The Bucklin Children in 1949

This is a photo of my mom and her siblings in 1949.  I’ve posted a photo of the same group from 1948.  Then there is one from 1950 that I’ve shared, and it has both of their parents in the photo as well.  These photos don’t exactly seem like formal portraits, because they look to be taken in my grandparents’ home at the time.  Plus, in this one it looks like my mom was just wearing a t-shirt and she added a scarf around her neck to dress up her appearance a bit.

From that bit of information, you can tell that my mom is the girl on the right in this photo.  Her name was Betty Lou Bucklin and she was the second child of Fred D. Bucklin and Myrtle Sylvia Phenice Bucklin.  She was born on May 20, 1933, in Hathaway, Louisiana.  Her older sister Sylvia was born in March of 1931.  You can see her sitting in the front on the left with the black dress. 

Alma was the next one born, though she looks like she is shorter than her younger sister Loris.  That didn’t stop her from being a really good basketball player.  The family was big into basketball.   Grandpa and Grandma both played when they were younger.  Mama always talked about working on Alma’s game by guarding her really hard when they practiced.  With height comes long arms and mom knew how to use them for blocking basketball shots.  So Alma learned to deal with this and one of the things she perfected was a hook shot that mom said was the best around.  She was proud to help her younger sister develop that.

Loris was the youngest of the sisters, and we can thank her for sharing the group photo with me.  I had never seen it before she sent it to me in June.  Mom didn’t have a copy of it, but she did have this individual photo of herself taken the same day.  I’m kinda surprised that I’ve never shared this photo before.  I thought about waiting to share it as a post on its own, but the story calls for it to be shown now.

This was probably one of my mom’s favorite photos of herself.  She had an enlargement of it in her photo album.  Even though she’s smiling better in the group photo, this pose is better.  I didn’t realize she was just wearing a t-shirt until I saw the group photo.  The scarf fooled me into thinking she was all dressed up!  She looks older than 16 years old.  She kept this look for most of her life.  Most people find her easy to recognize in photos whether it was taken when she was three or when she was an elderly woman.

I can’t finish this post without identifying my mom’s brother Austin in that first photo.  He was the only boy with four older sisters.  He was five years younger than Loris, so there was an age gap that seems larger when you’re a kid growing up.  Fortunately for him, there were several male cousins who lived nearby.