Boyle Lake Fish Fry group photo includes (L-R): Back - Barbara holding Chuck, Ulys and Annie, Jay and Bernice? (I'm really not sure who this man and woman are, but logic dictates it would be them), Evalee, Cleffie (bending forward), Olan, Vernell, Lester, Ray, Wathada, Charles, Lowell and Elaine (carrying Russell). Front - Carl Ray, Ronnie, Jeannie? (Olan's), Clint? or Shelby? in hat, Bobby, Mary Gail, Velda, Beverly, Morris, and Buck.
Annie and Ulys with Jeannie and Clint
Ruby, Irene, Cleffie, Annie, Evalee, Vernell, Bernice
That's all six of Annie's daughters, in order of birth.
Beverly, Ronnie, Bobby, Buck, Morris, Wathada
The house in the background is where Lester and Cleffie's family and Charles and Evalee's family lived -- in two separate sections of the house -- for three years. It was on Territorial Road in Benton Harbor, Michigan.*
Labor Day Picnic
L-R: Wathada, Morris, Bob, Ron, Evalee, Lester, Charles, Buck.
I think Beverly might be between Evalee and Lester , obscured by Lester's hand.
L-R: Vernell, Cleffie, Olan, Ulys, Lowell, Annie, Irene, Ruby, Bernice, Evalee
"Aint Luveenie" (well, that's what it sounded like to my 4-year-old ears - she was some relative of Jack and Doc Barnett), Wathada, Cleffie, Ruby, Dianne, Donna and Mike Hawley. Oma Dell was probably behind the camera. Ruby and Cleffie and Wathada took me with them on a car trip from Michigan to visit relatives in the Ozark mountains of Missouri and Arkansas.
Olan's family. I wondered who the extra kid was, and then I realized this is a double exposure. Jeannie is the only one who doesn't look blurry because she moved to a different spot in the frame between the two shots while the rest of them stood still.
Mildred Arnold (one of "Uncle George's girls) and Cleffie
*Here is what Wathada wrote about the house at 1656 Territorial Road ... After school was out that year, we moved from the farm to Sister Lakes for the summer. It was a good summer. We rented a big old summer house right by one of the lakes. But when it got to be about the first of August, Mama said we better find somewhere else to live before winter came. So we moved to another big old house at Consel’s Corners, which was the area where Napier and M-140 Hwy intersect. The house was on Napier, not too far east of that corner. We lived there for that month and when it was time for school to start, we found that we had to go to a little old country school that was only a one-room school and it was two miles from where we lived down a little gravel road, and there wasn’t even a school bus to pick us up. So Mama said we were going to have to find a different place to live because Bob couldn’t walk that two miles to school and back every day because he had asthma. So that day, we went in search of someplace else to live and Mama spotted a big old empty house directly across Crystal Avenue from Hull School, and it was empty. So we asked around and found out that it was owned by the House of David, and it was for rent. So that’s where we moved. It was a two-story house and had a complete apartment upstairs including kitchen. So we sublet the upstairs to Mama’s sister and her husband and their two kids (Evalee and Charles and Buck and Beverly). We had family close around us again. It was my favorite place we had ever lived since leaving Judsonia (but I still felt that I didn’t have a “home” to go back to like normal people have. I have always missed having a hometown. I still do). But Grandpa and Grandma, and all their kids – grown up, married and with children of their own, were all around close so we were in the middle of the family again and I loved that.
