Saturday's Old Photo

Monday is oldest son's birthday, so shouldn't today's old photo be one of him? This picture was taken sometime in the spring after he turned two.

He'd been crying before this photo was taken. Can you see the glisten of tears in his eyes? He hadn't wanted to sit by himself away from the rest of his family. As long as he was close to his sister or a parent, he was a sedate child who didn't require a lot of attention, but he did not do well off by himself until he was older.

He was a watcher first, and then a doer. No trial and error learning for this boy. He did a lot of sitting and watching older children play—he was not the sort of toddler who required chasing—and then one day he'd get up and do whatever it was he'd been watching the older kids do. When he was eighteen months old, he hopped on his older sister's trike for the first time and pedaled off slowly, which was his normal speed for everything, but without any struggle to coordinate the pedaling.

He was never one to flit from one activity to another. The summer he was four, his goal was to catch a grasshopper. For hours at a time, for days that turned into weeks, he sneaked around the greenbelt behind our home, crouched over Hamburgler style, cupped hands turned downward and outstretched, stalking the elusive locust. He never did catch one, but t*The pursuit kept him busy for almost the whole summer.

He turns 28 on Monday. He still can hyperfocus when he decides he wants to accomplish something, but thankfully, his goals have changed over the years.

*Update: I've been corrected by the locust chaser himself, who says, "I'm pretty sure I caught some." If he did, he didn't show them to me.

Saturday's Old Photo

This is a photo of my father at his home in Tribune, Kansas, when he was a baby. My mother's notes on the back say he was eight months old and the year was 1927. Yes, that's a dress he has on. Back then, in the days of cloth diapers and no plastic pants, little boys wore dresses until they were potty trained.

I have a white baby dress worn by my father hanging up in my bedroom. I don't think it's this dress, because the sleeves seem different on this one.

That looks like a little mission style (or arts and crafts) rocker he's sitting in. If you know about old furniture, you're welcome to correct me. And someone else will have to tell us about the car in the background, too. Furniture and automobile experts are welcome to click on the photo for closer inspection.

I love that my dad is more interested in whatever it is he is holding in his hand than he is in the person holding the camera. Do you suppose they were trying to get him to look up and he was ignoring them?

Within a few months of this photo, my dad's father died after his appendix ruptured, leaving my grandmother a very young widow with two sons, aged 3 and 1. There's more to that story, but I'll save that for another day with another photo.

Saturday's Old Photo

I was going to use another photo, thinking there'd been enough of them featuring me, me, me. But hey! Tomorrow's my birthday, and the word's already out, so if ever there was an appropriate time for one more photo of me as a child, this was it.

I'm guessing I'm four in this photo and that would make the year 1959. The house in the background is the ranch hand's home on my uncle's ranch, the P Lazy P, in Gannet, Idaho. We lived there while my dad helped my uncle with the ranch work and my mother cooked for the crew in the big kitchen of the beautiful log ranch house my uncle built by himself.

I amused myself outdoors while my mother worked indoors. There were always animals around--dogs, kittens, chickens--and people working. Sometimes I helped collect eggs, and sometimes I hung on the outside of the corral and watched the horse training or the calf branding. Another thing that fascinated me was the artesian well right outside the fenced-in yard, which gushed water from a 4 inch pipe and made a little stream that ran out into the field.

My family continued to go to the ranch in the summer whenever we could. My dad had been a cowboy, so he loved being there during round up, and my mother loved visiting all her relatives who lived nearby. The ranch was only twenty miles from the Sun Valley ski area, and eventually the area became a place for the rich and famous to have a vacation home. It became more and more difficult to keep cattle on the open range, so my uncle sold the ranch to someone with Hollywood connections and he moved further west to the Wallowa area of Oregon.

Saturday's Old Photo

It's cold out, so this picture seemed appropriate for today's old photo. My sister and I are showing off our brand new parkas in this family picture. We'd just moved to Minnesota that fall, and the coats we'd used back in Illinois weren't appropriate for the colder northern winters, so we'd gone with my mother to J. C. Penney's to buy us each a parka.

These are what we picked out. If I were writing this unprompted by my mother's notes on the back of the photo, I'd tell you that the coats were a lovely shade of blue, and then I'd pat myself on the back for my accurate, detailed memory of my childhood. However, my mother's notes say they were red, and you can trust her on that. That is, I guess, a little warning to us all that while I'm always certain that what I write in these little pieces is factual, I can get my facts wrong.

