Betty Lou: Pretty in Green

Last week I mentioned that my mom and our next door neighbor were in the same graduating class from Hathaway.  I looked through my posts to find the photo of their Hathaway High School graduating Class of 1951.  But I didn’t find it.  I’ve never posted the photo before.  The group photo that I did post with both of them in it was a photo of the Hathaway Hornets basketball team from 1948.  So I thought I might post their graduation photo this week.

But then I came across this old photo.  I posted a similar photo of her two years ago.  She was wearing the same dress and her hair was similar, so I’m thinking it was from the same time.  The one I posted before was definitely a school photo that was taken in 1946.  So little Betty Lou Bucklin would have only been thirteen years old when this photo was taken.  She looks much more mature than that.  My mom in her later years wrote on the back of this photo that she was fifteen years old at the time. 

Oh, wait.  I just realized something.  I have a black and white version of this photo and it looks like it came from a textured photo.  My mom is actually wearing this same dress in a photo with her siblings that I’ve posted before.  The date of that photo was 1948, so that goes along with Mama’s writing on the back of the photo.  So she either took an individual photo with the photographer on the same day they took the family photo, or there is another version of that family photo out there.  Because it is not a crop of the family photo I have.  She has her head turned in that photo.

My mom must have liked this photo, too.  She had an 8 x 10 enlargement made of it.  I think she did that in the 70s when she was hand-tinting black and white photos.  There are two enlargements of her that I think she used to practice her skills.  So when I came across those photos last weekend, I thought it was time to make the dramatic combination of them and hopefully come up with something I could use as a post.  I liked the colors she used in the tinting, but it was cropped too much for my taste.  So I used the cropping from the black and white photo and the coloring from the hand-tinted photo.  I tried to stay true to the colors that she used.  But I also wanted to darken the background to give it a more dramatic look.

Of course I cleaned up the photo and sharpened it a little.  And Voila!  Here is the final result.  I am very pleased with it.  She looks so striking in the photo.  It’s a keeper.