Photographs were not just a dime-a-dozen when we were kids. It was not like now when everyone carries their phone in their pocket which means they have an excellent camera within reach at all times. That means that childhood pictures were few and memorable.

My grandfather was an excellent photographer. There is a great photo of him with his head under a black cloth taking a photo back in the '20's. There are some lovely portraits of my mother, as well as some of her friend and neighbor Kitty Ford, taken when they are teens. Every once in awhile I look at the ones of Kitty and think that they should be in the hands of her daughters and grandchildren but, unfortunately, I have long since lost track of them. Hopefully they have prints of them passed down from their grandmother.

By the time I came along the photos were less formal. There are a couple of me as a young person that come to mind though - carefully posed to look spontaneous. One is of me at, I suppose about age 7, lying, resting on my elbows on the living room floor with the Sunday funnies spread out in front of me, presumably reading them. I can't recall ever spontaneously assuming that pose, but the Sunday comics had a special place in my grandfather's story as, probably in the late '20's or early '30's, he would read the Sunday comics over the radio. He became "Uncle Jake" for this show and would encourage the listening children to get their funny paper and bring it over to the radio while he read to them. He was the perfect person for this role as he could assume many different hats and was great at assuming accents. He would occasionally be called down to NYC to play radio parts for roles like an Irish cop or a German butcher. I have no idea how long this shoe lasted as it was well before my time.

When I was a bit older I received one of those box cameras. I never was a particularly great photographer but there is a fun photo which I took with that camera, again organized by my grandfather. We were visiting my Uncle Harvey and Aunt Hattie at their home in Maspeth. LI. I don't remember how the clowning started, but grandpa set up a photo shot so that it looks like he and Uncle Harvey are playing leap-frog with grandpa leaning over and Harvey (the younger brother) is about to jump over him. Needless to say, Uncle Harvey never actually leaped but kept both feet firmly on the ground. It is fairly convincing though and we all had fun setting up the scene. Apparently leap-frog and hoops were part of their childhood pastimes and stayed back in the childhood activities of the 1890's.

I rarely posed pictures like he did. There is one fun one though that Pete and I set up. Our daughter Casey was probably about four months old. We propped her into sitting in the corner of the couch and positioned her Uncle Julius's recently published book, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama, in front of her as though she is reading it.

Another posed photo was one taken out at the cottage of Peg and Agnes on Lake Ontario. My mother and I went out there once a year with the "Twenty-Thirty Club." This was a group of single women who met monthly for dinner, rotating among their houses. They kept the name over the years, even though they aged to thirty-forty and forty-fifty. I'm not sure when they stopped meeting. I do remember when they came to our house it was a big deal. My grandfather would always order Petit Fours as a special treat and I was restricted to only one before the company came. I think he and I vacated the front of the house when they arrived, leaving it to the women. As I said, once a year in the summer, Peg and Agnes would take their hosting turn by inviting the group out to their cottage to stay for a long weekend. In retrospect, I assume that they were a lesbian couple, but such things were not talked of back in the '50's. As these were all single women, I was the only child. I was used to that and always enjoyed the attention and the whole experience. The photo from our album was taken to look like I was in mid-swing on the wooden swing which hung from a large tree next to the cottage. What you don't see is that my mother was holding my feet!

Speaking of Casey, we were really bad about taking pictures of her. Fortunately her babysitter, Diane Panozzo, took several of her as an infant. One is one of those classic photos of a naked baby Casey pushing up onto extended arms on the changing table. Of course the photo is in black and white. Recently Casey has been teaching a class at church and everyone was supposed to bring in a baby photo. The director had all of the photos converted to black and white so there would be no clue as to which one was Casey.

Diane made sure that Casey got copies of all of those baby photos since her parents really failed in that task. It is fortunate that Bob has been much better at fulfilling that parent task of taking photos as the boys have grown up. There are many good photos of Robin, Mischa, and Ian taken throughout their childhoods. Not that photography had advanced that much by then. He was just much better at getting photographic records of their doings. If not, the more recent section of the photograph album would be fairly empty!