Old Photographs
About a year ago, as a result of closing out a family property long distance, I received a surprise in the mail: two boxes of family photographs. As would be expected, there were lots of school photographs, relatively recent college graduation photos marching backwards all the way to first grade, from my generation and those before. It gives one pause to see oneself, siblings, cousins, best friends impossibly young in soup bowl haircuts and stripey shirts; posed in footed jammies before Christmas trees; vamping as burnt-cork bums or white-sheet ghosts with pails of candy; blowing out birthday candles. I still have the grey satin cumberbund and bow tie I wore to prom, but I am relieved to note I've long since sworn off the hair mousse.
But the older photographs tell deeper stories, because though they move backwards in time they reach forward to the contemporary viewer. Was my goofy prom night that much different from my father's or mother's? Really, only the trappings changed. My father, the quintessential high school jock of his era in the Chicago suburbs, had the blond brushcut and letter sweater that somehow determined his future even if history didn't exactly work out that way. Down in the Oklahoma dustbowl, my mother wore white gloves and her hair in pincurls just like you see in movies from the 1940s. The graduation program from Sand Springs Area High School is bound in pebbled navy leatherette and capped with a golden tassel; the names within are written in gold script. Tucked inside the cover is my mother's final report card -- she excelled in English -- and written on the endpapers are notes from classmates (even at graduation, they strove for good marks on what was then taught as "penmanship"): she was known for being flirty and vivacious and for her red lipstick (surely the two are linked). As a bookmark, I found a hand crafted invitation to the graduation party. It's made from purple construction paper, long since faded to the brownish lilac of a pressed flower, and affixed with a crescent moon that was the result of someone's labor with some bottle glue and dime glitter from the Tulsa Woolworth's.
Two sets of histories are told through these photographs. My father's family was a large German-Swiss outfit who had a summer house on a Wisconsin lake (who knew?) and whose oldest girls were local performers (who knew?). There are pictures of these aunts -- whom I knew as beloved wiseacres whom we'd visit annually in their immaculate midwestern homes -- in younger days as tapdancers, curtseying before the camera in matching spangled skirts. Pictures of my grandparents show a stern, but not unkind-looking, German man with oiled hair and a striped suit, chomping on a pipe (is this why the smell of a pipe shop makes me feel nostalgic?), and a plump, matronly Swiss woman with a nimbus of blond curls and chunky, old-world boots, the kind you buttoned with a hook. These photos trigger a thread of memory of the scent of lilacs and the clomp of witchy shoes. It would have had to have been in my infancy: my grandmother Diesel died before I turned one, but the impression has always been there, and this seems the explanation of it.
As, perhaps, befits a certified Okie of the Great Depression, who had other things to do with his day than vogue for picture-takers, photos of my mother's father are scarce, but those extant literally give a face to what I heard growing up: he was second- or third-generation French (born out by my mother's French surname), with a sculpted Gallic jaw line and discerning eyes (perhaps a Gallic national trait). There are some precious tintypes of wagon-train settlers whom I believe to be his people. The French were among the first white people to interact with Plains Indians, which resulted in a unique French-Indian cross-culture which remained very real at the turn of the twentieth century, and which was exemplified by my grandmother. Pictures of her are of a dark-haired, medium-skinned woman with fine-boned features and veiled eyes. She identified as Osage and made sure to pass that on to me, but if I was looking for a maiden in braids cooking fry bread in front of a tipi, I was to be disappointed. In photos she is dressed like the plains wife and mother that she was, usually in the context of a kitchen or her garden, sometimes on the back porch workroom where she sewed and did upholstery, even once or twice in downtown finery. Click here to read some additional memories of my grandmother.
One of my favorite photographs from this time and place is of my grandmother, posed arm in arm with the female army of her family: aunts, sisters, cousins, in- laws, family friends, ladies from the church. They present a solid wall of Oklahoma plains women in print dresses, surely the portrait of a force of nature if ever there was one. These women are the pivot point of all the occasions that are memorialized in these boxes of memories: the women, once children themselves, who became the mothers of children who themselves became mothers and fathers.
Thus the two most precious photographs to me are of my grandmother as I remembered her, taken in the photo machine in the downtown Woolworths when I happened to be along for the ride, and as she was when she herself wasn't much more than a child, posing with her brothers on their patch of land. I spliced these together with photo tape and set them into a mat that I covered with paper in Osage orange. This color, which is very important to the Osages, honors my grandmother's family (myself included) and, by the way, harmonizes with the bedroom color scheme. I like to display family photographs in the bedroom as this is one of the most intimate rooms in the home. The photos are very small, so I cut the mat to the top third of the frame, which, honors the importance of these photographs and the history they represent by drawing your eye to them, even on a crowded shelf.
After an initial sort during which I separated the most fragile of these mementos, I have been slowly organizing them. I am not rushing the task, in order to savor it. I will scan them all onto the computer, for preservation as well as sharing purposes, remembering to transfer the images to a flash drive to be stored with important papers. The most precious ones I will place in protective archive boxes I found at my favorite paper store. I found wonderful albums by Umbra at Mxyplyzyk, one of my favorite home stores. Though some prefer to print the scans and archive the originals, with all but the most fragile photographs I will build these albums with the actual photos and mementos and leave them out so that visitors can thumb through them, perhaps even ask a few questions. And, as I scan them, I will post some of those images here, so that the virtual community can also travel through time.
