Parents...

Parents...  Here's a collection of photos I found in my mom's collection that include photos of one or both of my parents.  First up: a group of photos of me as a baby with my mom.  The first one is dated December 1952, when I was about 3 months old.  The other three are from June 1954, when I was almost two years old.  The first two of those are taken in roughly the same place, where there's a circular sidewalk.  I believe this was on the southeast corner of my grandparent's home.  The last of these is actually marked as being taken on the porch of my grandparent's home.

Next up: one that none of my siblings will recognize the location of!  This one was taken in the kitchen of the tiny third-floor apartment that we (my parents and I) lived in for a couple of years while our home was being built.  I believe we moved into our home in the spring of 1953, shortly after my brother Scott was born.  That means he probably spent a few months in this apartment, too, but only as a teensy infant.  I actually have a few memories of that place, despite being so young.  I instantly remembered that kitchen.  My high chair is out of the frame, just off to the right.  My mom is holding me, and the little boy on the left must be my cousin Jonathan (who lived in the lower regions of the same house).  For me the big shocker in this photo was my dad: wearing a tie and sporting a mustache.  Both are nearly inconceivable :)  Those look like dress pants, too – I'm astonished that he owned any!

At left is a photo dated August 1959 and marked on the back (in my mom's handwriting) “Lake Oswego”.  That threw me, as the Lake Oswego I know is in Oregon, and we never went to Oregon in 1959!  After a little investigation, I concluded this must be a typo: she really meant Oswego Lake, which is not far from our family home in New Jersey in the New Jersey pine barrens.  I have lots of memories of the pine barrens, but not of Oswego Lake in particular.  I was almost 7 when this was taken.  Left-to-right the foreground people are my dad, me, my sister Holly, my mom, and my brother Scott.

The photo at right was a nice surprise for me, because the older lady at the left is my great-grandmother Emma Jobes.  I didn't recognize her, as this was taken in December 1952 when I was two months old (that's me in the middle, and my mom at right) and Emma looks quite a bit younger (and sprier!) than my first memories of her.  I'm glad to have another photo of her.

Here's the whole family at Christmas dinner in 1958 (at left).  My dad is missing from the photo, so I'm assuming he's the one who took it.  Left-to-right there's my brother Scott, me, my sister Holly, and my mom.

Here are a few photos (below) of my dad with my brother Scott and I.  In the first photo he looks like he's squinting up at the weather.  He's wearing the  old Army surplus jacket that he bought in an auction lot (the same lot in which he bought a brand-new Jeep disassembled in barrels of cosmoline).  This was taken in February 1957, when I was four.  That's me on the left, my brother Scott on the right.  We're walking along the driveway to our house, heading toward it.  The second photo is my dad and I in the summer of 1953, when I was just under a year old.  I'm not sure where we were, but I'm guessing either the Jersey shore or possibly Maine (though it's usually a bit cold for swimming there!).  The last photo was also taken in February 1957.  Scott is in the center and I'm on the right.  We're walking along that same driveway, but this time you can see our old water tower in the distance, between dad and Scott.  Scott is hiding the larger shed, but the smaller shed is visible to the right of me.  Lots of memories in that photo!

At right is a photo of my mom that I had never seen before.  On the back, in her writing, it says “at age 18”.  The house in the background is her parent's home in Locust, New Jersey.  I remember that swing!  The photo looks to me like it was retouched on the negative, but I could be wrong.  She and my dad were married when she was just 19...

Last but not least, here are a couple more candid shots of my mom.  The first one says “me with some of my flowers” on the back, in my mom's handwriting.  There's no date.  I think she's in the northeast corner of our home's dining room, before they carpeted it.  That would put it somewhere in the late '50s or early '60s.  In the second photo, she's in our living room, carving a (rather large!) pumpkin on our card table.  To the right of her in the photo you can see our front door, which we rarely used.  The two rockers in the background I remember, along with that table next to the door.  And the card table!  We played many a game on that table...

Great-grandmother...

Great-grandmother...  The two photos below are the only images I have of my great-grandmother Jobes – my father's mother's mother.  She was born in 1867, and died in 1962 – 95 years old.  Her full name was Emma E. English Jobes.

I spent quite a bit of time with this fine lady, especially for two summers (1960 and 1961, when I was 7 and 8 years old).  When I knew her, she lived in the home of her daughter Grace and her husband Earle (my grandmother and grandfather), on the same farm where we lived.  She had a small wing of the house to herself, with a hallway that opened onto the house's kitchen.  She was quite frail and seldom ventured from her rooms.

The first photo below was taken in her sitting room, the first room in her wing.  I spent many hours in there with her, playing checkers, Chinese checkers, and chess.  Most of all, though, she told stories.  Marvelous stories about things like the first time she ever saw an automobile, or a train, or an airplane.  She had a sense of wonder about her, especially regarding the works and progress of mankind.  She lived through three major wars that the U.S. was involved in (WWI, WWII, and the Korean War), and in her youth the Civil War was a recent event – all of these were vivid memories for her, and she was profoundly thankful for the extended peace of the '50s.  She followed politics closely, too – I remember her railing about Joseph McCarthy.

