Old Treasures

I was at my friend Dana’s house recently when I noticed an old photo she had framed in her dining room.  I love old photos, and by old I mean the sepia or black-and-whites of 60 plus years ago.  There’s something to be said for those faded, pinkish brown photos of the seventies and polaroid shots too, but I really love the antiques.  Why is everyone so grim?  Why didn’t they smile? 

The photo in Dana’s dining room showed four children, ranging in age from about 10 to a baby, who was sitting on the lap of the oldest child.  I remarked to Dana that I loved old photos like this one and she told me the story behind it.  Apparently, her grandmother was one of the girls in the photo, and the four children were having their picture taken because their father had died, and their mother was sickly and couldn’t take care of them anymore.  The only boy was being taken in by family, but the three girls were being sent to an orphanage.  The photo was taken so the mother would be able to remember her children!

I guess I know why the faces of those children were so grim.

And then I read a post Mark wrote about his family, and I enjoyed reading about these old people I didn’t even know and I thought, “The next time I don’t know what to write I’ll tell you a little about my family using some old photos”.  You can guess that an alternate title for this post could be “Nothing to Write About!”  I don’t have a lot of old family photos, unfortunately.  I’ll have to go digging at my mom’s house sometime.

First up, here is a picture of my Grammy and Pappy, my dad’s parents. 

I knew my dad’s parent’s best because my mom’s mother died when I was 4, and her dad remarried fairly quickly after that (men of those days needed a wife to take care of things, I think) and moved to the new wife’s home in Baltimore.  My Grammy and Pappy lived 5 minutes away, and it was Family Central for picnics, parties, game nights, and babysitting.  I have really happy memories of my Gram and Pap and knew every inch of their house.  They had a secret room behind their bedroom closet (really, now that I think about it, it must have just been an access area for the bathroom pipes) and they had a hole in their kitchen ceiling that looked up into one of the bedrooms.  The hole had a grate over it, and we spent a lot of time talking back and forth through it or throwing things down through it.  They also had a blackboard in their hallway for the grandkids.  That’s normal nowadays, but back then it was unusual and awesome!  There were always a ton of cousins running around and they had an apple orchard and grapes and sour cherries on their property and train tracks that we could walk on right next to their house and a tire swing tied to a very high branch and there was always singing and fun and good food.  I don’t know what’s going on in that photo above.  I always thought it looked like Pap was about to propose to Grammy, or maybe he was trying to get her to dance, but unfortunately, neither of them are around for me to ask anymore.  I really miss those days.

Moving along to my mom, pictured below in a photo given to her from the newspaper photographer who took it.

Mom (the tall one on the right) and the other children were dressed up for a Dress Up Parade at the Meadowbank (my Dutchy mom pronounces it “metabank”) Playground.  My mom tells me that in those days, local playgrounds had playground directors and you could go to the playground all summer for activities all day long.  A bell would ring in the morning letting all the children know the director was there, and they would run to the playground and play games and do crafts and play.  At noon the bell would ring and the children would go home for lunch until the bell rang again letting the children know they could return.  They had evening dances and parades and contests galore and my mom entered everything she could because the prizes were good, like paint boxes and silver dollars.

Here is my dad in high school.  He was (and still is) a great trombonist.  He made it all the way to state band at one point, and this was in the days when concert and marching bands numbered in the hundreds, not the wimpy 30 member bands we see nowadays.  The Lebanon High School Marching Band was so good, according to my dad, that they were invited to march and compete in the Mason City, Iowa band competition held to celebrate the opening of The Music Man movie.  This was a big deal.  Bands didn’t take yearly trips then like they do now, and there was a lot of fundraising to get those kids uniforms (dad was so proud of his) and get them to Iowa.   Their director, R. Lesley Saunders, actually marched the route and counted out the song they’d be playing in his head ahead of time so that he could have the band arriving at the judges’ stand at the exact right moment so that the march they were playing would explode in the judges’ ears.  The band placed third, which was excellent, and much of the city of Lebanon showed up at two in the morning to welcome the band home.  Mom still gets choked up when she tells about the tired and surprised band members getting off the buses to cheers from the very proud and excited crowd. 

The photo above was taken on Easter of 1964 when my parents were engaged.  They would be married about 3 months later. My mom was so proud of her outfit.  She bought it at Tillie Spangler’s, a very expensive and exclusive shop in downtown Lebanon, certainly not the type of place my mom would have normally frequented.  The color of her suit was a light aqua and was a nubby sort of fabric, and that’s a little dickie across the opening of the suit (do you remember dickies?  And bodysuits?) and her purse and shoes were light pink.   I wish I had that purse.  The photo was taken at my Grammy and Pappy’s house and you can see the apple trees around them.


The photo above was taken at the Pensacola Fair.  Dad was in the Navy and stationed in Pensacola, FL at the time.  Dad remembers this as the best time of his life.  They did a lot of scuba diving and my dad played in a band at Rosie O’Grady’s, a local nightclub-type place (when he wasn’t in uniform defending our country).  He was also in the Navy Band, and very proud of that fact.  Mom is pregnant with me in the photo.  She would be about 23 and he was probably 22.  I was born in Pensacola, and the horror stories my mom tells about the Naval Hospital prenatal care are pretty funny (they had a “fat ward” for pregnant mothers who gained weight too quickly…they’d be sent there to stay until they lost weight!  Mom weighed less after I was born than before she got pregnant.)


This is my favorite  baby picture of me.  I love my diaper sticking out of the bottom of my dress, and the sweet little ring on my finger, and the fact that they didn’t wait for me to smile.  I  also like the thick, textured paper it was printed on.

Moving on to a Polaroid!

My best friend Jenny is pulling my hair through little holes in the cap on my head.  Then she applied hair color to “frost” the hairs sticking out of the cap.  This was horrible.  It was so painful because my hair was all tangled under the cap (I have very long, thick hair here) and the hair had to be coaxed and pulled out of those little holes.  Jenny looks like she’s having fun tormenting me and I look ready to bolt.

And finally, a modern photo of two antiques:

We are in Cape May just a few months before we got engaged.   Look how nice my nails look!  I used to get manicures every two weeks.   And look how thin we were.  And young.  Happy Anniversary to us, by the way, last week it was Fourteen Years of Mostly Wedded Bliss!

Thanks for taking a little walk through pictorial history with me.  I hope it wasn’t as painful as a Frosting Cap Maneuver, which trust me, is pretty darn bad.