themightyten.com Blog

For most of us that don’t know, we have a cousin in Las Vegas Nevada. He is 61 years old today. When I was growing up we called him Jaybird. He called me Butch. We still use those nicknames and that is a beautiful thing. I know many of you don’t know him but he remembers you. Actually check out this other old blog post is a photo of him and our aunt Gerry. Gerry was our fathers sister and they actually have a brother that is in California. So this is just a simple request to keep Uncle Billy and our cousin Jaybird in your thoughts and prayers.

If there is an empty space in my life I usually try to take a vitamin D or sit out in the sun for an hour and I usually feel better. I’ve practiced, sometimes successfully Transcontinental Meditation but found that I need the perfect space, time and silence for it to work. If that doesn’t help, then I need to do something creative. Ever since I was a little kid I loved and was fascinated with animation. I used to create them in books by drawing one thing at a time on the bottom of a page. Old school stop action animation. My first one was in one of my fathers old Hardy Boy books of a stick figure running and catching a football.

About ten years back before smart phones, I found out that the camera I was carrying around with me all the time had video. That was the beginning of the end for me. My kids were young and I tried to get stuff of them before they grew up. So I had all these little movies and decided to just mish-mash them together just to get them up on YouTube (for all eternity I was hoping) So there I was with my free time on top of a skyscraper in New York City, my job in pre-press, using my free time to put these little things together. They were ridiculous. But what I remembered most about putting them together was just how much fun I had doing it. I mean, I loved graphics but now add some movement and then music and sound effects, I was in heaven. No plot. No rhyme. No reason. Ridiculous.

The weird kid that I was, when Greg and I were in Westfield and we went to the Music Staff on Elm street to buy music, Greg would load up on Bob Dylan and classic rock and I was buying albums of sound effects. Sometimes I would make the sound effects myself if I couldn’t find them in the Music Staff. Once again, in today’s world, Internet to the rescue. Now I have an endless library of sound and music.

The two photo albums I received from our aunt Carol were in terrible shape. Something about the Florida humidity and weather just kills old photos. I had promised her long ago that I would do my best to save them. She thought it would take me a week but it is an endless job, the results of which have ended up somewhat archived here on Family web site at Photos That Make You Think.
Nobody makes real photo albums anymore.* That might be one of the saddest things to ever happen to this digital society we now live in.
A lot of the old photos on PTMYT needed quite a bit of restoration in Photoshop before I posted them. You’re welcome.
One of my favorite pieces was a great old photo I found of mom in front of 710 Austin street in Westfield. She can’t be more than 19 years old.
I enjoyed this image of my mother so much that she ended up in a movie. Snowball.

I incorporated Adobe Flash, Photoshop and constructed an entire apartment building in Adobe Illustrator with this movie. Getting the “camera” to pan in and out was a great revelation for me. The thing about this “art” as there is with any art is that there were many accidental explosions of brilliance! I was influenced greatly by the graphic novel Watchmen. The movie was brilliant. The recurring symbols and imagery, the smiley face, the doomsday clock were simply genius. The movie, even more so. In this two minute and twenty-five second YouTube video, “Where Do The Clouds Go?” I tried to make it all “cartoon” and that’s why it’s only 2:25. It was a lot of work but still a lot of fun.

This was a fairy tale land. So much better than Carteret. So much more elegant! This town was full of little nooks of culture and art. You could feel the energy in the air. Instead of traffic lights there were real policemen directing traffic and crossing people at the streets. The endless rows of shops and food. The old A&P. The clean back alley shortcuts. Grandma and grandpa Hartman lived on a third floor apartment right around the corner from Dads store. We went there often for lunch. These were the days, right? When everything seems so pure and innocent and carefree. Everybody is nice to you. Everywhere you go is magic. Everything has character and depth and the places even smell good. It is all burned into my memory. And then what happens? All the adults eventually die and things change. These were the good times and I thought they would last forever.
Westfield was my second childhood. We knew the back alleys and mom and pop stores like the back of our hands. It still remains a charming town but has lost it’s innocence as everything does when you grow up. The smell of Woolworth’s during a busy noon time lunch. Tommies. Little Joes luncheonette. Even the smell of our own fabric store, Westfield Sewing Center. Greg sitting in the back room eating his hot dog lunch and reading the back covers of his newly purchased albums. Where is he now???

*another post for another time.

