Camping out (including maybe my mom's parents)

 For a few short years, from about 1913 to around the mid 1920s, auto camping was all the rage. As new owners of automobiles, Americans were learning what the freedom of having an automobile felt like. To be able to get in their cars and drive someplace, away from the city, even if just for a few days, it was worth it to be able to relax and escape the responsibilities of day to day life. Although this trend lasted just a few years, it laid the groundwork for the ways Americans would travel for years to come: auto camps were the precursor to both motels and RVs.

Thanks Facebook, Posted by Hershey Region Antique Auto Club of America

My maternal grandmother and her sister took photos of their camping out (or something outside by a car) in Texas. On the other side of my family (my father's parents) went on some hunting trips with various photos. I'll try to dig them out, but I think the hunting trips were in the 30s, so they'll be in a separate post, and my mother took part in them, while at just 7-8 years old, she wasn't in the camping outing with her mother and step-father below.

Mozelle Miller Webb Munhall, 1925, my mother's mother. 

A series of photos collected by my mother as a young girl. Later than the dates shown I think, because some of the dates are confused....probably posted after her step-father died when she was 10. 

Mozelle Miller Webb Munhall 1925

Fred Munhall and brother Jack, 1926. Fred married Mozelle Miller Webb and became my mother's step-father in November, 1924. It looks like these guys might have been hunting also, but standing on a civilized sidewalk kind of foils their intentions. Get out in the woods, guys!

Fred Munhall 1926, looking very much like he got out in the woods

Mozelle Miller Munhall and my mother, Mataley 1924 (however same outfit and standing in the same place with her step-father, my mother noted in her album 1925.) Upon further thought about them being dressed up in the daytime (not a concert or party happening) I think it might have been when Mozelle married Fred Munhall in Nov. 1924. At that time my mother would have been 7 years old.

Fred Munhall 1924

Fred Munhall

Uncle Jack Munhall, Mozelle Miller Munhall and Fred Munhall, 1926. It appears they are sitting on the bumper of a vehicle, with various boxes around. Perhaps camping, or moving...who knows.

Dorothy Miller 1926 - My great aunt Dorothy, sister of my grandmother Mozelle Miller. No clue what she is holding!

And we come back to a car with a family gathered to enjoy the great outdoors. 

 Family by the side of the road with a model T Ford

Sharing with Sepia Saturday this week.

The Sepians may be by the water, but my family was in dry land, yet outside on all occasions!

Queen of Carnival

Helen Guenther, queen of the Court of Carnival Flowers, San Antonio TX 1911.

I came across this gorgeous photo the other day on FB (Traces of Texas perhaps, but I can't find it any more).

I saved it because I had a relative who worked on some of the dresses for the court.  My grandmother was a seamstress, though relatively young when Helen was the queen.  Mozelle Booth Miller had just reached her 13th birthday in Sept. 1911.  She was the oldest of the 4 girls born to a German immigrant father who worked for the railroad and a Texas born woman from a family of lawyers and Spiritualists.

I give her background, since almost everyone in San Antonio came from someplace in their family trees, those who'd originally come from the Canary Islands, those of German heritage, or the many Hispanic families from Mexico who settled Texas before it became a Republic and then a US state.

But back to my grandmother. At 13 she probably went to see the parade...imagine a rose parade as Texans would do it...lavish, colorful, a grand celebration with music and romance in the air. Grandmommy was precocious, I'd imagine, and wanting very much to dress up like those gorgeous ladies on the floats. She would know all about the "season" of balls and receptions that the elite families were having in the city. She wasn't going to any of them, but talking about them while attending school.

Why do I think she was precocious? She married when she was 17! Of course that might have been a normal enough age in 1915, and she turned 18 a month later.  My mother wasn't born until March of 1917. And her father was in real estate.

But he died very young, and Grandmommy continued living on her own, with her 2 year old baby at least for a year. (Census of 1920, after Bud Webb died in 1919.)

And this is where her career as a seamstress started, I imagine. She was good enough at her trade to sew the ball gowns, and perhaps some of the gowns worn by the court members of the Carnival of Flowers. Her sisters also listed seamstress sometimes on their census records.

