Saturday's Old Photo

We don’t have very many old photos from my husband’s side of the family, and the ones we do have have been reprinted from already developed photos instead of negatives, so the quality is not good. This one is of Keith’s mother and father, Albin Stark and Ann Louise Peterson, with their first child (invisible, almost) who, incidentally, grew up to be an occasional commenter on this blog.

 

One of the fun things about photos of the grandparents when they were young is that you can look for family resemblances in the grandchildren. Everyone always said that Keith looked just like his dad Albin—and he does—but with youngest son the resemblance is even stronger. Youngest son’s hair is exactly the same—dark and curly—while Keith’s was lighter brown and straighter. Youngest son’s build, nose, mouth, eyes, hands, and swarthy Mediterranean complexion—everything, really—are all very similar to his granddad’s.

 

Youngest daughter may look a little like her grandmother, and in some photos (not so much this one), oldest daughter does as well. 

 

Both grandparents were born to immigrant parents. Albin’s parents were Slovenian and Ann Louise’s were Norwegian. The only family recipe I have from that side of the family is one for pasty, which, according to Wikipedia, originated in Cornwall, United Kingdom. There is, however, a good explanation for that seemingly odd traditional food. Both grandparents grew up on Minnesota’s Cuyuna Iron Range, one of the areas world-wide where Cornish miners brought their “expertise and traditions”, including their pasty recipes.

Saturday's Old Photo

Darlene is begging for an old photo so she doesn’t have to look at my jars of peaches anymore, and since she says she’d send me some heat from her place if she could (I’ve moved my tomato plants in tonight because it may frost here, so you know I need it.), I guess I’ll oblige her. This is a photo of my husband when he was in the U.S. Army. This picture is taken in Germany, but he was also in Viet Nam.

Whenever anyone in the family would ask him about Viet Nam, he’d say there was really nothing to tell. He was just a company clerk, he’s say, and there was nothing very exciting about that. 

 

After he passed away, the subject of Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols came up in youngest son’s social studies class, and the teacher mentioned that youngest son’s dad had been a LLRP. It was news to us, and frankly, I didn’t know whether to believe it or not. Mr. Sullivan, youngest son’s teacher, was my husband’s friend, and he’d grown up as a U.S. military brat, so they had talked about the military a lot, and there was a possibility Keith had told him more than he’d ever told us. But then again, I figured Mr. Sullivan could have mixed him up with someone else, since Keith had never hinted of it to me or anyone else in the family.

 

When oldest daughter moved home this summer, we went through a few of her dad’s things. In his trunk we found his tiny brown metal military can opener, and she put it on a chain and began wearing it around her neck. One day at work, a couple of old Alaskan military men stopped in for lunch.

 

“Hey,” one of them said, “is that a military can opener you’re wearing?” She explained that it had belonged to her dad, who’d served in Viet Nam.

 

“Was he a Lurp?” he asked. Something about the can opener made him think her dad might have been a LLRP. Lurps would wear the can openers around their neck with their dog tags, all three things taped together, he said, so nothing jingled as they reconnoitered.

 

So perhaps it’s true: Keith was a LLRP and he chose to keep it to himself.

Saturday's Old Photo

 

 

I was going to use another photo, thinking there’d been enough of them featuring me, me, me. But hey! Tomorrow’s my birthday, and , so if ever there was an appropriate time for one more photo of me as a child, this was it.

 

I’m guessing I’m four in this photo and that would make the year 1959. The house in the background is the ranch hand’s home on my uncle’s ranch, the P Lazy P, in Gannet, Idaho. We lived there while my dad helped my uncle with the ranch work and my mother cooked for the crew in the big kitchen of the beautiful log ranch house my uncle built by himself.

 

I amused myself outdoors while my mother worked indoors. There were always animals around—dogs, kittens, chickens—and people working. Sometimes I helped collect eggs, and sometimes I hung on the outside of the corral and watched the horse training or the calf branding. Another thing that fascinated me was the artesian well right outside the fenced-in yard, which gushed water from a 4 inch pipe and made a little stream that ran out into the field.

 

My family continued to go to the ranch in the summer whenever we could. My dad had been a cowboy, so he loved being there during round up, and my mother loved visiting all her relatives who lived nearby. The ranch was only twenty miles from the Sun Valley ski area, and eventually the area became a place for the rich and famous to have a vacation home. It became more and more difficult to keep cattle on the open range, so my uncle sold the ranch to someone with Hollywood connections and he moved further west to the Wallowa area of Oregon.