Photo’s That Make You Think
Yeah, brother Gary or Gunk as he may be known as, suddenly started randomly texting me photos. So cool and it made me realize (like I’ve always known anyway) just how many photos are out there that I don’t have access too. But one of these photos really set me back. It was during one of our Uncle Brother’s visits after Dad died. We were a gang alright! All thirteen of us on the picket fence. Beverly hiding in the back. Gary always the clown. Bonnie and Bern little babies.
|click for a better view|
So Mom or Brother were able to harness us all together for a photo. How did they do it? How did they manage us or even feed us for gods sake? These were good times. I wish we took more photos but this one (a photo of a photo-means there’s better quality out there—) makes up for all the photos that were never taken. Thanks for sharing it.

In this months PTMYT (April 2014) another old mysterious Gill photo taken on Austin street in Westfield NJ. (probably). This photo had the same kind of look and feel of another old Gill photo mentioned in a previous BLOG POST.

Definitely not from the same day at all. Maybe some of the same people but several years earlier. Our grandmother May Gill was born in 1915 to John Coleman Rosecrans and Maude L. Rosecrans. May died at a very young age of only 44. She died suddenly and shockingly of a heart attack at home. There have been rumors flung about about her death being suspicious based on several “things told to me”.
1. The fiery relationship she had with her husband Fredrick, a Westfield NJ cop.
2. The decision by husband to have NO autopsy and a quick burial.
3. A suddenly new relationship by husband with a new woman only a few weeks after funeral.
So yeah, ha ha, secret family scandal. May Gill was poisoned by her cop husband. None of this has ever been proven. Nor will it ever be. I’m not exhuming the grave of the grandmother I never saw and I certainly don’t want to see what she looks like now. Rest in peace everyone involved.

One thing I really ponder on now, was that May had THREE brothers and SIX sisters! So that big family thing isn’t just a Hartman trend? So there were NINE aunts and uncles that we also never really met or saw. I might have been too young to remember even if I did meet them. Her three children, Joan, Fred and Carol told me Grandma Gill was a nice woman. That’s all I remember. Another story was that when she pooped, her kids would all go in the bathroom with her and she would tell stories. She was known as a very kind woman in her job at Westfield High School where she was a cook for nine years. Her death at 44 was so early that she only had two grandchildren when she passed away, Barb and Beverly. She would have been surprised if she hung around.

So my curiosity remains at who is who in the top photo. At this point I’m going out on a limb to assume that most or all of them are her siblings.
Starting from left, John Rosecrans Jr, May Gill, sister, another brother (maybe Fredrick Rosecrans with wife OR another sister. Fred Gill Sr is next and he is holding a little baby Caroline our aunt. At the end the only thing I can say here is “Get a freaking room.”
Of course in the first row is Joan Gill (our mother) and Fred Gill Jr our uncle. He is wearing an official cap of some sort. This stirred up even more curiosity in me. I do know that we have a great uncle that was lost in a submarine during WWII. I am assuming this photo was taken around 1940-2. So there was a war going on when this was taken. That man in the middle appears to be wearing dress military uniform. So I am assuming that the cap our uncle Fred is playing with is actually from that guy in the center of the photo. I did a google image search on Navy caps used during World War 2. Not surprisingly something very similar came up. It might be an officers cap from Navy.
So is this the guy that was never found on a sunken submarine in WWII??? Sure enough I found a web site that listed every submarine and their crew member LOST during WWII. I actually clicked on every submarine and checked for the sir name Gill. I did find one- on January 24, 1942 the submarine USS S-26 went down BUT three men survived. The mans name TMC Joseph Mathew Gill was goggled and as it turns out he is from Alabama and not New Jersey.

The only other things I think of is that great uncle from the Navy was actually a Rosecrans and not a Gill. This is not the way I remember it being told to me. This WWII hero was definitely named GILL. OR maybe that is a fireman or policemen uniform. It is a fact that Mays father was indeed the Cheif of the Westfield NJ police force which is exactly how our grandfather Fredrick Gill got the job.

Yet another Rosecrans search, I found in the Westfield Leader newspaper (bottom left middle article) that Mays brother, Windsor was promoted to a Lieut. in the National Guard. But this was July 1927. (yet still possible, that might be a captains cap after 13+ years!)

So this is how it goes with web research on the amazing and still growing world wide web. I was just trying to find out some names. People that have long passed on. People that were “somehow” related to our mothers and fathers. This spark of a connection in life that electrifies our existence. Like I said, if I had this interest even before Carol or Joan died, I would have had all the answers and names and probably a few cool stories too.

