Category Archives: Old Photos

Should I Display This Photo?

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A few days ago I wrote about all the strange emotions I felt when I saw the first photo of my mother as a child. I showed the picture before, but I’ll show it here again.

Ruthy MericaAfter editing the photo to remove some of the shadow and enlarging the portion where my mother is visible I was overwhelmed with feeling. I felt the thrill of discovery because after resigning myself years ago to never seeing an image of her as anything younger than 22 or 23, I found her in the shadows of a photo of my Aunt Ola I’ve had all along. I felt joy that I finally knew what she looked like. Disappointment that she was veiled in shadow and I could barely make out her features. Confirmation that she was the same brunette beauty I’d seen in later photos of her. Delight that she looked like a happy, spunky little girl. And a twinge of shame at seeing her in a smudged and ill-fitting dress. I tried hard to fight off that feeling, but there it was. It overtook me before my rational side could jump in and block it. So I can toss in the feeling of disappointment at myself for that rush to judgement.

The shame went against everything I thought I knew about myself, that I observe objectively and do not judge irrationally or without considering varied facts. (I infuriate friends for refusing to take sides.) But the dirty dress went against everything I thought I knew about my mother’s family. Would I have to rethink it all?

I’ve always heard about the clockwork routine they lived to. The chores her parents expected the kids to do every morning. The hearty and complete meals that were laid out three times a day for this farm family of 12. Wash day was every Monday and ironing every Tuesday. Her mother did all that, but each Saturday the whole family pitched in around the farm. My mother’s job was to clean the upstairs. Every Saturday she scrubbed the floors, washed the basins and windows, dusted, and tidied up. Her little sister had the job of cleaning the downstairs, but since she was three years younger her mother helped her.  Then Sundays were for church and a big supper, the table laden with roast chicken, macaroni and cheese, green beans or peas, rolls, and if they were lucky, a berry pie or coconut cake.

Such disciplined routine typically means a clean and orderly household. The oldest child, my Aunt Ola, 13 years my mother’s elder, was fastidious to the point of obsession. No dirt dared enter her spotless house. And no grime dared step foot on her property. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she washed the tire treads of her car after every trip to the store. Yet there was my mother in a photo of Ola and her tidy baby boy, with my mother looking like Pigpen from the Charley Brown cartoons. Of course, it’s easy for me to justify the way she looks in the photo. Maybe it’s Saturday and she just finished washing the floors. Maybe it’s a warm spring day and she’s been hoeing rows with her mother in the garden. Or a hot summer day and she’s been playing hide and seek with her Comer cousins down at the bend. Or she’s just back from the swimming hole. The kids swam clothes and all, and this would be a perfect swim dress.

It’s easy to justify a kid being dirty. But they’re not usually photographed that way. If we know a photographer will be present we dress our children to reflect well on ourselves. And if a photo turns out less than flattering we tear it up. It’s a small manipulation of reality that helps us shape the image we want to show to the world.  We take photos. We look at them and sort them, throwing out the bad ones, keeping the good ones, and choosing the great ones to display in frames. Or these days, as our home screens or screen savers. That is acceptable and normal behavior. All good, right?

Yet here I am with the only photo of my mother being one I bet her mother would not have wanted to last 84 years, as it has so far. As the only photo I have of her, I love it. And that pretty face and hair I recognize? I adore it. Pulling wider to show her leaning into the photo from over the porch rail? It makes me smile to see this joyous, impish girl who so wants to charm the camera. Even the composition of the photo is great, all angles and squares with the porch posts, house siding, chair back spindles, window frame, and my mother’s checked dress. Quite artistic. These things make me happy. Then I zero in on the dress and suddenly my emotions become very mixed. I don’t like the sour shame that creeps into my warm soup of emotions. Again, it’s easy to justify a dirty kid. But photos worthy of display can’t come with attached captions that explain the circumstances.