The second photo was taken in the living room of our home at Christmas.  My grandfather is seated near the picture window, his face obscured by the reflection of the camera's flash.  My sister Holly is on the right, and I think it's my brother Scott with his hands thrown up in the air, just in front of my great-grandmother.  Holly looks like about four in that photo, which means it was probably taken in 1959.  I have no memory of my great-grandmother ever visiting our house.

In this photo you can also see something my father did a lot of work on: the (beautiful) oak floor, and the tongue-and-groove solid knotty pine paneling.  To save money (which was always in very short supply for us), he did the finish sanding himself.  There were two stages to that work: rough sanding with an old-fashioned (gigantic) orbital sander, and fine sanding by hand.  On the knotty pine paneling, the wood was soft – but there was lots of it, and quite a bit of it was resinous, which clogged the sandpaper up.  The oak floor was hard as nails, and the fine sanding was awfully hard work.  I was there for some of that, as an infant, and I have a memory of sitting on the living room floor while my dad was fine sanding nearby.  The flooring was all installed, but of course unfinished yet – just raw oak.  The house was fully framed, but the interior walls were just studs, and the plumber and electrician were still working away as my parents could afford them.  We moved into that house before it was completely finished on the inside, and work continued for several years afterwards...

Childhood pets...

Childhood pets...  The first pet we had was a boxer named Synda (which I always thought was spelled “Cinda” until I saw my mom's notations on the photos).  I loved that dog; I have many fond memories of playing with him, and especially of feeling safe when he was around.  The first three photos include Synda, and they were all taken in 1955.  The dog in the last photo below is Lady, a female mutt who had six puppies one Christmas Eve (I think around 1960 or 1961).

The people in the first photo (left-to-right) are my brother Scott, my sister Holly (not even a year old!), and me.  In the second photo is my dad, and in the third photo me.

The second photo was taken in our kitchen in the home my mom and dad built, and the home where I have the most memories.  I remember that funky, rubbery tile floor, the beautiful knotty pine cabinets, and the ugly Formica behind the sink.  I don't remember that old Westinghouse refrigerator (I remember a Sears refrigerator in a different place in the kitchen).  Over the sink is that giant can opener; I don't remember that, either.  I do remember the naked fluorescent bulb that my mom hated, and the paper towel dispenser...

Mystery photo...

Mystery photo ... in my mom's collection.  This photo isn't dated or marked in any way.  The sign in the background reads “Straw rides at short notice”.  I have no idea who this is.  The photo and mount are of a style popular from around 1910 to 1930...

My dad...

My dad ... Thomas Jobes Dilatush, in 1926 at the age of two.  I'm pretty sure he wasn't actually reading that book :)

Not ransom, huh?

Not ransom, huh?  Late yesterday the news broke that the $400M payment to Iran was held up until the American hostages were confirmed to be on the way home.  If that's not a ransom, then I'd sure like to know what would be considered a ransom!

Our leaders lie to us almost continuously.  It looks like a reflexive action on their part, just like the old saw:

How do you know when a politician is lying?  Easy: when his lips are moving!

That was originally intended as a joke, but at this point it really isn't funny any more.  What's even less funny: our politicians keep testing the limit of the American voters' stupidity.  They haven't found the limit yet, despite trying really, really hard...

Oak leaf mold...

Oak leaf mold...  Most people have never even heard of leaf mold, but we used it on our farm to help fertilize and acidify the soil for the holly trees we raised.  We also bagged the stuff and sold it at retail.

My dad had a connection with a man I knew only as “Pete”.  Pete owned a beat-up, broken-down two ton truck and a pitch fork.  When he was in need of some drinking money, he'd go down to southern New Jersey, load up his truck with some choice oak leaf mold (from public lands), and then deliver it to our shed.  There he unloaded it into a big pile.  I remember Pete vividly: a scrawny little guy, always with alcohol on his breath, always grateful to my dad for buying the load, and always playful with us kids.  His vocabulary was full of words I didn't know then :)

After that we'd use some of the leaf mold ourselves, and bag it up as you see in the photo above.  That's me, at age 7, right about when my dad started paying me to fill the bags.  The first couple of years I was bagging it, we used burlap bags (as you see in the photo).  Afterward we used the new-fangled polyethylene bags, nicely printed up the same way.  In both cases we closed the bags using a stiff wire that was twisted with a hand tool much like a Yankee screwdriver – I had endless trouble using that tool!  We had a metal stand that held the bags upright and open while we filled them.  When we were little, we moved the bags with the steel cart you see in the photo – I remember that cart very well.  It was at the limit of my ability to push that thing with a bag of leaf mold on it!

So what is oak leaf mold?  It's what's left after oak tree leaves fall to the ground in the autumn, and then rot for several years.  The photo at left (not mine) gives a good idea what it looks like.  The odor I can't think how to describe, but it's pleasant and earthy, and very distinctive – I'd recognize it immediately even though I haven't smelled oak leave mold for probably 50 years.