When I first saw this photo, given to me by our cousin Robert (Jaybird) I was taken back. A very rare shot of our young family with our uncle Jay. The smiles and expressions are priceless BUT damn, who took this photo? Who cut off Bernadette? The photo is ruined!!!
But it’s not.
The photo exists and that’s good enough. I can not condemn the photographer for at least trying. In this case my assumption is that Aunt Gerry (Uncle Jays wife) took the photo. I have criticized her in the past for taking blurry photos but here’s the thing: Gerry was a picture-taker. If we didn’t have the picture taker…we wouldn’t have pictures. There is always that one or few in a family that always took the photo. They always tried to get everybody together for a photo. People hate when it’s picture time. The family picture-taker has to fight that. The family picture-taker has to coral as many people as they can in a short amount of time and take the photo. Taking photographs can be hard work but somebody has to do it. The picture taker is usually the unsung hero. In some cases a “timer” on the camera will get everybody in the shot but in most cases planning photographs can be very difficult. Sometimes (ok, all the time) when I look at old family photos I wonder out loud, “Who took this photo?”
Thank God for these people. They cared. They tried. In the back of their minds, “these people” knew that moments in life don’t last forever. People don’t last forever. If you grab a micro-second of life on film and have it forever that is PRICELESS. Most people don’t realize that. Looking at a photo that is now over thirty years old will make you realize it NOW but not at that time….most people don’t give a crap.
Gerry was very very special like that. She cared about keeping the family torch lit! Her name is on the “credits” page of the (see last Blog post) Family Memories. She has “piles” of family photo albums. (I know because I saw them when I went to Las Vegas right after she passed away) Not only does she have the photos but they are very well taken care of and arranged. If she had the negative, she kept it taped to the back of the original photograph!!

Joan Gill Hartman, Barb Hartman, were all very good early day picture takers.
How do we know who the picture takers were? I had a box of photos from when my boys were growing up. They are currently being held captive somewhere in Central Jersey. My kids were looking thru them and they happened to ask me: “Where were you in all these photos dad?” Well, my boys, I was the one taking the photo!
I was the picture-taker.

My Current Status: 7/13/13 1:52AM- Some people expect a lot out of me, I can change that. My Current Statement: Constantly being tuned into the alternate digital universe can create a false sense of urgency and dominate your mental freedom. My random Memory: One day I was out on the front porch with Brenda my sister and something stupid happened and I got so mad at her that I hit her on the side of the head with a huge 6 volt lantern battery. She was bleeding and crying and ran inside the house. I had forgotten all about this. I mean totally. Like blocked it out of my memory. Many many years later when I took her to a Giants football game and we were tailgating out in the parking lot she reminded me of it. At first I was shocked and sad and guilty. She forgave me at that moment. Days later and up to today, I think about how powerful my brain was to block something that traumatic in my memory.

The photography art medium has been changing at a crazy pace in the last 15 years or so. I remember film. The cost. The limits. The wait. No redo’s. Today, everyone has a camera in their pockets or there could be one watching you. Our world has become image saturated. If you go to google images and type in sunsets you will get 33,800,000 matches in just 0.19 seconds.
Surveillance cameras capture the image of an average city dweller 300 times a day.
Desk top publishing and photo editing software is at the fingertips of anyone that owns a computer. Musically it’s the same thing. It’s become a digital overflow of digital compositions. Some bands that have actually gotten their start in the oil stained garage floors of a real garage are being replaced by “Garage Band” on the Mac.
There are now fewer limits to express yourself and you can show yourself off to the entire planet earth!

Apparently the actual living of our lives doesn’t seem so “wonderful” sometimes. In one of the top ten movies of all time “It’s a Wonderful Life” the hero, George Baily leads just an ordinary life. Yet he is the seeker of a wild exciting life and even desires to attend college for which he is denied. He ends up living a mundane and simple life. It takes an angel from heaven to open his eyes to the fact that his life truly is extraordinarily meaningful and impactful. (impactful is not a word but I like it)

Thank you for all your uploads! Thousand upon thousands. I have downloaded and opened your photos for the past four years. Thousands of RGB memories. Miles and miles of canvas. I haven’t become desensitized by your weddings, sunsets, celebrations, family portraits, pets, and children. Because of YOU, I have seen the amazing moutains, forests, oceans and cities of the world! I have sat in my windowless Macintosh corner of the world and seen the world, thanks to you. Still, after all this time your photos MOVE me, make me LAUGH, give me goosebumps, and sometimes bring a tear to the corner of my eye.
Like George Bailey I yearn to travel. Crave excitement. Unexpected paths, twist and turns. I know there is only one thing better than your photo. The print is beautiful on canvas but in all cases of printed images-“You really had to be there!”

