Some Of My Things Part 8

The Portraits

In our office at home these two portraits hang side by side. My husband, and I are immortalized at ages six and four. We knew nothing of each other and our worlds were thousands of miles away. These portraits  were painted from photographs taken in the 1950’s. One was a black and white photograph colorized by a professional artist in Texas and the other was an oil painting by my father, painted in Utah. Two children, so sweet and full of hope would eventually meet at college, fall in love and get married.

I was posed on a stool, my chubby arms pressed to the side of my face, a crown of flowers on my blonde hair. I am sure the flowers were my mother’s idea. She loved doing my hair in different hairstyles because I was her only daughter. One style was her favorite. It was called Affenschwänze meaning monkey tails in German. Braids were tied up with bows on each side of the head creating a swing which used to bounce along my head. In the painting my hands are awkwardly tucked to the side of my face. This was a common children’s pose I later noticed in other pictures from family albums. Maybe it added to the innocence of that age?

 Taking a professional photograph was very unusual for my frugal immigrant family and I assume the opportunity presented itself with a very reasonable cost. My father, Kurt, loved the picture from which he painted the portrait. This oil painting was done in his later years when he had time to create art. He was still smitten with the little girl who was born after twelve years and three older sons and he captured my blue eyes and happy smile.

Mark posed at a local photographer in Dumas, Texas. He was “dressed to the nines”, as his mother would say in her southern drawl. Dressing up was a common occurrence for Mark as a child because his parents owned a children’s toggery in their hometown.  Toggery, a word unfamiliar to me, meant apparel or clothing. Mark’s mother Beth purchased the store with money she inherited from her mother. He was an only child for six years and Beth used him as child model for little boy’s clothing in her store. She liked dressing him in the current inventory and taking pictures for advertisements in the local newspaper. The bow tie was a signature look for Mark who wore them well into his twenties. I think dressing well started in his youth and continued on when his mother took him to a tailor to have suits made from fabrics he picked out.  A tuxedo he had made when I met him had a gold silk floral design as a lining in the jacket and that same fabric ran in a thin line on the outside length of his pants. Somehow his love for a well cut suit collided with his love for military camouflage. The ‘camo’ style won out in later years. 

I was raised in an immigrant German home and Mark in the wide open spaces of Texas. Our parents both had accents which got confusing when they met for the first time at the wedding. The “Bitte” and “Danke” got mixed with the “yo’ awl” when they greeted each other.

It is still surprising to me that we found one another and combined our two heritages together to make another different family with a Northwest relaxed outlook.