I had a huge girl crush on my beautiful, mysterious, sophisticated aunt. She was my mother's sister. She lived in Florida in a gorgeous apartment, and I only got to see her once every few years. I slept there overnight a few times, and was pretty much enthralled with everything about her, and everything that she owned. I used to love to accompany her when she went clothes shopping...it was like being with Posh Spice...we went to all of the best shops in Miami, and she only bought the most classic, beautiful things. She would find an exquisite blouse and buy it in 12 colors. Everyone would stare at her, and men would follow her and bother her and try to buy her things. Any time she would try to buy something, a man would pop up out of nowhere and offer to pay - a cup of coffee, a pair of shoes, a designer coat...pretty much anything.

Whenever it was time to go back to PA I would cry, heartbroken. I loved her more than my own mother in a way - I did idolize her.

She was so beautiful. She couldn't deal with getting older and the lessening of male attention and she killed herself when she was in her early 40s, and the detective assigned to her case fell in love with her and became obsessed with her photographs.

My father's youngest brother. He was a well-regarded west coast artist who got tired of the politics and BS in the art scene and bought a farm to start over. He and my aunt are very sharp, but very down-to-earth. They love to BS for fun, but brook no BS when intended seriously. And they both have world-class bullshit meters.

When I was a teenager, I used to spend summers working on the farm, and for other farmers in the valley. This was a pivotal time for me, because I was very intellectually arrogant, but insecure about my physicality. The long days of hard work, being treated as an adult, yet being (goodnaturedly) called on all my shit was very good for me.

To this day I largely credit them for decreasing my dickishness quotient by at least 75%.

Wow, iconomy, that's a beautiful and mysterious story!

My aunt, who is my mother's brother's wife. She is my only aunt who is not my mum's sister (Mum = from big Irish catholic family, 5 sisters, one brother who happens to be her irish twin). Aunt Anne was so different to all my other aunts - she laughed all the time and was a consumate piss-taker. My mother's immediate relatives are all kind of grim. When I was young I used to like her because she was the least overtly religious of the family as well.

Beyond that I really don't know why I idolised her so much. But I did. Nowadays I like most of my extended family pretty equally, although I still like her the best. Her sons and daughter are my favourite cousins. She's still by far the least negative of my aunts (and mum) so is the easiest to be around. And now as an adult I see that she's in fact the most Christian of my somewhat annoyingly pious family. Except that she's not annoyingly pious. She's still a huge piss-taker. She just lives a very Christian life rather that judging other people for not doing so (unlike the others). So I admire her for that.

Wow, iconomy, that sounds like an amazing film noir plot. You should write a book about it!

She was so beautiful. She couldn't deal with getting older and the lessening of male attention and she killed herself when she was in her early 40s, and the detective assigned to her case fell in love with her and became obsessed with her photographs.

Truth, fiction, all that. I want to write this as a short story right this minute.

My aunt, my mothers' sister, the Queen of Bohemia. She has lived all over the world, most notably in the Chelsea hotel, in India, in London, in Paris and she owned a house in Spain on Mallorca (where I went to live with her as a teenager.) She's a painter and a fairly well known one and for years she was deeply involved with a writer - they never married, just lived together whenever their paths intersected, which I've always thought was a sane way to go about things. She's been smoking pot all day every day since about 1947 when she used to sneak off from Antioch college and go down to Greenwich Village to hang out with jazz musicians. Granted, she's a little fuzzy now - yeah, if you smoke every day for over 50 years your stories may tend to blur together a bit, it turns out to be true ;-) although she's in fine health otherwise - and my brother reports in worry that there's nothing in her fridge but vitamin C and vodka, but hell, she's 78. She had an affair with Franz Kline and Bill de Kooning used to crash on her couch when he'd had too much to drink. She hung out with Bill Burroughs in Tangiers and Robert Graves in Spain. In the 60s she turned into a hippie and did a lot of acid and that's her beating on a drum and chanting on a couple of Gong and Mother Gong albums. She went off to India and joined Rajneesh for a while; dyed everything orange and got hepatitis, which only barely slowed her down. "Hepatitis is wonderful," she told me, "Because noone can smoke after you, so they feel sorry for you and give you the whole joint!" As a teenager I thought she was totally awesome and motly I still do.

Be my guest, jokeefe. I can tell you tons more about her. She really was pretty fascinating, and had a dark side that just about eclipsed everything about her that was good.