I remember loving the fuzzy feel of these parkas. I wore mine for a couple of years before I outgrew it, and then my poor sister got my hand-me-down, so she wore the same parka, just different sizes, for four years.

When we moved to Minnesota, we lived in the parsonage at Northern Bible Chapel. The pastor of the church owned his own home, so my dad and mom cleaned the church in exchange for a deal on renting the parsonage. On our first Christmas there, which would have come a month or so after this picture was taken, Mr. Klein, an elderly man from the church who didn't get out much because he couldn't leave his sick wife for long, knocked on the door and delivered a package for each of us girls. He'd bought us little white zippered Bibles—the very first Bibles we owned.

Saturday's Old Photo

When oldest son was in grade 8, he flew with his dad to Togiak, Alaska, a fly-in village in southwest Alaska, to see his dad's best friend from his school days back in Crosby, Minnesota. Steve, the friend, lived near Togiak with his family for a few years, teaching in a couple of schools around that area.

Togiak has excellent fishing, and here they are with a couple of salmon. When it came to catching halibut, dad was the king, but that's a story for another day. You can see who caught the biggest salmon!

Oldest son was in the process of growing his hair long. He grew it until it reached the middle of his back and wore it that way for a few years. At this stage, however, it was just long enough to curl up underneath his cap, and it was, as you can see, quite blond.

On the flight to Togiak, oldest son and his dad were the only passengers on the plane. On the way there, the plane made it's regular supply stop in a tiny village. Every time the plane came, it was customary for most of the people in the village to come out to meet it. It was, I'm told, the big event of the week. Not only was it exciting to get the stuff the plane dropped off, but the pilot had a light complexion, and the villagers, being used to darker people, found him particularly interesting.

But this time, instead of just a little giggling, they were laughing out loud and pointing at the plane. All of them. The pilot turned around and looked at oldest son. "Buddy," he said, "they've never seen anything like you!"

Sort of related church history note: The church Steve and his family attended in Togiak was Moravian. The Moravians, who were descendents of Jon Hus, a pre-reformation reformer and martyr, were early missionaries in these remote regions of Alaska. In many of the villages of the Yukon-Kuskokwim region of Alaska, the only church is a Moravian one.

Saturday's Old Photo

This is my mother and father on their wedding day in June of 1954. They met doing summer mission work among the Navajo of Utah, and were married in my mother's sister's backyard in Salt Lake City. At the left of the photo are my dad's parents, Robert and Mary Vogt; and on the right is my mother's mother, Rosa Deckard. I'm not sure why my mother's father is not there. Perhaps he didn't attend the wedding. The most unusual thing about my parents was that my mother was 32 when she married, and six years older than my dad, which is not the way it usually went.

Saturday's Old Photo

With Valentine's Day coming, I'm posting this picture of my husband and me, taken about four months after we started dating. I'm sure by this time I knew that we'd get married, but I wouldn't have admitted it to you. I was only 18, after all, and just starting my first year of Bible school.

He was 23 and ready to settle down. Besides, he'd asked God to send him someone, and the next day I'd started work at the truck stop where he was working. He thought I was cute, then he found out I was a pastor's daughter, and that was all the confirmation he needed. He was wise not to tell me these things until much later because I'd have sent him packing.

As it turns out, I married him because he was a worthy Scrabble opponent. When you meet your match at Scrabble, it would be foolish to let him go.

We played blood Scrabble, no mercy. His talent was using all seven of his letters in one turn on a triple word score. He once did that 3 times in a row and robbed me of a game that was rightfully mine. My strongest suit was making up words, then convincing him they were real words by making up bogus yet plausible sounding definitions.

That last winter we played 22 games and each won 11. That is the winter I learned that sometimes you must let your perfect Scrabble match go.

Saturday's Old Photo

I'm playing dress up in this photo, and I'm six. My family lived in Wheaton, IL when this picture was taken, but this is a different house than the one on Liberty Street featured a couple of weeks ago. This is the house on Union Street, just a couple of blocks west of the Wheaton College campus. If the campus has expanded since then, this house may not be there any more.

