This image of a man in (Vietnam?) hung in the living room of my childhood home. I think it was Vietnam because the war was in full swing at the time and the magazines were printing photos of people there. Like the Woman at Night, mom probably found a photo and painted it. Again, it was unusual that a small town white family in the midwest would have a painting of an Asian person on their wall, especially if he were Vietnamese. I cannot imagine my cousin, Harold, would have been happy. I liked it though.
I always through he looked like a family friend:
This painting, like the Woman at Night, will go into storage since there is nowhere to hang it here.
Sometime before Christmas 1969 my mom painted the portrait of an African American woman standing under a street lamp at night. I am pretty sure she found a photo in Life or Look Magazine and made a painting of it. She was always looking through magazines and cutting out interesting photos. She had at least one file cabinet full of clippings and magazines.
This painting hung on the wall near the front door for a few years. I was proud of mom for this painting. At the time I thought it was well done, plus it was of someone that didn’t look like us. I think she captured something in the woman’s expression. Is she sad? Angry? Tired?
I was proud that our home displayed a painting of an African American woman.
This was painted during the civil unrest of the late 1960s — possibly in 1968 even where there were riots even in our hometown after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
I wish I had available wall space to hang this painting, but the walls in the attic are too low. I’ll store it and let Andrew and Clare decide its fate.
Christmastime 1969 my family was given a fruit basket as a gift. It’s possible it was the first fruit basket we ever received because we took at least three photos of it.
In the above photo, Kevin, Mom, and I sit beneath the Christmas tree with the Fruit Basket in front of us. We’re all dressed up, so we must have been heading out to a relative’s soon — so it could be either Christmas eve or Christmas day.
This is a perfect photo to show off my mom’s creative endeavors. Mom’s painting of the African American woman was based on an image she saw in a magazine. It hung in the living room for a long time. I have it now, along with another, similar-sized painting of an Asian man with a rickshaw.
To the right, and below the painting is another craft mom made. It is a candle holder made out of several terracotta pots, partially spray painted black, then shellacked.
Also in this picture could be the only proof that mom made stained glass windows out of tissue paper and tape. I think mom wanted curtains over the windows and dad did not. Dad got fed up with the tissue paper stained glass and took a razor to them. After that she put black tape on the windows to represent segments of a stained glass window. I think Dad took a razor to that too. They eventually got wooden shutters to put on the inside for privacy.
In these two photographs Dad looks sad, angry, or depressed. Kevin looks mischievous.
Dad rarely smiled for photographs, but usually had a smile in his eyes, but in this case I don’t see any of that. I wonder what happened to make him so sad. It could simply be that he didn’t want to pose with the fruit basket but mom wanted him to so he was being passive-aggressive about it.
The first photo shows the curved shelf I remember well from the kitchen. I can see mom’s recipe box. on the second shelf.
I do have memories of the (or a) fruit basket and I think they might have gotten it from Dad’s workplace — this might have been the year he began working for Reber’s Appliance. I don’t know, however, why so many weird photos were taken of it.
Clutch Cargo Lips 