Mom

 I recently received some family pictures I had not seen before.

On the back of the little 6x9cm sepia shot my mother and her brother are identified.  Under their names the location and date are noted, Wisconsin - 1928.  If the date is correct my mother looks old for her age, which would have been 10 or 11 at the time.  That is probably the family car in the background.  Tough times.

The family left Wisconsin, probably soon after the above picture was made and drove to Idaho.  Living in Winchester, my uncle grew tall and became an accomplished highschool athlete.  He went off from there to become a WWII aviator.  My mother went to work for the phone company as an operator in Lewiston, where I was born.  She stayed with the phone company after the family moved on to Seattle.

The picture on the street was shot in Seattle in the mid-1940s.  It was very likely made by one of the photographers who lurked on the streets in those days, snapping photos of pedestrians and then giving them the address of the the photo processor, usually a drugstore, where the photo could be retrieved.  The quality of this shot must have been disappointing, though it does portray a pretty good representation of the style of the time.