This home was the furlough home of John and Eileen Kuhn–a little bungalow, not quite craftsman style, but craftsmanlike. We only lived there for half a year, moving during the summer to the Liberty Street house because Mr. and Mrs. Kuhn, who were missionaries in Singapore, were coming home on furlough.

John Kuhn had a more well-known wife named Isobel, but Isobel died of cancer in 1957, and Eileen was his second wife. Isobel and John had been missionaries, too, first in China and then in Thailand. Isobel wrote several books telling of her experiences, so people in conservative Christian circles knew Isobel. Not long ago I found a paperback biography of Isobel in the Salvation Army Thrift Store here in town, and that makes me think she continues to be a fairly well-known Christian missionary of the past.

Eileen Kuhn and my mother became friends, and in the office upstairs there is a little wooden box with an elephant carved on the lid that Eileen gave my mother. Eileen lived, I think, in the shadow of Isobel, but it didn't seem that she minded.

Only a couple of years after my family left Wheaton, John Kuhn died. As Eileen considered her future as a widow, the story is that she told God "throw me to the lions but don't make me work with youth!" So where did she go? She went to Singapore to spend the next 25 years teaching at the Singapore Bible College, eventually becoming dean. That means, I suppose, that God chose not to throw her to the lions.

Saturday's Old Photo

I have a couple of winter photos in my old photo collection and January seems a good time for one of those. This photo is of a sliding party we had in the winter of 1962 in the front yard of our home in Liberty Drive in Wheaton, Illinois. We are using old pieces of cardboard instead of toboggans or sleds, and the hill doesn't look very big, does it? I do remember how much fun it was, and that it was my first time sledding. Later on, after we moved to Minnesota, sledding on real sleds down big hills would become part of my regular winter time experience--and I have the barbed wire scars down my back to prove it--but at this time, this tame little hill was exciting enough.

Who are the children? There's my sister and me for certain, and probably the two Mainprize girls. The two other children may be the two Mainprize brothers, and if they're not, I'm out of guesses. The blond head on the right, standing at the top, is probably me.

We lived in that house for about a year while my dad was a student at Wheaton. It was a lovely house, roomy and bright with a big fireplace, but it was scheduled for demolition so the rent was cheap enough for us. Our block was right next to the jail, and the county had purchased the block we lived on with plans for it to be the new jailhouse parking lot. Our house and the one you see next to it were the only houses on the whole block. The rest of the block was divided into plots for the community garden, and during the growing season, there were often women with children there, hoeing or weeding or picking vegies.

I was in first grade when I lived there, and I walked 7 or 8 blocks down the street to school. The wife of another student at Wheaton, a former elementary school teacher, had taken an interest in me, and she offered to take me out to a restaurant for dessert if I read 100 books. Going out to eat was not in my family's budget, so that promise was big incentive for me, and I read the 100 books in short order and collected my reward.

This is also the place where I got my first bike. I did a lot of riding up and down the sidewalk in front of this house. The large back yard was also a good place to catch fireflies.

However, when I think of this house, the first thing I remember are the trains. Our back yard butted right up to the railroad tracks that run through Wheaton. Trains to and from Chicago were coming and going day and night, and twice during the short time we lived there, someone was killed on the tracks behind our home. Once it was a suicide, and the other time it was an old woman whose pull cart with groceries had become stuck on the track while she was crossing.

Saturday's Old Photo

I'm sure I don't need to tell you who this little person is, but I will anyway. This is me when I was around 18 months old. This photo was taken by a photographer for the yearbook at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee. My dad was a student there (Do you remember the back story to his student years at Bryan?), and this picture was for the photo spread on Trailerville, the married student housing at that time. I'm not certain this one made it into the yearbook. There is one of me that did, but I don't remember seeing this picture there.

The married students attending Bryan back in the 1950s lived in little trailers in what was known as Trailerville; and Trailerville was my home for the first two years of my life. Most of the trailers would have been the size of our travel trailers, and none of them had bathrooms. Instead, there was a communal shower house and a communal laundry. There was no air conditioning, either, and the trailers became like ovens in the heat, so the families who lived there, particularly the women and children, spent much of the time outdoors where it was cooler, chatting and watching the children play.

