When I was a kid, I had an argument with a math teacher. He was teaching that when you toss an object and it hits the ground that the curve is a parabola which he stated is the same as a hyperbole. I argued that the curves are not the same and when we got into details I said "well, my dad says that..." and he said "what is your dad, a rocket scientist?" And I replied "well, actually, yes." The entire class laughed and the incident went around the school.
Engineers run in my family. My father, Howard Sebree Hays, was a design engineer for Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for over 35 years. My grand-father was a design engineer for the Hover Dam (Boulder Dam) and I have a picture of myself, as a child, pointing to his name on a plaque in the middle of the dam, photo taken by my father.
I'm proud of my father, who has his name on plaques on several spacecraft, such as the Mariner, Viking Landers 1 and 2, the Lunar Rover, Voyager 1 and 2 (the furthest-away man-made objects from earth), the Space Shuttles, Galileo, SeaSat and others that I can't remember. I inherited some memorabilia and still have a re-entry heat shield for a small module that was never deployed, complete with hand-sewn multiple layers of Mylar. My father was a pilot, and as a young man in the Army Air Force during WWII, he piloted a bomber in the Pacific theatre. I inherited a Norden Bombsight, which I'm not sure where it came from (since he was not a bombardier), but it's a really interesting item with obvious usage and I was told that they cost about $50k apiece during wartime and the bombardiers were told to remove them from the planes at the end of each mission and sleep with them (literally.)
A couple of interesting anecdotes: My father told me that our ancestors with the original family name "DeHaya" escaped from religious persecution in Scotland by stowing-away on a ship to Ireland. The original couple hid in a pickle barrel, until discovered part way through the voyage and the ships never turned back in those days. Somehow, the ancestors made their way to New England and became some of the first witches known in the recorded history of early America. I have documents which explain about a famous witching trial "wherest thou Sara DeHaya hast been accuseth of witchcraft" (in very olde english.) Young Sara was accused of turning a neighbor boy into a rat. The boy went missing and there was a rat in the room where they expected to find the boy, and you can guess the rest. Sara was found guilty and burned alive at the stake and the name has been associated with witches in movies and books ever since. That branch of the family tree ends with poor innocent Sara.
But, I always wondered why my biggest fear is burning in fire!