From Photos That Make You Think: Feburary 2011 (click here)
A closer zoomed in look can reveal many things. Perhaps that may be Beverly and Glenn with him.

In a desperate plunge for the camera from my laptop bag after realizing that day two was running low, I zeroed in at anything hoping for some art. In route 46 north Jersey traffic jam, and perhaps moving the camera on purpose, I snapped at least twenty shots in the dark out the front windshield. This is the one I picked for day two.
Last night on a warm couch, instead of Everybody Loves Raymond, I ended up watching NOVA. It was about something that I could never even to begin to understand: Quantum Physics.
The show tried really hard and succeeded, (at least I thought) in explaing something so complicated as “how an atom works” Wow. The graphics they were using gave me inspiration for day twos photo:

Next Episode:-Drinking out of a colored tin cup in Las Vegas.-

When I woke up Kryha said “Those poor Japanese people” and here it was eight or so days later and we are still captivated by the news. But when it is the first thing you say when you wake up then you know it was such an intense, earth moving event that you become consumed by it….well at least I was. It is the opposite – “does – G(g)od – really – exist” – thought. What I mean by that is this: “Why them?” Aren’t the Japs supposed to humble, quiet and clean? Free of crime? Spiritual?” If G(g)od really does exist then why would he wallop them with the triple-header? Tonight was the biggest moon in eighteen years. I thought of Richard and Clara. How close their dead bodies were. How I wanted to be by them. I imagined laying down on the grass spread out. Reaching for their bones. Reaching for the life that they lived. The Trolly cars, the horse shit on main street. Chicken dinner with the Hartmann’s The woman with the beautiful big brown eyes, mother of fifteen children. Burying two little infants (I will find them one day too!) and what about all the heartache, that they experienced? It all means nothing now. They had the world on their shoulders and now they are buried in it. This hustling-bustling time bomb of a planet. I would see Joshua and Jonathan tomorrow, BUT today, a day before the Big Moon, I would visit Richard and Clara. Swiftly through the sky blue windy day. (one day before Big Moon. In German dreams and tongue, I travel through time on slow moving elephants. Into the sands of time, the hourglass of past memories, into the streets of Jersey City.
Only In America can you come home from such a busy day and pop some popcorn in the microwave oven, sit down and watch a war, live on television, and then they cut over to a nuclear disaster (they are finding trace amounts of radiation in Seattle Washington) There are people over there that have been buried underneath the rubble for a week and they are uncovering them alive. If you want to know what it is like to get swept away by a tsunami, then you should watch the first ten minuets of Clint Eastwoods (directed by) movie, The Hereafter Although, it is nothing like the first ten minuets of “Saving Private Ryan” it has the same effect. It blows your mind!

PHOTOS THAT MAKE YOU THINK
In March 2011’s photo’s I only now just noted that there is one thing similar to all the photos for that month. I took every single photo. Do you think I will ever run out of photos that make you think? Maybe when all the photos are grabbed off my laptop it may mean only three things: 1. I have run out of photos and I am desperate. 2. I am just a lazy bastard and didn’t have time to scan, clean and color correct. OR 3. I am still waiting for help from the family in the form of emails and/or snail mail scans.
In Feb 2011 photos that make you think there is a photo of one of the scariest moments in my life. In the Summer of 1975 I was sent to California to visit the Jones’. The Jones’ were our nephews and niece from our fathers side of the family. Our father had a sister named Geraldine. She married Robert “Jay” Jones. They had three children: Robert, (Jaybird) Diane and Dennis. We used to be very close with them as children (for those very few of us who can remember) Jay Jones was a professional soilder and “worked” as a soilder in south Jersey. Dad used to take us down there alot. His sister Geraldine, was a shrieking manic-depressant that yelled and cried a lot. She was a very good woman, though. She also had another child, much older than the others named David, I think out of wedlock that eventually became some kind of manager for Dads fabric store in Westfield.