When the detective went to her apartment to...uh...do whatever the hell it is that they do after someone kills themselves, he saw framed photos of her all over the place. She was vain. Anyway, she was tall and blonde and very regal and elegant and poised. Very unattainable-looking. He was so intrigued by her look and her persona that he ended up falling in love with her just from her photographs, and called my mother (her sister) almost every day from Florida (we lived in PA) just to talk about her and to ask for more pictures.

My grandfather and his brother, my uncle Ben.

My grandfather had a big long upper lip and wore seersucker suits; his hair greyed and curled around his temple and he was taller than my dad by an inch (but not as tall as I am now). He took me to Mexico when I was an infant, to church, and I remember the crinkly press of seersucker against my face. He was an epidemiologist for the Army during WWII, stationed in Alabama working on pills for malaria, and then taught at Columbia University while my mother was in grade school, before they moved to Denver, where he worked for the Air Force, eventually moving after my mother graduated from East High School to San Antonio, where he trained astronauts for the space program. He gave me his whistle before he died, and the same Acme Thunderer that put guys like Glenn and Grissom through their paces drilled junior high school basketball teams after I took it to Japan.

He always had time for me, and in the years before he died, after my grandmother was gone, we spoke frequently, both researching our genealogy and reading passages copied from the fronts of swiss family bibles and from odd scraps of Dublin land records with concrete clues that someone like us had been there.

As I grew older, I learned from my mother that he had been a drunk during her childhood, terrorizing her and her sister while her mother bravely put them to bed. As an officer, he was expected to attend the officers' club after work, and would come home pounding his chest and bellowing most nights. I don't know when he stopped, but he did.

He and my grandmother eloped to get married, and his mother-in-law lived bedridden an extra ten years out of spite, cursing him every day.

He's been gone about ten years, and I miss him.

My uncle Ben was a corrections officer in Chicago through most of the second half of the 20th century, and taught me how to play ping pong. He was a master. I never came close to beating him, even after I grew up and he was getting old.

His wife, my aunt Gertrude, was the sweetest woman I ever knew (Pips, you're almost there); she kind of looked like the current queen of England, what's her name? only not so dour and plain, with copper-red hair and all these tiny little freckles. She had polio as a young woman, and spent most of her time in a wheelchair by the time I knew her, though she had a pair of specialized crutches and one of those shoes with the cutouts. I guess my parents are my model couple (I'm pretty lucky that way, I know), and I think aunt Trudy and uncle Ben were my parents' model couple.

They died in a fire about five years ago.

I'm very close with my family, and I idolize them all in different ways and for different reasons, really, but there's always been something special between me and my grandpa and my great uncle, may they rest in peace.

My paternal grandfather- the only grandfather I knew, incidentally.

He was a quiet guy, smoked a pipe, and had a voice like tree bark. He was as steady and unflappable as my grandmother was flighty and excitable. He drove a huge green Pontiac that smelled like tobacco, and listened to Johnny Cash on the 8-track player. He was also a painter- nature scenes, very Bob Ross, and I used to love to sit on the floor and watch him paint while puffing on his pipe. He and my grandmother lived in a small town in the mountains, and he seemed to know every single person in town.

He died when I was 15 years old, but as I got older I felt like I still got closer to his memory as time went by. He designed carpets and rugs for one of the carper companies in north Georgia, and I think that and my grandparents' house (which was a time capsule of late-1950s decor) had an incredible influence on my whole sense of aesthetics. He was also the most patient man I've ever known (a trait my dad didn't inherit), and to this day I consciously try to emulate him, rather than some of my other relatives, when I deal with people.

My uncle - my father's brother - but in my younger years it was probably because my mother didn't like him. He always had some great stories and carried around this small hand puppet that was just a big mouth. He would talk to my brother and me through this mouth puppet, and I always got a kick out of it.

He had some great jobs, too. He was an unaccomplished actor, puppeteer (he operated Rizzo in the Muppets Take Manhattan), writer, food critic... I remember he had this one "robot" he used to manipulate by sitting inside of it and riding around. I was terrified of the damned thing and always wished he wouldn't bring it around when he came to visit.

He was obsessed with the Titanic, also, and took at least one transatlantic voyage on the QE2. He had Lionel trains that he gave to us when I was young.

My parents told me abruptly one day that he was gay and had AIDS - had, in fact, for the previous ten years (I was about 12 at the time). I had absolutely no idea up to that point.

