had 3 hours of sleep would take care of him, like my 8 year old has any business taking care of HER son and poor Hayley was in tears cuz she just wanted to sleep), I went down there, she was still pretending to sleep, so I stripped the blankets off of her had one hand on her throat and the other balled up in a fist and just as I was about to beat the shit out of her so she couldn't pretend to be sleeping anymore, her dipshit husband came in and said he was on his way up to get Christopher. Little bitch wanted to shirk her responsibilities and force them on my baby. She has also taken to dressing like a total whore lately. How she can be 20 lbs. lighter than me and be a size 1 and still have fat rolls sticking out of her shirts is beyond me, but she looked like a common streetwalker. She is disappering for hours at at time and when she says where she was, you can just see she is lying. Spunky and I think she's slutting around on her hubby to try to get herself knocked up again. They have only been to my parents to see Christopher once since Christmas (it's an hour and a half drive in bad traffic). Then again, we will never understand that bitch or her idiot husband. We can be blunt and straightfoward to Mike and he understands everything we are saying and then just fucking blows us off. How a parent can let someone else raise their child and not fight to do the things necessary to get their child back is beyond me. Completely. On the up side of the whole thing...Christopher is doing wonderful in spite of all of the shit from my sister, her husband, and my mother. My father is basically raising him by himself with my mother in the background yelling at him. Christopher is even speaking a little above his age. Putting words together. And his generally happy. I had a lot of fun with him (when I was watching him because my sister is a fucking sleeping idiot spending her waking hours throwing pity parties for herself). I did tell her straight out that she didn't have any business having another baby, period. Even if they were loaded, if she can't take care of her son on the weekends or holidays and he is two years old and much easier than a newborn, then she has no business having any baby in her care at all. She just looked at me like she didn't understand and talked about how I will be an auntie again in the next year. She is (not so secretly) in love with Spunky's brother, so just to hit home I told her that I already was going to be an aunt again this year, because Tony and his wife were expecting and their baby was due in may. Then she got pissed off because he is happy and having kids with Michelle and not her and threw a fit right there about how better off he would be with her and how he could have her right in front of her husband. She is fucking idiot who is the poster child for forced sterilization.

yes. but it is like trying to convince you that a conservative point of view does not mandate skull bashing.

you can pay to have people killed, you know. Or steal kids. just a thought....

If it were only that easy and I actually had money!!!!! My mother is working on a plan to give Christopher back to my sister. The thing is that if anything happens to him after that point then they cannot get custody of him again. So now she is working on a plan for when he gets hurt next. Apparently they want him to go to their Great-Grandparents instead of us. Funny isn't it. They want Christopher to go to people who are in their 80's, why? Because our plate is full with our two daughters. Like we wouldn't fight to get him if ANYTHING EVER happened to that baby again. Like we would let these people (who are nice but incapable of taking proper care of him) raise him to age 4 and then die. I guess the plan is to let him get hurt again and then try to keep Spunky and I from doing the right thing by this baby. Only time will tell, but I do GUARANTEE that if ANYTHING happens to him ever again, I WILL be fighting to raise him, keep him, and NEVER give him back to people who hurt him, EVER! Too bad I can't do anything now to prevent the plan from ever happenning.

Here's a "Can You Believe We Survived?" story of a different nature for ya: (cut and paste the URL) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-575677,00.html Can you imagine this guy being your dad? That would be a trip and a half.

I must be typing it in wrong somehow, but it isn't going thru.

Argh. OK, go here -- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/ -- and scroll down to the bottom until you come to the Obituaries section. Click on Major H. F. Fane-Hervey.

Woah. "wartime commander and prison camp escaper." He sounds like he was pretty awesome. Heroic and all that stuff too. Bleh. There was a letter to the editor this morning that really pissed me off. Sometimes I think they deliberately pick the inflammatory letters for me to read over Thursday breakfast. I want warm and fuzzy letters about puppies and kittens, damnit.

At least we can say he had as strong will and had to be pretty ingenious to do all of the escaping he tried and did. Did his kids even know him? Could you imagine him running that farm with the cows in line "Left, left, left right left". I bet his kids have all kinds of stories.