I sent the photo to a photo restorer and got back an improved version where some of the shadows were removed from my mother’s face and dress. It was now slightly improved, but still nothing I considered mantle-worthy. Here’s the cleaned-up version:

Ruthy_Merica_c.1930Her mother, my grandmother, would not want to display the photo. Aunt Ola wouldn’t either. And my mother would certainly have thrown it away. But it’s the only one I have.

Should I display the photo?

The Only Photo of My Mother’s Childhood

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Mine is not a family of photographers. We don’t click pictures of every party or parade. We don’t all put on white shirts and jeans to sit on rocks at the beach for annual family portraits. We don’t even usually remember to document landmark events like birthdays, graduations, or meals that aren’t burnt. That requires a certain kind of self-consciousness that we’re short on. It may have originated with my grandfather, who rejected the “bourgeois life of Wall Street” and moved his family into a utopian community in the 1930s.

Whole decades are missing from our family’s life in pictures. I never thought about it much, but now that I’m older I’m beginning to think not just about where our family is going, but where it’s been. We humans nearly always feel that inexplicable connection with the homelands of our ancestors, and with our “roots.” We know there is a genetic imperative to favor family, but it’s more than that. There’s a sense of grounding, of the permanence, even immortality that comes from seeing the long line of ancestors that reaches behind you, then panning forward we can see that same line extending into the future and on over the horizon.

My family is probably better at knowing we’re related to, say, Sir Isaac Newton or steamship builder Robert Fulton, than we are at knowing our immediate ancestors. Thankfully, my father’s long-gone mother documented his every childhood phase. Flipping though the photo album I see him posed in his christening gown, a page later in his velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, then bundled in funny little coat and ready to go outside, then I flip the page and there he is with old Nell, the harness horse that pulled his grandfather’s buggy. In all these posed photos he was with his usually identically dressed fraternal twin brother.

But my mother? Fugedaboudit. I never saw a picture of her as a child. The earliest photo of her must be around age 22 or 23, and even then it’s just a snapshot from a distance far enough to have to look close to see it’s her. Of the few photos I have of her before age 45, none show a clear view of her face. This one, of her and my older brother as a baby, is typical:

Ruth Berryman and Teddy c. 1944I don’t care how good your photo editing software is, you’re not going to find my mother’s face in there. Which is why my heart skipped a beat when I peered into a tiny two inch by three inch photo of my aunt and her toddler boy and there, in the shadowed background, was a figure that might have been my mother. Might have been. As in, I felt a glimmer of hope. Aunt Ola is front and center in the photo. She’s in the yard of her parents’ Shenandoah, Virginia house, all smiles and looking modern in her short skirt, flapper cloche and baby Ray in her arms. He’s wearing his jumper with the big buttons and white shirt, high socks, and his Buster Browns. There’s a Model something-or-other Ford in the driveway behind them. I’ve had the photo for years but never stopped to examine it because, well, it was Aunt Ola, not my mom, and that figure in the background was too faint to see much of. This is what the photo looked like to me. Like I have glaucoma:

Ola Grimsley, my aunt, holding baby Ray at home of her parents, Tom and Florence Collier, in about 1930. Ruth Merica, my mother, is on the porch in background

No, the borders aren’t really that dark, but this is exactly how the photo felt every time I glanced through the album. Then a few weeks ago I decided to restore some of our old photos and get copies to other family members. I brought out the album for the first time in quite a few years and looked at the pictures with the idea that the newest restoring and retouching programs could correct some of their problems. I took another look at the photo of Aunt Ola and baby Ray.

Ola Grimsley, my aunt, holding baby Ray at home of her parents, Tom and Florence Collier, in about 1930. Ruth Merica, my mother, is on the porch in background

Could that be my mother? I had to move the lamp to spotlight the photo. I rested the heavy-handled and usually only decorative magnifying glass onto the edge of my keyboard, and practically stopped breathing to get an unblurred view. But yes, I was certain, that is my mother! I imagined she had just been out playing in the summer fields somewhere, maybe playing hide and seek with her Cardin cousins down at the corner. More likely she was with her mother in the garden. Unlike her sisters, she liked be out there digging holes with a hoe while her mother came along behind planting beans or peas. Or going along the bean rows with a stick in her right hand to knock worms off the leaves, dropping them into the pan she carried in her left hand.

