More Golden Oldies

More golden oldies to see; the top left is a pic of some of my family members at one of the summer reunions we used to have at my great-grandmother's house. I am the child on the left (about age 6), the girl to my left is the cousin I recently visited in Tennessee and her brother is on her left. All of the adults are deceased; my mom on the left, her dad beside her, my uncle and aunt on the right.

The top right is a photo of the farm house, from the opposite side of the creek, and a good shot of the rickety swinging bridge we had to cross to get to the house. Scary stuff, that bridge, especially when my older cousins thought it was a hoot to wait until I was in the middle and then shake the heck out of the bridge by running onto it. I imagine it to be like walking near the epicenter of an earthquake. I died a thousand deaths there!

The buff guy on the lower left was one of my mom's three brothers. This photo was taken in Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie. He always thought he was a lady-killer! A policeman when young and a master electrician later, he died shoveling snow to help some people whose car was trapped in an icy ditch. When he died, my grandmother was 90. She mourned his death terribly and it was my first noted lesson in parenting. No matter how old your child is or how old you are, it hurts horribly when they die. She kept wailing...."A mother is not supposed to outlive her child".

The matinee idol in the middle was my dad, circa 1930-35. He wore Homberg hats until the 1970's, when men's hats became passe. He and my mom eloped after only six weeks of dating, and she was buried on their fiftieth anniversary.

On the right is my mother's mother, standing in front of her rooming house. This was in the 1940's, as you can see from the old jalopy on the street. She swept the sidewalk in front of her house nearly every day of her life. After she left her first husband - he of the flicking chalk fame - (see the first golden oldies post) - she married a man called Bucky, who became a judge and later was the mayor of their city. I knew him much better than my real grandfather. He was not very good with children, but he tolerated me and her many other grandkids. When I was visiting at their house, and he came home from the office, he would stomp into the front hall and shout..."Fee,fi,fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he live or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread." Now you may think a small child would be terrified of those words, but I must not have realized what they meant because I thought it was great fun, and I would run and hide (under the big four-poster bed) and he would always find me and give me a big kiss. The other thing I remember about him is that he would always read the funny pages to me whenever I asked. I hope you have rested in peace, Bucky.