You'll notice I'm playing with a slinky, which I suppose was the latest thing back then. That I have a slinkly rather than a stuffed animal tells you a bit about what kind of toys I liked. You could go through all my old family photos and you'd not find a single one of me with a doll. I did have a doll--one with outfits my grandma and mother made for her--but she wasn't played with much. I tried to play with her, but after a few minutes I'd begin to wonder what the point was. I preferred cars and trucks and building blocks--things you could use to do something or make something.

When I was in junior high I mentioned to my parents that I remembered how much I'd loved playing my toy 7-up truck--the one with the little pop crates that could be loaded in the back.

"Seven-up truck?" they said. "You didn't have a 7-up truck." It turns out that my first toy memory is of a toy that wasn't mine at all, but belonged to a neighbor boy we lived next to for six weeks when I was two.

The favorite toy that I did own (and I guess it wasn't really a toy) was the red wooden recurve bow I got when I was ten. I spent many afternoons roaming the northwoods with the neighbor boy shooting arrows at things that moved. I suppose most present day parents think anyone who would let their ten-year-old out to roam with a potentially dangerous weapon was negligent, but back then, that sort of unsupervision was standard. My friend and I created our own adventures, had some disagreements, got into a few minor scrapes, and learned how to cooperate to make things right again. Problem solving at its best, don't you think?

Saturday's Old Photo

This is an old photo of my mother's father with his family. My grandpa, Ira Deckard, is on the far right, next to his mother, Mary Hepsibeth Deckard (she went by Hepsibeth, if you can believe it) and then his father, John Wesley Deckard. The rest of the group are my grandpa's sisters and brother: Virgie and George in the front, with Effie, Ethel and Rosie in the back. I'm guessing, by the age my grandpa looks, that this photo was taken sometime in the 1930s. The family is standing in front of my great-grandparent's home in rural Missouri. My grandpa, Ira Deckard, married my grandma, Rosa Jane Mackie (who was featured in a previous Saturday's old photo), and they moved to rural Idaho in hopes of improving their circumstances.

This family is from pioneer stock. They are descendants of Davey Crockett's sister, and the previous generations of this family moved from Tennessee to Indiana, to Missouri and then to Idaho, always looking for a better life. Reading the names in the geneology from that side of the family is a little like reading a history book. There are Benjamin Franklin Deckards, George Washington Deckards, Thomas Jefferson Deckards and Samuel Adams Deckards. I assume my grandpa was named, in the same tradition, after the historical John Wesley of the first Great Awakening.

The geneology also shows that those pioneer couples from whom I descended were often officially married after they already had several children, and then several couples would be married all at once on the same date. I'm thinking that there was probably no church and no minister where they settled, and they would officially marry whenever it was that a travelling minister came through.

While they may be of pioneer stock, don't mistake them for "Little House on the Prairie." This was a family that was full of extremely talented and hardworking people, but alongside those good qualities there were also some dark secrets, some emotional difficulties, a little mental illness, and many very short fuses. I suspect part of their pioneer spirit was a general discontentedness with life and the inability to fit into the society around them as it became more organized. And maybe the desire to keep some ugly secrets secret.

Click on the photo for a larger view.

Update: Information from Ken Melvin: The year is more likely 1946 or 47, and the one identified as Effie is probably Lena. John Wesley and Hepsibeth went by Bud and Hep.

Saturday's Old Photo

Over the Christmas holidays, oldest daughter visited us from Vancouver for the first time in a year and a half, although we've made trips out to see her. Last Thursday, the day she left, was her thirtieth birthday.

In this old photo, she is two years old. The photo is taken in the early spring, after the snow melted, but before the leaves sprouted. The road, I think, is the road to Carcross. That road is a lovely paved road now, but it used to be gravel most of the way, and more narrow and windy, so back then, even a trip to Carcross was a bit of an adventure.

We used to go to Carcross regularly to have ice cream in the Caribou Hotel and see the parrots in the lobby. The famous parrot, Polly, had died by then, but the hotel owner had replaced Polly with several other parrots. None of them had Polly's ability to speak--perhaps a good thing, since Polly, I'm told, had a rather shocking sailor sort of vocabulary--so we had to be satisfied with a lot of very loud screeching.

But enough of Carcross, and Polly and the Caribou Hotel*, and more of oldest daughter. She's sitting still in that photo, but that's not how she usually was. Or is. She's a whirlwind of activity, except when she's reading. Always has been, and probably always will be.

