Catspaw49, my mother's grandfather worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad for years; somewhere, we have the tickets he got for FDR's funeral train.

My dad is still very much alive and we're great friends. He used to put my brother and I to sleep at night by telling us gruesome stories; Ulysses and the Cyclops, Hinckley, Minnesota, forest fire (then he read us "the Hound of the Baskervilles"). He sang to us at bedtime and on car trips ("Jesse James", "Captain Kidd", "Joe Hill", "Goober Peas", "Just Before the Battle, Mother", "Bonnie Blue Flag", "John Brown's Body", "Battle Hymn of the Republic", "Abdul Al-Bubul Amir", and "Old Chisholm Trail" with personalized verses). Taught me to paddle a canoe, drive stick, and test an electric fence with the BACK of my hand.

Both of my parents are fun, but Dad was always the more spontaneous one. One day when he was visiting me at college in central Iowa, I took him to a park outside of town to show him a plaque that marked a section of the old Mormon Trail. He read it, thought about it for a moment, and then said, "Hey, let's go to Nauvoo and see the temple site." So, we drove over two hours to Nauvoo, Illinois, to see where there had once been a Mormon temple.

Another time, Dad developed an obsession with Larry Penn's song about Kate Shelley. We spent hours--HOURS--in an underpopulated area east of Ames, Iowa, trying to find Honey Creek. The only Honey Creek we found was a four-foot-wide stream that didn't look as if it had EVER had a trestle over it. Finally, we gave up and headed south to visit my friends in Missouri on the way home. One of said friends' father lived in Boone, Iowa, and when we told him of our adventure, he offered, "That's funny, I think there's a Kate Shelley Memorial Bridge near where my dad lives . . . " I made Dad promise not to do any more research based solely on musical references.