What a topic for Long & Short Reviewers to propose. Photos of living people do not belong on the Internet.
But wait--this might be fun. They didn't say "my life in photos of me."
Typical house in the suburb of Los Angeles where I was born...
The kind of car my mother drove across the length and breadth of the continental States when I was a wee tot. It was called the Plymouth Fury and advertised as having "a hellcat of a motor." It behaved very well in the hands of a competent, responsible driver. It must have been her generation's counterpart to the Camaro.
Photo from Daniel Schmitt & Co., thanks to Google.
The model horses my brother and I used to play with. We had all five of these and hundreds of other, smaller models. These were Barbie-size, two inches to one foot; Our "herd" of model horses included "Matchbox" horses that were just one inch high. The company that sold these horses, all cast in one mold, would later develop a line of horses that stood up in different positions; we never had those. We did have the one with jointed legs.
Photo from Google.
The first books it was known that I actually read, as distinct from memorizing stories after they'd been read to me a hundred times. I must have been reading Little Golden Books before these, but when I moved from memorizing to reading I don't remember.
Photo from Amazon.
The first game I played with my brother involved me shouting "Bz-z-z-zip!" and him giggling, when he was six months old. Later these little plastic things were all his.
Photo from EBay. They lived in houses and forts like these, if anyone took all the pieces out of the box to build the house.
Photo from NYPathSociety. We both liked Legos, too, and Tinker Toys, but neither of us ever got into Erector or Meccano building sets. We branched out. My Barbie collection started with this.
Photo from Etsy. Mine had an amateurish haircut when I got her, but I had fun with her and her foot-high friends, anyway.
Beyond the nursery...Historical events happened. I have very little memory even of joyous historical events like this.
Photo from Forbes.
A teacher brought in a TV set on which we could watch this. I was bored.
I do remember this. We were renting a place that had television. I watched the speech.
My brother and I tried to listen to this debate. Both of us fell asleep in minutes.
I wore this little cotton dress to school almost every Thursday in grades three through six. We actually chanted, at summer camp,
"We are Girl Scouts green and jolly.
We don't swear; we just say "Golly."
We don't smoke, and we don't chew.
We don't go out with boys that do.
Do you think we don't have fun?
You're right. We don't."
Actually swearing, smoking, and dating boys who did weren't much temptation in the middle grades.
Photo from Etsy. Of course the insignia on the shoulder sash were individual souvenirs. I had a sash full of badges, though. The only one I now remember earning was the "Pets" badge, in which my mother documented that I fed a goldfish every day for a month.
Having one of these was mandatory though having a place to ride it was never guaranteed. The important thing was that although it had small wheels that didn't make good time, the seat and handlebars could be adjusted to fit any child, up to and including one tall enough to ride a full-sized bike. My brother's was a Schwinn Stngray, as shown. As I recall mine was a Schwinn Daisy, though I learned to ride on an off-brand model, first.
Photo from Google.
In the 1970s Girl Scout uniforms changed to give us more options. None of the options was very flattering but I think the one my mother picked for me, as modelled by the little nerd kneeling at the far left, was absolutely the most unflattering to me. Sturdy Polyester Pants That Wouldn't Tear or Show Dirt and Would Grow Up With the Child! (Static cling city and, since nobody wanted to bother with Scouts after grade seven, destined never to fit me.) And That Vest with Extra Room to Display Lots and Lots of Badges! I wore it, anyway.
What I did after school on the other days:
Photo by Hope Gardens.
Photo from Music Teacher. ("Don't fear the French Horn" indeed. No. There's nothing to fear. It just makes a horrible noise in the hands of a child who wanted to play the flute. Wear ear plugs. You'll survive.)
The dog who met us at the bus after school legally belonged to the neighbors, though she was my pet. The dog we had euthanized, after he ate a bantam, legally belonged to us, and was nobody's pet. Go figure. The dog who met us at the bus looked something like this.
Some teenagers hid porn under their beds. I hid this.
Photo from Etsy. I display this book with pride now. In junior high school I hid it under the bed. Dad hated Latin and said no child should have to study it. So we didn't have to study it any longer. So I wanted to study it. Even nice, quiet children who hardly ever make trouble are perverse and rebellious.
Bantams are chickens bred to grow to about half the size of the standard breed they resemble. There are lots of different breeds with different looks. All healthy chickens have bright red crests and wattles, except a few who have been bred for melanism. This melanistic specimen resembles my little buddy Loretta. Free-range chickens normally live up to five years; at the time Loretta's six and a half years was just half of the world's record life span for a chicken. By now it's been confirmed that some chickens have lived more than fifteen years.