He wrote a book about New York City's Chinatown and the general Chinese immigration to there through the eyes of our ancestors' movement there. It's a really good book, and it gave me a lot of insight into my family.

He died a couple of years ago. I have an antique leather suitcase of his, his old scripts, and that ridiculous hand puppet I remember from my youth.

So far all of the male posters have idolized male relatives and all of the female posters have idolized female relatives. These little stories are so fascinating. My favorite snippet so far: 'he had a voice like tree bark'.

Heh. Well, I wasn't going to answer, because my answer is boring, but now that you've mentioned that, ico, I'll chime in - since it breaks the pattern, and say that for me, it's my dad.

No great stories to tell, really, without getting into lots of little anecdotes, but I always did, and still do, think my dad is mr. wonderful because he's honest and good, funny, strong, faithful, fair, fun. Everyone who has ever known him has always made a point to tell me how great he is ... and I thought I would never, ever find a man as good as him. But I did! I adore my mom, too, but my dad and I are more on the same "wavelength" for lack of a better term.

I'm truly happy for bunnies who had and have these people in their lives. I'm somewhat of a Desperado.

But you know who I really idolized?

Barbara Frietchie.

Who did your aunt look like, iconomy? I picture Cate Blanchett when you talk about her.

Mine was my grandmother. She was born on a farm in Kentucky and quit school in 10th grade so she could work in the local dress shop, but never bothered to tell her folks until what should have been her graduation.

She was still married to her first husband when she met a brash young soldier at a bar. He kept leaning in to talk to her and she kept telling him, "If you don't back up, I will put out this cigarette on your nose!" He didn't. She did. He fell in love with her right then and there. Not longer after, she ended her marriage, packed up her three-year-old daughter (my mother) and moved to Philly.

He bought her a house down the shore with a cabin cruiser parked out front. He named it the Naughty Nora, after her. When I was a kid, boaters would ride by and scream for "Naughty Nora" and she'd flash the lights, then run out on the deck and do a little dance. I thought she was a celebrity.

She was addicted to yard sales and would get up bright and early to scour them. I went with her one day and discovered that the reason she got up extra early was that she would go around checking on the elderly neighbors, bringing them the daily paper and some groceries. She had never mentioned it. It was just something she did instinctively. She was that particular brand of good.

She reminded me of Flo from "Alice," only instead of saying "Kiss my grits!" she liked to yell, "Up your ass with a piece of glass!"

She was so much fun and she adored me. I honestly have not felt adequately loved since she died.

My cousin who's a few years older than me. We lived all the way across the country from the rest of the family, but we usually visited once a year and stayed with them. He was athletic (neither my brother nor I was, but I was a bit of an athlete-wannabe) and would run rings around me playing soccer. We set up tents in the backyard and slept outside in the summer, catching fireflies and playing with whatever rambunctious dog was in residence at the time.

Also my grandfather on my mother's side. He wrote children's books and poetry, published and everything. He also had a streak of child-inappropriate humor which he tried to stifle in our presence, with limited success as I could usually figure out what was making him laugh. He laughed a lot, always starting with a whoop and continuing to the point where no sound would come out. He kept being curious his whole life, visiting different churches and synagogues to see what they were about, for example. In his late seventies he would go to music stores asking about the most interesting contemporary music, which is how I ended up inheriting some Sonic Youth albums. (I think he liked them better than I did.) In the last year of his life we lived not that far apart from each other, and it was good to be around for that time.

jrossi, if someone combined the very best of Sharon Stone and Michelle whatsername from The Mamas and The Papas (when she was young), that's what my aunt looked liked.

Do teachers count? I did idolize my clarinet teacher. Practiced four hours a day for him. Hung his picture in my dorm. Sacrificed small frogs.

No family suitable for gilding, I'm afraid. Too much rust.

My dad, but not particularly until my adolescence. I started really getting to know the man behind the diaper-changer, unbreakable roughhouser, and hairy thunderer the year I was recovering from a back injury, when (if I'd finished my homework and my part of supper cleanup was done) we'd drive to the library to get stuff to read -- he, engineering books; me, novels and history.

