25 People Share What Story Made Their Dad Legendary In Their Eyes

How much do we really know about our parents? At some point, we all realise that our parents had a life before us. They lived, they loved and they learned. Though we cannot imagine our parents any differently than what we are used to seeing as children, it stands to reason that they have undergone their own life experiences which may have greatly influenced or changed them, just as we did when becoming adults.

#1 One time when I was really little my dad went to his plugs house to do a transaction or whatever. While he was there the guy had a new dog, small cocker spaniel that he was severely mistreating. All you had to do was look at it and it would fall on itself and pee all over itself it was really sad. Anyways my dad got his weed, stood up, picked up the dog and said “I’m taking your dog a*****e” and just left with it, and we had a new dog.

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#2 My step dad, who is long since passed away, was in the military during Vietnam and about a decade after. On his last mission, his helicopter was shot down and he was the only survivor out of 11. After the crash he looked down at himself and saw his stomach was split open and all his guts had fallen out. He pushed them all back inside and used his belt to hold everything together until help arrived. He ended up with some digestive issues from it and had to have his spleen completely removed, but otherwise ended up physically okay. The PTSD destroyed him, but he did his best to not let it affect me and my mom and he was the best father figure I could have ever asked for. He got an honorable discharge and a purple heart from it.

He told me plenty of stories, some totally badass and others really sad, but this is the one that really stands out about how strong and capable he was as a person. He died 19 years ago and I miss him every single day.

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#3 My dad used to be in a band, and grew up in Belfast. June 1978 he and his band were recording in Wizard Studios, and a guy from the band recording next door came in and said: “Hey, we need some guys to do some hand claps on our song.” So my dad and his mates go and clap their hands for this other band for a bit, then go back to recording. And that is the story of how my dad’s hand clapping is in the song Teenage Kicks by The Undertones.

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#4 The second time my dad was struck by lightening, he didn’t even fall down.

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#5 My dad was a tough old dude. I remember as a kid when he needed knee replacement surgery, he had a consult where the doc asked if he’d ever broken any bones and he said nope.

Cut to after the procedure- the dr was like: why didn’t you tell me you broke your leg previously? Dad- oh, was it broken? I did hurt my leg many years back but I just walked on it until it felt better. ?.

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#6 This is a story about my grandfather who served in the Pacific theatre in WWII-

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As I was told, he was on patrol when an ambush occurred. While running back to his companions, a grenade landed at his feet. He picked it up and threw it back at the Japanese soldier who had thrown it, who in turn picked it up and threw it back. They played this game of “catch” for a few tosses before they both realized the grenade hadn’t been primed. Grandfather looked at the soldier, the soldier looked at him, and they both shrugged in that “Do we really have to do this?” sort of way.

So the next toss, the soldier pulls the pin and just lobs the grenade way out of the way of either of them, and they both just go their separate ways.

Cut to a few nights later, I guess the soldier had been found dead — grandpa recognized him from a photo in his wallet that a serviceman had nabbed. Grandfather was able to steal the wallet back, and years later he was able to return it to the family based on stuff he found inside.

#7 Late 70s, in Toronto (York) my Dad heard that the bad boy in the neighborhood had broken his girlfriend’s arm because she wouldn’t do what he wanted.

Image source: Scribblesandsnails, Keira Burton

My Dad had no idea who she was.
But being the guy my Dad was, found the bad boy. Let him know if he ever laid a hand on her again, he would kill him. Though my dad was a nerd and loved DND, he was still the hockey star and a big “scary” guy. Buddy never laid a hand on her again.

My Dad would later give the said girlfriend a ride home in the rain, while she was walking home from rollarskating. Marry her and have me 20 years later. .

#8 My dad and his friend were driving around. Pulled up to another car at a red light which my mom and her friend in it. The guys hit on the girls and convinced them to stop for a drink. They pair up with my dad talking to my mom. His opening line was that he was a virgem. (Virgo in Portuguese but to my 20 year old Scottish mom it sounded like virgin.) she was like “ok, cool, good for you. “ still laughed about it 20 years later.

