New Year's Eve 1968

Among the photos in the scanned photo bonanza I received from my sister, I found some photos that pretty clearly are from at least one New Year's Eve party.  Obviously, New Year's Eve is a great time to post them!

These four all seem to be from the same party.  I'm pretty sure this was our house in La Puente.

This photo is why I think it was New Year's Eve 1968.

This is my mother in what kind of looks like a Gypsy costume.

That's my mother in the middle.  No clue who the other two people are.

Maybe the woman on the left is Aunt Sam?  No idea about the other woman.

And this one might be from a different year.  It looks like New Year's Eve with the hats and the garlands but doesn't seem to be the same mix of people as the other four.  I think this is also in La Puente.

My mother and father are the two people on the left in the front row.
Some of the other people show up in other photos,
but I don't know who any of them are.
Usually my father took photos; I wonder who was
behind the camera for this one!

A Chanukah Past

It's Chanukah!  I cooked a lovely dinner last night:  Italian Chanukah fried chicken and yummy latkes.  The chicken recipe is my riff on one that, if I remember correctly, came from Gabriele Corcos and Debi Mazar.  It was traditional in Corcos' family for Chanukah.  I can't find my copy of the recipe anymore, so I've been winging it for the past couple of years.  Everyone raved about this year's version, so I have to try to remember how I made it so I can repeat it next year.

Since it's Chanukah, I went looking through my photos for some to post.  The only ones I could find for my own family were these two, which had to have been from 1968, which is when my sister Laurie and her mother, Mary Lou, were living with us in La Puente, California.

According to TimeAndDate.com, the first night of Chanukah in 1968 was December 16 (coincidentally the same date as today!).  So if I'm seeing the candles accurately in these photos, the first one was taken on the evening of December 20 (I see five candles) and the second one on the evening of December 22 (I see seven candles).  Does anyone see a different number of candles?  And that, of course, assumes that my mother did the correct number of candles on the appropriate days.

I can't figure out what the thing is next to the menorah in the first photo.  Maybe some strange kind of tabletop Christmas tree?  Or, as my mother commonly said, a Chanukah bush?

Myra (Meckler) Sellers, Laurie Sellers, Janice Sellers,
approximately December 20, 1968, La Puente, California

Laurie Sellers
approximately December 22, 1968, La Puente, California

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Happy Birthday, Sissie-poo!

Today is the birthday of my older sister (technically half-sister), which I've decided to celebrate on my blog, just because I can.  Oh, the joys of having a blog devoted to family history!

Laurie is my father's daughter from his first marriage.  Because my mother was very family-oriented, my siblings and I probably would have known about her anyway, but we really got to know her and her mother because they used to live with my immediate nuclear family when I was a child.  We were very forward-thinking for the 1960's, I know.  There's even a photo of the four of us from 1968:

After Mary Lou and Laurie moved out of our house, they were in California for a while before moving back to the East Coast.  But I always stayed in touch with Laurie by writing.

When my family moved back to the United States in 1973 after two years of living in Australia, we also went to the eastern part of the U.S., albeit in Florida, and I continued to write to Laurie.  My brother and sister got to know her better than I because at different times they both ended up in her area and were able to visit in person.

Then, in 1991, plans were made for my mother, my brother, and me to visit San Antonio, where my sister lived, for a big family Christmas.  And my sister decided to surprise everyone else by having Laurie show up.

They plotted and planned.  The day I was scheduled to fly in, Stacy went to the airport to pick me up and had Laurie come along.  Laurie was waiting in the area through which passengers exited.

I was walking along, looking for Stacy, when suddenly someone I had just passed said, "What's the matter?  Don't you recognize your own sister?"

I turned and had to take a few seconds before I realized that Laurie was standing there in front of me.  She later commented with great joy about me standing there with my mouth hanging open.

She also mentioned that after this wonderful surprise had been planned, for several days she had been telling her coworkers, "I'm going to see my sister I haven't seen for 23 years!"  Which of course just begged for an explanation she was happy to share.

Because we had all four siblings together again, we commemorated the occasion with another photo, all of us in the same relative positions as in the one from 23 years prior.

Which is one of my favorite family photos that I have.

Happy birthday, Laurie!

Wordless Wednesday for Loving Day

Read about Loving Day.

Shared Responsibilities in a "Blended Family"

Loretta (family friend),
Laurie, and Mary Lou, before the
latter two lived with my family

Today is October 16, the birthday of my half-sister's mother, Mary Lou.  I've written previously that Mary Lou and my sister Laurie lived with my family for a while in California.  I believe it was during that time that my mother and Mary Lou came up with a creative way to share responsibilities for childcare.

As I recall, Mary Lou would get us kids up in the morning, fix us breakfast, and help us get ready to go to school.  My mother, who worked a graveyard shift at the time, would come home in time to see us before she went to sleep.  She would then pick us up from school in the afternoon, spend time with us until our bedtime, and put us to bed.  After that, she would go to work, and the cycle would start over again the next morning.

I think this was when my family lived in La Puente and Laurie and I attended the same elementary school, so roughly 1968.  We apparently were well ahead of the curve with blended families and coparenting, which were probably terms that hadn't even been thought of yet.

And I had Laurie read this before I posted it, and she agrees it sounds right!  Not doing too badly for events that happened when I was 6 years old.

Will the Real Mrs. Sellers Please Stand Up?

Mary Lou in 1964

My family was "blended" decades before that became a common term.  In 1968, and maybe a little before and/or a little after (I don't know the exact dates), not only was my father on his second marriage, but his first wife and his daughter from that marriage (whom I always have called simply my sister) were living with my family in Southern California.  For a while my sister and I attended the same elementary school.

Mary Lou, the aforementioned first wife, told me a story about a contest at the elementary school.  It was for the "best mother" in the school.  One day she was at the house when the phone rang.

"May I please speak to Mrs. Sellers?"

Mary Lou answered, "Which one?"

This threw off the woman from the school a bit, but she recovered enough to say, "The one with a daughter at Rorimer Elementary School."

And again Mary Lou answered, "Which one?"

The woman on the other end of the phone became a little more disconcerted.  "The one who submitted an entry for the best mother contest?"

You guessed it:  "Which one?"

By that point the woman from the school was totally confused.  Yes, my sister and I had both submitted our mothers for the contest.  After a few more details, Mary Lou discovered that she had won the contest.  (I guess my sister, being five years older, could write a better essay.)

Funny, but now that I think about it, it's interesting that Mary Lou told me that story, but my mother didn't.

I'm posting this story in honor of Mary Lou's birthday, which was yesterday, October 16.  If she were still with us she would be 78 years old.

Wordless Wednesday

Loving Day

The judge who ruled against the Lovings when they were living as a married couple in Virginia in 1958 stated, "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents.  And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages.  The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

My not-quite-aunt Jean said, "We were married in 1968 [the year after the Loving decision by the Supreme Court].  We went to visit Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1968 without the fear that we could be put in jail for up to 25 years.  Resurrection City on the Mall was being dismantled and the smell of tear gas was hard to ignore."