As a side line to her regular job, she designs, sews, and sells clothing. She also developed her own selective bleaching process to decorate the things she makes or ready made items. She sewed and bleached up a storm while she was here, making Christmas gifts for everyone she knows. Thankfully, she's better at cleaning up her messes than she used to be (and better at taking the precautions to protect everything around her work space), but while she's deep in the creative process, there is extreme chaos.

She also loves to cook, and often made the supper meal for us. And yes, she makes chaos in the kitchen, too, but her food is so tasty that I don't mind, even if I'm the one who has to clean up.

She couldn't believe she was turning thirty, and I can't believe I have a thirty year old daughter, but I do. I wish she lived closer so she could visit more often, but she's a city girl at heart--a doer, not a contemplator, and she needs the activity of the city.

*Although they all have very interesting histories, including a sinking ship and a gruesome murder. You'll find little snippets of those stories in the linked article.

Saturday's Old Photo

This is a photo of youngest son with his dad. Next Thursday, that babe in arms turns seventeen. At the time of this photo, he was around seven months old, and though he's probably perfectly average in size, he'd be the smallest of my babies by a long shot. Now he's the tallest person in the family and still growing.

He's grown to be the sort of young man his dad would be proud of. He shares his father's wiry athleticism and team-playing attitude. He expects a lot of himself, he's thankful for everything that others do for him, and he's not afraid to express his thanks. Not to mention that he's trustworthy. If I gave too many details, he's be embarrassed--actually, I've probably already embarrassed him--so I'll leave it at that.

Even in this baby photo, you can see how much he looks like his dad. He still does. Check it out for yourself in the photo below, taken last spring.

Saturday's Old Photo

I promised no more picture of my sister and me for a while, and today, I'm going back on that promise. The point of this photo, however, is not to show you my sister or me, but our horse, and unfortunately, the best photo with our horse in it has the whole family in it with him.

That's my dad on Zero. The corn in the background is growing in our garden behind the parsonage (where my family lived) at Northern Bible Chapel in the little community of Northern, which was 4 miles north of Bemidji, Minnesota. (You saw another photo of my sister and me at Northern a couple of weeks ago.)

We kept our horse corraled or staked on the church property. His job was to keep the grass on the softball field short. At this point, my sister and I didn't ride him much on our own, since he was still a little unpredictable, needing my father's firmer hand to keep him under control. Eventually we got bigger and he got easier to control, and then it was often our chore to exercise him.

My father bought our horse as a mostly unbroken 4-year-old from a man named Tom Duvall. My dad had been searching for a while for a horse to buy. (Horses had once been his passion--he'd been a cowboy, remember--and he thought he missed them; although when he'd had one for a while, I think he realized that his interest in them had waned from what it was.) We had little money, and my dad wanted a quality horse. Minnesota wasn't ranch country, and the horses for sale weren't worth owning, he thought, until he saw Tom Duvall's ad in the paper.

We went to see the horse for sale, and here, finally, was a horse that satisfied my dad quality-wise--a palomino gelding quarter horse--and the price was right, too--$125 dollars, which was something we could swing. I remember that Tom Duvall, who owned the horse (or so he said), talked a lot and pushed for a quick deal. My dad was not one who could be rushed into making a decision, so he took a couple of days, thought things over carefully, and decided this was the horse and the deal for him. My dad paid Tom Duvall, and Zero came home with us.

My dad worked with his horse daily, training him to walk, trot, gallop, stop and turn to voice commands. We'd had him for several months when a man stopped by and introduced himself as Harold Clemenson, a teacher at the local high school. He'd owned a horse, he said, that he'd boarded with a man named Tom Duvall while he was gone on vacation. When he returned from his trip, both Tom and the horse were gone, Tom leaving a trial of unpaid bills and shady dealings behind him. Mr. Clemenson had searched for Tom Duvall, but had eventually given up and resigned himself to the loss of his horse, until that day when he drove by our house and recognized the palomino staked out on the church softball field.

That night, at our kitchen table, Harold Clemenson and my dad made a gentlemen's agreement. Mr. Clemenson could have just taken the horse--Tom Duvall had no right to sell it, and the horse still rightfully belonged to him--but I suppose he recognized that the horse was worth more trained as it was than it had been when he'd had it boarded, and he was not the sort of man to let good work go unrewarded. So that night, Mr. Clemenson and my dad decided to split their losses. My dad paid Mr. Clemenson $62.50, and they signed a bill of sale for the horse. Zero stayed with us and that was that.

