The old black and white photos in the storage closet that I have seen countless times still captivate me. They are a reminder of people, places and things that are gone but should never be forgotten.
Most of the pictures were handed down by my parents. They were made with a little Kodak Brownie box camera. My dad would hold the camera at waist level and use the viewfinder at the top to line up the photos.
The pictures are square and just a few inches wide. Some of them are in albums, held in place with little stickers in each corner. Others are just loose in a cardboard box.
My folks took the film to Burnham’s Drug Store, which sent it off to be developed and got the pictures back in a week or so. They got two prints of some of the photos so they could share them with kinfolks.
People didn’t make pictures of everything that moved back then like they do now with I-phones and fancy cameras. Film and photos were expensive, and pictures were mostly for special occasions.
Documented in our little collection of black and white photos are things like birthdays, church socials, new bicycles and baseball gloves from Sears, visits with relatives and big snowfalls.
Our white dog Spunky, who was part of the family before I was, seemed to wander into most of the pictures. Spunky didn’t have much of a pedigree, but my dad told people who asked that she was a feist. I saw my dad cry for the first time when Spunky died.
There are some pictures of my mother’s mother, a tall, stately lady with her gray hair in a bun. They said she would take me to her house in Bastrop for days at a time when I was little. She died when I was three, and my only memory of her is in these photos.
One of the pictures is of my Uncle Buddy in his Army uniform the day he came home from World War II. He gave me the khaki-colored overseas cap he had on that day, and I wore it for years.
The birthday pictures are some of my favorites. They show motley assortments of snaggle tooth boys in shorts, sandals and suspenders with me or my brother holding a cake with candles.
Those were our best dress-up clothes. Most of us had bad haircuts that our mothers tried to fix with some Brylcreem gel or Vitalis lotion.
A lot of the parents in our neighborhood cut their kids’ hair themselves, but my dad took us to Corley’s Barbershop. Mr. Corley ran the clippers across our head, splashed Fitch’s hair tonic on us and brushed powder on our neck, all for 25 cents.
Dr. Butler delivered me and most of the other kids in Springhill, and there are photos of him with his black bag making house calls. He is posing in a couple of them with snowmen in our front yard.
There is a picture of me with a white-haired preacher in front of Calvary Baptist Church. He was doing a revival there that week, and it changed my life.
Some photos show new families moving into the neighborhood and others packed up and leaving. Most of the men there worked for International Paper Company, and they were transferred to and from different mills.
My dad got a new Plymouth every few years, and there were photos of them in the album. The pictures were black and white, but we knew the cars were green. All of his cars were green Plymouths.
There are pictures of my dad with big white perch that he caught at the mill ponds spread on the ground in front of him and of my mother with a ceramic Christmas tree she made or something she embroidered.
My brother or I are getting on a school bus in some pictures, probably on the first day of school, and there’s a photo of our first television set and the big antennae on the roof that went with it.
We have pictures of aunts, uncles and cousins that I remember and others that I don’t. My dad identified them on the back of the photos with the Parker ink pen he used for all his writing.
These faded photos are black and white, but they provide a bright, vivid, colorful illustration of simpler times and family history.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES