Saturday's Old Photo: Brothers

My father is on the right and his brother is on the left—Frank (my dad) and Elton (or, as the family called him, Chief) Russell, natural sons of Bruce Russell, who died when they were both very young. The father who raised them was technically their stepfather, my Grandpa Vogt, a man who married my grandma and took her little boys in, raising them as if they were his own flesh and blood. In current language, we’d call their family a blended family—they had step-siblings and half-siblings—but they thought of themselves as just plain brothers and sisters. Soon, perhaps, I’ll post a photo of them all.

My mother’s note on the back say this photo was taken “about 1945,” which means my dad is nineteen and Uncle Chief would be 21 or so. They look very boyish, don’t they? Both men had ruddy complexions, so I bet they looked even more boyish  in person.

My dad, as you can see, is dressed in his army uniform.  He just missed WWII, he says, and if this photo is truly from 1945, I’d say he’s not exaggerating his near miss, since WWII wasn’t officially over until well into 1945. Do you suppose his mother breathed a big sigh of relief when the war ended?

When my Uncle Chief was a boy, he had polio that left him with some lingering health issues. For one thing, he had difficulty swallowing, so he had to be careful what he ate and how he ate it. When I remember him at family dinners, I see him chewing, chewing, chewing before he swallowed and then sipping water to wash things down.

Uncle Chief also had hole in his heart—perhaps not yet discovered at the time of this picture—and that made him weaker and more easily tired. I’m guessing that it was in the early sixties that he had open heart surgery to patch things up. Whenever it was, open heart surgery was still a fairly new procedure and I remember my parents waiting anxiously for the phone call to tell them how things had gone during the surgery.

Although he was never entirely healthy, Uncle Chief ran a farm, raised a family, and lived into his seventies—all accomplished with a vigorous attitude that compensated for any physical frailty.

Saturday's Old Photo

 

This one of the few photos we have of my Grandfather Russell, my dad’s father. His name was Bruce Russell and he was a banker in Tribune, KS. Sadly, he died of a ruptured appendix while he was still in his twenties, leaving his two little boys, three-years-old and one-year-old, without a dad.

 

Not too long after he died, my grandmother married my Grandpa Vogt, the one you saw in the last two old photos, so my Grandpa Vogt is the only father my dad knew. And a very good father he was.

 

Do you notice that Grandfather Russell is holding a camera while he has his photo taken by someone else with another camera? That’s a little curious, don’t you think? Were they taking photos of each other? Comparing cameras?

 

And was this the camera that took my dad’s baby picture in the rocking chair? So many questions and no one to answer them.

 

We have a collection of love letters between my grandma and this grandpa, letters written before they were married, while she was still in high school and he was a working man. Most of the letters were only a paragraph long, a few sentences, but they wrote faithfully, twice a day. Those were the days, remember, of twice a day mail delivery, so if she wrote in the morning, he was reading her letter in the afternoon.  Almost like email.

Saturday's Old Photo

As promised, here’s the photo of my Grandpa Vogt dressed up for Pioneer Days. I think he grew the goatee just for this occasion. I have this hung on my dining room wall, along with the photo from last week. This picture, like the previous one, was probably shot in the sixties.

Unfortunately, when the kids were little, one of them touched this photo with a very dirty finger and that bit of our family history is there for you to see, too.