We're Going to Giovanni's

 
There was a television series produced by the BBC named 'Connections'. It demonstrated beautifully that events are rarely linear in nature. "This happened and then that happened as a direct result." Hah! More often than not, it was one accident after another.

In the last episode of this blog-ette, the Lone Ranger had discussed the extensive drinking habits of his parents and concentrated on the legendary Betty B, a prototypical lower-end watering hole frequented by those in the 1940's who had forgotten to charge their smartphones.
 

Here's my Mom, Sophia, on the left with her friend Edna (whose last name is lost) standing before the Betty B. When I was researching these photos, I was able to use tiny clues like this one to uncover the name of the bar. Pretty clever, huh?

But at this point, I didn't know where the Betty B was located, so I flew to Miami (okay, this wasn't the only reason) and examined the old Polk City Directories in the Miami Public Library. No, not the beautiful old library of my youth that smelled of knowledge and a bright, unlimited future. They tore that down and replaced it with a brutalist concrete box.

 
There, in the 1945 Polk, I discovered the address of the place as 700 NE 79th Street and also the name of the owner as Giovanni Venturella. In my tiny but hyperactive brain, this triggered a 'connection' (get it?) with a long buried memory. Just as I could recall the names of bars frequented by my father, Leon, like the Doghouse and Jimmie's Blue Room (I wonder if that's where David Lynch got his ideas), the name 'Giovanni' fired off some long-slumbering neurons. I could recall my parents referring to 'Giovanni's' as in "We're going to Giovanni's".

There in the photos was the proprietor of the Betty B. No, he's not wearing a name tag, only an apron but it's a strong bet that here, direct from Palermo, Italy via Havana, Cuba is gray-eyed, black-haired, 5 ft 4 in, 154 pound Giovanni Venturella who arrived in New York in 1939. 

Are we sure he knew my parents, hmm? Well, this photo is from 1942, so my father was not in the picture yet, but there's my mother's friend Edna on the left and Giovanni Venturella, third from the left. Next to him with his arm around my mother is her friend Charles Gillespie. It is interesting that the soldiers here appear to be wearing no insignia or indication of rank whatsoever. I wonder if this was a wartime thing to keep people from discovering what units are deployed where.

Giovanni lived just a block away on 80th Street. When my parents were married, they lived on 82nd Street, also close by and my father worked at Hayes Gateway Service Station at 8000 Biscayne Boulevard, also two blocks away. Nice tight little grouping, huh? For the visual people among you (I applaud you, by the way) here's the Miami fire map from 1943.

The Red box is Betty B, the Green box is Giovanni's residence, the Orange box is Hayes Gateway Service where my father worked and the Yellow is the apartment where my parent's lived. If there is a lot with no building showing, that means it was an empty lot. There was a great deal of open space in Miami Shores then. That's Little River running along the bottom of the frame.

Nowadays, things are a bit more built up. Many of the original buildings are gone. The boxes and colors are the same. The river is still Little River. My parents' apartment is under a bank.

So, did he change the name of his bar to Giovanni's? No, he moved about a mile west on 79th Street and bought the Fannie Grill at 1015 NW 79th Street and then built a new restaurant building next door at 1005 NW 79th Street: Giovanni's Restaurant! "We're going to Giovanni's". His newspaper ad offered salad and spaghetti for 80 cents. That would be about $9.00 nowadays.
 
The building still stands, even though the neighborhood has... ... changed. The business there is now the Yellow Meat Market. I don't know if there's much call for yellow meat. How hot do you have to get meat to turn it yellow? I'd love to go inside to get a feel for the building, you know, pick up the vibrations in the walls. But I know that once inside I would be murdered two or three times. It's a tough neighborhood now.

It can't be all bad, there's wheelchair access and the barbed wire looks pretty fresh. And with a security camera on every corner, whew! My guess is there's not too much foot traffic.

Giovanni died in 1962, he was 72. The restaurant had a very long run as top players in the bowling leagues. However, there is no record that Giovanni was ever married and I haven't found any reference to a relative at all. But he knew my parents and that's good enough for me and now the magical Internet won't forget him.

If you thought that was the end of the story, oh no... there's more!
 
