Mom, dad, three kids and creepy Uncle Bob in the background. I have a soft spot for photos like this. My father was born in 1919, lived through the Great Depression, and served in World War 2. He was very proud of his cars and always kept them clean and polished.
This is another one of those photos that has been cut down from a larger image. I always wonder why. An ex-boyfriend, how about an ex-husband? Maybe it just needed to fit in a frame. Written on the back, "Mon. Jan 2, 1939." An interesting year. The Great Depression was winding down, and U.S. involvement in World War 2 was only a few years away.
It looks like some photographer is chasing a couple of women down the street. Of course, more than likely, the cameraman knows his female subjects. I always search the background of photos for clues as to where and when the picture was taken, but no such luck here. I suppose I could try to match hairstyles and clothes to an era, but I don't feel like doing the research. Let's take a guess of the 1930s to 1940s. Is that the photographer's thumb in the bottom photo?
Someone cut this photo in half, and I wonder why. Anyway, I picked it up here in Los Angeles, as part of an envelope of old snapshots. I've read about how polo became a sort of fad among the movie star community in the twenties and thirties. Go to Will Rogers State Park and you can visit the humble cowboy's private polo pitch. Not exactly part of his down-home image.
I'm closing in on the final few posts from this particular album page. I have purchased a second page from the same seller that looks like it's from the same era, so when I get around to putting that one up it will have the same common label, The Los Angeles Indiana Collection. Great California car culture roadster, by the way, even if the family looks more Midwest farm than L.A.
On the back of the print. "MIRROTONE GUARANTEED PERMANENT AUG 51" Some of the men in this photo look old enough that they may have been in the military during World War 2, and some don't. They all look like they could have fought in Korea, though that was a much smaller mobilization. Whatever else they may have done in their lives, they were alive in the post-war America that had the only real booming economy in the world when everything seemed possible.
This is the flip side of an album page that I've already posted. (Click on The Los Angeles Indiana Collection in labels to bring everything else up.) Every time I put up an album page, whether it's been cut out of an album the way this one has or if it's from a full album, I always like to put up the whole page at least once to show position. More than likely it doesn't really matter, but it's always possible that the person who made the album had a reason other than available space for the choices they made. Perhaps it's the order they were taken or the same location. Unless a photo is labeled there's no way to tell, but just in case. So, just to repeat myself, why Los Angeles Indiana? Well, I purchased this album page from an eBay seller in Indiana and there's a decorative border on a couple of the prints from L.A. Right at the top is the peristyle of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. It's true that the photographer could have sent his film out to be processed and he could have sent his film through the mail, but I doubt someone living in Indiana would have mailed film all the way to Los Angeles for processing. So, did this Hoosier family make a trip to the west coast? If they did, they might have gone to the 1932 Olympics. Or perhaps, they were living in L.A. and eventually moved to Indiana. Who knows, and I doubt I ever will.
If you are a fan of silent movies, you've probably seen a film where a family with a large car, drives around a city, and don't do much of anything but run over things, and generally causes a major mess. It's hard to believe, but when those films were made, very few Americans actually owned a car, and those movies were as much about class as they were about cars. There's black construction paper on the backs of the prints, so at some point, they were cut out of a photo album. I thought about trying to peel the paper off and see if anything was written on the backs, but the risk of damaging the prints is too great.
Just enough of the license plate holder is readable to see that this Rambler station wagon was purchased from a dealership in North Hollywood, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, and not really all that close to Hollywood itself. I wonder if she's off to dance class for the aspiring child stars of the 1950s.
It looks like he's determined to make others pay for not being the center of attention, while the more subdued cousin just sits off by himself, ignoring everyone.
