Betty Lou in First Grade

I wasn’t sure if I had posted this photo before or not.  I searched through my posts and couldn’t find it, so I think I’m good.  I think I may have shared an animated version of it on Facebook a few years ago.  But I didn’t do an official family history post.  It definitely deserves a post, because it is so painstankling cute.

This is Betty Lou Bucklin in the fall of 1939, which would have been the year she started first grade in Hathaway, Louisiana, long before she was my mother.  I cleaned the photo up and sharpened it a bit.  The original is in pretty bad shape.  It is splotchy and there is a big dark spot on her chin.  It looks stained in some way.  I didn’t do the coloring.  I think my mom used the photo as one of her practicing photos for hand tinting.

The color tinting may have been done when she was young, because it wasn’t a very good example of it.  So I smoothed out the colors to try to make it look a little more natural.  It looks like she added a bit of red color to her lips.  That seems appropriate because if she was ever gonna have any makeup on, it would be her red lipstick.  

Betty Lou was born in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression to Fred Bucklin and Myrtle Phenice Bucklin.  She was their second child.  By the time of 1939, there were two more sisters to join the family.  When she was born, three of her grandparents were alive.  Her paternal grandfather Louis Bucklin had died in 1929 at the age of 54.

Her paternal grandmother Addie Hine Bucklin lived nearby when she was young, so she knew her pretty well.  Addie had twelve children, so there were lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins around.  They would have big covered-dish dinners at Grandma Bucklin’s house, and Mama said that the food was always delicious.  Her mom’s parents were both alive and they lived nearby also.  Harry Clifton Phenice and Daisy Keys Phenice were her Phenice grandparents.  H. C. was known for his fiddle playing and Daisy would play along on the piano.  I think they were a big musical influence on her.

All four of my mom’s grandparents came from different areas.  Louis Bucklin had been born in Iowa to a father whose family was from Massachusetts and a mother whose family were Irish immigrants.  Addie was from Indiana.  Their family had come down to Louisiana in 1894.  Daisy was an immigrant from England.  Her family had moved to Louisiana in 1887.  H.C. had been born in Pennsylvania and lived most of his childhood in Nebraska where his father had homesteaded. 

Actually H.C.’s father was still alive the first few years of young Betty Lou’s life.  Samuel Charles Phenice could have told my mom the story of being a witness to the Lincoln Assassination when he was a young man.  But Samuel lived up in southern Nebraska/norther Kansas, and I don’t think they ever met.  She would have told us about it if she had.  She remembered her bad haircut when she was three.  She remembered taking photos with a real doll in 1938.  I think she would have remembered meeting her great grandfather. 

He died around the same time this photo was taken, but she talked about him the rest of her life.  She told me about him being a witness to the Lincoln Assassination when I was a kid.  In school we learned about the Lincoln Assassination in history class.  Of course, I had to tell the teacher that my ancestor had been a witness.  I don’t think the teacher believed me.  I can’t remember the exact details, but my mom made sure that the teacher was informed of our family’s history.  Either she talked to the teacher or she had me bring the newspaper article to school.  Similar to this one here.