 

The Peripherals

 
  In the world of genealogy, many people concentrate on their direct ancestors, those who are the DNA-contributors to their current condition. In this instance, 'direct' would be one's father or grandmother and not an aunt or great-uncle. Often, however, those 'indirects' are where you discover your connections to Presidents and winners of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, so we don't ignore them. As you can see from this example, there are usually two direct ancestors per generation and over time this gets very large, even overwhelmingly large. 

Over time, there are other connections you come across in your research, the people and things that may not be related to you by blood at all. These are what I refer to here as the 'Peripherals'. Anyone who has done genealogy for a while has run into such marginal characters, bit players who keep cropping up, just tantalizing enough to look into. They're not absolutely necessary, but they seem to add something to the context, like when a cook adds spices to the stew.

Some such factoids are so marginal they practically fade away. Things like our milkman's name which was Wally. Wally the Milkman. Or that the doctor in North Miami who took a mole off my forehead was named Dr. Peppercorn. Bert Peppercorn to be specific.

All right, I've set this up long enough, time to get to it.

One such Peripheral in my life may have played a fairly significant role. You see, I don't know how my parents met. I had decades to uncover this tidbit, all I had to do was ask. But this is one of those woulda/coulda/shouldas that didn't happen because I was too dull or unconscious (see previous posts) to just ask the simple question. Such is the bane of all late-blooming genealogists.

Back in the 1940's, people did not have online dating apps on their smartphones. Any Millennials out there reading this (really?) probably just passed out. But it's true. My parents were not the church-social or hospital-volunteering types, they did their socializing in bars. Hey, that's the way it was, deal with it. At least if you saw a person in a bar, you knew they weren't Photoshopped. What you saw was actually a living human. Not like when they tried to jam Oprah's enormous, misshapen head onto Ann Margaret's body. Ain't happenin'!

Miami, Florida in the 1940's had a lot of bars, I mean a LOT. It has a lot of bars now, too, but proportionately it was almost silly how many they were. My father, Leon, was a connoisseur of bars, places like the Doghouse, the Hide-Away and Jimmie's Blue Room, names that I heard growing up. My mother, Sophia, on the other hand found a place she liked and concentrated her energies there, not exclusively, but to a large degree. Yes, she went to the Park Avenue 'Stuff' and the Bottlecap Inn, but mostly it was the Betty B.

The Betty B.

My mother was working for the von Neida family who lived on Normandy Isle on Miami Beach for the winters and back to St. Paul for the summers. Here's the von Neida winter home in 1938. When she was off, my mother would occasionally travel the couple of miles on the 79th Street Causeway to the Betty B. Actually, 79th Street was called Everglades Boulevard in those days and the Causeway was put there to get people from the beach to the Hialeah Race Track, so the buses ran regularly.

The Betty B was originally the Betty Jane but there was probably some huge corporate takeover (yeah, right!) and the name changed. It was located just on the Miami side of the Causeway at 700 NE 79th Street. I went back to visit it, but it's a boat sales lot now. It's rare for things in Miami to stay the same for very long.

By a freakish coincidence I DO have photos of the real Betty B! Quite a few, actually. More, in fact, then there are of me growing up. Well, there you go. That's my mother, Sophia, second from the left. I don't know any of the other characters, but the well dressed gentleman with his arm around my mother looks strangely like the evil Nazi from 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', you know, the one whose face melted.

The Betty B was an open-air bar. In Miami! It had a westerly exposure, so in the afternoons, the sun would have beat in there like a blast furnace. Maybe they closed for a siesta, maybe they all snuck around back. I know it would have been too much for me and I was born in Miami. In this photo taken from NE 7th Avenue, the sun is already turning the ketchup to jelly. I've speculated that the cloth piled up on one of the bar stools there is hopefully some sort of canvas sun block they hung up, but I can't be certain. That's my mother sitting on the left being blinded by the sun.

My Uncle Richard, for whom I was named, also frequented the Betty Jane/Betty B. He also worked for the von Neida family. Here is Uncle Richard with Betty Jane Rickard. Hmm, 'Betty Jane'? Could this be the Betty Jane for whom the bar was originally named? I don't know, but rest assured I'll keep researching. He cuts quite the dashing figure here, huh. I hope his spine was okay.

That fence of signs espousing various beers like Old Bohemian is protecting the bar-goers from falling into or driving into Little River which is right behind the sign. Those are Australian Pines showing in the distance in this photo. They were often planted along canals and rivers in Miami.

