Daddy was quite a character.  He and Mom divorced when I was four.  He was career Air Force so I didn’t see him much, growing up.  I lived in Dallas.

At the first of every summer, Mom would put me on an American Airlines flight for Chicago.  I was an official junior stewardess, when stewardesses were cool.  I had my little pair of wings that all my friends coveted.

In Chicago, Aunt Gladys and Uncle Joe would pick me up and we’d drive to their home in South Bend, Indiana.  Sometimes we’d stop at an old hotel, in Downtown Chicago, where Uncle Joe had “friends.”  I remember back rooms, chalkboards, and old men with visors.  They would always give me a five-dollar bill to buy myself a 50-cent candy bar.  At the end of each summer, I came home rich.  With at least $30 or $40. 

When I grew up, I realized these back rooms were bookie joints.

Aunt Gladys was Daddy’s, mother’s, sister (that’s how Southerners say paternal great aunt) and I absolutely adored her and Uncle Joe.  Uncle Joe showed me how to play poker.  I always won with a full house or 4-of- a-kind.  It never dawned on me, he had rigged the cards, so I WOULD win.  And every night, at dusk, all the kids in the neighborhood would play hide-and-seek with home base being a huge oak on the very corner where my aunt and uncle lived.  Uncle Joe would sit on the front porch, smoke a cigar, and smile, as we played.  Every night he would slip me a $10 bill and I got to take the entire gang to Dairy Queen (just a few blocks away) for dip cones.  I was in kid heaven.

I remember little things. 

Aunt Gladys telling me about her and Grandma growing up in Chicago.

Falstaff beer delivered bi-weekly, by the beer truck.  The age of returnable bottles. And delivery!

We were watching a movie one night about John Dillinger. I think it was Willie Oates, playing the hoodlum. She told me the "lady in red" at the theater (who ratted on John and set him up with the FBI) was a friend. She and Grandma actually knew the arrest was going down and watched from a hotel room window, across the street. Way cool stuff to a 10 year old!

Uncle Joe smoked cigars all the time and I “assumed” he was a cigar salesman. He would go away for days at a time. They let me “believe” that was his career. Mom never even told me the truth. After I grew up, Daddy told me he had been a professional gambler.  He never had a social security card and was born in Sicily.

I spent my summers in South Bend; from the time I was 5 until my teens, when I got too cool to leave my friends in Texas. And every now and then, Daddy would visit.

The last summer I went to South Bend, I was 15 and Daddy had remarried. Let’s call her Joan. She was a real gem. I remember her dress that looked just like striped window shades down to the zipper with a cloth hoop on the end. You know, the canvas kind, you pulled down with the little hoop, and fringe at the bottom.

She used pure hair lacquer to mold her short hair, up, and she used a hundred bobbie pins to hold the strays. Then she took a fine hairnet stuffed full of hair, and stuck it on top for a bun-thingy.

And her lips …oh my gawd! She would paint the bright red lipstick way above and below her actual lip lines. I swear I had to hold the giggles back because it reminded me of those wax lips we bought for nickel at the little corner store.

She was pregnant at 35 and Daddy HAD to marry her. She was also a bitch.

One day she showed me a bunch of old photos. I kept seeing someone that looked familiar and she finally told me, “Silly girl, don’t you know who that is with your grandfather? That’s Al Capone.” 

Seems, he was a friend of my real grandfather. You see, Grandma had been married five times before she died at 45. These pictures were of my Daddy’s real dad, standing by Big Al. Made sense to a naïve Texas teen. They all lived in Chicago, during “gangster times,” and Grandma and Aunt Gladys knew “the lady in red”. Why wouldn’t my grandfather know Al?

Flash forward………….30 years.

I was married with a 6-year-old son, living in a very small town in South Arkansas. Daddy was dieing and he wanted to live his last days with us. Well, not exactly with us, but he insisted we buy a mobile home and put it adjacent to our house. Which we did. We lived on 6 acres with no neighbors in sight and no restrictions for such things as a damn trailer sitting in our backyard. We even had a ramp built so he could be wheeled from his trailer to our house.

The Air Force arranged to transport him to Little Rock and an ambulance brought him the last two hours of his trip. They put him in our little, local hospital to stabilize his condition. He died 2 days later.

He never saw his trailer.

Dad had also insisted I go to Dallas and get Mom. Keep in mind they had not seen each other in 40 something years. To my dismay, Mom agreed to come. After Daddy, died, she didn’t go back. I took care of Mom for the next 15 years. But that’s another story.

Well there had been a couple of years where Daddy and I had not spoken. The letter I received started out, “Dear Princess, please forgive this old man…..” (A deserving post, in and of itself)

We mended the past while he was hospitalized at the Biloxi Air Force base.

                  Daddy & I

After Daddy died, attorneys in Mississippi, contacted me. Seems Daddy had 2 wills. The first had small amounts bequeathed to a couple of ladies that had served him soup. It actually said that in the will! (Found out later, they were hookers.)  And to an organization that no one could identify. The second will was leaving his entire estate (such as it was, not much) to my son and me.  The second was written in Mississippi, the first written in Indiana.  Well, it seems a lawyer and the executer of the first will, decided to contest the second will. 

All of a sudden, I had more attorneys than OJ Simpson.  One for the kid and one for me, in Mississippi.  More in Arkansas, and a couple in Indiana.

So ........ I’m sitting in a lawyer’s office in a small south Arkansas town with 4 other attorneys. (All of whom I knew, personally. I knew their wives from PTA. I had socialized with them.) I was there for a deposition.  Just 4 attorneys, a court reporter, and me.  In the midst of the questions, the opposing attorney told the court reporter to take a break. 

He looked at me and said “Off the record.”

“Are you aware that your father might be the illegitimate son of Al Capone?”

Well, hell no, I didn’t KNOW that! What the fuck?

After I picked my jaw up off the table, I asked where in the world did this come from. I had found Daddy’s service records. He had been decorated 21 times including 3 purple hearts and the Distinguished Flying Cross and he had never shared that with me, little lone that his mother had a fling with the most notorious gangster of our times.

According to the good counselors, it seems there were photos. Photos and papers alluding to this but, somehow, they had been misplaced. (Perhaps by one of Daddy’s lady friends or that bitch he was married to for a short period of time?)

When those precious, small town, Southern lawyers quit laughing, they asked if I was going to pursue this.

“Pursue it how?” I asked. “Y'all need to quit laughing. What am I going to tell my son? All I know is Grandma was married a bunch of times, lived in Chicago, Daddy was born in Chicago, and she died when I was 3 years old.” 

Then I told them about Aunt Gladys and Uncle Joe.

They had information about Uncle Joe. Seems he was in the mafia. Well, that explains no social security card and a Sicilian birthright, now, doesn’t it?

And besides, how in the hell do you prove something like that? Where’s Geraldo when ya need him?  And yes, I watched the infamous vault opening. I was leery there might be evidence of Al's relationship with Grandma, but alas, nothing.

It was a beautiful day and my lawyer and I were walking back to his office. He asked if I knew anyone in Chicago.

I replied, “Nope, why are you asking?”

With a shit-eatin' grin on his face, my precious lawyer said,  “Well, we need someone up there to call that old fart that is the executer of will number one and say 'You know those rumors about Big Al? They’re true and we highly advise you leave Al Capone’s illegitimate granddaughter alone'.”