My dad had grown up the only one of three children (all boys) to survive infancy on a farm -- really, a communal group of farms with everybody related by blood or marriage -- in what are now New Jersey suburbs. He was an apprentice tool-and-die maker at Picatinny Arsenal, getting a journeyman's card a few months before Pearl Harbor, which surprised him very little -- he'd always thought FDR would join the war over U-boats the way the furor over the Lusitania sinking had fueled war fervor nearly thirty years previously. Although he was already in a war-related job, he still somehow got drafted and wound up in France for the tail end of hostilities there -- a bitter rear-guard action the Wehrmacht fought in the Lorient. His job was maintaining howitzers, but he managed to get shot at somewhat more than an Ordnance Corps type should've. He returned from the war and occupation duty in Austria (a childhood neighbor of Adolf Hitler did his laundry for a while in Linz) a bitter, disillusioned former pacifist and isolationist who was convinced that the only people really better off from the war were corporate interests like Standard Oil.

Like myself, it seems, Dad always found himself obligated to do things the hard way when it came to a career. He was one of a fast-vanishing breed, postwar -- a self-taught engineer who really understood, from the machine-shop perspective, how manufacturing was supposed to work, but without a degree or a lot of the advanced science and mathematics that mechanical engineers typically are exposed to (and often seldom use). Yet he wasn't stupid -- he taught me stuff about mechanical drawing that my instructor didn't, and in one memorable six-week stretch of those library trips, he taught himself differential and integral calculus followed by differential equations, just because he needed to use certain mathematical techniques on his job. He had an earthy, farmer's sense of humor, but an appreciation of the absurd and of the gifts that he'd occasionally let literature and culture give him -- he'd occasionally quote Shakespeare to make a point or mention Mozart.

He wasn't a perfect guy -- he was, incredibly, somewhat of a a racist, a bitter anti-Semite and at times even a Nazi apoloigist -- but he loved us and our mom, and I regret every day since 1999 that I've no longer been able to seek his counsel, however flawed and human it might've proved.

Also bucking the same gender trend: I adore my grandfather. He was born in the Ukraine in 1898, came over to the US with his parents when he was about three. He quit school at 12 and started working. He became a successful fur seller in New York and made enough to send his younger brothers to college, an opportunity he never had. But that's not why I adored him when I was a little kid. I adored him because he was sweet to me, and told me stories, and showed me trinkets. He moved slowly and deliberately and made me calm. And he had old fur samples and my dad's old ViewMaster with reels of Hopalong Cassidy and Wonder Woman that he let me play with.

I suppose "adore" in the first sentence should be "adored." He passed away at the ripe old age of 96, when I was in high school.

My Aunt Sharon. She was a real Southern Belle, as are all of my aunt's on my father's side. She was beautiful, and sweet as sugar. Soft-spoken and demure. Her house was beautiful and clean, and she always had delicious things to eat. She let us drink Coke. She made rice crispy treats and chocolate chip cookies for my cousins and me. I thought this was so great, because my mother never really baked or made after-school treats. She had a closet full of beautiful clothes and accessories. She had a million different pairs of earrings that she kept in ice-cube trays and she would loan to me. Most importantly she trusted me and treated me like an adult. Beauty and accessories aren't really worth idolizing, but that's all I had.

There are a lot of interesting women on my mother's side. But since they all live in Canada, I didn't grow up with them.

My maternal grandfather from Maine with his thick Down East accent and a face like a craggy rock breaking the Atlantic waves. He has black hair, turning to salt and pepper, and the wildest eyebrows I've ever seen. He wears a Dickies work suit with a string tie everyday. A practical, efficient and highly-intelligent man, he taught university physics, worked on radar in WWII but was still easily accessible to us as small children. He built an outhouse for my sister's dollhouse, took us ice skating on the lake and would eat a single York Peppermint Patty every evening.
He and my grandmother have a simple system worked out for everything and are totally unflappable, accepting and loving.

I need to go for a visit.

(I love this thread btw, each story is so touching.)

You know Zonker Harris from Doonsbury? That was my mom's youngest brother.... at least it sure looked like it. We called him Uncle Hippy in those days. He got drafted, went to Germany, got high all the time, came back, got high all the time, got drunk a fair amout too.

He was a lot of fun to be around, even if he never let his nephews partake in his vices. We partook vicariously.

He eventually cleaned up, settled down, and got married about the same time I did; his kids are the same age as mine.

We idolized him because he was just a great big kid. With a car. And money. And he used to take us places my parents never got around to taking us to (most of them actually kind of droll, like museums and stuff).

I love this thread btw

Me too:)