Now that we're established the geography of this Peripheral, next time we'll discover the human Peripheral who may have played an important role in my family's events. Stay tuned, there are lots more non-essentials where these came from.
 
  

Youthful Memories

So, what's the very first thing you remember? I know people who say they can remember things from when they were one year old. Really? I can barely recall what I had for breakfast. However, the first 'image' I have as a memory is of a planter.
Yes, I know. Some of you are certainly thinking, 'This explains a lot'. My family lived in an apartment on NE 82nd. Street near Biscayne Boulevard (US 1) in Miami until I was two or so. This is my Mom trying to hold me up in the courtyard behind the apartment due to the extreme weight of my diaper, and look, the planter!

Of, course, I wonder, as we all should with our 'memories': Do I actually have an authentic memory, or have I convinced myself it is for real? Do I 'remember' the planter or did I look at this photograph as a small child and insert the memory in my own tiny but hyperactive brain?

The photograph had been lost to me for nearly sixty years but when I saw it again I recognized the planter instantly, the shape, the grapes, the little palm tree. It must have made quite an impression on me, being my size and all. It may have stuck out brightly amidst all the grownup legs that many children are lost among.
I have had other instances in my life where I 'remembered' something very clearly only to have it unequivocally proven that it didn't happen that way! Was I protecting myself, perhaps attempting valiantly to make myself appear better? Yeah, like that will happen!

Well, that's what I first remember, along with fleeting images of scenery - like through a car window. I could see through the car windows because my mother was probably holding me in her arms. My parents never owned a car seat. They probably never heard of a car seat and I'm willing to lay down good money that neither of them ever used a seat belt in their lives.

Yet, my brother and I are still alive! How??

Speaking of cars, when I was a kid my father was an automobile mechanic. Actually, he was an automobile mechanic before I was born, before my parents were married and long after I was a grown man. It just sounds better to say, 'When I was kid...'.

The first car I remember my father owning was a Terraplane. Yes, a Terraplane. What? Haven't heard of them? They were built by the Hudson Motor Company in the mid-thirties.

John Dillinger drove a Terraplane for a while, they had an excessively sized engine compared to body weight, so they were fast.

You know, it just occurs to me now, having written the name down, that this word is a play on 'airplane'. A terraplane would be an earth-plane or ground-plane. See 'terra firma' (solid ground) or 'terra cotta' (pottery made from earth or clay).

Interestingly, my planter may have been terra cotta, how's that for 'everything's a circle'?
Back to my father's Terraplane, I have no idea whether the model and year he owned was the same as in the photo here, although the condition was probably about what you see. I can't show you any photograph, why would anyone want to take a PHOTOGRAPH??
Notice a couple of features on this puppy. First, the suicide doors that open backward from what is normal today. It was easy to get in and out of, but don't accelerate with the door open or you're in deep water!

This car had 'running boards', essentially a built-in step to help to get up into the seat. They were also very useful for cops to stand on and fire shots at John Dillinger who was trying to escape.
The model my father had definitely had no back seat and the front seat was just one long bench. And the front windshield was separated into two, much cheaper panes of flat (non-safety) glass.

Note also the radically simplified dashboard. No unnecessary knobs or flashing lights. You may notice the single knob to the left through the steering wheel - that's the choke. No fancy-schmancy automatic choke. You had to operate this locomotive. You turned the key, pulled out the choke and pushed down on a little knobby on the floor to start the car.

Notice also that there's only room in the front for two adults and a brother. The little kid had to ride up in the back window and I don't recall any seat belt up there for me either. Fortunately, we never had a head-on collision - that I can remember.
Unfortunately, I don't recall if my father's model had the last feature I wish to point out. If you look at the trunk, you'll notice that it opens backward as well, from the front to the back. And it wasn't a 'trunk' at all! It was another seat. An open-air, no-way-to-get-into, better-hope-for-dry-weather-in-Miami seat. They were popular for quite a while, they were called rumble-seats.

Guess why.

As circumstance would have it, I DO have a photograph of my mother in a rumble seat, long before she met my father. This was taken on the Fourth of July, 1942. That's my Mom on the left in the rumble seat and my Aunt Del in the passenger seat. Aunt Del isn't in the rumble seat because she's pregnant with my cousin Audrey who wouldn't be born for a couple of months yet. Please - no rumbling.
Remind me... How are we alive?