Sometimes she climbed up into the big green gauge plum tree while her mother worked below. It was cool amid the leaves, and she liked to eat plums and watch her brothers out in the fields. Or sometimes she went in the kitchen and brought out the salt shaker, then poked around for the biggest, reddest, juiciest tomato, licking its silky skin so the salt would stick, then biting into its warm flesh till juice spilled down her chin and onto the front of her dress. No mind. Gardening is dirty work, and that’s what old clothes are for.

Whatever she was doing, it wasn’t being the star of any photograph. She may have looked up from whatever she was doing and seen Ola, her autocratic oldest sister, looking like the center of attention with her baby boy and having her photo taken by her husband, Raymond. Mom probably thought, oh no you don’t, it’s not just you and Ray and Raymond. I’m here too.” So she skipped up to the porch in her little black slippers, leaned over the rail, and smiled for the camera. 

I sent the photo to an expert photo restoration artist and asked her to give it all she’s got. A day later she emailed me back this:Ruthy_Merica_c.1930

The thick brunette hair and something about that barely-visible face told me this might be the one and only photo that exists of my mother as a child, this half-lit figure peering over the porch railing, crowding into a photo that isn’t supposed to be of her. She looks about nine or ten. The camera is oblivious of her, but she’s smiling for the photographer like the beauty queen she would later be. I’d recognize that alabaster skin anywhere. Her mother made her carry a sun parasol whenever she was out in the sun. And her gorgeous hair. She wore it shoulder length into her early 50s, and it always fell across her forehead in cascades of soft waves. She told me about those slippers too. Her father bought them for her before a church recital, and she loved the dainty little things. So different from the lace-up boots with thick stockings that she wore all winter. I don’t know anything about that old dress, except that the last duty for any bit of clothing, before being torn up for rags and rag rugs, was for wearing to do work like cleaning and gardening. 

This is the one picture to the thousands of words in the stories my mother has told me. The tomatoes and the plums and the bossy sister and the pretty slippers and the seed sack dresses and happy summers. It gives evidence to more than the stories too: To my experience of her smile and her soft hair and her impish humor. I am now the proud owner of exactly one photograph of my mother’s childhood. But that’s all I need, just the one.

 

Born to Run

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I have lots of photos of my father’s mother. Portraits of her as a child. Portraits of her as a young woman. Portraits of her with her twin babies. Then snapshots of her with family, with friends over the years. A full chronology of my grandmother’s life.

But I can count the photos of my grandfather on one hand and still have a finger left over. He wasn’t camera shy. He just didn’t stop for the camera. In the first photo he is a boy of ten. It’s 1890 and he is with his family before their very large Ohio farmhouse (I count nine windows and four doors on just the two sides I can see). It looks to be late winter and this yard is no doubt beautiful in summer with its overhang of leafy trees and long views, but here it is a mess of mud and melting snow, a hazard for the ruffled skirts and high heel boots of his sisters. Grandaddy is in knee-high leather boots and holding the harnesses of two yearling calves, an odd prop for a family photo, and amusing given the formality of the other family members. He looks like he was just passing through and the photo’s subjects stepped aside to make way for him, he stopping for a moment before moving on. He was always headstrong, so more likely he insisted on including two calves he was raising himself. John H. Berryman Family 1890The next photo is a good 20 years later. My grandparents lived in a big two-story Colonial on Glen Road in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey. Granddaddy commuted across the George Washington Bridge and into Manhattan each day. In the photo his suit coat is off and tie is loosened. He is holding his baby boy in the air, gazing at him as if in sheer wonder. Or perhaps sheer fear, because these new twin boys were conceived bittersweetly three years after my grandparents’ darling daughters, one six and one six months, died of then-incurable disease, my grandmother deciding she would never again have children. Her own father had to intervene to persuade her that she could love other children, but that’s another story for another time. Granddaddy waited patiently, as was really his only choice, and now I have this photo of him cautiously holding this precious bundle of baby that was my father. Or uncle. I can’t tell.RF Berryman and Baby Ted BerrymanSometime during their Woodcliff Lake period he decided to invent a better kind of running shoe. He had been a track star at Oberlin College and held the “Big Six” record for the fastest two mile. Only fragments of the running shoe story remain. The soles were made from tires, or tire rubber. To prove their superiority he ran in them from Woodcliff Lake to Passaic (20 miles) or Lima, Ohio (625 miles), I forget which. That’s all I know. There is no photo commemorating his accomplishment. In fact, I have no other photo of him until about 40 years later.

