Childhood 1

Mother kept all the family photos stored in a black metal trunk that was as enigmatic to me as Pandora's Box .  Every time she opened it my small world was gladdened, delighting in images of faces I would never have known were it not for her.  Using her hand-held camera that popped open into bellows and produced a less than sharp 3 X 5 inch negative, months before they were married in 1942, Mom (Pearl) and Dad (Jack) photographed each other standing in front of her green Packard or his Hudson?

Daddy Jack holds me while Mama Pearl snaps a photo of us.  Right from the beginning I was "Daddy's Girl".

These framed photographs of my parents, taken each of the other, hung on their bedroom wall through the fourteen years of their marriage that ended in my father's death. 

Mother loved to fish and hunt, things she had learned to do in her first marriage of six years to Carmel.  Now she had these things in common with Dad who was passionate about both fishing and hunting, in that order.

Daddy bragged that he could out fish anyone both lake and fly fishing.  I ate a lot of trout growing up and enjoyed a months camping trip each year as Dad and Mom fished northern Arizona's Big Lake and Blue Lake in the White Mountains between Show Low and Springerville, and Oak Creek Canyon south of Flagstaff. 

I was an only child for awhile and spoiled rotten with attention from all sides.

My sister Peggy arrived in October 1945.   I had just turned two August 20; Mom turned thirty-two August 2, making her nineteen years younger than my Dad; Mom and Dad celebrated their third wedding anniversary August 31. 

We were almost always dressed as twins, even when we wore "play" clothes (dressed in jeans on the left) which we changed into after school or church.  We were never allowed to "play" in our dresses.