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Flashback Friday

This is another repost of Flashback Friday.  Sorry about the recent spate of re-posts, but it has been a bit busy down here with everyone moving and my taking care of two kids.  We'll get to some new stuff soon but even re-posts are worthy of reconsideration.  especially this one.




These three ruffians are not too happy.  They have been awakened, dressed up, and forced against their will to attend Sunday morning church services in Seaton.  The twins are 4 years old.  Phil has just turned 6.  We have been propped against the tree for maximum photographic effect, and no doubt been told to smile or say "cheese", but let's face it,  this is a bad morning.  Church!

In what is probably one of the best pictures we three ever took together, this unhappy band of brothers exudes attitude; a kind of mad mob mentality that says, "we'll get even".    This classic picture is my favorite, and oddly enough, has a bit of history itself, besides the un-posed un-happiness of its subjects.

You see, it has been lost to history for a few years now.  Somewhere in this blog I drew a picture from memory of this photo.  It was a plea to sis-in-laws Holly or Jeanne to check their albums for a copy of this picture.  I was positive I had lost my copy in a BFE flood of my basement.  Sadly, neither had a copy.  

Just recently I was going through some boxes I'd never unpacked; one of those Spring Cleaning things where you see if you can get rid of anything to unclutter your life.  I always find new things to clutter it up with so it's a losing proposition, anyway.

I came across a couple of negatives and immediately threw them into the trash.  Who needs old negatives?  One voice said, good man, unclutter.  The other voice said "Keep all negatives, you never know if you'll need a copy."  The first voice won.  I tossed them and went on to the next pile.  But, damn if that second voice didn't keep whispering, "You never know!"  Just for the Hell of it, I grabbed them out of the trash and put them up to the light, and you know what?

Yep, the picture I thought was lost forever, it was the negative.  I squinted again and saw three figures against a tree.  Out of the depths of history, or maybe just one of those small miracles that happen, here, in a box, then tossed in the trash was the negative of  my most favorite of all pictures.  A small miracle indeed.

I found a place here in town that works with negatives and within a few days, that negative had produced a small moment in time, a fraction of a second when three boys, on a Sunday morning, a half century later, once again, displayed how pissed off they were to have to go to church.

Lesson number one:  you have to go to church when the folks make you, but you don't have to like it.

 Lesson number two:  always take lots of pictures; one of them will be priceless.

 Lesson number three:  never toss your negatives.

 ADDENDUM:  A couple additional things about that picture.



  • The house was new, having been built just a couple years earlier.  The layout and some of the building features were ideas that Marj had.   Thus the lack of vegetation which would be planted later.
  • That tree we are standing in front of would survive another 5 or 6 years.  It would be cut down the same day "Bunker" Hill died in his Plymouth Valiant at McCaw's Corner south of Aledo.   
  • That tree also had a scythe stuck in it that the tree had claimed.  I always thought that was creepy.
  • The tree to the right in the side yard survives today and is full and lush and as pretty a tree as there ever was.  It was our climbing tree.  You could see as far away as a kid was ever likely to see in Seaton from heights of those limbs.  
  • The car is a bright orange '56 Buick.  Marj on a trip up to the Cities would carelessly flick a cigarette that would reenter in the back seat area and catch the interior on fire.  Their next car was a '62 Oldsmobile Starfire.   
I look at that picture and see the unbridled distaste for convention in a young kid's life. One of the first of many in a lifetime.  Suck it up, guys, it gets worse.  But not today it doesn't.  It is the absolute worse thing that could happen to these three guys on this particular day, and there is simply no disguising it.

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