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#9 My uncle told me this story years after my dad had passed away.

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My dad grew up in a farm town in western PA in the 60s. Being a teenager in the middle of nowhere in the 60s he was known to partake in a bit of libations here and there.

One night he got home and was visibly toasted. According to my uncle he sat in a chair facing out the front window and just stared into mostly darkness for a good few minutes. Mind you this was in full view of the whole family. So my PopPop asked him, “Jim, why don’t you go to bed?” And my father replied “I’m waiting until the cows come home.”

My PopPop thought he was being a smartass and told him to go to bed. Then he looked out the window and saw a herd of cows crossing the road into the yard.

#10 When my grandfather was a kid his parents were going through a nasty divorce (his dad would beat his mother and his siblings constantly). His dad caught his mom at the store one day, took all of the kids except the one who was at the store with his mom, and hightailed it across country to California. With it being the 60s they had no contact with their mother for 3 years.

Grandpa turns 14, and decides he’s sick of getting beat. He steals his older brother’s ID, and a small TV out of his dad’s room which he sells at a p**n shop down the road for a fraction of what it’s worth. He then hitch hikes across the United States, and almost makes it back to Ohio, before being arrested in Illinois for getting into a fight with someone who was trying to rob him. Once he tells the cops his true identity, they contact Cleveland PD who confirms he’s a missing child that disappeared 3 years before, and thankfully are able to get him back to his mother. His other 3 siblings weren’t brought back until 4 years later, when the oldest kid stole his father’s car in the middle of the night.

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#11 Not dad lore, but grandfather lore:

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My grandfather grew up in Germany during WWII as a young boy. His entire family was about as anti-Nazi as you could be without getting thrown into jail.

One day, members of the Nazi Party came around the village and began hanging up large propaganda banners that said “we are protecting the futures of our children”. My grandfather, in his infinite wisdom, had an idea…

That night, when the village was asleep, he went around with a bucket of paint, changing the first letter of the word “Children” from a K to an R.

In German, the word for children is “kinder”. My witty grandfather, however, also knew the word for cattle, which is “Rinder”.

The next morning, the village woke up to see that all of the banners put up by the Nazis now read, “we are protecting the futures of our cattle”.

What a f*****g legend.

#12 My dad was born in 37, his brother in 38, in Belgium from a jewish family. When the war broke out, They hid him and his brother in 2 different catholic families. Those families pretended they where theirs, everyone pretended they believed it. They where even written down in the churches register with boggus date of birth and they got baptised (for real). The moms where sisters so until the end of the war my father and my uncle believed they were cousins.

At some point, near the end of the war, 2 russians deserters trying to get as far as possible from the war walked in the village asking for help. Since it’s was the war, every help was welcome and they became farmhand. One of the first thing they did was to gather a bunch of scraps and a pressure cooker, build a still and make vodka from potato peels. One night they got blind drunk and my father, because he was a little s**t, stole the gun of one of the soldiers who rightfully became extremely angry.

Once the war was over, his father came back to take them (his mother didn’t make it)

Because my father was the type of guy who would embelish the stories, i asked my uncle if it was true, he confirmed everything, including the angry soldier. I asked about the gun and he said “i don’t know” with a smile. In his language it means “i know but i won’t tell” and my father smiled back

When i got older, he actually showed me the gun (it’s a Tokarev TT33). When my father died, i asked my mom where was the gun and she answered “somewhere” (the situation with this gun is very illegal in my country) I pretty sure it’s still somewhere in the house.

One of the russian soldier went back to russia, the other one married one of the farmgirl. My family is still in touch with the families that “adopted” my father and my uncle. My uncle asked that a tree was planted for them at Yad Vashem but i don’t know if there is actually one.

