Cousins - Karen's First Birthday

I love quests.  I love gathering, researching, compiling information.  And I always feel rather satisfied when the pieces come together into a cohesive story.  The following images are the result of one such quest.

The pictures were in one of Aunt Nancy's photo albums.  They weren't labeled and they were scattered throughout the pages.  As I sorted her photos, I realized I had three images of the same event.  Emails from RoseMarie and Sue confirmed that they were they two oldest children.  The three of us guessed that the baby was Karen.

Then I emailed Aunt Katherine and as Paul Harvey always said, "...now you know the rest of the story."  

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Click the link below for the second page:

Career Goal 1960

This was just too fun. Taking three somewhat random photographs and grouping them like this.....fun.

Technically, my career goal of Cowgirl began before 1960. I got the red and black outfit in the middle picture for Christmas 1959. The other pictures were from 1960. I would have been 5. Frighteningly, that was 50 years ago. 50!!??! How crazy is that?

If you would like to read additional information about the gallery mount itself, go to elizadhill.com, Products page.

Across the Road

Across the road from the Little White House was Dunn Funeral Home. Grandmother and Granddaddy lived in the left half. The right half was the funeral home. I think that the piano we all learned to play sat in the central hallway.

(If you look carefully to the left of the funeral home, you can see the garage that was in front of where Mama's current house is. The "concrete pad" was the floor of the garage.)

These pictures must have been taken when the funeral home was new because there are no fish ponds in front. There were two large, rectangular, concrete fish ponds on either side of the walkway. Grandmother had goldfish and lilies in the ponds. Seems to me that the goldfish were HUGE!! Big enough to bite a chunk out of your leg. But then again, I was pretty young.

I spent a fair amount of time here with Maudie. Mama had the flower shop, Daddy was working for Grandmother and Granddaddy, and Maudie played with me. Coloring with her was the best. She made me feel like she had nothing better to do than to be with me. She was wonderful. I wish you all could have known her. Her funeral was the first one in the "new" funeral home in Eddyville. 1962.

Me, Cindy, Mama, Grandmother, Rosemary, and Maudie

This picture was taken in the living room. You'll recognize the birch tree picture on the wall as one of the many Paint-by-Number pictures that Grandmother painted. I believe that's the dining room through the doorway and the kitchen beyond that. The kitchen opened onto a porch and there's a picture somewhere of Uncle Kenneth turning the crank on an ice cream maker and Aunt Katherine in pin curls. She was trying to avoid the camera, but no such luck. Hopefully, that picture will turn up, too.

Mama, me, and Granddaddy

On Easter, we would all go to church and then come here for Easter dinner. While we were at church, the Easter bunny would come and hide our eggs. All of us, all the cousins, would then head out looking for eggs. One Easter, we were playing shadow tag. I jumped on Karen's (cousin) shadow. She jumped backward and.........FELL INTO THE FISHPOND!

Yes, she fell right into the 200 foot deep fishpond with the killer, whale-sized goldfish! All the grownups came running, got Karen out. Truly if she had worn the heavier coat that Aunt Katherine told her to (yes, Karen disobeyed), she may have drowned, or been eaten by the goldfish, or something even worse! I felt that it was my fault that she fell, but she was never mad at me about it. She knew I didn't mean to make her fall into the fishpond.

Dunn Funeral Home always seemed like a mansion to me - actually, it still does. :-)

This picture came from a CD that Mama and Bill had of photographs from Old Kuttawa. It looks as if it was a picture for the newspaper.

The Little White House

Cindy had a great picture of her as a baby with Granddaddy. I checked with Mama and confirmed that this picture was taken in the sideyard of the little (and I do mean little) white house we lived in when both Cindy and Rose were babies. Because you were both so little when we moved to "New Eddyville", putting your picture in context of that little house may give you a new perspective. I remember this furniture. I have it associated with "Diana's Flowers". Mama speculates that is because the furniture and the sign for her business were in the same yard.


Uncle Kenneth and Aunt Katherine lived in the little white house before we did. They moved out and onto Granddaddy's farm. We moved in and lived there until the TVA made Barkley Lake, about 1963 (I was in third grade). It was when we moved to New Eddyville that we transferred our church membership from the Baptist Church in Old Kuttawa to Eddyville First Baptist.


Can you see the reflection in the glass on the coolers Mama had on the front porch for her flower business?


This picture is of the yard on the right side of the house. Don't know if you can see, but there is an electric fan on the picnic table. The door you see in the block foundation led into the basement. The house only had one bedroom, so when company came for an overnight visit, they slept in the basement. My recollection of that basement is that it was more of a cellar than anything else. (Rose, maybe that's where your "cave" impression comes from! LOL)

Since this post began with Cindy, it's only fitting that it end with a picture of her. Cindy and Uncle Hershel. This picture has our car in the background, and at the corner of our property, beside the car, was a sink hole. The sink hole had, what were in my 6-yr-old opinion, beautiful orange day lilies growing in it. I was afraid that if I ever fell into the sink hole that I would wind up somewhere close to China or die or something else that would be equally horrible.