Peg and Bob Berryman, Elizabeth and Waldo Berryman, r to lIn that photo he is an elder in his 80s, standing next to his brother and behind my grandmother who finally, after a life more nomadic and in all ways unsettled than she ever wanted, was sitting in the lap of luxury at her Leucadia, California home, the gleaming Pacific to one side and an endless panorama of rolling hills to the other. Granddaddy lived in that lap of luxury too, but it was luxury he did not want and did not take to with ease. The febility of old age frustrated his need to put one foot in front of the other toward some fanciful goal.

As a boy Granddaddy was a prodigy. I have it on numerous family authorities that he flew through high school in one year and graduated from Oberlin College in two years. He was  fluent in English, Spanish, French, Greek, Latin and Portuguese. As a recent graduate he accepted a one-year position to teach school in the Philippine Islands, where he became fluent in Tagalog. On coming back he went to work for a Wall Street Bank as an interpreter. A few years later he moved his family onto a commune called The School of Living in Suffern, New York, founded by the noted utopian, Ralph Borsodi. After a few years of that he scouted the Land of California, writing home that it was “a magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude.” That impressed the family, and as soon as my dad was home from WWII, off they went.

They weren’t following history, though. California’s greatest population booms followed the Great Depression and World War II. In the 1930s thousands of Americans, left destitute by the double whammy of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, went west in search of work. By that time my grandfather’s brother, Waldo Berryman was already moving his growing auto aftermarket company from Ohio to Palo Alto. He eventually moved it to Encinitas, California, though I don’t know if that was before or after my branch of the family moved there.

After WWII thousands more Americans moved to California after GIs had passed through there on their way to the Pacific Theater. They came home, grabbed their wives or sweethearts, and headed for the promised land of sunshine and opportunity. By the time my father was home from war the family’s bags were packed, furniture all shipped, and car gassed up and ready to head west and join Granddaddy in the Berryman family’s new-found home upon that “magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude.”

In the last photo I have of my Grandaddy he is an old man walking, stooped and gnarled by Parkinson’s, but still, as he always was, moving forward and deep in thought.

I recently went hunting for photos of him online. Surely, with all he had done, there were photos of him in some college yearbook, newspaper, or historical archive. I know he was a track star in college, so I Googled “Robert Fulton Berryman” and “two mile,” his specialty.

Nothing.

I tried the search again with “R. F. Berryman” and bingo, I landed on the Oberlin College yearbook of 1905. (Thank you www.archive.org – you always come through!) I found the yearbook photo of the Oberlin track team. But…argh! The team members were not named in order of the photo. There was no, “Named, left to right.” In fact, there were more young men in the photo than names to the side. This wasn’t going to be easy. After studying each face, looking for my grandfather’s unmistakable upside-down pear shaped head, I settled on just one possibility. He had to be the confident looking young man sitting in the bottom row, second from right. Technically he’s seated in the second row, I suppose, but also technically his is the second head from bottom right.

