When we are kids we think our parents are weird. I’m sure you can recite the many times you felt this way. Was it being forced to visit that elderly aunt on your mother’s side of the family twice removed, who smelled funny or they would make you go to church every Sunday even though you didn’t believe. And then forced you to be baptised.
My parents, Betty and Chester, would be in the running for sure. I have receipts.
My friends, when I was a kid, all had normal family lives. None of them were from single parent environment nor did they have older siblings—one friend did have an older brother but that’s a story for another day—who made picked on them. No Chet to a Wyatt.
My family life was normal. There were just these weird pockets of weirdness that became obvious as I grew older.
I was born in 1953—as stated in another post the year the Corvette Stingray debuted—in Iowa. I lived in a cement block house. This was a one level house that was build out of concrete building blocks (not even close to a Lego block) and was the perfect example of plain, boring, and non-adventurous. It was out in the country right next to a farm family that still used an outhouse—and outhouse brings up another memory from that time. Again a story for later date.
In 1961 my parents pulled up stakes and moved myself, my younger sister(by 3 years), a dog that had befriended us, and our worldly possessions in what today would be a Suburban or an Escalade. But way more ghetto.
I remember cresting the freeway on Mercer Island and seeing the I-90 bridge spanning Lake Washington. Which at that time was more water in one place than I’d ever seen in my short life. Looking back the idea that that bridge was going to support us, was kinda scary(I had a thing for deep water) but we safely made it across and entered Seattle.
Now fast-forward forty-some years to a conversation I was having with my father. He was in his early 70s (probably around my current age). We somehow got on the subject of the past and I asked a question that had bugged me ever since that day we drove across the Lake Washington Floating Bridge (catchy).
My assumption, as a kid, was my father, who was a machinist, had moved us to work at Boeing. Silly me, that was way too logical for my family. During the conversation, it was revealed that, no, working at Boeing was a by-product of that move.
The reality was, in fact, my parents moved so they could see the Century 21 Exposition or as we called it the Seattle World’s Fair. A quick aside, I’ve always thought the World Exposition of Tomorrow that Howard Stark created had many callbacks to the Seattle World’s Fair. But as a favorite comics author used to say, But I digress.
Imagine my shock at two adults with two young children just up and moving to an unknown place without any plan other than wanting to see a fair? Of course the Seattle World’s Fair was a huge thing. Hell Elvis shot a movie there, It Happened at the World’s Fair.
Granted they made the most of it, as we went to the Seattle Center more than once. Relatives came to town and we squired them around Seattle, taking in the beauty of the PNW. And of course, the World’s Fair.
Weird? Maybe not but I don’t know of many kids who were uprooted from one place and re-rooted in another place in a seemingly random set of circumstances.
But again as I said in the beginning, everyone considered their parents weird but I think I might be in the running for weirdest parents ever.
You be the judge once I regale you with more weird parents happenings.
Oh and if you’ve read The Comicbook Detective you’ve met a fictional version of my parents. The fictional version is way more normal(but still a bit weird) than the real version.
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