David Bruce Anecdotes
Fathers
• Having a Hall-of-Fame baseball player for a father does not mean that you will make it to the major leagues. Hank Aaron’s son played in the minor leagues, and Hank realized that his son would never get out of the minor leagues and that it would be better for him to pursue a different avenue in life. Therefore, as a baseball executive and as a father, he told his son, “You’ve got two choices. Either I can keep you here in A ball or you can go back to college, get your degree, come back out, and have a family.” His son thought about the choice, and he was about to make the wrong decision, so Hank told him, “While you’re thinking, here are your release papers.” Of course, his son was angry at first, but much later and after graduating from college and becoming a schoolteacher, he told Hank, “Thanks for making that decision, because I couldn’t have made it.”
• When she was a child, gymnast Nadia Comaneci could be naughty. At a store, she tried on a pair of roller skates. Because she wanted the roller skates so much, she skated out of the store, forcing her father to pay for them. In addition, one day she stayed outside until after dark, playing, and her parents worried about her. When she finally came home, her father spanked her once, then made her kneel on cracked walnut shells for three hours — so she would be as uncomfortable as he had been waiting for her to return home.
• When Robin, politician Bob Dole’s daughter, was young, she wanted to get her ears pierced, so she wrote him a decision memo similar to those used in the Senate. She asked permission to get her ears pierced, and at the end of the memo she drew two boxes — one marked “Yes” and the other marked “No.” Senator Dole drew a third box on the memo and checked it — it said, “Maybe.”
• Yitta Halberstam Mandelbaum’s father, a Rabbi, encouraged her to learn and to write. He steered her in the direction of the nonfiction section in the library, even though she preferred the fiction section. In addition, he paid her $1 for each poem she wrote, and $2 for each short story — a lot of money back then.
• When Maria Montessori became interested in education, she wished to study a book by Edouard Séguin about disabled children. She hunted for the book in Rome, but could not find it. Finally an old, dirty, musty copy was found in New York. Before allowing her to read the book, her father disinfected it.
• Thurgood Marshall’s father, William, endured prejudice, and he knew that his son would have to, also. He once told his son, “If anyone ever calls you a n*gger, you not only got my permission to fight him, you got my orders to fight him.”
• Pro basketball player Michael Jordan sometimes stuck his tongue out while playing hard on the basketball court. This is a habit he picked up from his father, who sometimes stuck out his tongue as he worked in his yard and house.
• On the spur of the moment, Quaker humorist Tom Mullen decided to embarrass his young children after they boarded a bus taking them to 4-H camp — he ran after the bus, shouting, “They’re taking away my babies!”
• Comedian Beatrice Lillie used to send her father money. When he died, she found a box at his house. Inside was all the money she had sent him and a note saying, “For my daughter, Beatrice Lillie, for a rainy day.”
Food
• Canadian figure skater Toller Cranston enjoys putting on his friends, and he has the luck to get away with it. Once, Mr. Cranston and his friend David Liu ate in an all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant, and standing at the buffet they saw a 500-pound woman loading up her tray with 20 desserts. Mr. Cranston told his friend, “Look at that woman. This is a disgrace. I am going to go right over there and snap that food away from her.” Mr. Cranston then went up to the woman, who recognized him and asked if she could have his autograph. Mr. Cranston replied, “Yes, but you’ll have to put down those desserts.” At this point, Mr. Liu was so horrified that he left the restaurant, and he still thinks (unless he’s read Mr. Cranston’s autobiography, Zero Tollerance) that Mr. Cranston forced the woman to put down her desserts.
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Copyright by Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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