Saturday's Old Photo

This is one of the Saturday’s Old Photo posts from the old blog. The old post lost its photo when my son closed his Smugmug account, so tonight I’m uploading the photo here and reposting the text that went with it. I chose this piece to repost because it gives background for the old photo I plan to post next week.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you who this little person is, but I will anyway. This is me when I was around 18 months old. This photo was taken by a photographer for the yearbook at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee. My dad was a student there and this picture was taken for use in the photo spread on Trailerville, where all the married students and their families lived. I don’t think this actually made it into the yearbook, but it did make it into my family’s collection of photographs.

You’ll notice I’m playing with a slinky, which I suppose was the latest thing back then. That I have a slinkly rather than a stuffed animal tells you a bit about what kind of toys I liked. I had a doll—one with outfits my grandma and mother made—but I didn’t play with her much. I tried to play with her, but after I’d changed her clothes, I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I preferred cars and trucks and building blocks—things you could use to do something or make something.

When I was school age I mentioned to my parents that I remembered how much I’d loved playing with my toy 7-Up truck—the one with the little crates of pop that could be loaded in the back.

“Seven-Up truck?” they said. “You didn’t have a 7-Up truck.” It turns out that my first toy memory is of a toy that wasn’t mine, but belonged to a boy who was my neighbor for six weeks when I was two.

This slinky isn’t mine either, but belongs to one of the other Trailerville kids.

Saturday's Old Photo

These are the Mackies of Missouri, my mother’s mother’s family. I know very little about this photo or the Mackies, and my mother’s writing on the back doesn’t give me a whole lot to go on.  She doesn’t record the date or occasion and identifies only a few of the people.

The third woman from the left in the back row is my grandmother, Rosa Mackie Deckard. (I posted another photo of her last June.) The two women farther left  are Marie and Olive Mackie, the daughters of my grandmother’s brother George, and the woman to my grandmother’s right is her sister, Sarah Emmaline (known as Emma) Mackie Burrell.

In the front row, far left, is my grandmother’s brother Haulace Mackie. He lived in Hailey, Idaho where my mother grew up, so he is the only other person in this photo besides my grandmother that I knew. My mother called him “Uncle Haulace,” so that’s how I think of him. Next to Uncle Haulace in the front row are four people my mother identifies as “4 cousins.” They would be her cousins, I guess.

Because I knew so little about this picture, I popped the names into Google and found this photo of the grave of my grandmother’s parents, John and Mahala (Halie) Mackie, listing Haulace, Rosa and Emma as their children; and also this one of the grave of  my grandmother’s brother George and his wife, listing Marie and Olive as children.

In the information for the first photo, I rediscovered something I’d forgotten: My grandmother had a sister named Rebecca, only she was called Betty, not Becky, as I am. I’m not named after her, since I’m named Rebecca only because the state of Tennesee required a “proper Christian name,” and Becky wouldn’t do. (Haven’t times changed?) I’ve decided it’s nice to have a namesake among my ancestors anyway.

Did you notice that two of the men are wearing denim overalls, but the older man in the center leaning on a cane has topped his with a heather knit cardigan. Everyone else has short sleeves or rolled up sleeves. Is he cold because he’s older?

And three of the men are wearing hats. Not cowboy hats or farmer hats, but fedoras. What’s up with that?

Saturday's Old Photo

This is my dad. He’s about 14 or 15—that would be 1940 or 41—and he’s with the first and only pig he ever owned. She was born on the farm in Kansas—one of a litter of little pigs that had to be bottle fed. He helped his mother raise the babes and in return he kept one of them as his own. He sold her—and her litter, I think—shortly after this photo was taken.

He made enough money, he says, to pay for her feed and that’s about it. That he only broke even may be the reason he went pigless for the rest of his life.

What he really loved were horses, anyway.