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#13 I don’t know all the details, the family kept it kinda hush hush, but apparently my dad and his 3 brothers kidnapped their sister back from the Jehovah’s Witness. Apparently she kinda started distancing herself from the family and eventually stopped responding at all. They went and found her and just brought her back home in the middle of the night one night haha.

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#14 My dad’s friend came and stayed with us for a few days one time. (He lived in a different city.) They were drinking a lot of whiskey and reminiscing about the good old days. “Remember when I had to bail you out of that Tibetan prison?” “Yeah, the Chinese had the place wiretapped and the god damn monk wouldn’t stop talking s**t about them.”.

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#15 My dad fought with the Ariel Sharon brigade during the Israeli Yom Kippur war in the Suez Canal. He was on a dune with two of his squad members when an Egyptian plane showed up and started shooting towards them. They all lied down on the sand to take cover, my father was the only one who ever got up.

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#16 My dad was once dating a girl who was into golf. She took him to a major tournament (don’t know which one) to watch it with her and her dad.

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She was obsessed with one of the golfers there so she and her dad woke up early to go around and follow the golfer. My dad sleeps in and then isn’t interested in the golf so he goes to the nearby beach.

There was a man there with windsurfing boards and he decides to give one to my dad for free because everyone is at the golf. He windsurfs for a couple hours and then returns to the golf around hole 15.

He meets up with his girlfriend and her dad and lies and says he walked around the holes and watched a few different people and everything goes fine.

He returns to home and then a few nights later goes to her house for dinner. He sits down with a plate of lasagna for dinner and there watching the golf re-runs and the commentator pans out and does a full zoom around and sees my dad wind surfing, zooms in on his face and says “there’s a lad who’s not very interested in the golf”

My dad was dumped on the spot.

#17 When my dad was a small child, like 4 – 6 years old, he found and tamed a baby fox in the woods near his house. He brought it home and his parents said he could keep it if he trained it and took care of it himself. They lived in very rural Newfoundland, and with farm animals, so the biggest concern was that he’d kill the chickens.

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I guess he got trained well enough not to kill any livestock at their house, but often the neighbours down the way reported foxes killing their chickens. They threatened to shoot the fox if they ever saw it, and sure enough one day he didn’t return home, and my dad always suspected it was them. That was after several years together though, and my dad thought of that fox as one of his favourite pets in his entire life.

He shared that with me in his final months. My advice to anyone with an ailing parent is to talk to them about their favourite memories. I had no idea my dad had lived such an interesting life (particularly from the ages of 4 – 14) until it was too late to hear it all.

#18 Dad was on the SWAT team when I was a kid in the 80’s. He told me about a hostage situation in the middle of winter at 3am where a guy barricaded himself in his house with his wife and kids. My dad and his spotter needed a place to post up but since it was downtown the adjacent roof was too high of an angle so they went to the 2nd floor to unfortunately commandeer some poor tenant’s window. He knocks on the door and an elderly lady with curlers in her hair and pink nightgown answers the door to two gentleman who look like GI Joe on steroids. They explain the situation and ask to use her window facing the street. She doesn’t say a word just leads them to the bedroom that contains her husband watching Sanford and Son reruns in a bed that fills most of the tiny room and leaves the narrowest of walking space around it. As dad and his partner are shuffling their way around this bed the lady crawls back into bed next to her husband. They fling the window open and this blast of cold air fills the room and the couple just pull the covers up to their chins. Having no room to pull up a chair dad and his partner have to sit on the edge of the bed that is just big enough for the husband and wife. After an hour or so the hostage taker comes out of the house brandishing what looks like a gun towards the team on the street. Looking through the scope dad can tell it’s a bed post. He jumps on the radio, ‘NO GUN! NO GUN! NO GUN!’ and prevented the guy from suicide by cop. The couple continue to watch tv during this whole situation and couldn’t give less of a s**t about what was going on. Dad just kind of thought it was this funny surreal moment.

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#19 Some time in the ’70s, my dad went to see Tom Waits play in some dive bar in Downtown Denver. A drunken, passed-out man was in the doorway, who my dad realized was William S Burroughs. So he had to step over Burroughs to get in to see Tom Waits. Legend.