My Bucketed List

Yes, 'Bucketed', not Bucket. As with most creative endeavors, I got this idea from one of my children. Instead of going on and on with a list of what I haven't done, let's list the things that I have done that I'm glad I did. The list of things I've done that I'm not glad I did would be way too long. So I searched my rapidly declining memory for those things that were worthy of being on such a list. I apologize in advance to those events I've forgotten or underplayed, but I had to limit the list to the top forty.

Top Forty Bucketed List Items

1. I have been married to my first wife, Deb, a very tolerant woman, for forty-one years.


2. I have seen my children grow up into beautiful, decent, respectable and successful adults.

3. I have looked into the eyes of my grandchildren and I liked what I saw.

4. I have traced each of my four major genealogy lines back at least five generations, in some cases much more.

5. I have stood at the graves of my father, grandfather, great grandfather and great great grandfather.

6. I have used my bizarre and twisted humor in creative and sometimes even positive ways.

7. I have discovered that my immense flaws are also my greatest assets.

8. I have slept on the fantail of a Destroyer under a sky so filled with stars you would imagine you could read by their light.

9. I have communicated with Kleyleins all around the world although for years I believed my family was the only ones.

10. I have walked around Stonehenge and stood on the moors in the wind and rain.

11. I have dipped my hand into the Mediterranean Sea.

12. I did not fall into a life of crime unless you call management a crime - which is kind of a gray area.

13. I have retained many of my teeth long after my parents had lost most of theirs.

14. I have walked in the Parthenon.

15. I have visited Unterrodach, the town in Bavaria where all the Kleyleins come from.

16. I have walked the same stones in Ephesus where Anthony and Cleopatra walked and John the Baptist preached.

17. I graduated from college. This is noted because there is no record of anyone in my family doing so before me. I've seen my daughters graduate as well.

18. I have spent time doing basic electrical work, mechanical work, carpentry, concrete work, roofing and most other such trades.

19. I have walked on the Great Wall of China.

20. I have climbed trees, dug holes and written on sidewalks with chalk.

21. I think I have a pretty good relationship with my brother, Dave. At least it's much improved from all the fighting we did as children.

22. I have been to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and most other destinations in the Caribbean.

23. I have been very, very hot and very, very cold. Sometimes even just right.

24. I have swum in the turquoise water of a motu in Bora Bora.

25. I have ridden a train between Miami, Florida and Saint Paul, Minnesota.

26. I have been on a submarine under da sea.

27. I have traveled the Chunnel several times.

28. I have been to London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Munich, Athens, Stockholm, Shanghai, Beijing, Bangalore, etc. and even Silver Lake, Minnesota.

29. I have ridden on a bullet train in China at 431 km/hour.

30. I climbed the steps to the top of the Washington Monument and then took the elevator down just to be contrary.

31. I scanned my mother's photographs from the 1930's and 1940's, studied them, tracked down the original locations and rephotographed the scene 60 or 70 years later.

32. I have had as many as 700 people working for me.

33. I have been to the top of the Empire State Building.

34. I have a degree in Computer Science but am only a couple credits short of a second degree in Math.

35. I have been able to locate many of my long-lost high school friends by means of social networking.

36. I was able to parlay my ability to recognize patterns into a pretty good career.

37. I have seen the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park, the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Devil's Tower, the Redwoods, the St. Louis Arch, the Golden Gate Bridge, Niagara Falls, the Everglades, the Black Hills, Diamond Head, the Great Salt Lake, Skyline Drive, the bayou, the forest, the desert, the plain, the swamp, the Pacific Coast, the Atlantic Coast, the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes.

38. I have worked for a lot of different employers in a lot of different fields in a lot of different occupations.

39. I have had a number of ex-employees tell me that the best time in their careers was when we worked together. Hah!

40. I have never taken, ingested, smoked, chewed, smeared on, snorted, huffed, shot up or otherwise imbibed any illegal or illicit drug. I probably should have.

OK, NOW It's Mother's Day

The third part of a trilogy is supposed to be the best. Yeah, right.

I saved the third entry in the trilogy about my mother for after Mother's Day. Somehow, it seemed appropriate because now we'll talk about her when I knew her. The previous two posts were about her life before her marriage and my brother and I coming into the picture.

