Myrtle Phenice Bucklin in 1954

I’ve been wanting to post this photo for a while, so the only problem I had with it was determining the date of it.  I had a date of 1947 for it, and I even started the post with that in the title.  This photo came from my Aunt Loris a few months ago.  She is my mom Betty Lou Bucklin Landry’s younger sister.  I like this photo so much, so I was wondering why mom didn’t have a copy of it in her possession.  It is a photo of their mother Myrtle Sylvia Phenice Bucklin after all. 

So I went to the family photo album that I put together when I was in junior high school to see if I could find it.  There on the first page of the album was a small photo of my grandmother in 1954.  My grandmother was Mrs. Bucklin who taught the 3rd grade at Hathaway High School back in the 1940s through the 60s.  And one of the things they’ve always done at school is take school photos.  There were usually one or two photos to choose from.  The nice thing about those old photos was that they put the year on the bottom of the photos. 

The 1954 photo was taken on the same day as this one.  It seems that Loris liked this version of the photo, while mom liked the other one.  I have to agree with my aunt on this one.  It is a much more striking photo than the other one.  Sure, she is smiling a bit more in the other photo and it shows the date, but this one is just more dramatic.

Myrtle was born in 1906, so she would have been 48 years old in this photo.  When I was growing up, I remember my mom saying that Grandma was known as a “handsome” woman.  Well everybody knows that you’re supposed to call women either pretty or beautiful, and men are known as handsome.  I always took it to mean that she was attractive in a masculine sort of way.  And I went along with it.  After all, she was my grandmother.  That means that she was much older than I was.  My concern was that she was nice to us and she fed us well when we went to visit.  She also had an infectious laugh, especially when her sisters were around.

But now that I’ve been looking through these old photos of her, I notice that she had striking features.  She had high cheekbones, full lips, and really pretty eyes.  She and her sisters were beautiful young women.  And in this photo of her when she was 48, she could still strike a pose.  Come on, vogue!