Len's Memory Blog

  More Wonder (entry for 9/25/24) In my last blog post, I recounted the beginnings of my family’s trip to Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1951. I also talked about how the book  Cubby in Wonderland  had affected and influenced my attitudes about the trip. And I had ended the post by recounting my mother’s cautionary tale about what would happen to me if I wasn’t careful near the geysers and hot springs. It wasn’t fair! Cubby’s mom hadn’t tried to scare  him  like that! And my mother hadn’t tried to scare my sister, who was even younger than I was! Having accomplished her purpose, however, my mom soon turned to marveling at the wonders herself. Although, for her, the wonders weren’t just the thermal ones. She loved the campground and, in particular, our campsite, which was among gorgeous pine trees, reminiscent of the ones around her mother’s cabin near Denver. She wasn’t at all frightened or worried about the grizzly bear that had awakened my dad and ...

Wonderland (entry for 9/18/2024) When I was nine years old, someone (I don’t remember who) gave me a book for my birthday entitled  Cubby in Wonderland  by Frances Joyce Farnsworth, about a little bear cub, born in a cave in the Teton Range in Wyoming, and accompanied by his mother into the nearby Yellowstone National Park, which he calls Wonderland, because it is full of so many strange natural features. It’s a kids’ novel, told in the third person from the cub’s point of view, and while it was a bit below my normal reading level (I had just finished  Huckleberry Finn ), I did devour it and love it. We had passed through Yellowstone briefly in the late spring of 1947, on our way through to see my Aunt Reba’s college graduation in College Place, Washington, but I had very few memories of it. Old Faithful, of course, and West Thumb, and the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, with its upper and lower falls, but that was about it, as far as anyth...

Seeing the Light (entry for 9/11/24) The first photographer in our family was my mother. (She was also the first, and only, electrician in the family, but that’s another story.) In 1939, a year before I was born, she was given an old Kodak-brand folding camera that used a strange 116-size paper-backed black and white negative film. (It was the only film ever invented that resulted in 2.5 inch by 4.25 inch photos, a weird longer-tha-normal rectangular format.) She fell in love with the unwieldy thing and took pictures of us and our surroundings everywhere we went. (The black and white photos of me in various posts of this blog were all taken with this camera, and she was always the photographer, except for a few photos where she is in the picture herself.)  Kodak advertised it as a “pocket camera,” but this must have been a joke, for I’ve never met the pocket it would fit in! Purse, maybe. Pocket, no. It measured four by eight inches, and an inch and a half deep when folded flat (si...

Turnip (entry for 9/4/2024) Memories can be funny things. Sometimes you can actually remember something from your early childhood, but memories that can  seem  to be from ‘back then’ can be tricky. Maybe somebody took a picture of you doing something when you were, say, two years old. Is your memory of doing that thing a real memory, or is it just a memory of having seen the picture? I remember, for example, seeing a picture that was taken of a group of people sitting on and around a huge Texas-shaped road sign, “Welcome to Texas.” I’m one of the people in the picture, and I remember the picture well, though I can’t find it to post here. What I don’t actually remember is the event. Being there. Doing that. Having the picture taken. Here’s a later picture of the same sign, or at least one very similar, so you can see what I’m talking about. I remember the event well, but only from pictures and from people talking about it.  But I don’t remember actually  doing ...