Sepia photos

 Sepia Saturday reminds me to look at old photos (of which I have a lot actually)

This week Alan has offered this prompt... Stringed instruments and people bunched together!

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I just went down a rabbit hole, and was looking at many photos of my ex-husband's on Facebook. That's because he posted one of myself, which was a repost from 2023, and had been taken in 1969.  I had no idea the photo even existed!

This was shared in 2023 on Facebook by my ex (with whom I had not become Facebook friends yet) and seen by at least two female relatives, who liked and commented on it...but nobody thought to share it with me! 

Now I'm a friend of my ex on Facebook, so when he reshared it this week, I finally got to see what I looked like in 1969...and I barely (pardon the pun) remember that swim suit.

We had just moved to Florida, so it might have been my sons' (Russ to l. and Marty to r.) first experience of fine white beach sand in St. Petersburg. I do wonder who the blue sleeve and arm belong to, who was drinking a Pepsi in a bottle on the far right corner! Doug (my ex) was probably taking the photo...at that angle there couldn't have been a place for him to set the camera with a delayed shutter, so I do wonder. We didn't know anyone in the area yet, so I'm at a loss for who the blue shirted person might be.

Incidentally we had stayed at a Holiday Inn with a room right on the beach in Jacksonville Beach on the way to Tampa, where we were relocating. Maybe there was bad weather and we hadn't enjoyed the waves of the Atlantic before coming to the west coast of Florida, not a clear memory 56 years later!

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Here is a shot of some men playing stringed instruments - back to topic!

West Virginia Coon Hunters ( unknown photographer)

And some lovely young ladies with their stringed instruments!

And I gave up on finding any photos of 5 men sitting on a bench. Here are some more mature ladies sitting together. My maternal grandmother, Mozelle Miller Webb Munhall, is seated in the middle with her sisters Dorothy, Margaret and Rowena circled above. A Christmas picture no less! My grandmother was the oldest, and Margaret the youngest. They lived almost all their lives in San Antonio TX.

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And over on Open Yesterday's Pages: Muhammad Ali for Black History Month

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Politics again:

"This coup is the greatest theft of information ever."

From: Choose Democraacy via ActionNetwork.org

"This is an administrative coup, and it will require persistent action to block further erosion of democratic norms and build democratic power on the local, state, and national levels. "  

From: Side with Love, The Organizing Strategy Team of the Unitarian Universalist Association

 From Jen Rubin on Substack site, The Contrarian, dated Feb. 19, 2025:

On Monday, thousands of ordinary Americans across the country turned out to protest.

“Thousands of protesters opposing broad swaths of President Trump’s agenda took to the streets across the United States on Monday, calling Mr. Trump a ‘king’ on Presidents’ Day for his efforts to terminate thousands of federal workers and to fire prosecutors and independent watchdogs within the federal government,” the New York Times reported.

If Trump does not understand the essence of our constitutional system, at least some Americans do:

“No king, no crown, we will not back down,” chanted those who gathered a few hundred feet from the U.S. Capitol on the National Mall in Washington.

Many protesters opposed to Mr. Trump’s agenda embraced symbols of patriotism, waving flags and wearing heart-shaped earrings and beanies adorned with the U.S. flag. The members of an a cappella group sang the national anthem by the Capitol Reflecting Pool. The audience burst into applause after the final line: “And the home of the brave.”

Many Americans have expressed frustration with congressional Democrats for not doing more (although it is hard to pinpoint what “more” would look like). The protestors on Monday did not wait for elected officials to lead. They took it upon themselves in the best tradition of our democracy to make their voices heard.

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Today's quote:

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials. 

-Lin Yutang, writer and translator (1895-1976)

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Today's art: (Seated people at least, and a group of men in the background!)

Carl Bloch's In a Roman Osteria (1866)

I love how everyone at the main table is looking at the artist!

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?