R.F. Berryman Oberlin 1903 team

I still don’t know for sure if this is Robert Fulton Berryman, Oberlin Class of 1905. But I’m going to believe it is. Because he was almost certainly in the track team photo and no one else is a close match. Because the head shape, ears, and eyes match the photo I have from 1960. And because the only photos I have of this man I loved so dearly are blurred, dark, or from his back or side.

R.F. Berryman 1903 and 1960I take this from these few scattered facts or semi-facts: Robert Fulton Berryman always ran towards, never from. The whole world was that magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude. He raced through college and then ran (not literally, I must point out) to the Philippines to see the aftermath of the Spanish American War. He got an inheritance and so ran to Oklahoma to start a sheep ranch (fine occupation for an academic prodigy!). He ran from Wall Street to a commune, and from there to California. Whether he got comfortable in California and so decided not to explore further lands I don’t know. I do know that as I age, changing my life gets harder. I would like to move someplace completely different than coastal Southern California, but so many ties tether me here. After a while in one place it gets like that. But that’s another story for another time.

Grandaddy didn’t have time for cameras. But he had time for me. No camera can capture that.

Ladies Who Lunch: Costume Edition

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Nine kindly little ladies on a lovely outing.

That’s what I thought. Nine friends on a festive picnic, away from family duties for a few short hours of girlish giggles and shared secrets. They hiked their dresses and pulled each other up the sandy bluff like a chain of pink roses, never minding their scuffed shoes and wrinkled skirts because those are a small price to pay for the rare bliss of unencumbered time with old friends.

I’m sure some of that is true in spirit if not in fact. But look once more at the photo. What seems at glance to be a simple picnic turns far more curious at closer inspection. The photo was taken in Bainbridge, Ohio in 1920. But alert readers will note the ladies aren’t looking very 1920s, roaring or otherwise. Can these women be so fashion-challenged that they’re wearing 30-or-so year old styles? And who among them is the same size as she was 30 years ago? Even if they didn’t gain weight, some settling of contents does occur. Or are they so strapped to the old ways that they refused to change with the times? And why is the black-clad woman at far left brandishing a rolling pin?

Their clothes are some kind of mashup of Edwardian and late Victorian. The high collared shirts and bell-shaped skirts could be 1890s or 1900s, though the length tells me 1890s. The puffy sleeves are definitely 1890s. I don’t know what era the rolling pin or picnic baskets are from; they aren’t much different from ones I have. The cook’s apron, though, is definitely 1920s. I know at least one of these women is college-educated and a member of a prominent local family. The pretty little lady with the picnic basket, third from right, is Clara Brown Eggleston, my great-great grandmother. She was the wife of a distinguished doctor of both medicine and theology, who himself was the son of a college educated clergyman and businessman who lived in one of Chagrin Falls’ largest mansions. They were down-to-earth Emersonians and G-Grandmother Eggleston at least was far from pretentious. She spent a good deal of her time filling her basket with food and delivering it to the needy. But why would she do it dressed like Little Red Riding Hood, as she seems to be here?

I want answers! But lacking any, I sent the photo to fashion history expert Pauline Thomas, who believes the women are dressed in simple costumes of earlier eras for some sort of fair or anniversary event. That’s what I kind of figured. Since all their get-ups can be generally classed as Victorian or Edwardian, and the photo was taken in 1920, I can only surmise that they’re either on a costume picnic or cast members of a bring-your-own costume play. G-g’ma Eggleston does look like an elderly Red Riding Hood. And the black-clad school marm at left looks like she’s about to beat the dickens out of whatever miscreant is behind the camera.

I’ll never know what they were up to that day, but it’s comforting to see my g-g’ma looked like a sweet and kind lady, ready with brimming basket to dusty her shoes and skirt walking Bainbridge’s still-dirt side roads to share her blessed bounty with those in need of her – and her food’s – nourishment.

As for the costume picnic vs. play – I’m loving the idea of a costume picnic. Anyone want to join me?