These bags of oak leaf mold were one of the few things my dad was willing to make a straightforward profit on.  I remember he and my mom sitting down at our kitchen table one day, figuring out how many bags were in one of Pete's loads.  They set the price for the retail bags by taking the cost (from Pete), adding some amount for the labor of filling it (which was much more than they paid me!), and then multiplying by three.  I can't remember any other product my dad sold where he applied a markup rate like that.  Particularly with trees and shrubs he was quite likely to sell them at cost, or even to give them away.  In the years that he was doing plantings and landscape maintenance my mom was often hollering at him for not charging enough for his labor – often below minimum wage.  Several members of my family have inherited this aversion to profit! :)

Julius and my grandfather...

Julius and my grandfather ... with an unknown nursery customer in the middle.  This photo is undated, but from my grandfather's appearance I'd guess it's from 1957 or 1958.

The man at left is Julius Mate, the Hungarian immigrant who left in a small house on our farm and helped out (especially in our greenhouse).  He's the man my dad helped by lending him $800 to bring his family (wife and two boys) to the U.S.  This is the only photo I'm aware of that has Julius in it, and I'm delighted to have found it.  Seeing his face again brings back lots of lots of memories...

My grandfather...

My grandfather ... my dad's father, Earle Dilatush, with me when I was just 18 months old.  Most of my memories of my grandfather are from after he had a rather horrible automobile accident, which affected him both physically and mentally.  I do have a few memories of him like this, though – before that accident, hale and hearty, and smart as heck...

Oh, he looks so young in this photo...

Oh, he looks so young in this photo...  My dad, I mean, on the left in the photo at right.  My brother Scott is in the middle, and that's me on the right, when I was six years old.  My dad would have been just 35 years old, less than 10 years after returning from the war.

On the back, in my mom's handwriting:

Hiking in Maine

I don't remember this specific trip, and I can't identify the pond (there are a zillion of them in Maine) – but I certainly can remember the many wonderful hikes we took there with my dad.

I've no idea who took the photo.  It's very unlikely to be my mom, as she only rarely went on even a short hike with us...

A favorite of my mom's...

A favorite of my mom's...  I found this in her photo box.  On the back she wrote:

one of the greatest pictures on a camping trip
can't believe we camped with 3 like this – they were great

Left to right that's my brother Scott, my sister Holly, and me.  The photo isn't dated, but I'm guessing 1958, possibly 1959.

Construction update...

Construction update...  By the end of the day yesterday, the crew had the vertical walls of the sun room completely installed.  The door frame is also there, but the doors themselves are not hung yet.  Some photos:

Much to our amusement, our sun room is the talk of the contractors and of quite a few people in town.  Our builder is responsible for this.  In one of the conversations we had with him when we first discussed the project, we mentioned that our plan was to allow the cats in the basement cattery to have access to the sun room.  This seemed sensible to us, as if we were planning to build the sun room anyway, and the cats were right there (two windows in the cattery open into the sun room), then why wouldn't we let them enjoy the sunshine too?  But our builder seems to think that the only reason we're building the sun room is for the enjoyment of the cats – and that has been passed along to the other contractors and people he knows in town (he lives in Paradise).  Several times now I've met people who want to know how our cat's sun room is coming along.  Funny!

A gorgeous full moon tonight...

A gorgeous full moon tonight...  I couldn't sleep; got up around 1:30 am.  I took the dogs outside (they were delighted!), and to my surprise I could see just fine.  I'd lost track of the moon's phases, so I wasn't expecting the bright night.  I could see greens and reds quite clearly; blues just looked like grays.  The dogs acted like it was broad daylight, and had a blast chasing balls, pine cones, and sticks.  Happy mutts!

An old memory...

An old memory...  I found the photo at right in my mom's collection.  It shows the vegetable market that was once on the farm I grew up on, along the highway.  This photo shows the market 20 or 30 years before my memories of it.  There are gas pumps in the photo that I don't remember, and I remember a large, square covered area right about where the sign is in the photo.

I've been told that I “helped” selling apples and vegetables at the market, and that my grandfather (Earle Dilatush) was much amused by that.  I have no memory of helping out.  I do remember the (to me) enormous baskets of apples, the displays of vegetables, the lovely aromas, and the excitement of people stopping by to buy produce. My dad told me that the market was torn down in the fall of 1957, when I was just 5.  That makes the market one of my very earliest memories.

I don't believe any of my siblings (all younger than I) remember the market.  For their sake: it was located along US 130, just north of the nursery entrance and sign they surely remember, and south of the Ames' home.  At least until the late 1960s, the foundations of the market building were still poking out of the ground just west of the dirt road alongside US 130.

There are several men in the photo.  I believe the man on the right is my grandfather, younger than I knew him.  The child in the photo may well be my father, which would date this photo to roughly 1932.