Nostalgia is Catching

In the last few days, I've seen several blog posts resurrecting vintage family photos. Baby pictures, ours or our adult kids', for example: see here, here and here.

It's catching. Now I've come down with the fever, forced to dig through old boxes and cabinets, looking for memories.

Here are some I found, in chronological order.

My aunt in first grade. Toronto, about 1910, 1911. She's the one on the front left (your left, not hers), holding her doll upright, by the feet. She never was the maternal type. Never married, lived at home with her widowed mother until Nana's death, a schoolteacher by profession and temperament. The quintessimal "maiden aunt" of old fiction.* We don't see many of those, these days.

*Except that she laughed a lot.

I see dolls like those in antique fairs. They cost a pretty penny today.

My father in shop class, fourth from the left. Toronto, early 1920s.

Most of the boys in button-down shirts and ties, suit jackets. Mostly with the apron; it's a shop class, after all.

Look closely; those are small work-benches, with bench clamps and rows of holes for wooden-handled chisels and files and a saw. There's a big plane and a measuring compass, a T-square on the wall. A well-equipped shop.

On the blackboard: acorns, some type of propeller, the words "tangent, tangential". A cross-section of a log, some kind of pattern. I wonder what it is they were going to be making?

Along the top, a variety of bird houses; previous creations by the boys?

My brother and I, 1945/6. Red Deer, Alberta. And our car.


Anyone know its make and year? I don't. I know it was black. Of course.