Four Photos and the Stories They Tell

 Photographs from our younger years remind us of who we were way back when. Here are four of me. The first photo is from 1950 when I was 6 years old. Two are from 1960 and the last photo was taken in 1970 when I was 28 years old. Each of these photographs has a story to tell and seeing them again has taken me on a surprising and enlightening journey into my past.

  

        1950 6 YEARS OLD  In this photo I’m wearing a one-piece bathing suit, decorated with stylized fish swimming across my little belly which I am proudly sticking out just a bit. I’m barefoot and standing with my legs planted firmly on the ground. My arms are bent at the elbows, my hands are holding onto my waist. My hair is blunt cut to my neck, with straight bangs, and sets off my square shaped face. And then there is my smile, not a full smile, but it is a confident smile that crunches up my eyes and puffs out my cheeks.

The photo was taken when my family was in the “country” which is how we identified the place where we and other families rented dilapidated cabins for seven summers, from 1947 to 1953. The cabins were on Cross Lake in Wisconsin, just north of Antioch, Illinois. The lake which we called “little lake” was about 80 acres in size (the equivalent of 16 Chicago city blocks) and was one of the Chain of Lakes in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.

Looking at the photo, I know that six-year-old Betsy owned the world. I had no fears in the country at Cross Lake. There were lots of kids, some my age, some older, some younger and we children were free! The days were ours to fill with whatever we wanted. Most days we went swimming in the lake. Sometimes we collected tadpoles or rubbed our faces on the soft furry white fly-away seeds of the cattails in the swampy area adjacent to the lake. We rode our bikes on the unpaved roads outside the cabins and up and down the one very small hill in the community.

On some days I walked by myself in the field across from our cabin, through knee high grass taking in the sweet smell of clover. Other days I went with my older sister Susie, or on my own when I got older, by way of a country road to the town of Antioch, where there were two attractions: the white frame house that held the Antioch public library and another frame building that housed the general store. Days were hot and the library was cool and spacious.  As soon as I could read well enough, I devoured the Oz books (there were many), Black Beauty and other horse books in the series and of course the Nancy Drew mysteries.  

At Antioch’s general store, Susie and I bought paper dolls to add to our collection. On rainy days, we would play paper dolls on the double bed in our parents’ bedroom, making up stories about mothers, fathers and children, as long as the stories included many different scenarios requiring outfit changes.

1960 SIXTEEN YEARS OLD  I found two contrasting photos of me from 1960; both were taken by my father and I am standing in the living room of our brick bungalow on the north side of Chicago. The first photo was from my sweet sixteen party in May 1960. I have a fake formal smile on my face, and my hair has been fixed by the beauty shop lady. My bangs are plastered in place, the hair above my bangs is teased and the rest of it is pulled back into a twist. The whole hairdo is held in place by lots of hair spray. The photo is black and white but I remember the dress was green taffeta. It had wide lapels that came down to a v-point at the three-inch waist band. My bosom is modestly covered by a white linen dicky.  The dress has a straight skirt down to just below my knees and sleeves that come to just below my elbows. Two-inch heels finish off the look.

I’m standing stiffly in front of the tables my mother set up for the party. She coordinated the napkins, paper plates, and plant centerpieces with the green color of my dress. My eyes are alert behind the white cat glasses, but it seems that my expression conveys a tentativeness about the whole experience. Or it could be that I remember to this day how tentative I was about having the party.

In the second photograph from 1960, taken in the fall of that year, I am standing in front of our spinet piano with a somewhat open, half smile on my face. I’m wearing the same white cat shaped glasses. My bangs and my softly curled page boy haircut frame my face. When I was six my hair was straight as a stick, but in the intervening years my hair developed a bit of a wave and  in my normal life, I didn’t need any beauty shop lady to arrange it and spray it into shape.

The camera must have been angled slightly upward and I look taller than my full-grown height of 5 feet. I’m wearing a black sheath dress with a cowl collar and buttons down the front. The dress is cinched at the waist with a thin black belt, It fits me well and shows off my slim womanly body. I have on black two-inch heels and though I am posed, I look relaxed with the heel of my front foot meeting the middle of my back foot, like a very casual third position in ballet.

