Category: Bucklin

I’m not so sure I like the title of my post this week, but it’s the best thing I could come up with for the unusual situation that it refers to.  1952 was the year that my parents were married, and I’ve posted stories related to that during the past two months.  (Meeting the Parents in 1952 and A Letter From Home in 1952)  Seventy years is an important milestone and even though my parents are no longer alive, I think it is appropriate to acknowledge such an important part of my own family history.

The other two posts talked about  the earlier part of 1952.  My parents – Bob Landry and Betty Lou Bucklin – got engaged and they went to their parents’ homes to meet their future in-laws.  My dad also joined the Air Force and went to basic training in Texas.  He would later be stationed at Edwards Air Force base in California.  They wrote letters to each other that they saved until some of their nosy children (my sister Jamie and I) found them and read them.  And we laughed and laughed at the sweet messages that they sent to each other.  This led to the letters disappearing, and for the most part never to be seen again.  I’ve shared the letters that we were able to find. (Love Letters Lost)

Well, one of the other things that happened that year was that my mom decided to become a Catholic.  I don’t know that this was a prerequisite for Daddy to marry her or not.  He had stopped dating her a while because she was a Methodist and the Landry family were devout Catholics.  But she was too irresistible to him and they started dating again and became engaged.  Maybe she decided to become Catholic because it was so important to him and he wanted to get married in the Catholic Church.

So she went through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) or whatever the process was back then.  But she did not go through it alone.  Her older sister Sylvia had married Ronald Pilcher in February of 1951 and he was a Catholic also.  She must have decided to become Catholic as well, because my mom always talked about them going through the classes together.  Sylvia was married with a child in Lafayette at the time and mom was living at home with her parents in Hathaway. At least it looks like that from the pictures she sent her beau when he was away.  The photos of Betty Lou show her with her younger siblings on their parents’ property in Hathaway.

My mom must have gone to Lafayette to go through the process.  It’s the only thing that makes sense.  One of the things that happens is that those in the class are baptized if they have not been previously baptized.  Those who have been baptized in other faith (such as Methodist) are not rebaptized.  But they do make some of the same professions that are made during a baptism.  Usually there are godparents present who also profess to be an encouragement in the faith.  So in an unusual turn of events, Sylvia and Betty Lou were allowed to be each other’s godmother.  I never heard anything about godfathers when my mom talked about this part of her life.  She was always so tickled with the fact that Sylvia was her godmother and she was Sylvia’s.

This picture may have nothing to do with the RCIA or the process they went through.  I like it because they look so chummy in the photo.  Sisterly love.  I always think of the story of the mutual godmothers when I see it.  Now maybe you will too.

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.

I like this pair of photos.  I got them from cousin Carla in 2019.  She let me borrow a whole stack of these old photos so I could scan them.  I’ve shared a few of them with you before.  Many of those photos had my grandfather Fred Bucklin and his identical twin brother Clarence Bucklin – father of Carla – in them.  In many of them I am unable to tell who is who since they were identical.  I keep thinking that at some point I’ll be able to tell them apart.  Because in some of the photos – like this one – you can tell which twin is which by who they are standing next to.

The person that is recognizable in those photos is Myrtle Moon.  Do not confuse her with my grandmother who was also a Myrtle.  My grandmother was Myrtle Phenice.  I have always found it interesting that both of the twins dated and married a woman named Myrtle.  So when I see a photo of the twins with Myrtle Moon, I’m pretty sure that she was likely standing next to Clarence in the photo.  That’s how I identified Clarence and Fred in this photo.  Myrtle Moon had a thin frame and curly hair and I recognize her standing with her arms crossed in front of her.

The other woman who is standing closer to my grandfather Fred is not my grandmother Myrtle.  I don’t know her name and I don’t know if it was a girlfriend or just a friend of the twins.  They took several photos with different friends and family members.  So it could be a friend of Myrtle Moon or a friend of one of their sisters.  At this point it’s not likely to be found out, though  I have found out things about photos from unlikely sources at unexpected times.  I post these photos and never know what kind of information I can get in return.

The other part of this pair of photos is this one with the same four people with their backs turned toward the camera.  It’s an unusual pose to see in an old photo, yet it shows a playfulness that they must have had.  I really don’t think they were distracted by anything behind them.  And the photo only makes sense if you have the first photo.  If you only found this old photo, it would leave you mostly puzzled.  It might even leave you frustrated because you know they’ll never turn around to show you their faces.

Now that I look at these photos more, I am getting a bit puzzled and frustrated.  It’s like there is an inside joke and somehow I’m missing something.  And why are they hugging those pine branches?  Is that a clue?  Perhaps I am overthinking it.  It’s just a fun front and back set of photos.  Like a before and after photo.

While I’m at it, I might as well post this other photo of my grandfather Fred on the same day.  I’m pretty sure it is the same day.  He is wearing the same thing, he is with the unidentified female from the other  photos, and she is wearing the same thing as well.  I’m not exactly sure where the photo was taken.  My grandfather and his brother lived in Hathaway, Louisiana, which is a small town in southern Louisiana in Jefferson Davis Parish.  When we visited my grandparents in Hathaway, we used to go the “Myrie” and play.  That was actually the Bayou Grand Marais, but it was more of a drainage ditch.  It looks like they were near a more substantial body of water.  It could be the Mermentau River near Jennings, but that didn’t have a beach like you see in the third photo.  I’m thinking it is most likely the Ouiska Chitto Creek.  It’s a waterway a few miles west of Hathaway where you can canoe and swim.