In my Summer trip to California I met all the Jones’ for what would probably be the last time in my life. My aunt Geraldine loved to take photos but she was lousy at it.
I hated being there in California that Summer. I was told it would only be “a week or two” but it turned into the whole Summer. I wil never forget that lie. Mom drove me to Newark airport very drunk and late. The plane ride was my first and it was amazing to me. To look down at the clouds, toy cars and toy cities it is only then that you realize just how bug The United States of America is!! (2,825 miles)
I wanted to be home. Summers were magical back then. The side-street gang may have been fading, Bill Brunner may have moved away for all eternity but there was no school, no work and long hot days. Mc, Gitts, Beds, and the others were all playing baseball, football and hunting for unexploded fireworks on the streets July 5th.
In this photo Jaybird had me! His arm around my neck. Aunt Gerry ready to snap a photo and I just knew he was gonna throw me in the pool and the sound of “cheese”.
I was a very awkward fifteen year old boy. I was as skinny as a stick. I had a uncontrollable mop of yellow hair, pimples all over, I had two huge front teeth that were chipped (I didn’t smile for 18 years until I had them fixed myself) I was lost without my father, my mother was always drunk, I had zero self-confidence, I had just completed my freshman year in an all-boys Catholic High School that was an absolute nightmare, I didn’t know what was going on inside my body or outside my body. My penis had become an uncontrollable monster connected to me like an evil twin. I was confused, very lonely, young, dumb and full of ……
Jaybird never threw me in the pool but now thirty-six years later I am looking for him. On Facebook. In people searches, obituaries, web browses… I have been trying to find this part of our family for as long as the internet has been around. The biggest obstacle that I have faced is their last name: JONES. (this is the third most common name in the United States behind Brown and Williams)
The “TAG” words in this blog, I have discovered are VERY powerful. They are openly exposed (and very quickly I might add) to search engines all over. I have randomly added our cousins the Jones’ to many of the blog posts in the hopes that maybe one day they may “google” themselves and find us. So far nothing. No sign of any Jones’ anywhere. Come out, come out, where ever you are!
Why America is so Damn Fat getting fatter.
It all began about eight or nine years ago when fast food establishments ended their CASH ONLY policy and started accepting credit cards. WORSE THAN THAT, they suddenly started their “We are open LATE” routine. Not just until midnight but two or three o’clock in the morning. Have you ever driven past the drive thru of a McDonalds at ONE AM in the morning and seen seven or eight cars waiting for deep fried fat and hamburger meat on a sesame seed bun?? Is it dinner time? NO! It’s let’s have ANOTHER fat drenched meal before bedtime!!!
WHY do we CARRY ON like nothing happened?
Am I the only one that still feels a sense of dread and doom over the loss of 15,000 human beings and counting in Japan?? That there is STILL a NUCLEAR TIME BOMB on the edge of the ocean some where in the world. Life still goes on. We work. We go to school. We play. We turn on the news and Japan isn’t the headlines anymore, sometimes not even the second page. Mothers are still driving their cars, loaded with their young innocent children into lakes. People are still getting blown-up beyond recognition in third world countries, the economy is still sinking like a Western sunset into the sea…people are still killing people, with guns, their cars, bats, knives and poison. Life goes on.
WHERE IS THE HAPPY NEWS?
HEADLINES:
Father Doesn’t Leave Family
or
Women Completes Rehab rejoins family to tears and hugs
or
Family Buys A Home
or
Man Donates HALF his Savings to Charity
or
Woman Opens Door For Crippled Woman at WalMart

Things began early that day. The alarm clock never wakes you. It is the dreams, thoughts and swirling blood in your body. Saturated with sex.
Dinner (last night): Shellfish, sauteed garlic and several long stares at the waitresses ass.
“Get your mind out of the gutter. Doing laundry at 3am, watching Spanish TV and noticing the cops passing the windowed wall real slow”
Butch: (perplexed) All bloodthinners.
Coco: What is?
Butch: Everything I ate for dinner.
Coco: And all that aspirin you eat too. What is that all about?
Butch: (changing the channel) It’s good for your heart.
It started early in life. Addiction. When I was sick Mom gave me hot tea and St Joseph’s Children’s Aspirin. Two of them and you had to chew them. They certainly weren’t candy but they weren’t overwhelmingly medicine tasting but I liked the bitterness and the tea had caffeine. So I felt better. Immediately after that was the taboo of vagina, ass and tits. Women didn’t poop. They were too amazing. So these nonhuman objectified “things” walking across parking lots in tight jeans. Tight jeans were like an overdose of St Joseph’s aspirin and the price of a porno magazine escalated to over $5.00 each so I stole them.
6:22 PM: You have planned every second of the next two hours. Your mind is enveloped in the reflections in shiny silver cash registers and dressing room mirrors. You walk in, look up at the cameras, buy a Snickers Bar and leave. As you drive home in peace, the sun melts into the night like lava. Orange clouds imitate smoke and a plane sinks into the horizon.
Butch: Wish I was in that plane, I don’t care where it is going.
Coco: (squinting into the sunset) Looks like it is going south from here.
Butch: (getting off his bike) Yeah, south … south ….south is good.

