Saturday's Old Photo

This is a photo of my father at his home in Tribune, Kansas, when he was a baby. My mother’s notes on the back say he was eight months old and the year was 1927. Yes, that’s a dress he has on. Back then, in the days of cloth diapers and no plastic pants, little boys wore dresses until they were potty trained.

I have a white baby dress worn by my father hanging up in my bedroom. I don’t think it’s this dress, because the sleeves seem different on this one.

That looks like a little mission style (or arts and crafts) rocker he’s sitting in. If you know about old furniture, you’re welcome to correct me. And someone else will have to tell us about the car in the background, too. Furniture and automobile experts are welcome to click on the photo for closer inspection.

I love that my dad is more interested in whatever it is he is holding in his hand than he is in the person holding the camera. Do you suppose they were trying to get him to look up and he was ignoring them?

Within a few months of this photo, my dad’s father died after his appendix ruptured, leaving my grandmother a very young widow with two sons, aged 3 and 1. There’s more to that story, but I’ll save it for another day with another photo.

Saturday's Old Photo

It’s cold out, so this picture seemed appropriate for today’s old photo. My sister and I are showing off our brand new parkas in this family picture.We’d just moved to Minnesota that fall, and the coats we’d used back in Illinois weren’t appropriate for the colder northern winters, so we’d gone with my mother to J. C. Penney’s to buy us each a parka.

 

These are what we picked out. If I were writing this unprompted by my mother’s notes on the back of the photo, I’d tell you that the coats were a lovely shade of blue, and then I’d pat myself on the back for my accurate, detailed memory of my childhood. However, my mother’s notes say they were red, and you can trust her on that. That is, I guess, a little warning to us all that while I’m always certain that what I write in these little pieces is factual, I can get my facts wrong. I remember loving the fuzzy feel of these parkas. I wore mine for a couple of years before I outgrew it, and then my poor sister got my hand-me-down, so she wore the same parka, just different sizes, for four years.

 

When we moved to Minnesota, we lived in the parsonage at Northern Bible Chapel. The pastor of the church owned his own home, so my dad and mom cleaned the church in exchange for a deal on renting the parsonage. On our first Christmas there, which would have come a month or so after this picture was taken, Mr. Klein, an elderly man from the church who didn’t get out much because he couldn’t leave his sick wife for long, knocked on the door and delivered a package for each of us girls. He’d bought us little white zippered Bibles—the very first Bibles we owned.

 

Update on Thursday, March 8, 2007 at 12:15PM by rebecca

Hmmm….the little Bibles, I’ve been reminded, were red, not white.  Later I had a white zippered Bible, but that did not come from Mr. Klein.  So our parkas and our Bibles matched, and I was wrong on the color on both accounts.

Still Winter After All These Months

Copyright © 2006-2007, Andrew Stark. All rights reserved.

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