LOUISVILLE, KY—In a wide-ranging conversation about the hardships and difficult choices her family had faced during the Great Depression, local grandmother Mary Sipple casually mentioned Tuesday that in August 1937 she took the life of a man who refused to give up a jar of mayonnaise. “She just crushed his skull with a rock and […]
100%. I worked with an old-timer Newfoundlander who delighted in telling me that in the ought-sorties when he was a teen he passed out in a dinghy on the dock after a night of drinking and woke up at sea as an accidental stow-away on some merchant ship. He hid as long as he could but eventually got caught and it was some ship/crew from the eastern hemisphere and (to hear him tell it) threatened him with going overboard unless he got to work in the galley so that’s what he did. He said he sailed with them all over the world for two or three years before landing in Canada again and decided to take a stroll around his former community to learn that his family had assumed him dead, had the whole funeral or whatever, case closed in their minds. I asked him if he looked up his people to let them know and he was like fuck that shit I hated all of them with a passion! so he went back out to sea and did that most of his life. He was hilarious.