Or you can just go there with friends and take fun photos for people to think about 100 years later.  That’s what my grandfather did.  I, for one, am glad he did.

I can’t believe  I’ve never posted a photo of my mom as an young child before.  There aren’t that many of them, but it seems like I would have posted one before.  I know I have mentioned photos of my mom as a baby before.   In 2017 I posted a photo of my grandmother Myrtle Phenice – my mom’s mom.  I mentioned a baby photo of my mom that was from a contest she won.  Then in 2019 I mentioned in a post about her mom that they had both been cute babies and that Mama had won a Gerber’s Cutest Baby Contest. 

My mom used to say that she won a cutest baby contest, and this is the photo that she would show.  But on the back of this photo it says that this is the photo that she won honorable mention in a national Sears contest.  What?  Did she or did she not win the Gerber’s Cutest Baby award?   That would have been in 1933, and the first contest was just two years earlier.  I looked up that information just now and realized that the first winner of that contest died this week.  What a coincidence!

But I don’t think my mom was the winner in 1933.  Maybe she got honorable mention in that.  Or maybe she just got honorable mention in the Sears contest.  Either way, she did pretty well for a national contest for cute babies.  But really, just look at that cute little face of hers.  She was adorable.

I’ve been thinking of writing this post for about a year now.  In a few of the photos I’ve posted, there have been some paintings by my mom in the background.  I always took them for granted because they were always there.  But some people were surprised to hear that my mom painted.  When I heard that, I knew I had to write a post that featured some paintings by my mom.  The easiest way to do that is to share some photos of her paintings that I own.

This first painting was the first painting that my mom painted.  At least that’s what is written on the back of the painting.  It was painted around 1950 when she was a junior or senior in high school.  I’m sure she must have dabbled with paints and colors when she was growing up.  Otherwise she wouldn’t have had the talent or skills to produce a painting like this that she considers her first real painting.

It’s hard for me to imagine that my mom was painting something so nice when I see some of the photos of her from that time.  She just seems like a young country girl having fun playing basketball, singing at church, and performing with the band.  She had a lot of interests and seemed to be pretty good at most of them.  I could say that she was the worst skier, but to be fair that wasn’t really an interest of hers.  My dad taught water skiing, so when his new girlfriend said she couldn’t ski, he got it in his head to teach her.  After she got tired of drinking lake water, he agreed to concede – water skiing was not a skill of Betty Lou’s.  She was his only failure.  A fact that never seemed to bother Mama in the least!

And even though that painting was the first one that my mom painted, it wasn’t the first one that I obtained.  I got my first one around 1977 or 1978.  I call it “The Path to the Lake” and it was painted around 1977.  There’s a story about why it is mine.  After she painted it, she was always changing the little shrub in the foreground on the right of the painting.  For some reason it always bothered her.  She called it a “trash shrub” and nothing she did to fix it was acceptable.  So one day I saw her getting her gesso out while sitting in front of that painting.  Gesso is a thick white paint that artists use to make a canvas smoother for painting, or to give yourself a clean surface to start a new painting.

I asked her what she was doing, and she said that she was going to paint over that trash shrub and start something new.  I told her that this was one of my favorite paintings of hers, so she gave it to me then and there.  I have always liked this painting, even that sweet little shrub on the right in the foreground.  It reminds me of a place near where we lived in North Carolina. 

One of the last paintings I got of my mom’s was this “Still Life with Flowers.”   In January of 2016 – a few months after we had moved our parents into Brookdale Assisted Living in Lake Charles – we cleaned out their home in Jennings because someone wanted to buy the “happy little house on Lucy Street.”  One of the things we divvied up were the many paintings that my mom had done over the years.  I picked out a few of my favorites, then Chuck picked this one.  I had never really noticed it before.  I usually look at the landscapes.  But this one has grown on me.

I was talking to my dad a few months later and mentioned the painting.  I tried to describe it to him, but couldn’t.  So I sent him a photo of it.  He showed it to Mama, and she claimed that it wasn’t one of hers.  They were in Assisted Living because of her memory issues.  She definitely painted it.  Her standard signature is on the bottom right, just like on the other two photos I’ve posted.  For some reason, paintings were particularly confusing for her.  She thought some paintings by other people were hers.  She would say that they were stealing her paintings and claiming them as their own.  Then she didn’t know her own paintings when they were shown to her.  That’s what Alzheimer’s will do to a person.

But my mom outsmarted it in her way by writing messages on the back of many of her paintings.  That’s one of the reasons I know about her first painting.  But I knew that already because I had heard her talking about it through the years.  I never thought I would own it, but my mom gave it to me one day when I went to visit her.  I also know that the “Still Life with Flowers’ was painted in 1992.  I would never have known that if she hadn’t written it on the back.  That’s just one of the many things that I appreciate about my mom.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there.