First color photo
Here's Mom and Dad in the back yard of Dad's brother Bill's house in San Marino, California.
click image to enlarge
I really like this picture. For one thing, it's the earliest color photo I have of them together. I can't be certain of the date, though, because I found this image as a negative; I'd never seen it in print form before. (Mom conveniently wrote the date on the back of most of our family photos.) I know it has to be before I was born, however, because of the way Dad is sitting. He injured his back then while building a brick wall in the back of our house in Glendora. No way in the world he could have sat like this after his accident. (I never knew my dad without back pain.)
Anyway, just judging by faces, my first best guess was that it was taken in 1953 - the year before I arrived on the scene. While trying to photoshop-out the severe yellowing in the image, though, I noticed a pair of toddler legs visible at left under the rose bush. That's probably my cousin Dave. If so, then the photo more likely dates to 1950 or early 1951, which would make this the only color picture I have of my parents before they were married.
I have just two very dim memories of this house in Temple City. It was the first place I ever saw bronzed baby shoes, and I remember some excitement about the older boys finding a black widow spider in the garage. In 1959, Bill and Lila Shannon moved their family to a new house in Glendora, just a couple of miles from where we lived. Only a few months later, though, we moved to our new house in Covina...
click image to enlarge
I really like this picture. For one thing, it's the earliest color photo I have of them together. I can't be certain of the date, though, because I found this image as a negative; I'd never seen it in print form before. (Mom conveniently wrote the date on the back of most of our family photos.) I know it has to be before I was born, however, because of the way Dad is sitting. He injured his back then while building a brick wall in the back of our house in Glendora. No way in the world he could have sat like this after his accident. (I never knew my dad without back pain.)
Anyway, just judging by faces, my first best guess was that it was taken in 1953 - the year before I arrived on the scene. While trying to photoshop-out the severe yellowing in the image, though, I noticed a pair of toddler legs visible at left under the rose bush. That's probably my cousin Dave. If so, then the photo more likely dates to 1950 or early 1951, which would make this the only color picture I have of my parents before they were married.
I have just two very dim memories of this house in Temple City. It was the first place I ever saw bronzed baby shoes, and I remember some excitement about the older boys finding a black widow spider in the garage. In 1959, Bill and Lila Shannon moved their family to a new house in Glendora, just a couple of miles from where we lived. Only a few months later, though, we moved to our new house in Covina...