Bob & Betty at Kerosene Flats in 1953
Newlyweds Bob and Betty Landry in their first home in California
Last year I wrote about the events that led up to the marriage of my parents in 1952. I like to commemorate important anniversaries, and 70 years is notable. I thought I would continue that a bit more with a couple of photos from their first year together as a married couple. The photos come from a photo album that was always in our house when we were growing up. I always thought of the photo album being something that my mom put together. But when I look at it now, I notice that the writing is definitely my dad’s.
Thinking back to how I thought when I was a kid, that photo album was the be all end all of our family history. Any curiosity about my family’s past was found in that album. I mean really, it went back a whole fifteen years when I was an eight-year-old. World War II ended just over seven years before my parents’ wedding, and I remember thinking that that was ancient history. Our perception of time definitely changes as we get older.
This first photo was on the first page of that old photo album. It is a photo of my parents in front of their first home in January 1953. How do I know that? Because it’s written on the page of the album below the photo. I had to include that in the photo. I also included their names – Robert Joseph Landry, Jr. and Betty Lou Bucklin Landry. My dad was in the Air Force at the time and he was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in Kern County, California. It is on the edge of the Mojave Desert and near Joshua Tree National Park. The housing for married service members was called Wherry Housing, but it was also known as Kerosene Flats.
My mom would talk about her days in the desert. She was not familiar with the dry climate. She said that the clothes dried on the line so much quicker than in Louisiana. She said that by the time she finished hanging all of the clothes, the first things she had hung up were already dry. One time in the wintertime she hung them up, but instead of drying the clothes quickly, they froze. She didn’t realize how cold it was.
Betty and Bob Landry in California at their first home. Note Betty’s newest painting on the table behind them.
But her favorite thing to talk about was the fact that the stoves at Kerosene Flats actually used kerosene to cook. This was fine for young newlywed Betty Lou, because she had grown up using kerosene. But all of the other wives in Wherry Housing were not familiar with it. So my mom helped them all out and taught them the basics of cooking with kerosene. There were some benefits to growing up in the small Louisiana hamlet of Hathaway.
This second photo of my parents was taken a few months later. It was taken in the spring of 1953. It’s a great photo of the two of them. They even had an enlargement of it made back then. It’s hanging on the wall behind me right now. My mom had just finished the painting that you see in the background.
They sure do look happy!