Saturday's Old Photo

I promise that after this, I'll give you a break from pictures of my childhood. This photo features, once again, my sister and me. My sister is the one hiding right behind the tire swing. In last weeks' photo, I was probably ten or so, and she was seven or eight. In this one, I'd say I'm 14 and, since it looks like it's fall, she's probably just turned 12.

I'm holding my cat Rusty, who'd been hit by a car and lived to tell about it, but as a result, one leg was grotesquely mangled. Perhaps it could have been set properly if he'd seen a vet right away, but he didn't come home until two weeks after his accident. We'd been told of the incident by the woman who hit him. She was pretty sure she'd killed him, and since we couldn't find him anywhere, we assumed he was dead. Then one day, a couple of weeks later, Rusty showed up at home dangling one leg. He managed well on his three good ones, and I loved him all the same, so he spent the rest of his cat years quite happily.

The tree we're standing by was my favorite tree--a huge willow that was perfect for a tire swing and perfect for climbing. I climbed it quite regularly, up as far as the branches would hold my weight, which was high enough that if it were my kid up there, I'd be having a heart attack. I continued to climb it until I was sixteen or so, and then climbed it once later after I was grown just to prove to my future husband that I still could.

But this post is really about the location of the picture. This building next to the tree is Solway Log Chapel in Solway, Minnesota (now called Solway Bible Chapel, and no longer sided with logs), where my father was pastor from the time I was twelve until I graduated from high school. The house you see in the background is the parsonage where we lived. So in this series of photos, you've seen my sister and I together by three different churches, and in each case, we lived in the parsonage next door. Ours was the typical life of the small church pastor's children back in the sixties and seventies, playing all around (but never in!) our church. We knew pretty much everything that went on in the church, not because anyone blabbed to us, but because we lived right next door. Unless we were sick, we were at whatever services were appropriate for us because we lived right next door.

Saturday's Old Photo

This photo continues the theme of last week's old photo. It's another glimpse into my childhood. This one is of my sister and me with two of our friends. Can you guess what we're doing?

We're playing wedding with our dress up clothes. My sister and I didn't have many toys, but we did have a collection of dress up clothes that was the envy of all our friends. My mother had access to a "missionary barrel", which had a never ending supply of interesting items for dress up, and she had a real eye for seeing the possibilities in the clothes found there.

The groom in the wedding is me. I'm wearing a cape made from half of an old black quilted circular skirt. The bride is my sister, wearing a made-over white woman's dress and a curtain panel veil. The bridesmaid is my friend Colleen Emery, and she's dressed in a light blue woman's dress remade to fit a young girl. The little girl peeking out from behind me is Dawn Weinert, who was a few years younger than the rest of us. She did not want to dress up that day--I think the whole idea made her uncomfortable--but she wanted to be in the picture.

(The circular skirt morphed into a cape is a something that my mother repeated again and again. One Christmas she gave my oldest daughter a cape made from a very brightly coloured quilted circular skirt, and oldest son's gift was a cape made from a grey wool flannel circular skirt. Oldest daughter put hers on, stood on the coffee table, announced, "I'm a butterfly!" and took a flying leap. Oldest son, not to be outdone, stood on the coffee table wearing his cape and announced, "I'm a moth!")

And what ties today's photo together with the photo from last week? See that sidewalk we're standing on? That's the sidewalk of Northern Bible Church, which is 4 miles north of Bemidji, Minnesota. We're playing on the sidewalk because we lived next door in the parsonage. The church is still there, but the parsonage isn't.

Saturday's Old Photo

Yes, I know this isn't a very good picture, but I'm using it for a reason. It's the first in a series of three pictures that I plan to post, all of of me with my sister over the years of our childhood. They all sharing a common element--and no, it isn't trikes!--that will tell you something about the sort of childhood we had.

In this one we're tricycling together on the sidewalk of the Presbyterian Church in Belleview, Idaho. (This church, by the way, is mentioned in my very first blog post.) My sister is the one with the smaller trike. She's two and a half years younger than I am, and since we left Belleview when I was 5 years old, she can be no older than three.

