Thursday, October 29, 2009

Flapper Mom


We tend to remember our parents as they were when they left us.
We forget that they led a full life. They were babies and children and young parents and middle aged and everything all the way up.
Here is my mother as a flapper. She's 16 and knows all the dances, the styles, and behaviors of the time. It is 1926 and in three years she will be living through the Oklahoma Dust Bowl while living on farm on the Red River.
Four years earlier she spent almost a year living at a hostel in Oklahoma City so she could be near her brother who was hospitalized with polio. Later in this sophomore year of high school she will have to leave school to stay home and help her mother with her four younger siblings. She will never finish school. But eight miles down the road lived a boy, who also had to drop out of school after the eighth grade who has had his eye on her for years. I can not quite wrap my mind around my mother and father doing the Charleston at a dance in their school gym.
Next year it will be 100 years since she was born. My mom was a flapper, wow!

4 comments:

TStockmann said...

I hope one of your kin inherited her looks.

drlobojo said...

It weren't me for sure.

International Transactions ~ Developing Community said...

great pic ~ I love the way she embodies everything I imagine about the rugged west ...

drlobojo said...

One more family tale from Dr. Lobo. His mother's father was reading a National Geographic Magazine at his brother's Bank in Davidson, Oklahoma. When he read about the Carlsbad Caverans it caught his imagination. So he gassed up his car and got maps from his cousin's gas station, went home, and the next day he and assorted family members who weren't needed on the farm headed off to New Mexico to see these Caverns. Her mama and some brothers and youngest sisters were left behind. It three or four days to get there, and they camped along the way. At Carlsbad Caverns they had to pack a lunch and water and meet at the hole in the ground where a series of wooden steps led into the darkness. Every other person was issued a coal-oil lantern (OB had brought several of his own) and they proceeded into the darkness. The wooden steps and walkways had been built the summer before. They hiked about 2 to 3 hours she said down into the cave and it was cold. At the bottom they ate their lunch and then the Rangers lit up the big room for several minutes and they all sang "Rock of Ages". After that it took them twice as long to get out as it did to walk in and wasn't even half as much fun. That night after supper, she and her Dad walked back down towards the Cave entrance and watch a million bats fly out of it at dusk. They returned home just in time to cut their wheat. That was in May 1926, and she was 16.