I remember visiting her when I was pretty young and seeing the gowns hanging from doors...gorgeous fabrics and colors. I never got to see them worn, but I knew they were not to be touched by young hands. Perhaps that's why I enjoy touching fabrics so much these days.

And I'm sharing this with Sepia Saturday this week. I can't match this prompt, but figure having a nice old photo might let me sneak in.
What old photos (sepia or otherwise) might you wish to share?

Grandmommy

Happy birthday to Mozelle Booth Miller Webb Munhall
 b. Sept. 9, 1897 Hillsboro, TX,
m 8.7.15 Albert Webb (1891 – 1919)
m. Mar 27, 1924 Frederick Munhall (1890 – 1927)
d. 1960, San Antonio, TX

Statistics don't say what a big hearted, but sad woman, my Grandmommy was.

I honor her life on the 117th anniversary of her birth.

Last year I posted a bit about her life Here.

I've been spending many hours looking at various ancestors, trying to learn more about their lives.  They were full of passions, loves and hates, beliefs and fears, courage and instincts, talents and foibles.  They walked each day through, from waking to sleep, occupied just as I am in whatever activities consumed them.

My grandmother was one of the most talented people in my family, able to tailor beautiful materials into clothing for anyone.  When we moved from Texas to St. Louis, she would receive measurements of my sister and myself, then sew intricate dresses that fit perfectly.  The cloth might be a bit strange, from her knowledge of dresses for ball gowns we would have plaid taffeta dance dresses when the other children wore wool or cottons.

I don't know if I have shared how difficult it was for my mother growing up with her mother.

My mother often told me that she was raised mainly by her grandmother, after whom she named me.  Mother also had a young aunt who never married, and she spent a lot of time with as a child.  Grandmommy had had 2 husbands die when she was quite young.  I never heard what my grandmother was doing while my mother was with her own grandmother...but only know that when I later was visiting her she did show signs of a disease that impacted both my mother and myself...alcoholism.

I worked to understand that disease and how it affects the children and even grandchildren around it.  There's an understanding of a secret that must not be talked about.  There's also a sense of lack of control of your life, that the alcoholic person can erupt at any time in unexpected and dangerous ways.  To deal with those conditions, people who live with an alcoholic try to have some control over their lives, no matter how small.

That is how I grew up thinking that my mother hated Grandmommy, but then would make efforts to visit her.  A very confusing set of emotions, love/hate, fear/control.  It was just a process that was the reaction to the disease, where a person would drink and get completely out of control, either being very nice, or maybe the opposite.  Of course my mother had her own way of coping, she went for religion.  I went for counseling.  And found out all the dynamics that were true in my life had been studied and explained by some other people already.

1926 photo of Mozelle with her second husband, Fred Munhall on the right, and his brother on the left.

Grandmommy did show her loving nature, probably in irrational ways.  I remember driving to Monterey, Mexico with her to visit her sister Dorothy Buchanan one summer.

We were in Great Aunt Margaret's big old car (Oldsmobile maybe?) and at one point on the dirt road to the ranch we had to cross a stream bed, then go up a steep hill.  I was in the middle of the front seat, and remember pushing on the dash board to help the car go up that hill.  Now-a-days a four wheel drive vehicle would be called for, but this was in the 1950s.

Scenes from Great Aunt Dorothy's ranch, somewhere in Mexico

Then we ate in a French Restaurant, Luisanne, and I wanted to try frog legs.  What?  My mother kicked me under the table.  Never in my life had my leg been kicked, and I didn't really get the message.  Here she was trying to let me know that that would be a foolish expense, but not getting through to me.  I was maybe 11.  I got the frog legs...and liked sharing tastes (just like chicken) with everyone else.  But mother fumed at me for days afterward.

My dear Grandmommy had insisted that I could order whatever I wished from the menu.  She who worked as a seamstress to make her living, often living with friends and relatives rather than in her own home, glady paid for a very expensive dish for my curiosity.

Mother was of the opinion that grandmothers and grandaughters get along better than mothers and daughters.  

My grandmother hated trains (where her father worked as a conductor all his life) and would only travel distances by airplanes.

Visit by Mozelle to Houston, (1948-9) with Mary Beth on left, Barbara on right.