My grandmother left my granddad and she got pregnant. Her lover dumped her.

My grandfather took her back along with the baby. They had two kids together after that.

He always treated her son the same as their two kids.

I didn't learn any of this until my 50s.

My father's side of the family had "the help" all the way up until the 70s or so.

Their family employed a black woman who resided in a separate part of the home, did almost all the cooking, cleaning, babysat my father and his siblings, etc.

But she was not permitted to eat at the same time as my father's family - to say the least. There was an extremely small room off the kitchen she was allowed to eat in by herself after the family had finished their meal.

With that said - after my grandparents passed away, my father allocated a portion of his inheritance to her so she would no longer have to work. It wasn't living lavishly or anything - but it was enough to get by. He also insisted absolutely that she be included on family events like holidays and birthdays, because she was also family. I grew up viewing her as like a great aunt.

New Zealand: A snake. Always wanted a pet snake, but we dont even have them in the zoo they are so unallowed lol.

In Venezuela it's illegal to own anything with camo print on it.

India: A tiktok account.

Dana Carvey underwent heart bypass surgery for a blocked coronary artery, but the surgeon operated on the wrong artery. Eventually he won a lawsuit against the hospital and won 7.5 million dollars, all of which was donated to charity.

Tom Sawyer author Mark Twain invented the clasps commonly used on women’s bras.

A clown saved 300 children during the deadliest avalanche in history. Only 400 people survived out of around 18,000 in the town of Yungay, Peru. The children were attending a circus and a clown led them to higher ground moments before the avalanche destroyed the entire town.

During WW2 the Nazis spent the modern day equivalent of 100 million usd to make a underground base in Poland which saw little to no use. Soon after building it they lost the war, and it is now one of the largest bat habitats in Europe.

The native language of the volcanic island Manam Motu has no words for cardinal directions (North, East, West, South). Instead, it uses polar coördinates—with words meaning “towards the volcano”, ”towards the sea”, “clockwise around the volcano”, and “counterclockwise around the volcano”.

A 2022 California Supreme Court decision allowed bumble bees to be considered a protected species because they met the state’s legal definition of a “fish”.

Dictator Muammar Gaddafi had a strange obsession with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He had Libya's most famous composer write her a song called "Black Flower in the White House." A photo album full of pictures of her was also found next to his bed by opposition fighters.

US president Benjamin Harrison was widowed while in office in 1892. Four years later, Harrison married his dead wife's niece and had a daughter with her. His adult children who were around 40 years old, were horrified that their father married their cousin and didn't attend the wedding.

In world war 2, English soldiers would use passwords that had sounds that the language of the people they where fighting against did not have, so that they could tell if an unidentified person was an enemy soldier tying to infiltrate them by if they said these sounds correctly.

During World War II, US comedian Redd Foxx dodged the draft by eating half a bar of soap before his physical, a trick that resulted in heart palpitations.