Saturday's Old Photo

When my oldest son got rid of his SmugMug account, I lost some of the photos in the Saturday’s Old Photo posts in my old Blogger blog. Since the primary reason I’m doing these posts is so that my children will have a record of the details of the photos and the family stories associated with them, I don’t want to let the posts go photoless forever. So I’ve decided that on Saturdays when I’m really busy (like today), I’m going to repost an old old photo post and upload the photo that goes with it again. I’ll be rebuilding my old photo post collection and keeping this blog alive on busy Saturdays. They don’t call me the queen of efficiency for nothing!

This post was originally posted in March of 2007.

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.

Saturday's Old Photo

In last week’s Saturday’s Old Photo, I posted a photo of the home my mother grew up in. This week, I’m visiting the other side of my family. This is an aerial photo of the farm south of Tribune, Kansas that was my father’s childhood home. The house you see on the far left is in the background of this photo.

This picture came from the front of a Kansas farm magazine. My father was unsure of the name of the magazine, but he did remember that it featured an aerial photo of a Kansas farm on the cover of every issue. There was a prize of some sort—a year’s subscription, he thought—given to the first person to identify the farm. It was a friend of my grandparents who won the prize this time. My dad guesses that this photo was taken some time in the 1950s.

We visited this farm often when I was young, sometimes during the wheat harvest so my dad could help out. We ate all three meals around the big dinner table on some of the same pastel Boonton Ware dishes I have in the bottom of my china cabinet now.

The handwriting under the photo is from my grandmother, who died nearly 30 years ago.

Saturday's Old Photo

This is the home in Hailey, Idaho where my mother lived with her family. She moved out in 1942 to go to business school, then to Biola, and then to live with her sister in Salt Lake City. A year or two after she left, this family home burned. What was left after the fire is what you see here.

My mother was the fifth of eight children, so when she lived in this house, there would have been at least three of her siblings and her parents living there, too. From the photo, it looks like it’s a single room with an added lean-to. It would have been just a little cramped, wouldn’t it?

My mother’s note on the back of the photo says, “Bldg at right is where cow kicked Thelma [my mother’s name] out of doorway.” By the looks of it, the cow may have had a roomier home than the family.

As you can see, my mother’s family was dirt poor. People were poor during the depression, but her family was poorer than most. She felt, growing up, that her family was the poorest of all the families around and I think she may have been right. Even as an adult, she was a little embarrassed by the poverty of her family.

When she was in first grade, my mother was invited to an after school birthday party for a girl in her class. She only had one dress and my grandma washed it out by hand every evening, hung it to dry overnight, and then ironed it every morning. My grandma didn’t want my mother going to the party wearing the dirty dress she’s worn all day at school, so she wrote a note to the teacher asking that she be excused a couple of hours early.

The plan was to wash, dry, and iron the dress so it would be fresh and ready to wear by the time the party started, but the teacher refused to let my mother go home early without knowing why she needed to leave, and my mother was too ashamed to tell her. She didn’t want her teacher to know that she had only one dress, something the teacher must have already known, since she wore the same dress to school every day. So my mother sat in school all afternoon, worrying about how she was going to make it to the party, and feeling different—somehow worse—than all the other little girls.

As it turns out, her mother and older sister managed to get the dress washed and ready just in time for the party, but I don’t think my mother ever forgave that teacher for her insensitivity.

When she told this story, my mother always contrasted this callousness with the thoughtfulness of her second grade teacher. My mother had borrowed a sweater from her much younger sister to wear to school one day, and looking back, she said, it must have been way too small for her. But at least it wasn’t just the same old dress she always wore. Her second grade teacher noticed the sweater and told her that it was lovely. My mother never forgot how thrilled she’d been to be singled out with a compliment on something she was wearing.

My mother always made sure that my sister and I were well-dressed. Much of our clothing came from the missionary barrel or other second-hand sources, but she saw to it that our outfits fit and matched and were in style. It was, I think, her way of protecting us from feeling poor—and somehow different—as she had when she was a child.