Pictures of Dead Relatives, Pt. X

[fflo]

This is a picture of my father (on the left) in his dorm room at the U. South Dakota in the mid-1950s. That's a portrait of my mother on the wall. I suppose that's his roommate. How cheesy & collegiate, the alcoholic beverages & the wastebasket with pennants; how cool, that desk lamp; how odd that they had bunk beds.




He was probably 15 in this one, getting ready to go to college. Kinda got the dork goin'. I didn't scan any of the baby-beauty-contest-winning ones from his early youth.



Pretty dorky here, too. I like this shot, though. They seem to be pretty happy, and there's a trailer in the background. Something about him here reminds me of pal L.

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Seeing this reminded me of an interesting thing I found in a google search once. The brother that I have the least contact with, Walter, actually submitted a paper that my dad wrote about his experiences in WWII (all safely behind the lines), along with some photos to a historical/veteran website. I had never seen the paper or the photos, and so this was all news to me when I stumbled across it:

http://www.qsl.net/pe1ngz/stories/story-rafiraq.html

Maybe I should put this on my own LJ.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Cool. Seems like a guy who's related to you, I'd say---passion for his technical thing. Dig the old photos.

[paperkingdoms]

Your college dorm experience didn't involve bunk beds? Mine certainly did. They were more substantial than those, and unbunkable... but most people bunked them.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Nope, no bunkables. pijeanf & I had twin beds about 18 inches apart, against their respective walls, with an area at their feet about the square footage of another twin bed. I've been astonished in recent years thinking that we lived together in such a small space & didn't kill each other.

[paperkingdoms]

::nods:: The "and we didn't kill each other?" factor is kinda impressive for college dorm rooms. My freshman year I don't think our beds could've bunked - they certainly weren't. But the next 3 years I lived in bunk beds... senior year, in the one-bedroom four-person apartment [it seemed like a not-horrible idea at the time], you couldn't put all four beds flat on the floor. [It was campus owned, and the rules said you had to unbunk the beds before you moved out. And, well, we did. But it wasn't a particularly *good* idea in our apartment.]

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I had big ambitions at one point to build a loft in my dorm room, but I didn't really need to---I was in singles after my freshman year, albeit a small one as a sophomore.

What I miss is a cafeteria pass. Now that I'm single again, it's very appealing. Oh, the cereal bar! The many beverage options! The only thing I was glad to see go was the tray. After 4 years of that, no more trays for me---I take stuff off of 'em and set 'em aside now.

[paperkingdoms]

I had a loft one semester... but it was with extra super special modular furniture, so it wasn't that exciting.

There are definitely times when it would be nice. ::ponders trays:: Oh! That's right. My group of friends was in the habit of sitting far too many people at one table, so trays tended to be piled up and set aside... or half the people were eating on a stack of two or 3 trays, and the rest of us were trayless. You can put a whole more plates around a table than you can cafeteria trays.

[sprig5.livejournal.com]

that picture of your parents with the trailer in the background-- your dad has your jaw there

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Cool! I hadn't noticed.