"On reaching Rome, the couple made contact with the Rome escape organisation, run by Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty of the Vatican and Major Sam Derry, himself an escaped prisoner. Until the city was liberated by the American 5th Army on June 4, 1944, Fane-Hervey used the alias of “Count Paolo Fattorini”. Finding himself on one occasion next to a group of German officials in an adjacent box at the opera, he introduced himself and secured their signature on his programme." :)

How much of that can be substantiated? It sounds totally made up. That guy couldn't be anybody but a Brit, though. He's the epitome of derring-do.

That is interesting. My grandfather was a prisoner of war for about three and a half years. He was captured by the Japanese at Corregidor. He has some incredible stories. One where he talks about the men who died after they were rescued as a result of eating too much food too fast, gorging themselves because they were so weak.

Kazoo, your grandfather should write his memoirs! Or, if you have a videocamera, maybe you could tape him talking about it. I heard that one of the mistakes of feeding people who've been starving is to give them too much protein. Apparently the body breaks it down faster than it can use the calories. A peace corps worker once told me that peanut butter is actually a very good food for starving people because it contains fat as well as the protein. I have no way of knowing if this is bullshit or not.

I live too far away. I have to get my brother on this project. I'll transcribe anything he sends me. Somewhere I have a cassette tape of me interviewing my grandfather when I was about 13 for a school project. He will not cook rice, though he'll eat it if someone buys him chinese food. They had to eat it every day. He once told me a story about stealing tofu. It was years before he would let anyone else wash the dishes, apparently because so many men died of dysentary from dirty silverware (among other things).

My great unlce Jim died of dysentery on the Bataan death march.

Kazoo, your grandfather's story reminds me...my mother is friends with a man who survived four concentration camps, and he became gravely ill when he ate a piece of meat immediately after liberation. I think I've told the story of my grandfather and the real-life "Life Is Beautiful" story around here...let me see if I can find it.

Ah, screw it, I'll tell it again. My grandfather was one of the soldiers who liberated Buchenwald, and he managed to sneak a camera in when he was there. Most of the photos mysteriously didn't come out when he had them developed, but a few did, and he kept them in an album -- pictures of piles of bones, the dog pits, the barracks, and a few prisoners. He gave the album to my mother about 10 years ago, and I helped her go through it and organize it. We came across a picture of a little boy (maybe 2 or 3 yrs old) saluting the camera, standing next to a tall man in rags, and my grandfather's caption read something like "the little prisoner." My mom and I thought it was strange to see a little child alive in a camp at the end of the war....most children (especially those of his size) were killed pretty quickly upon internment. (We also thought the pictures of men holding out their tattooed arms for the camera with big grins on their faces were weird...we still don't know what was up with that.) Anyway, my mom subscribes to an Italian magazine called "Oggi" (like our "People"), and around the time that "Life Is Beautiful" came out, "Oggi" ran an article about a real-life "Life is Beautiful" case. Wouldn't you know....there in the magazine is a picture of the little boy from my grandfather's album. His name is Joseph S[xxxxxxxx], his father had hid him in the camp, he survived, and he now lives in NYC. My mom goes on a mission to find Joseph S.'s address or phone number, so she can contact him and tell him about her father....she writes to the magazine, she checks the NYC phone books, the internet....no luck. Then, a couple years ago, she goes to grad school to study the Holocaust and decides to end one of her presentations with a mention of Joseph and his picture. She needs help setting up PowerPoint in class and asks one of her classmates to help her. The guy sees the picture of Joseph and says, "Oh my God, is that Joe?" Joseph S. is his father's best friend! He gives my mother Joe's phone number, and that night, she calls him. They have a very friendly conversation, and Joe mentions he's about to leave on a vacation to Las Vegas. My grandfather lives in Las Vegas! So Mom talks to Grandpa, Grandpa and Joe meet after 50+ years, and they are still in correspondence. The end.

wow.

wow.

I didn't do that on purpose.

fucking awesome. id love to see those images spidey. can you scan em?

I know, isn't it a cool story? It's beyond coincidence. My mom has the pictures with her in Boston, but she's coming down to PA on the weekend of Feb. 28, and I could get the photos scanned then and then email them to you all. They're neat. In fact, let me email my mom now so I don't forget...

Came across your chat of last year re the obituary on my father, Major Fane Hervey. Don't know if you are all still out there (Spider, Platypus, Eri, Wisper, etc. but would love to find out. It was amazing to see that my father was the topic of a conversation. Please let me know if you all still exist and are still chatting. Regards