Here's some old shots, from before I was born.

Pat's old pictures of his family have inspired me to post some old shots from my family. As you can see, these are from October of 1955. That's five years before I was around. Not even a glint in my fathers eye. These came from one of those books you used to get your pictures back in. We've got boxes of them layin' around. Treasures.



The shot above is one of my favorites from this bunch. From right to left; that's my uncle Macklin (my fathers younger brother), my cousin Shirley, my cousin Mike, and uncle Mack's wife Vonne. Vonne is so friggin' HOT in these shots, and uncle Mack had it goin' on too. What would folks in New York give for those jeans and that shirt today? Vonne wasn't Mack's first wife or the mother of these kids, but she helped him raise them. They had a hard life. Mack was a carpenter and never made much money, and what he made was always goin' for horses and rodeos and such. He was a tough guy.



You can see it in those eyes. He rode bulls and trained cutting horses, and he rode life hard. He played hard too, and not always with his wife. Dad told me once that he'd ended up with his first wife after wakin' up with her after a long drunk. She ended up pregnant and so they got hitched. That was what you did back in those days. They had these two kids before they split, and I'm not sure what contact the kids had with her after that. I met that woman briefly once, at a rodeo in the early 1980s where Mike was riding. He ended up a star rodeo rider himself. She seemed real nice. It's safe to say that my uncle Mack knew how to have a good time, and those who loved him and rode along with him on that journey sometimes had a tough time of things.

I was always scared of him when I was a kid, but always loved him, and looked up to him. He seemed mythical to a little kid who grew up away from his family and home country and only knew about these things from stories. He was a real cowboy, and always seemed tough and cool, the few times I saw him while growing up. He was the real thing. In the last 20 years of his life he walked in a permanent stoop from an injury when a bull stomped on his back. Seeing him in that bent posture, with the big barrel chest, those huge arms, and those scarred and muscled hands, he was larger than life. I miss him a lot now.

He didn't go easily, coming down with some sort of encephalitis and losing his mind. He spent his last years in a nursing home, totally out of it, unable to recognize anyone. It wasn't a very nice nursing home ether, since all they had was Medicare. I'll never forget how small and weak he looked in his coffin. His son Mike leaned over him when the service was over, hugged his father and sobbed. They'd never had the words we all yearn for from our fathers. That always hurts when they go and you find it's too late.

Vonne had cancer several times in her life, and the last time it got her. She died a few years after Mack, with Mike and his family taking care of her. Those who were close to her say she never got over Mack's death. They went through a lot together, and in the end he softened a bit. He started to go to church with her, and began to have a closer relationship with his son and grandchildren. Then the disease took him, just as everything was beginning to work out. It's all very sad, but I think it shows that you should never waste any time. You never know how much you'll have.



That's Vonne on the left, and then Mike and Shirley. That's my sister at bottom center, peekin' up into view there. She was about a year old there, and already knew how to vogue for the camera. This must have been when mom and dad brought her home from England, where she'd been born, to introduce her to the rest of the family. Shirley died a few years after these pictures were taken. I'm not really sure why. My sister remembers her, and the shock of such a young death. Mike is still going strong, with children and grandchildren and a great life. His wife Peggy is my barber. I love them all to death.



That's my mom in the middle of that shot, and my sister in the arms of our paternal grandfather. That's Mike peekin' into the shot on the bottom left, and my uncle Mack to the right. That ghostly figure to the left of the picture is my grandmother (talking to Shirley). I remember her, vaguely. I have a memory of all the men in the family standing around her in a close circle, and her looking up through the haze of Alzheimer's. She didn't know her sons any more, but she did recognise me and the other kids. She died in about 1968, and dad wasn't able to make it back in time for her funeral. His brothers told him not to come. They didn't want to have to put off the funeral to wait for him. I remember going to the cemetery when we did finally come home and hugging his leg as he cried. That was the first time I ever saw him do that.




Here's Mack holding my cousin Larry. I'll do another post about he and his brother and my uncle Sam one of these days. That's my grandfather on the right. He attained a mythic stature in my mind growing up, hearing stories from my father. He was a sharecropper and didn't have the money to buy his own farm until my father went off to the Army and sent his pay back home to his family.

The place you see in these pictures is the farm they ended up in. Granddad died of a heart attack some time around 1964, hitching the mules up to the plow behind that garage in the back of this picture. My dad tells me he was found sitting up against a tree in the back yard with a smile on his face. Dad flew home for the funeral, and took his fathers clothes out to the field behind that garage and burned them. He couldn't stand the idea of any other man wearing those clothes. I'll never forget the day dad took me there and showed me the tree and the place where the clothes burned. All these things happened before I could be here and know these people. It's always been as if I arrived on the stage just in the wake of a great drama. That's not true of course, but these stories I heard growing up left me feeling it all the same.

That farm is still there, though not in the family any more. It still looks very much like it did then. The fields around it are still plowed and tall with corn in the growing seasons. They have a corn festival in Holland, and some years I get dad and go, and we look to see if he can run into anyone he knows. I drive him by the old farm now and then, and all the other landmarks of his early life, and the emotions well up in him. Most of the people who meant something to him in his life are gone now, waiting for him on the other side. That's got to be the worst thing about living that long.



Here's a last look at Vonne, Mike and uncle Mack. Check out the clouds in the sky behind them. They make me wish these were good color shots. There's a always a big sky over Texas, and the views can be majestic, particularly when the rain clouds boil up and the sky a hundred miles away and the sun gives them the look of a great painting by Thomas Moran or Albert Bierstadt. That faint line in the field behind them is the road to Holland, where my younger uncles went to school, and where some of my cousins can be found today.

Part of me would give anything to be able to walk into this picture and see these folks again. I miss them a lot. I also think about all the stuff that hadn't happened yet in October of 1955, and I'd like to jump back there and change a few things. You can't go back though, but it's a fun idea.