Tag: sepia saturday

When I first saw the prompt image for this week in the “Coming Soon” lineup on Sepia Saturday, I immediately knew which image to share this week.  It’s almost uncanny how similar the photos are, from the person in uniform to the dog and everything!  Unfortunately, I have no idea who the man was.  I posted on Google Plus to see if someone might be able to identify his rank and unit from the patches on his sleeve in hopes of narrowing it down.  Sure enough, a helpful community member was able to tell me he was Army, an E5 (Sergeant), and the patch was for the 3rd Army Corps.  Location?  Likely central Pennsylvania, somewhere near Clearfield or Altoona, but I can’t be sure where since there’s no identifying information on any of the photos.  A wikipedia article points to the reference that there was a 3rd Army Corps area that included Pennsylvania.  These photos were taken around 1945 (one of them is dated), so it fits the dates for the WWII organizational structure.  That same man appears in a photo with my great grandma Olga (Powis) Kitko with a very faint label on the back, “Joe thinks picture is good,” so I have to wonder if she they were perhaps romantically involved.  My grandpa Leon would’ve been 12 in 1945, and his father had disappeared shortly after he was born around 1933, but Olga’s divorce didn’t finalize till 1946.  If they were somehow involved, he didn’t stick around long since I don’t remember him and neither does my dad.  There are only a dozen or so  photos of him from just around 1945.

Wouldn’t you know it though, puppies grow into dogs…  That may be the puppy’s mother though since the markings are different enough, but it’s hard to tell since puppies can grow up to look so different!

 

Another photo of band members for this week’s Sepia Saturday!  I’m sure at one point, I’ll exhaust my collection of these, but it’s fun to explore two very differnt photos two weeks in a row.  There’s no label on this photo so I have no idea who these two gents are.  They don’t appear in any other photos in the family collection either.  I have to assume they were family friends of the Powis family and specifically of Herbert Powis from last week’s post.  The cap seems similar to last week, but this uniform is a little more elaborate, and the photo was taken in a proper studio by photographer J. Krismer in Coalport, Pennsylvania.  It looks to me like the man on the right has a trumpet and the man on the left a euphonium.  A short and sweet post this week since I don’t have a lot of information on these two men, but given they were playing in Pennsylvania, I have to imagine they played a polka or two in their band days.

Lest we forget those polkas, I’d like to post my favorite Polka, the Pennsylvania Polka, representing the state where these two men lived.

 

Another tough one for me! I have nothing that really fits for this at all – no Russian ancestry (none known anyway), no  photos of demonstrations.  However, it’s easy to imagine these two gents with their instruments marching in some sort of parade, so I’m going to call that close enough for this Sepia Saturday.  It’s well known that Alfred Herbert Powis (on the left, affectionately referred to as “Herb”) played the trumpet as part of a number of different bands.  Seated next to him, holding  some sort of french horn (a piccolo french horn perhaps?), is Bert Brown.  I haven’t quite been able to pin down who “Bert” is, but it’s possible he’s Albert Brown who lived in and around Clearfield County, PA.  Herb was born in 1892 and the two look to be about the same age, so I’d imagine Bert was about 28 or 30 when this photo was taken.

The stamp box on the back indicates this was taken somewhere between 1907-1929.  Herb  served in WWI and passed away in 1926, and this looks to be from his post-war days, so I’d say somewhere around 1920 or thereabouts would be good for a date.  You can just barely make out a ring on Herb’s finger, and he was married in 1918, so that helps set my idea of a date.  The location is most likely somewhere in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, and it’s pretty interesting that they took a photo somewhere in the woods instead of in a nice studio, but it makes for a pretty  backdrop.  The uniforms appear to be non-military, but would be something I’d expect an organized band to wear.  It’s really a lovely photo, and clearly Herb and Bert were close enough friends to have a photo taken together and shared with family.

Better late than never, I suppose!  It’s been an incredibly hectic month around here, but I’m still trying to keep up with Sepia Saturday (or Sunday, as the case may be) even if I’ve let the regular blog posts fall by the wayside.  The closest thing I have to this week’s prompt is something rather dear to me that I’ve been itching to fit into a prompt.  In 1925, when my great grandma Olga Powis was only 25, she got a job as a telephone operator.  She continued at that job for 33 years until the system switched to a new system in 1958, making switchboard operators obsolete.  As a single mother who raised my grandpa after his dad left very early on, I’m sure this was a great way to help her support her family.  The photo above shows her at the switchboard, and she took time to write a note on the back (later in life), “June 1955, On the job, Number Please.”

The way my dad tells it, she was quite the handy gal, and would regularly go back behind the board with the hot poker from the fireplace to make repairs, basically soldering back together bits of the board.  The spirit of tinkering with something to get it right, fixing things by yourself, taking things apart to see how they work is definitely alive and well in my family from my grandpa, Olga’s son, to my dad and me and my brother.  For me, it was  empowering, in a way, to know that my great grandma may have helped set the stage in her era, for me to be able to be a woman working with computers and technology.  Whether it’s learned behavior or part of our genetic makeup, I’m not sure, but there are so many stories about all of us in those four generations fixing, tinkering, and taking things apart to see how they work.  It’s nice to think that it might have started with one strong woman who wasn’t afraid to fix things herself.

The article below is about the end of the switchboard system and mentions her by name (along with a photo) and alludes to the fact that the voices of these operators will be missed as people will now be able to dial numbers directly.  (Click the article to see a larger version)