Bobbie Circa 1937
I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about today. There aren’t any 100 or 200 year anniversaries in my family that I am aware of. So I just decided to look through my old photos and see if anything jumped out. I had been thinking of an old photo of my dad today, since it is his side of the family’s turn for a posting. I looked at that old photo of my dad as an infant, but it didn’t inspire me. So I kept looking through my folder.
Robert Joseph Landry, Jr. in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1937. (Photo edit by Van Landry
And then I saw this photo. I’m pretty sure that no one in my family is familiar with this photo. I know it was in a group of photos of my dad from his school days. When I was in high school or so I put together a family photo album that included a few old photos. For me back then, it meant including a few photos of my parents’ grandparents and some photos of their own childhood.
Since class photos were the big thing back then, I included my mom’s and dad’s school photos. This is one of those that I included of my dad, but it didn’t really stand out. It’s a small black and white photo that gets lost on a page full of other photos. So when you scan it, it comes out looking much larger and you can notice more details.
Even though this one is a bit blurry, it’s a nice photo. He looks like a sweet, cute kid. I did clean the photo up a bit. When I zoomed in on the photo to get rid of dust and scratches, the different parts of his face reminded me of childhood photos of me and my brothers. The eyes reminded me of Rob, the middle of the face reminded me of Al, and the lips reminded me of myself.
But the earlobes didn’t remind me of anyone else but my dad. He always had those earlobes. For some reason I thought they must have grown when he got older. They probably did, but they started out large from the start. The reason I noticed this is that my mom had connected earlobes and I inherited that trait. It’s one of the traits that the DNA companies have learned to identify. Really, though, all you have to do is look!
So there you have it. A photo of my dad when he was in about the 3rd grade. Not a centennial anniversary, but sufficiently in the past.