Comparing the two photos today, I am surprised and delighted at the transformation I went through in 1960 from a gussied up awkward sweet sixteen girl to a sophisticated confident young woman.

 

1972 TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD When I went to college in the mid 1960’s, I discovered blue jeans and t-shirts which have continued to this day to be my comfort clothes. In 1969 I married a guy who loved hiking and camping and in 1972 we bought some land in Wisconsin. We thought we would learn how to live off the land.  It never happened but we spent many weekends on our 9-acres of wooded heaven, camping and hiking and cooking our food on a Coleman camping stove. 

This photo shows me standing on the rock outcropping that was part of our little world, in jeans and hiking boots, wearing my artist/photographer husband’s well-worn paint splattered oversized khaki jacket.  My short hair is windblown. Let the wind do what it will, was what I thought in those days when we were out in the wilderness. I’m standing confidently, trusting that my hiking boots will keep me steady on the uneven rock. I have a small smile and a knowing look on my face. I was where I wanted to be; I had my whole life in front of me and it looked to be full of adventures. Indeed it was.

About the land: we purchased it from a farmer and it was only accessible by driving on an unpaved tractor road through his corn fields. The farmer expected, and so did we, that within a few years we would find the funds and get the permits to build our own road with direct access from an adjacent county road.

About our dream and our marriage: We lost interest in our dream of living off the land; ost likely we came to understand how impractical and expensive it would be to make that dream come true.  And we lost interest in each other; we had no idea how to do the hard work necessary to become a loving, caring and respectful married couple. We divorced and my former husband eventually ceded our 9 acres back to the farmer.

I had a fine time remembering the stories associated with these photos.

WHAT PHOTOS DO YOU HAVE? WHAT STORIES DO THEY TELL?

 

The Cars in My Life and the Lives of my Cars

In 2005 I bought a Toyota Prius Hybrid. The Pruis was the fifth car I owned. But the first car in my life was a Citroen which was my father's mid-life crises car. 

1960 Citroen My father had his Citroen imported from France through a friend and enjoyed it for a few years.  He taught me to drive with this car, which had a stick shift but no clutch. At age 16 I took my driver’s license test in the Citroen. I think the woman who took me out for the test drive was so taken with the strangeness of the car that she wasn’t paying attention to how I was drivving.  I got my license on the first try.

About all the other cars in my life  My marriages figure into their stories, so it might help you to know that I was married and divorced four times between the years of 1969 and 2003. I'm a slow learner in regards to marriage and it took me 34 years to realize marraige was not for me. 

1969 Dodge Dart Swinger When Dave and I got married in 1969 we bought a used Dodge Dart Swinger for $2000, money that I received as an inheritance on the death of my grandmother, Anna LeBrint. 

No automatic steering system. No air conditioning but the car had two small 8 x 8” doors, under the dashboard near the floor, one on the driver’s side and the other on the passenger’s side. You could open the doors and while driving fresh air would come in. When we divorced, Dave kept our two cats but we shared custody of the car.  We had it alternate weeks. I liked this arrangement because there was good public transportation in Lakeview where I lived. But parking spots were hard to find so I appreciated my car-free weeks.         

1975 Second Dodge Dart Swinger When I moved in with Bob in 1975, I gave Dave sole custody of our Dodge Dart Swinger.  Bob had a newer version of the “Swinger,” but he preferred taking public transportation. So the car was mine to use most of the time and responsibility for maintenance on the car was also mine. We married in 1979. When our marriage ended in 1983, I took the car with me. Bob hardly used it and reluctantly he signed ownership over to me.

 

Pontiac Grand Prix (NOT MY CAR) After my marriage to Bob ended, the old Swinger and I moved in with my friend Katie. Eventually we became romantically involved and would have married but gay marriage was not legal at the time. Katie had a baby blue Pontiac Grand Prix. A heavy car with rear wheel drive, like most American cars at the time. It was exceptionally hard to manage in Chicago’s snow but still. . . it was a sweet car with a smooth ride. On the highway all you had to do was put your foot lightly on the gas pedal and whoosh you were going fast. I got my first speeding ticket during one of the road trips we took in the Grand Prix, going 80 when the speed limit was 55. This was during the twenty-one years (1984-1995) when 55 mpg was set as the national speed limit in order to reduce gas consumption. Do you remember that time and the “high” price of gas: $1.31 in 1984 up from 50 cents in 1974? In 1995 Congress returned to the states the right to set their own speed limits.

