You may be wondering, how can someone have “almost” fathers? Well, there are a few men that could have been my father based on certain connections I have with them. One that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is Hunter S Thompson. I sometimes joke to myself, what if my parents lied to me and I was actually his son and not my dad’s son? I have a few “almost fathers” actually, like the German Prince Meinrad I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the Crown Prince Constantine of Greece, a Scottish Baron, a German Army Lieutenant, and the owner of a Ferrari to name a few. This means that I could have been a German or Greek prince, a Scottish Baron, the son of a Lieutenant in the German Army or the son of the owner of a Ferrari. The funny thing is that, in a way, my mother married almost all of those concepts. I’ll explain.
I will forevermore be the son of Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, which of course I am very proud of and happy about. While my father was a lieutenant, it was in the Navy rather than the Army; he was also of German descent, ironically from the German Imperial, Royal, and Princely House of Hohenzollern. So, yes, my father was a descendant of German princes as well as the Imperial House of Habsburg. He was a descendant of Alexander the Great, so therefore he was a descendant of ancient Greek princes as well a few of the ancient Byzantine emperors like Romanos III of the Macedonian/Lekapenoi dynasty, Isaac II of the Angelos dynasty, Alexios I of the Komnenos dynasty, Constantine IX of the Monomachos dynasty and Andronikos II of the Palaiologos dynasty. My father was also a descendant of James IV of Scotland of the royal House of Stewart and Scottish nobles, including Barons. The only way my father differed from my mother’s other boyfriends… he owned a Mercedes coupe at the end of his life, but never owned a Ferrari.