A recent conversation with a friend brought to mind the fact that I have very few physical photographs of my childhood or of my family. I have photos of my daughters, my granddaughters, and of my late wife. I have several photos of my father and some also of my mother. But none of Nana, my maternal grandmother, or of my extended family—aunts and uncles who were our closest neighbors when I was growing up, or of my father’s family in Oklahoma.
My oldest brother came to visit and stay with me a few weeks ago so he could get out in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to photograph the elk at sunset and again the next day at dawn.
As we sat in the living room talking one evening I asked about the family photographs he might possess. He said he had many.
Turns out mom had some photos from Nana and photos from Edith, mom’s older sister, as well as our family photographs dating back to mom’s youth.
My brother said he had those and was trying to scan them so they could be shared.
He said he also had letters that dad wrote to mom from Italy, where he served as bombardier aboard a B-24 during World War II. There are also letters dad had written to his parents from the war zone. Those are also being scanned and organized by date.
Asked how many letters he has from that time, my brother held up his hand and spread a finger and thumb apart about three inches.
Wow. That sounds like quite a stack of correspondence.
Dad apparently wrote very different individual letters to his mother and his father.
Dad truly loved his father, but the letters he wrote to him were likely formal and to the point, or as much as he could get past the censors during war time.
I haven’t seen the letters yet, but it sounds like Dad was more personable and chatty with his mother. He was a mother’s boy, and she had nursed him through numerous illnesses in his childhood. The story goes that she saved him when he was about two years old and suffered the flu that ravaged the world in 1918. The regular doctor in Wynnewood told grandma that dad might not live, so she called an osteopath for a second opinion. That doctor taught my grandmother how to help her child eliminate the fluids built up in his lungs by regularly and gently pounding his back while holding him upside down by the ankles.
It worked. He lived.
My brother also said he has photographs of family adventures at the beach, including from years long before I was born.
We all liked to go to Edisto Beach in South Carolina, south of Charleston. We would go as groups; my family and the family of one of my uncles, or with family friends and their kids. Though unrelated, we kids called those adults aunt and uncle, as well—Aunt Biddie and Uncle Bill. Their children called my parents Aunt Ethel and Uncle Harvey.
I had always been told that my mother’s family had enjoyed going to Edisto as far back as, well, I’m not sure it was back to the 1930s but I am confident the extended family went together in the 1940s after the war.
I grew up with tales of the damage from either Hurricane Hazel in 1954 or Hurricane Able in 1952. (Why it had that male-sounding name back in the days when hurricanes only carried female names I have no idea.)
Nana told me that the family would ride from Buncombe County, North Carolina, to Edisto in the back of a farm truck, everyone sitting on bales of hay. Every family took a large cooler or boxes filled with foods to eat during the week at the beach. I imagine the drive to Edisto took a while, as the road carried them down through Saluda, North Carolina, in the pre-interstate years.
I cannot wait to see the images my brother has, as well as the letters from dad while he was serving in the war. For someone like me who loves personal history, they will be priceless memories.
—Jonathan Austin