My Landry Grandparents in 1946

This is the second week in a row that I’m posting a blurry photo.  Have I run out of clear, sharp images?  No, of course not.  Though after posting over 400 photos, my choices have gotten smaller and smaller.  I have many photos that are sharper, but this is the one that called out to me this week.  Or maybe I should say that it resonated with something inside me.  The content of the photo is much more important than the quality of the photo.  But it’s nice when I can have both. 

I tried to sharpen it up a bit with some software, but the results weren’t accurate.  There isn’t enough information in the photo to guide the software to show what the people really looked like.  Some small feature may have been accurate – like droopy eyes – but the overall results didn’t look like the people I remember.  I wasn’t around back then, but I have other photos of them and know that the software images didn’t have enough to work with.  In the future, the software will be able to look at all of the other photos of the people, gather the information about their facial structure, and make an image clear enough to represent their faces from back then.  But in the meantime, we’ll just have to make do with the image we have.

This is a photo of my paternal grandparents.  They are on the left side of this photo.  Robert Joseph “Rob” Landry and Germaine Erie Patureau were married in 1921.  Rob and Erie began having children in 1923 and ended up with eight altogether – Marie, A. J., Hubert, Germaine, Bob (my dad), Wana, Framay, and Johnny.  Standing with Rob and Erie is their son Hubert with his new wife Mildred Sutherlin Landry.  I think this photo was taken on the day of their marriage, which was on July 20, 1946.  It is a sweet photo of a young married couple with the parents of the groom.

But when I look at this photo, I think of the things to come.  Though they were not the first of Rob and Erie’s children to marry – older sister Marie married Malloy Reeves on the first day of October in 1945 – they would be the first to provide them with a grandchild.  So they weren’t known as Mee Maw and Pee Paw at this point, but that would be changing soon when my godmother shows up.  She would make them grandparents.  When you think about it that way, it is an honor.  And my godmother doesn’t let anyone forget it.  No matter how many times we say it just makes her the oldest, she doesn’t care.  She was, is, and always will be The First.  She wears that designation like a tiara, and she wears it well.

Another thing that I think about is that I never knew Aunt Mildred when she was a cute, young, and ambulatory.  Of course I wouldn’t know her when she was young, because she was born almost forty years before I was.  But she also had polio, so she wasn’t able to walk on her own when I knew her.  My mom always spoke very highly of Hubert and Mildred.  She talked about their positive approach to dealing with her difficulties and his devotion to continually working with her to provide as much mobility as possible.  When our family was performing at Shakey’s in the late 1970s, they showed up more frequently than anyone else.  Uncle Hubert would play harmonica on many of the songs, so we got to visit with Aunt Mildred quite a bit.  She was a sweet lady.

But this photo mainly makes me regret that I never knew these grandparents as a couple.  They look very pleased to pose with their son and his wife.  I never saw that because my grandfather died before I was born.  I never got to call him Pee Paw.  I’ve heard many good things about him and from all accounts he and my grandmother were happily married.  So it must have been a profound change in my grandmother’s life when he died.  She was my age (62) when she became a widow.  I have friends who have lost their partners and it is a difficult transition.  

I didn’t mean for this post to be so tinted with sadness.  It’s a sweet photo from a very happy moment in their lives.  It gives me a bittersweet smile.