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#20 On their first date, my dad accidentally fed my mom and himself dog food. Expired dog food. This is how I realized whose intelligence I inherited.

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#21 My dad is pretty pedestrian. My ex father in law, though, hooboy. I think that man is a Time Lord or a cat on account of he has had the most insane life and should be dead.

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He grew up rough with a alcoholic father and a stepmother that didn’t want him after his mother abandoned all of them. He ends up enlisting in the Navy where he spent nearly 30 years, in which he both survived a helicopter crash into the Indian Ocean and got to have lunch with President Reagan aboard the ship he was on. He is stationed all over the world, ends up in Texas where he divorces my ex mother in law, carries on a whole other career, all while saving his Navy money and pension. Then he goes itinerate for awhile, like on the movie Nomad, and finally decides to land in Minnesota where he pays as much for a house as I paid for my car to be closer to my ex wife while she was in college. While there he suffers a massive heart attack that essentially kills half his heart. Then he develops endocarditis, is read his last rites, and ends up surviving that and carrying on like nothing. He was then involved in a wreck so bad that they had to take bone from other parts of his body to reconstruct his face. A few years later, he moves back to his hometown, and ends up having another heart attack, which kills another quarter of his heart, but he survives just fine, AND had to have a massive tumor removed from his pancreas.

He collects old weapons of war including sabers and guns, bikes more miles than I even want to drive, is a huge hit with the ladies in his hometown, and lives all single pringle with his dog who just adores him.

Even though things didn’t work out between his daughter and I, I will ALWAYS respect that mans will to live, though I think he is running out of regenerations.

#22 My family is from Wisconsin. One year my parents decided to go on a vacation to Australia and New Zealand. While they were there deciding to go on a hike on a popular mountain range in New Zealand. While hiking my dad hears someone yell his first name. Thinking that there was no way that anyone on the opposite side of the world could possibly know him, he didn’t even look and just kept walking. Then the person yelled his first AND last name, which is not a common last name at all. My dad turns around and sees our next door neighbor! Our neighbors from a small town in Wisconsin just happened to go on vacation at the same time of year, to the same country, and decided to go hiking up the same mountain at the same time as my parents. The insane level of coincidence almost made me convinced we’re all living in the matrix.

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#23 More my parents as a unit, but it did involve my paternal grandmother.

My parents had been coworkers before my dad asked my mom out. They’re out driving on their date before a bee flies into the car, freaks out my mom, and causes my dad to wreck the car. They were both fine but were taken to the hospital as a just in case.

While at the hospital, my Dad’s parents are called to let them know what happened. About ten minutes later, my tiny, Five foot nothing, very Italian Grandmother comes bursting into the waiting room and yells at the top of her lungs “Were they wearing clean underwear???” The entire hospital room falls over laughing and my mom is informed of exactly what she’s in for. My parents made it more than forty years before my dad died, so I guess it worked out.

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#24 My grandmothers brother, my great-uncle, flew the hump from India to China. One night, when they were somewhere in China, a bunch of them got drunk & stole a train. Note that they did not ROB the train. They STOLE the damn thing.

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#25 Tonally a little different from the rest of the comments, but it’s one of my favorite stories about my dad.

So, apparently, back in his hey day my dad was a bit of a ladies man. Was introduced to my mom via mutual friend and was immediately smitten.

He asks her out and tells her to pick her favorite place to go, and he’ll treat her. She picks sushi.

Also important to note is how much of a traditional “tough guy” my dad is. Tradesman, drives a truck, goes shooting for fun, has played nearly every sport under the sun, and in keeping with all that, a “meat and potatoes” kind of man.

He HATES raw fish.

But he was so excited to take my mom out, he agrees and spends an evening downing sashimi (my mom’s favorite) with what I can only imagine is a very convincing smile on his face.

I guess it worked out though bc they’re still married to this day.

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