We knew two horses who looked something like this one. One had a white star on his forehead, so his name was Star. The other one was dark all over, so his name was Blackie. Like my current resident cat, they were animals of good will but visitors were warned that they weren't pets, so stand back. Usually they ignored me, or at most sniffed at me. My brother rode them. Bareback. It got him scolded with pride.
Photo from Picryl.
House on one of the streets where we had to occupy a rental property, some years, in winter. This is not the same house but they all looked as if they'd been designed by the same man. (This was not necessarily true. Some of my "Aunt Dotty's" houses had been designed and built by Aunt Dotty. They fitted in with the other houses on their streets.)
The college I attended has had so much renovation that Google photos of it don't look like anything I remember. The campus church was architecturally distinctive: Built to look like a new movie theatre instead of a church, it got around "wartime" building restrictions, It had individual seats that folded up as you stood up, rather than pews.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
I voted against Mondale.
Photo from Biography.com.
University: We spent the first week learning where things were, on the huge sprawling campus.
Photo from Adventist Universities.
Home with mononucleosis. Back to the city to work...wherever the little four-car Metrorail trains ran.
Photo from Yelp.
In the 1980s floppy disks were really floppy, and Google tends to feature the later, smaller designs. We did not yet think of computers as portable. If an office had its own computer network, the main computer had its own room and was typically between the sizes of a cooking range and a refrigerator. An individual terminal linked to such a computer looked like this (if you were lucky--often the screen lighted up in orange). It did not run different programs at the same time in different windows. In fact each computer's programs were limited strictly to what the employee was paid to do, and pity the fool who tried to get the office computer to do something more interesting.
Photo from Newretro.net.
The Awesome Eighties ended when the Gulf War began. President G.H.W. Bush advised all nonessential personnel to leave Washington and gave us a good example by going to Kennebunkport. I went to Pittsburgh. I saw things that still make me cry, but I loved the people I met in Pittsburgh.
Photo from Next Pittsburgh.
Berea College had been my first choice, if I haaad to go to college, when I was sixteen and knew some people who'd gone there. Years later, when they'd graduated and all the attractive men my age on college campuses were teachers, I had a chance to go to Berea. Loved the courses, the library, the computers. The people...I suppose there are cliques and rivalries everywhere. I did not like the social atmosphere at Berea and did not want to support it by staying another year. They really did proclaim that "God hath made of one blood all nations of men." So far as I could tell, that meant all equally hostile and competitive. Continued residency depended on grades. Grades were on a curve system. If you got an A someone else couldn't get that A, so look out behind you. More aggressive people claimed to love Berea. I didn't.
Photo from Wikipedia. I will say that Berea has a beautiful campus.
Everyone who liked computers loved Berea's computer labs. Shiny new terminals with this wonderful new layout that looked almost like a printable page, right on the screen...Windows! We wrote programs to tutor freshmen and tested programs older students had written to tutor us.
Photo from Computer History Museum.
I could still earn a BS at a public university. Which one? Johnson City, Tennessee, and Wise, Virginia, were about equally long commutes. I was accepted by both in June. Each of my parents was in a different hospital in July. Long commutes didn't seem feasible. I never did finish that BS. I had a CGNA certificate, although I hated sitting with geriatric patients. I earned a CMT certificate so I could work with healthier people. In the 1990s the overnight express Greyhound bus was my friend. Board that bus, go to sleep, wake up on the other side of Virginia...
Photo from Yelp.
Married my business's best asset, found a little fixer-upper house in between his house in Clarksville and mine in Virginia...Google currently shows five different houses, and (inexplicably) a street carnival that couldn't fit into a residential neighborhood, at the address of our little house in Maryland. Of the five houses this one doesn't look like the one I remember, but is the only one that has a chance of being the same house after twenty years of redecorating.
It was interesting to find books with which I helped writers on Amazon. Some books of which I wrote the complete first draft can't be found on Amazon because, of course, they were revised and published under different titles. Some books on which I've worked weren't completed, or weren't published. These three, for which I did typing and copy editing, are still available and warmly recommended. They are their authors' own work. I might have suggested a phrase here and there, but although these are books on which I spent time they're not my books at all.
In the public library's computer center. Photo from Yelp.
From this point on, youall know the story. The pictures are on this web site. Browse about.
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