Month: December 2024

I’m following my yearly pattern of writing two Christmas themed posts before Christmas.  I’m actually posting three photos that were taken the same day.  Two of them were a bit blurry, so I was never that attached to them before.  But now that we are able to sharpen them a bit with software magic, I’m liking them a lot more.  I suppose I’ll start with the one that I’ve always liked, even though my face is not showing in it.  Just like last week!

How could you not like this photo?  It’s such a cute photo of my cousin Charla and my sister Jamie.  You can tell that they are right in the middle of singing a song.  At least it’s obvious to me.  I was standing there listening to them as I was looking at my Zobor robot.  I loved that battery-powered mechanical robot!  Al and I both got robots that year for Christmas.  I think they were from Grandma and Grandpa.  It had replacement body parts and one of them was a magnetic hand.  I still have that piece!  Charla is sitting in my dad’s lap, and he is sitting on a stool near the piano.  Uncle Ronald’s head can be seen in the foreground on the right of the photo.  You know, the big blob that is blocking my face!

My mom is not in any of those photos, even though this blog post is about her side of the family.  She was Betty Lou Bucklin, the second child of Fred and Myrtle Phenice Bucklin.  We called them Grandpa and Grandma, and we would go visit them in the country every year on Christmas Day.  They were in Hathaway, which was only a ten-to-twelve-minute drive from our home in Jennings, Louisiana.  We usually visited them once or twice a month.

Mom had an older sister named Sylvia, and her husband was Ronald Pilcher – the man on the piano and blocker of my face.  He was a really good musician and mainly he played the piano and sang.  My dad was Bob Landry, and he was also a musician.  He played many musical instruments and sang.  But he was mostly known as a music educator.  It made him a legend!  So when the Bucklin family all got together, there was lots of music about.  The Bucklin family had always had musical get togethers long before these sons-in-law came along.  Mama and Grandma both played the piano and sang.  Even before that, Grandma’s parents played piano and fiddle.  I’ve shared some of those old recordings before.

And then there was Uncle Ernest.  He was also a musical fellow.  I’m pretty sure he was involved with the church choir in the Baptist Church that he attended at the time.  That’s him in the white shirt in that second photo.  Ernest Woolley was his name, and he was married to my mom’s younger sister Loris.  I always remember them living in Texas around Houston.

One of the other things I like about these photos is that we can see a little bit of my grandparents’ home.  Their piano was in the living room of their house, and it looks like it was decorated a bit with some Christmas flowers.  On the wall behind them, you can see some family photos hanging on the wall.  One of them is our Landry family photo that we took in 1969.  Those photos were sent to everyone!  

The third photo is the one that I changed the most.  I sharpened it up a bit and also “restored” the color.  It needed it.  It was the 1970s.  Color was everything and everywhere.  And evidently for the Bucklin sisters, so were wigs!  That is Alma Bucklin Seal, Sylvia Bucklin Pilcher, and Loris Bucklin Woolley standing in the back of this photo.  They were my mom’s three sisters.  I’m pretty sure Alma and Sylvia are wearing wigs.  Loris looks like she’s showing off her own hair.

In the front are Daddy, Uncle Ronald, and Uncle Ernest.  So even though this was a Bucklin gathering, not one person with the Bucklin last name shows up in the photos.  The only ones with the Bucklin last name at the gathering were Grandma and Grandpa.  Uncle Austin had the last name, but I think he was living in Australia at the time.

I wish Grandma and Grandpa had shown up in the photos.  There were also a lot more cousins around.  There were five Pilcher cousins, four more Landry cousins, three Woolley cousins, and one more Seal cousin.  Where was everyone?  I know we were all there when the presents were being given out.  That was a big commotion and lots of fun.  Especially when you get something cool like Zobor.  Maybe they were too busy playing with their new presents to gather around for the singing.

At least we have these photos, and they’re better than they’ve ever been before!  Enjoy.

 

For some reason I got it into my head that I was going to write about 1984.  It had nothing to do with the book of the same name, and I had no intention of writing anything so heavy and dark.  So when I sat down to write, I went to my computer folder to find my photos from 1984.  This is the photo that caught my attention.  The photo caught my attention several months ago, so I edited it and made it look its best.  At the time I had no intention of using it for a blog post.  I just wanted to make it look better for my collection of photos.

But how could I resist this photo?  It makes me smile every time I see it.  Just like I was smiling back in July of 1984 when I watched my mom strike this pose.  I have to admit that I don’t really remember that day in particular.  I (Van Landry) was 23 years old at the time and I was graduating from college that summer. My mom (Betty Lou Bucklin Landry) was 51 years old at the time and she had recently welcomed her second grandchild into the world.

Actually, I think both of those grandchildren show up in this photo.  Her first grandchild was Chris, who was born in 1981 before she reached her fifties.  Then the second one by the name of James was born toward the end of 1983.  I’m pretty sure it is Chris’s head that shows up in the bottom left corner of the photo.  He was a blond when he was that age and short enough to not block the view of me and my mom.  If the same setup was done today, you would only see Chris!  He’s a big guy and he’s much taller now.  At the bottom right are actually two heads.  My sister Karen’s head is the prominent one with the curls.  You can barely see past her to James’s cheek and his darker hair.  He must have been playing with his toy telephone.

Mama could have been playfully showing off for her young grandsons.  She only acted silly like that when she was completely comfortable and mainly it was around our family.  There aren’t many photos of that.  Maybe that’s why I like this photo so much.  It shows something that wasn’t easy to catch.  A moment of complete candor.  One of my favorite memories of one of these times was from 8 years earlier.

It was 1976.  The year of the bicentennial.  And the situation had all to do with the bicentennial.  Sure, a month before the bicentennial happened our family started performing together at the Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in Lake Charles, Louisiana.  I do tend to talk about our Landry Family Band when I talk about that time.  But today I’m talking about Sunday, July 4, 1976.  Yes, I had to do a search to find out the day of the week.  My memory is not as good as Jodie’s used to be.  She would always say what day of the week an event happened on.  Granted, we had no way of checking that back then.  We trusted her.  She was usually very honest, unless she was pulling our leg about something.  

Back to the bicentennial.  I know that I marched in a big parade in Lake Arthur that weekend.  Surely it wasn’t on a Sunday?  Right?!  Anyway, my mom was from Hathaway, Louisiana, and our family had a tradition of going out there to pop fireworks for holidays that required explosions.  The bicentennial of America’s birth definitely called for a trip to Hathaway with a stop at the fireworks stand on the way!  We had bottle rockets, firecrackers, sparklers, and assorted other things.  Nothing extravagant, just enough to celebrate appropriately.  While we were popping various things, my mom got a sparkler burning, raised it high in the air, and ran down the gravel road declaring, “I’m the Statue of Liberty!”  It was hilarious.

But I don’t have a photo of it.  Maybe I could edit this photo to make her look like the Statue of Liberty?  I could raise that arm higher and put a sparkler in it, then make her skin a bit green.  No!  Wait.  Someone might think she was a character from Wicked with a wand in her hand.  That wouldn’t do.  My mom wasn’t wicked at all.  I think I will just be satisfied that I have this photo from 1984 when she was striking a playful pose for her family.  It’s completely sufficient.