Photo Challenge : Historical

If you want to participate, here’s the link with all 52 photo challenges for the year:

Wild Daffodil

“Historical” to one generation is “A few years ago” to another.   A person who is 20 looks at the year 2000 as ancient history.  To someone who is 80, 1920 is ancient history.  If you see the last picture and you’re thinking, “That wasn’t taken very long ago,” you’re over 50.   🙂

I can’t take credit for any of these pictures. My mother, and the generation before her, provided these snippets of the past:

1. My father’s side of the family circa 1918.  Their mother died in the 1918 Swine Flu epidemic (also called Spanish Flu).  She was pregnant with her 5th child at the time. From January 1918 through December 1920, this pandemic killed between 20 and 40 million people. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. 

2.  My mother, flanked by two of her three brothers, circa 1920’s.  Her daily chore, from the age of 4, was to wash the dishes family dishes while standing on a stool so she could reach the sink.  Her mother loved to cook and she recalls standing on that stool for hours each day.

3. Family picture taken circa 1930’s.  Maternal grandmother, my mom, her dad, and her brothers Herbert, Harold and Bob.  I only remember them as being old, so I can’t tell you which brother matches the name.

4.  From my mother’s photo album, 1944:  German POW’s escaped from Papago Park (Near the small town of Phoenix, Az).  One officer made it through the desert to a hotel and was captured.  Most asked to be taken back to the POW camp.  If you’ve driven between cities in Arizona, you can understand why.  🙂

5.  Family photo of Mom, dad, my sister and me, circa 1960.  He’d helped his aunt move to a restaurant they’d purchased just outside Kissimmee, Florida.  At that time, there were miles of forests and lonely roads between Kissimmee and a small town called Orlando. We’re eating the catfish that my sister and I caught with our cousins.  The Kissimmee river was less than 1/4 mile away, but once Disney World was built, the river was rerouted.  

6.  Who doesn’t love the 1960’s?  My mom took this picture as we stood in front of our parent’s home in 1969.    My sister had landed the job from hell, after getting her BA, and was looking forward to leaving that job to go to grad school.  During a time before the term “minimal brain damage” (early 1970’s) had morphed into the term “learning disability” (1980’s) for a condition now known as Dyslexia, I was flunking out of college (Florida),  and my parents weren’t happy that my grade point average hovered around a C-, and I felt like a terrible failure.

8.  On to happier times!  3rd Generation, circa 1980.  Resting on the edge of a cliff next to my kids, where we watched bald eagles soar over the Wisconsin Dells.  

7.  I’m playing the piano in 1985.  I was in my 3rd year of college (Wisconsin), using books on tape to read, and had a GPA of 3.8.  Piano was my refuge from the world when my life got too out of hand.  Now, my refuge from the world is writing and I haven’t touched a piano in years.

Hope you enjoyed this tour of one family’s history.  If you wish to look at history from 1900’s and into the 1960’s, I copied my mother’s memoirs word for word and it can be found on my blog under “Memorabilia.”  My favorite is the one about the Papago Park great escape.