Sophia Pawlak married Leon Kleylein on April 15, 1944 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. There don't seem to be any wedding pictures that are identified as such, but here's one where Mom has a hibiscus flower in her hair and my father has one of those short 1940's ties on. (Hmmm, I wonder if they'll come back?) Anyway, This could be it for all I know. Just for fun, let's say it is - OK, here's their wedding picture! They seem happy.

Here's another one where they seem happy. I like this one because it's so well worn that I presume they liked it as well. My father is wearing his auto mechanic's uniform and Mom is wearing the type of housedress that I remember her wearing all the time. That insignia on my father's shirt LOOKS like the old Amoco logo before they went red white and blue, but I can't quite make it out. Maybe I should use that special software that the cop shows have that clarifies an image even when there are NO PIXELS available. Oh, wait, there isn't any such software.

Here she is with my brother Dave in January of 1946. Look how handsome my brother is, my mother can't believe her eyes.

As I mentioned before, my mother was a maid all her life. She worked at the Holiday House on Biscayne Boulevard and NW 117 St. in Miami and at the LuRu Motel at Biscayne and NW 145 St. operated by Lou and Ruth Bruno (LuRu). Interestingly, the back of the Holiday House property was on the Dixie Highway (East Dixie - see previous posts) and the LuRu was situated right on what was once the Dixie Highway and the Florida East Coast railway ran behind it. She could walk to the Holiday House, but she had to take a bus to the LuRu and when we moved to Carol City, it was a long trip.

And then, here she is three years later with me at five months. She looks like she's been through the ringer, but I guess that's what happens when you have a ten pound baby.

As much as she loved my brother and me, I think she had a special love for my daughter Leah. The family never had more than two nickels to rub together, but Mom would have given everything she had to Leah with no hesitation.

I'm sorry Mom never got to meet Heather since Heather wasn't born until a year and a half after she died. I'm sorrier still that Heather didn't have the opportunity to meet her grandmother Kleylein. Imagine how hard it must be to miss memories you never had.

My mother was a good mother. Our clothes were clean, there was always enough food and neither my brother nor I ended up in prison for any considerable length of time. Sure, my parents smoked and drank beer, but so did everyone in those days, there wasn't any television to numb our brains. My brother and I learned how to work and you can blame it on genetics or culture, I don't care, it worked out for me.

Thanks, Mom.

"M" is For. . .

No, it's not Mother's Day yet, but this is a followup to my last post about my Mother.

In my last post, I celebrated my Mother's 100th. birthday. Imagine if Sophia Pawlak were still alive! She was born in the first year of the presidency of William Howard Taft. To kids today, you might as well say "during the reign of Charlemagne." It sounds so distant, so foreign.

Look at this photograph, there's a lot to be learned. She was already a grown woman in 1931. She was in St. Paul, Minnesota and I don't know where she was going, but wherever it was - she was walking there. It was the Depression after all.

We also have a reminder of what was once a very common street scene - someone changing a tire. I've changed a few in my day, but not lately. It's not quite so common to see anymore, but even this friendly snapshot caught one.

Check out the sidewalk. Even in these circumstances, her shoes are nice, she knew where to put her money. The closer you look, the more impressive they are, they had soles on them and everything!

So, she had style, that's nice to know. At this point in her life, she was a live-in maid, so she didn't have a ton of money to throw around.

She was very frugal, very careful with money, but I must say, she continuously found 50 cents for comics for my brother and I even though I bet that 50 cents would have come in handy, you know for food and stuff.

Here's a shot of Mom with her brother, my Uncle Richard, when they were working for the von Neida family on Normandy Isle in Miami. Mom was the housekeeper and part-time nanny for their grandson, Marc Beebe. I've been to the house in the photo (on Normandy Isle) and duplicated the photographs of the property, it's changed but still easily recognizable. I was able to stand in the very spot where they stood in 1937.

Working in the housekeeping industry around all that dust can end up giving you a really dry throat and a tremendous thirst. But Mom was able to identify a remedy for that. Beer. Or the occasional 'high-ball'. Why, I've even had one or two myself after a particularly tough housekeeping day.

