Ghosts of Xmas Past - 1964

 

Cardboard fireplace. This was in the dining room where our table usually sat. I don't know what we did with the table. It's possible this was Xmas of 1963 -- we moved into this house in the middle of the school year -- so maybe we had not put the table up yet. 

Me and my dolly. My hair is not naturally curly -- don't know if I've had a perm or if I just curled it with curlers or a curling iron. 

Papa Burford, Lori, Rick, Dianne, Mark. Grandma Burford in background. We didn't usually have company on Christmas Day. This was the year John was born -- he would have been 4 months old -- so maybe that's why everybody came to our house. 

Foreground: Dianne, Rick, Lori.

This is the house where these pictures were taken. We lived in this house from the middle of my 4th grade year through 7th grade. It was a few miles outside of Hartford, and we rode the bus to school. Our bus route included Webster Hills, where the roads were dirt, and the bus got stuck in the snow a few times. One time they actually had to send another bus out to rescue us.

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When we lived here there was a big tree stump -- about 3 feet wide and maybe 18 inches tall -- about six feet in front of the front door. One time Uncle Ron came to visit and found that we were not home. (We were probably at K-Mart.) He decided to wait a while and see if we came home. Pretty soon he got bored and walked around to the back of the house and looked around in the garage for something to do...  Later on, when we got home, we found that our tree stump had turned bright purple while we were gone! No note. No explanation of any kind. But it didn't take much thinking to figure out that Uncle Ron had been there. Sure enough, in the garage there was a can of purple paint and a used paint brush. (I have no idea WHY we would have had a can of bright purple paint in the garage.)