The Clouds Lately
Summer skies are beautiful. So hard to predict. I love those big puffy mountainous cumulous monsters. I could just sit in a chair on the beach and watch those all day. The clouds lately have reminded me of Florida. Dramatic puffey white and a sun shower. This Summer has been nothing to me. Nowhere. Nothing. Roadside America for a couple of hours. I have been invited to Hall of Fames, pools, free rooms, great company, awesome family and BBQ’s. I am a slave to my job. I need to stretch my legs. I am making up for lost time though, last Summer I was lost in upstate New York. Jungles and rivers. Waking up to sleep naked by the side of the water. Weed whacker. Banner sealer. Sign designer.

A while ago Gary found this piece of wood with four very old photos of mom pasted to it. It was up high on a shelf in his home. These are some very amazing photographs. Mom is very young (very) and I don’t even think she met or knew Dad yet. Her boyfriend evidently had a camera and loved to take photos of this young sexy thing.

Butch: I don’t blame my sex addiction on my mothers genes….but I wish I had more of Dads genes and maybe I would have more money.
Coco: (putting on her panties) It’s never too late Butchie boy. You can be rich if you want. Ha ha ha. Money is the root of ALL happiness. Think about all the women you would have!
Butch: Yeah, right.
Coco: Remember how many hours your father spent in front of that mechanical manual adding machine. Chaa chaa ching. Chaaaa chaaa ching ???
Butch: Yeah. It was all about the money, it was always about the money. The ONE and ONLY vacation we went on to Gettysburg Pennsylvania and I remember him adding things up as we went along on a piece of paper.
Coco: And that darn Bible. Put the book down and pick up your children for Gods sake.
Butch: (lighting a cigarette) Do you think he would have been counting his money and buttons if he knew how short life really is??
Butch: Especially HIS life.

7:12 PM:
The urge is too strong sometimes. Overwhelming. Like the need for a smoke. Gotta have it. Want it. The internet is the crack cocaine of a new generation of sex addicts. Tommy put his Dell 560 with 4 gig of memory on the front seat of his Honda and drove to the bridge at midnight. On the bridge, he slowly lifted the computer from the tangle of seat belts and lifted it over his head. It was a few seconds before he heard the plastic splash. He was relieved and excited all at once. His heart pumping like crazy as he drove away.I’m free. Never again. Yet the next night he is buying a new one on sale at Best Buy.

To the best of my knowledge from what my mother told me: There was a neighbor that was an amateur photographer that came around and took photos of the Gill children. For the years that some of these were taken (the mid 1940’s) he is using some very high end equipment of the time. I found an envelope of negatives and from my best guess, he used a Browning Camera.
This photo of Fred Gill (Brother) is a pure classic. The photographer captured a moment in time that could thrill even non family members.
Just look at Brothers eyes! Doesn’t take much to thrill children this age. Innocence reigns!
My mother told me that Brother had this doll for many years. Took it with him wherever he went and as you can see by the look in his eyes, he absolutely adored this thing. As beat up and dirty as it got, he loved it even more, his sister Joan said.
Photography really took off in the 1940’s and was a huge but expensive hobby for many people. Family Ties will be revealing much more of these Austin Street gems in the future. Some of them need some work. This Photo Album was rescued from the heat and humidity of Florida just in time.
This photo had a pencil scribble in Brothers hair that I painstakingly removed. But when I thought about it, the pencil scribbles are acually part of the history and heritage of this awesome photo.
So here is the original, making us all wonder, WHO might have been the artist from such a long time ago.

About Aunt Pats glasses: What can I say? It was the EARLY 1960’s. Batman was a popular show on TV Saturday nights. Catwoman was his hot villian. Was Aunt Pat inspired by Catwoman? Who knows? Actually, who cares???