I was looking for my sister. I have mentioned the reasons for that, but in short, she was a show-biz lady and careful about the images she shared after the bloom began to pass from her career. Now that she is gone, her lovely daughter was looking for things she didn’t sequester for reasons of professional vanity. Wading through the hard-copy images contained in the unopened boxes from the folk’s estate was a wild rush through now-ancient family history. I am still looking, since there are more boxes, but some pictures led to references of photographic copies of things separated sequentially and digitally in time through generations of old computers.
That is where I found Dad. It was an unexpected veer off the original purpose of the search, and I was stunned. I may have seen the image at the top before, but it was new to me this morning. It is a self-portrait from 1946 or so. He had been in the third-to-last class of WWII Naval Aviators, trained at Naval Air Station Pensacola to be ready for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. The Bombs settled that, and the abrupt demobilization of millions of young Americans commenced.
Dad’s part of that was to pack his sea bag and head north to the Family homestead in Maplewood, New Jersey. From there he intended to use the GI Bill to complete his training as an industrial designer, just as millions of other men and women did. They all , had suspended their lives “for the Duration.” Now that it was over, they rushed to find improvement and opportunity as the smoke of the war clouds drifting away.
Dad’s goal was professional certification, and he thought that Pratt Institute of Technology in Brooklyn was the answer. That is where a close pal encouraged a blind date with a winsome young lady who had come to Manhattan from Ohio to work a war-time job at the Texas Corporation in their offices in the Chrysler Building. That was Betty, our Mom. But that story only began with their marriage at the Little Church Around the Corner in 1948. There was more to the story.
There are dozens of sketches he did at the time, building his skill set. Framed 8 x 10 images of his flight school comrades decorate the staircase at the farm. They are nice professional works, and seen in all the places I was able to pound nails into walls throughout my life. But this cache, surfacing only this morning had more. My favorites were ones that portrayed his life as a veteran single guy.
I suspect this woman in the uniform of a Petty Officer Second Class was the model for the sketch filed near it. The picture was created by Dad later, but long before our scan-and-forward technology. I can only estimate their transformation from paper to picture as being in the late 1950s, when he saw his professional work on automobiles transformed into advertising copy. But here is a real lady, circa 1946, of the same time as his self portrayal as a prospective Pratt Scholar:
OK, I know. It was early in his career, and I asked the boys down by the Loading Dock if any of them were related to her. Splash said “Maybe.” Everyone else was of an age that it could have been possible, though precise relationship was “unknown.” No one else is still alive to give any reputable testimony on that issue, but we were pleased to make her acquaintance even at this distance. And generally speaking, it is quite a surprise to be looking for one thing and discover something else completely.
Maybe we could ask this guy:
Heck, it was only 75 years ago, right?
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