Photographic Insert I

Mother worries because her daughter’s ear sticks out.

Mother poses in her aunt’s apartment the year she attended high school in Chicago. On rainy days on the farm she recalled this period of her life, particularly the opera, with longing.

Mother stands between her two cousins the year the three left Michigan to teach school in Washington. They find dressing in the clothes of a male relative hilarious.

Mother, in her high school graduation picture, faces the future with determination.

Father is photographed at the beginning of World War I for his mother, who insists on pictures of her five sons because they may go to war.

Mother and Father pose for their engagement picture.

My parents, at the time of their engagement, clown with Mother’s cousin.

The entire farm is my playground, a source of interest and delight.

My grandparents pose on the porch of the Bunn house in Yamhill.

I celebrate my first birthday by waving my very own hairbrush. Mother, who had tried to curl my hair, always remarked of this picture, “I thought your hair never would grow in.”

On my second birthday, when I have the measles, I refuse to hold still for the photographer. Swinging my legs was fun.

Winston and I stand together as bride and groom in the Tom Thumb wedding. I feel beautiful; Winston is miserable.

Winston and I are dressed for a party. By now my hair is thick enough to support a bow, even though the bow keeps slipping.

Too young to be trusted to wind the Maypole, Elma and I are bewildered flower girls in Yamhill’s May Day festival.

Yamhill celebrates the Fourth of July by having a board nailed across the stomachs of little girls so they won’t fall off the float. I represent Ohio, second from the left in the front row with dirty knees that show I have fallen down. The parade route is short because Yamhill’s main street is only four blocks long.

Mother organized her library in the Commercial Clubrooms on the top floor of this bank building. Forty years later the china cabinet, empty of books, and the worn leather chair remained in the dusty room where a dead bird lay on the floor. (Yamhill County Historical Society.)