I’ve glanced at this photo from my mother’s stash several times without thinking much about it. She wrote on the back:
Irma, Gerald, Mitchell, me
Irma is holding a rake, Gerald is holding an axe, and Mitchell and Mother are holding hoes. They appear to be standing in a field that includes Queen Anne’s Lace, a wildflower that grows wild all over the South. (I don’t know if this is Alabama, Mississippi, or Tennessee, and I have no idea who Irma and Mitchell are.)
When I decided to scan it, I looked at the back again, and the hair on my arms stood up, because I realized she’d also put the date on it: December 7, 1941.
For a while, I doubted her. Would there still be even a smattering of wildflowers that late in the year? And would people be outside in shirtsleeves in December? So I did some research, reading reminiscences of people who were alive and aware of the events on Pearl Harbor Day. Many people were enjoying leisurely afternoons and would only gradually hear the news as they turned on their radios. Winter came late to Mississippi that year, and one woman remembered how the mild weather drew people outdoors.
So I believe my mother’s date, and here’s the story I read from her photo. My mother was fifteen. She was out goofing around with her favorite brother and friends on a Sunday afternoon. None of them knew how their world was about to change, or that within twenty-four hours their country would be at war.
I think that’s a pretty amazing “before” photo to find in my family archives.
First, that is an awesome photo, and it looks like a fun day “before” – at first look I thought they had been fishing. I love the hats.
My Grandfather was a world away, on a battleship called the USS Oklahoma. I didn’t know that my grandfather was in the war at all till I was about 11 when I found a picture of my very erroll flynn-esque grandfather with a lei around his neck. So i asked my grandma ( who by the way was NOT my grandma – but his third wife… I told you, he was very errol … ) when he was in Hawaii, and she was the one who told me that he was at Pearl Harbor, he was wounded bad enough that he was discharged. He never told me a thing about it. My grandma did find some photos that he had of the aftermath of the attack.
I went to see that wretched Ben Affleck movie because, as morbid as it is, I just wanted to “see” what happened. My big thought “HEY! This happened in COLOR! This is what my PawPaw saw…” Up until that movie every picture I had seen had been in black and white.
He is spinning in his grave because I’m a Toyota girl.
I haven’t seen that wretched Ben Affleck movie because I can’t handle war movies. No way could I watch Saving Private Ryan and get even that Hollywood glimpse of what my father experienced in Normandy.
I’m not surprised your grandfather never said a word.
I not surprised either, but I wish I knew something, because now no one knows. And for good or for bad, that experience shaped him into who he was – and helped form my father and even me.
Great photo and even greater background research. But with all you discovered, the photo will still retain some mystery. Who was the fifth member of that sporty group … the person who actually took the picture?
the photo will still retain some mystery
Like all the best stories.
I, too, wondered who the photographer might have been.
Very cool!
Thanks. =)
That is a fantastic image…especially when you consider the date of the image.
What an incredible find! That is awesome.
Thanks! I know you’ve run into the same thing I have–photos without names or dates. No telling how much history we’ll never know is in those photos. So when one IS dated or has names on it, it’s very gratifying.
That’s awesome!
I think so, too! =)
in those days one didn’t just run down to the corner one hour photo development kiosk. thus, by the time she got the photo she knew the significance of the date. i’ll speculate that she knowingly wrote it on the back with the thought that someday someone would discover, and marvel at, it. so in a way you’re an instrument to make that little bit of prescience happen. i’ll guess she didn’t know it would be discovered by her younger daughter more than 70 years later. way so cool!
Yes. It could have been any other day with her brother and friends–but it became a date she would never forget–much like November 22 and September 11 (for her and for me).