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The Granddaddy Tapes
This coming weekend my parents and their five children, along with in-laws and grandchildren, will be gathering to celebrate my parents’ 50th anniversary which was earlier this spring. In preparation for a day of sharing memories, I’ve been gathering pictures and scrapbooks and all kinds of memorabilia to take along. As I was getting things together I happened to remember…
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The Antique Buggy
Imagine, if you will, a young mommy in the late 1960s out for a walk with her baby. In your mind, what does that baby stroller look like? Maybe bright and plasticky, with shiny chrome metal bars and such? Yeah, me, too. (Go ahead. Google “baby stroller 1960s” and you’ll see what I mean.) Whatever you had pictured, it was…
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The Eldorado Courier
My grandparents and their children moved away from Eldorado, Oklahoma in 1958. Many of our relatives still lived there, so my grandparents had a subscription to The Eldorado Courier (pronounced “Elda-ray-duh Coo-yer”) to keep up with the happenings in their hometown. Sometimes Grandmother would include a clipping from the Courier in a letter to Mother when I was growing up. When I…
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The Home Demonstration Club Quilt
As far as I could tell, downtown Eldorado, Oklahoma only has two or three “inhabited” buildings. There is the community building, where we met for our family reunion Labor Day weekend… an apparently current insurance office… and across the street, the historical museum. All the other buildings are vacant. For such a tiny, dying town, the museum is quite impressive…
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Tater Mountain
When we came to the turn-off for the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma last Friday, Mother asked, “Do we want to take a detour and drive through there? We have plenty of time.” Uncle Carlton and I responded, “Yes!” in unison. Mother wasn’t quite sure it was the right road. “Yes, it is,” Uncle Carlton assured her. “See those…
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Labor Day Weekend
I had intended to micro-blog all weekend so my family (at least) could follow along with my adventures. But “the best-laid plans of mice and men…” and all that. I hadn’t realized there wouldn’t be a very good cell signal in the remote little corner of south-western Oklahoma where i spent the better part of the weekend. I did have…
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Granddaddy’s Barn
Once upon a time a path led from the driveway along the edge of the garden to the barn where the hens lived. Red-the-cow and the nanny goats congregated there morning and evening to be fed and milked. We called tending the livestock “the chores.” Usually the teenage uncles were responsible for doing the chores. We little nieces and nephews…
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Priceless Heirlooms
This past week I’ve been updating a genealogy book I compiled about 10 years ago, at the request of my great-aunt who wants it for a family reunion in a couple of weeks. It had been awhile since I had taken time to work on genealogy, and I always enjoy it, so that was a fun diversion from some of…
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Grandmother’s Letters
For the past year or so I have been sorting and archiving my Grandmother’s “papers.” She was a prolific letter writer, and she kept most of the letters she received over the years. (My mother has done the same, so I have two generations worth of letters going back to the 1930s!) Grandmother had 10 children, and as far as…