We lived in the parsonage next door because my father was pastoring this church. Yes, he was an ordained Baptist minister, but Presbyterian pastors, it would seem, were hard to come by in rural Idaho. In fact, pastors of any sort were hard to come by, and my father preached regularly in another church in Carey, Idaho, a little town 2o miles or so away.

I remember him preaching during the evening in Ketchum, too, but perhaps that was only a one time event and not one of his regular duties. I do remember accompanying him once when he went there, while my mother stayed home with my sister, who was too young for such a late evening. I sat in the front pew by myself while my father led the service. I had a coin for the offering, and at some point I dropped it and it rolled clear across the front of the church; so I tiptoed after it, picked it up when it stopped rolling, and tiptoed back to my seat. I probably wouldn't even remember this incident, except that it pleased my father a great deal that I had proven that I was old enough and well-behaved enough to be counted on to conduct myself properly when left alone in a service.

After we left, this little church in Belleview was eventually supplied with two single women missionaries from Village Missions to run it. Oddly, when I looked up the requirements for pastors/missionaries at the Village Missions site, it looks as if, now, a pastor/missionary must be male, but apparently that wasn't the case back then.

Saturday's Old Photo

In this week's old photo we have my grandma--my mother's mother--with her sister-in-law, showing the catch from their latest fishing trip. I can't tell what fish those are; some may be salmon, since there were Pacific salmon in the rivers around where she lived in southern Idaho.

My grandma's name is Rosa Mackie Deckard, and her sister-in-law is Beatrice Mackie, who was married to my grandma's brother Hollace. The home would be Beatrice and Hollace's. My grandma's home was not nearly so nice.

My grandma had a difficult life. She moved, when she was only nineteen, from Missouri to Idaho with her new husband in order to make a better life for them there. I wouldn't say she got the better life. She had very little, managing to raise eight children on almost no income while living with an alcoholic husband who was not a good provider and a very nasty when he was drunk. And when she left her family behind, she really left them behind. Trips back to Missouri were not in her budget, and she only made a couple of them over her whole life. Of course, she had her brother Hollace and his family, who lived in the same small town in Idaho.

She was a strong woman and a hard worker, and a lonely woman, I think, after her children left and her husband died. My family lived in a little town 5 miles south of her for a couple of years, and I remember several times when Grandma Deckard came over for an afternoon visit and then just stayed for several days. Then she'd wake up one morning and announce over breakfast that she thought she really ought to go home.

It looks like she had a good time on her fishing trip, and I'm glad for that. I love the overalls, and the bandanas tied round the heads of both women.

Saturday's Old Photo

I am declaring--I love declaring things; have you noticed?--that every Saturday is Old Photo Day on this blog. (I love old photos, too; you may have noticed that, as well). Oldest son has been busy scanning and cleaning up some old photos and I might as well make use of them. A nice bonus to this plan is that I'll be able to post something even when I have a busy Saturday, as I often do.

Usually, I'll tell you something about the photo--maybe even a little story about it--but with today's photo, I'm letting you tell me. Put on your detective hat, get out your magnifying glass (Efficient folk will just click for the larger view.) and figure this mystery out.

Where was this photo it taken?

When was this photo taken?

Who is this person?

What is this person doing?

Update: Some of the questions have been answered. The person is me, the time is the summer of 1967 or some year thereabouts. (Check the comments to find out who guessed these things correctly.) No one has pinpointed where the photo was taken or what I was doing. The key is the where of the photo. Once the where is known, the what becomes obvious. I'm not asking the impossible, by the way. Someone will know this place, I'm sure. In fact, if some of the people who have already guessed would pull their thinking caps down a little farther, they would probably come up with the right place.

Update 2: Time for two hints:

1. If you googled for images of this location, you'd get pages and pages of photos of people doing exactly the same thing I am in this photo.
2. The person who gathered the main source material for Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha was at this spot in 1832.
   

Update 3: Jeremy Pierce correctly identified the place as the source of the Mississippi River. That's the spot where the the stream that becomes the river flows out of Lake Itaska in Itaska State Park. The person credited with discovering where the Mississippi starts is Henry Schoolcraft in 1832.

Almost everyone who visits here walks across, either on the rocks or wading through the water, just so they can say they walked across the Mississippi River.