I can't really say enough about the photograph below, you're really going to have to look at it in detail. I did, when I was figuring out where this bar was so I could track it down. That's Mom in the foreground and her friend Freddy holding a full sized mannequin on his lap. There must be a great story behind how he came into it's possession. Then there's the guy half standing in the center rear apparently wearing an earring long before they became fashionable. And the South American looking guy giving the side sockets to the drunk. And the prim looking banker's wife type who was probably drunker than all the rest of them. What a great photo. Party down!

Using my incredible detective skills, I was able to identify that this was taken at the Park Avenue Restaurant on Miami Beach, the site of which is currently underneath the Miami City Ballet. I bet they didn't see that coming. I wonder if occasionally some swan will be doing a fouetté rond de jambe en tournant and suddenly the ghost of drunkenness past would smack her and knock her on her ass. She'd look around to see what just happened and somewhere my Mom would be smiling.

Everybody Has a Mother

Today is my mother's 100th. birthday.

She's not still with us, however, she died quite a while ago. She died of complications from a perforated ulcer. Now, of course, we know that ulcers are caused by a virus and not the stress caused by raising two recalcitrant children. But we didn't know that then, so my brother and I figured that we had driven her to an early grave, or at least I did. If not for the stupid ulcer, she might still be alive. Sixty-six years old isn't very old for our family, everybody lives into their nineties. Except my father who died at eighty-nine after smoking and drinking his whole life. Sixty-six, boy, that's only a few years older than I am now! That's a sobering thought, huh?

That's Mom on the right with her younger brother Richard who has on almost as nice a dress as she does. She was born Sophia Eleanor Pawlak on May 1, 1909 on a farm in Silver Lake, Minnesota. These folks weren't well-to-do genteel farmer types, they were Polish farmers in a Polish community. And that community had most of their roots from a couple of small towns in Posen, Poland and they all grouped together and continued their lives in the United States.

So, she grew up working and that's what she did her whole life.

In this photograph, that's Mom on the right with her mother Wanda (Pokornoski) Pawlak, her brother Richard and her sister Delphine. Her youngest brother Edwin hadn't been born yet.


She did jobs like pick strawberries for extra money, but mostly, and for the rest of her life, she was a maid. I look at the photographs of her when she was a child and she's never smiling. In this shot of her at her confirmation, she's very serious with those eastern European eyes looking at us. What was she thinking? Was she making plans? Was she glad to be alive? Or was she already feeling old?

I can't ask her, because I never had the sense to when she was alive.

<sigh>

So, as soon as she was old enough, she got a job as a maid for a well-to-do family in Saint Paul, the von Neida family. At one point, all three older Pawlak children Sophia, Richard and Delphine all worked for the von Neida family. The family began wintering in Miami and that's where my mother met my father and you know how that turned out. Isn't it something how a seemingly small decision becomes a pivot point and everything that happens after that was dependant upon that one turn?

Here's Mom at twenty-one, she's very fashionable with that hair, huh? Remember, in 1930, they were very much in the Depression, I'm REALLY glad she knew enough to get some photographs taken.

But she also knew there wasn't going to be any college for Sophie. There wasn't going to be any 401(k) money to lose, there wasn't going to be any money, no trips to Tahiti, no ball gowns stuffed into the waiting limo. Actually, she never even learned to drive. No car, no reason to drive. Simple reasoning, huh?

But she came into her own, that's for certain! Perhaps I'll write about that tomorrow, you can't stuff a whole life into one post.

So, I'll leave you with a photograph of the four Pawlak childen in 1934. From the left is Edwin, the youngest, Delphine, Sophia and Richard. It might bore you almost to tears to learn that I was named after my Uncle Richard. They were going to name me either Richard or Kenneth. And that was one of those pivot points I spoke about, because Kenneth would never have lost his hair!

Sixty Years

In my last entry, I explained that I took a trip to Miami in an attempt to find the locations in some of the photographs in my Mother's photo albums. Nothing (hardly anything) was labeled (let that be a lesson to you) so I had to use all my detective tricks. Here are some examples of what I came up with.

Here's the house in Normandy Isle on Miami Beach where my mother used to work.

And here's the same shot sixty five years later.

Here's my father at the front door of the Normandy Isle house.

And here's a current view.

My father with his arm around the garden statue.

Here's the statue sixty five years later.

Here's my mother in the back yard before and after. Time passes, my friends. Take note.