Photo Friday: Awww, Ma Edition (1940)

Good morning!

Ugh, I am slugging my way through a terrible head cold this morning! I know everyone at my work has been talking about a nasty January bug going around, but kids, I thought I was invincible. I thought drinking 3 glasses of emergen-c and water a day was enough to keep me above the muss and fuss of a 4 AM fever and subsequent malarial-like sleeplessness... turns out, I was wrong! It happens. My plans for today look like this, which would be awesome if my head didn't feel like it belonged on another body, or possibly a string floating  high above my head. :(

Anyway, you know I wouldn't leave you hanging for Photo Friday. Neither wind, nor hail, nor sleet nor...the obtrusive number of times I have to get up and sneeze/drink hot water....would keep me from it! Let's get down to business.

Isn't this woman gorgeous? I love her dark, serious eyes. and crossed arms. source

A sneak into the Photo Friday process here at She Was a Bird...I usually spend my lunch hour on Thursday combing through Flickriver for photos of other-people's-relatives under a certain parameter. "Easter 1962" or "Mom 1950" brings up plenty of photos that were just the one thousand, nine hundred, and sixty second photo in the digital camera's reel, but it also can bring photos of people's moms and dads and brothers and sisters caught in the act of being vernacular photography superstars in those stated eras. When I find someone I like, I try and look through the rest of the user's photostream for other photos with a common element that would serve as a "theme" for the post-- were the parents sharp dressers in the sixties'? Is the one daughter preternaturally gifted at striking a pose that reads thirty even though she's three? Does one family have an obscene amount of mid century amazingness happening, furniture-wise, in their 1950's home? A thread is established, and we go from there!

Sometimes, however, I just stumble across photos that are one-off's-- not part of a larger archive of family history, but just a "This is my mom" type photo thrown in between dozens of modern pictures. Which is fine, but I feel like I'm gypping you, the reader, by not showing some of these uncategorized, but fabulous photos. So! These are one-at-a-time, "just a glimpse" snaps from the search term "mom 1940". Let's see what the cat dragged in (j/k, this is way better than anything the cat would conceivably drag in)!

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In this photo, I know the guy is kind of the center of attention with his great pompadour and long overcoat, but I'm secretly just obsessed with the woman's tiny shoes and feet. Not in a weird way! In that my own feet are planklike in dimension (as my friend Kelsey's grandma said, of her own size nine feet, "I'd have to back up to a door to open it," and I have two sizes on her), there's something about tiny shoes or women with extremely small hands and feet that make me sigh a sigh of the petite woman I was never to be. And I love the car fender just looming partially in-photo, in front of this Yankee clapboard structure. Isn't this picture atmospheric of a forties' world? You feel like you could walk out of the frame and buy some Beechnut gum and a copy of Life at the nearest newsstand. Would that I could!!!

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Check out this peach of an outfit from a forties' lady on vacation! Nowadays, you might wear old jeans and a flannel button up out fishing-- no such shirking from this woman of fashion. Flatteringly cut, wide leg trousers? Check. Matching casual playsuit-like jacket? Check. Brown suede brogans? Yep. And A SUNHAT TO BEAT THE BAND?! You'd better believe it! I hope some day my grandkids look back on photos of me from when I was the age I am now and say similarly nice things about my sense of style.  If this were me: "Grandma was a pip in her day, wasn't she?!" they'll crow, looking at old snaps of me that have been digitized so they read through the photo-viewing brain chip in my future grandchildren's dear little future heads. "But what's fishing?"

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This next gal, I love her swing cape, her pendant pin, and her elfin expression. Another thing I'm going to try to do more of next week-- wear capes! Capes, and capes, and capes. I secretly worry that I look like a) Endorra (not the worst thing you could look like, but not what I'm going for) or b) a great big steamer barge of a woman because of the billowing silhouette of one, but nothing cries out "DRAMA" quite like a cape!

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I can't even start with this one. What do I love most? ALL OF IT. The eff-off HUGE tractor everyone is posing on, the woman at the wheel taunting us with her thumb to her nose (did you know this gesture has a technical name? Wikipedia says it does, no joke!), the teenage girl with overalls and hat scrunching up her little face in a smile...I wonder if the dad/grandpa is taking the picture, as you'll notice there are no adult males in this photo! This could be on a nostalgia calendar for how good of a picture it is of a family on a working farm in the forties'. I can't get over it!

So! Which photo do you like best? Do you have a certain method of finding old photos and choosing them for your collection, either online or in real life? What really speaks to you about an old picture, be it somebody else's or in your own family? Are there any photos you have one of but wish you had a whole slew from the same time period? Let's talk!

Well, I gotta go lay my weary head down, hope I make through the weekend without too much sinus trouble! I'm going to take it as easy as possible, so I may live. You all have a great weekend, DRINK PLENTY OF WATER, and I'll talk to you Monday! Til then. :)