But the older photographs tell deeper stories, because though they move backwards in time they reach forward to the contemporary viewer. Was my goofy prom night that much different from my father's or mother's? Really, only the trappings changed. My father, the quintessential high school jock of his era in the Chicago suburbs, had the blond brushcut and letter sweater that somehow determined his future even if history didn't exactly work out that way. Down in the Oklahoma dustbowl, my mother wore white gloves and her hair in pincurls just like you see in movies from the 1940s. The graduation program from Sand Springs Area High School is bound in pebbled navy leatherette and capped with a golden tassel; the names within are written in gold script. Tucked inside the cover is my mother's final report card -- she excelled in English -- and written on the endpapers are notes from classmates (even at graduation, they strove for good marks on what was then taught as "penmanship"): she was known for being flirty and vivacious and for her red lipstick (surely the two are linked). As a bookmark, I found a hand crafted invitation to the graduation party. It's made from purple construction paper, long since faded to the brownish lilac of a pressed flower, and affixed with a crescent moon that was the result of someone's labor with some bottle glue and dime glitter from the Tulsa Woolworth's.
Two sets of histories are told through these photographs. My father's family was a large German-Swiss outfit who had a summer house on a Wisconsin lake (who knew?) and whose oldest girls were local performers (who knew?). There are pictures of these aunts -- whom I knew as beloved wiseacres whom we'd visit annually in their immaculate midwestern homes -- in younger days as tapdancers, curtseying before the camera in matching spangled skirts. Pictures of my grandparents show a stern, but not unkind-looking, German man with oiled hair and a striped suit, chomping on a pipe (is this why the smell of a pipe shop makes me feel nostalgic?), and a plump, matronly Swiss woman with a nimbus of blond curls and chunky, old-world boots, the kind you buttoned with a hook. These photos trigger a thread of memory of the scent of lilacs and the clomp of witchy shoes. It would have had to have been in my infancy: my grandmother Diesel died before I turned one, but the impression has always been there, and this seems the explanation of it.
As, perhaps, befits a certified Okie of the Great Depression, who had other things to do with his day than vogue for picture-takers, photos of my mother's father are scarce, but those extant literally give a face to what I heard growing up: he was second- or third-generation French (born out by my mother's French surname), with a sculpted Gallic jaw line and discerning eyes (perhaps a Gallic national trait). There are some precious tintypes of wagon-train settlers whom I believe to be his people. The French were among the first white people to interact with Plains Indians, which resulted in a unique French-Indian cross-culture which remained very real at the turn of the twentieth century, and which was exemplified by my grandmother. Pictures of her are of a dark-haired, medium-skinned woman with fine-boned features and veiled eyes. She identified as Osage and made sure to pass that on to me, but if I was looking for a maiden in braids cooking fry bread in front of a tipi, I was to be disappointed. In photos she is dressed like the plains wife and mother that she was, usually in the context of a kitchen or her garden, sometimes on the back porch workroom where she sewed and did upholstery, even once or twice in downtown finery. Click here to read some additional memories of my grandmother.
One of my favorite photographs from this time and place is of my grandmother, posed arm in arm with the female army of her family: aunts, sisters, cousins, in- laws, family friends, ladies from the church. They present a solid wall of Oklahoma plains women in print dresses, surely the portrait of a force of nature if ever there was one. These women are the pivot point of all the occasions that are memorialized in these boxes of memories: the women, once children themselves, who became the mothers of children who themselves became mothers and fathers.
Thus the two most precious photographs to me are of my grandmother as I remembered her, taken in the photo machine in the downtown Woolworths when I happened to be along for the ride, and as she was when she herself wasn't much more than a child, posing with her brothers on their patch of land. I spliced these together with photo tape and set them into a mat that I covered with paper in Osage orange. This color, which is very important to the Osages, honors my grandmother's family (myself included) and, by the way, harmonizes with the bedroom color scheme. I like to display family photographs in the bedroom as this is one of the most intimate rooms in the home. The photos are very small, so I cut the mat to the top third of the frame, which, honors the importance of these photographs and the history they represent by drawing your eye to them, even on a crowded shelf.
After an initial sort during which I separated the most fragile of these mementos, I have been slowly organizing them. I am not rushing the task, in order to savor it. I will scan them all onto the computer, for preservation as well as sharing purposes, remembering to transfer the images to a flash drive to be stored with important papers. The most precious ones I will place in protective archive boxes I found at my favorite paper store. I found wonderful albums by Umbra at Mxyplyzyk, one of my favorite home stores. Though some prefer to print the scans and archive the originals, with all but the most fragile photographs I will build these albums with the actual photos and mementos and leave them out so that visitors can thumb through them, perhaps even ask a few questions. And, as I scan them, I will post some of those images here, so that the virtual community can also travel through time.
Lovely! I'd like to see those photos.
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