 

But back to MY CARS, the cars I owned.

 

1985 White Toyota Tercel Wagon, with black trim  Love does strange things. In 1985, my lady love Katie agreed to sell the Grand Prix for a good price and buy a small inexpensive Honda CRX Hatchback. She gave me money so I could buy what turned out to be my favorite car, a very sharp looking 1985 Toyota Terel Wagon. I loved that car. Lots of room, 4-wheel drive, and a unique look. A friend said it looked like a sedan that had a square box with large windows placed where the car’s trunk should have been. Katie and I had unreconcilable differences and the Toyota and I moved out of Katie’s garage and her home. I kept the Tercel Wagon for eight years. 

Even though Toyotas had the reputation of being a reliable and problem free car that you could keep for many years and many miles, this was not so with mine. At seven years, the car started to rust. I sanded off the worst rust and covered the sanded areas with orange rust-resistance paint. My beautiful car looked like a zebra.  I was ok with that but at eight years and 100,000 miles it developed some electrical problems. The car would die any time I drove up one of the very tiny city of Chicago hills and the headlights, turn-signal, and windshield wipers were all on. My mechanics couldn’t find the problem so the car had to go. I gifted it to a young friend who took on the challenge of trying to fix it. I think he never succeeded.

 

1993 Red Ford Escort Wagon  After getting rid of the Toyota, I bought an Escort Wagon and eventually married again, hoping it would work out. (It didn’t.) My husband Evan and I lived in Albany Park near the Brown line and I worked at Illinois Masonic Hospital, also on the Brown line. In the late 1990s we had some major snow storms and I could let the car stay buried until I felt like shoveling it out. There isn’t much else to write about the Escort. It was a reliable car for eight years and then it wasn’t.  However, in 2005, I memorialized the story about a friend who bought my old beater-Escort after I decided to replace it. Here is the story

 

In The Balance.

It was 2005 and I had a twelve year old Ford Escort Wagon with 80,000 miles on it. I had a good payng professional job and was divorced with no kids.  My job required driving 300 miles or more a week and the Escort was having intermittent problems – to be expected due to its age and the 80K miles on it. 

 I decided to buy a new Toyota Prius and my friend Tanika was interested in buying the Escort “as is” for its $500 trade-in value.  Tanika had four children of her own and had recently taken in a nephew and a niece, so she and her husband were supporting six kids.

 I told Tanika that I was able to afford a new car because I had “no kids.”  She held out her arms as if they were a balance scale and moved them alternately up and down.  She said “Let me think” and as she moved one arm up and the other down, she said, “car, kids?    kids, car?”   She concluded “Yep, I’m happy buying your old car and keeping my kids.”

 Because I have no children, I have had the freedom to live life in a way that others who have the financial and parenting responsibilities of raising children don’t. In the balance, it has been a good life.

 

2005 Toyota Prius  The Prius got great gas mileage and was the car I needed on the job I had, working in the Outreach Laboratory department of NorthShore University Healthsystem. On my job I traveled regularly to the four hospitals in the system (Evanston, Highland Park, Skokie and Glenbrook) and to the many NorthShore phlebotomy labs in Chicago’s northern suburbs, and also to independent medical practices where I installed computers and trained staff on how to order their labs from NorthShore. I kept the car when I retired in 2011, but after 14 years and 140,000 miles, my trusty Prius was having difficulties. In and out of the shop too often. So it was time to replace it.

 Truth be told I never liked the lack of visibility through the Prius’ slanted/split back window, especially when driving at night since the 2-4” metal bar that split the top and bottom of the back window often prevented me from seeing headlights of cars driving behind me.

 

MY FINAL CAR 2020 Kia Soul (bought in 2022)  Surprisingly the Kia Soul looks , a bit like my favorite car, the Toyota Tercel Wagon! It has the same boxy style but the Kia has more height and is one foot shorter than the Pruis (14 feet vs 15). Compared to the Dodge Dart Swinger and the Pontiac Grand Prix (both 17 feet long), it is a shrimp of a car.

 Because it is one foot shorter than the most compact cars sold these daysm it is easier to find a parking spot in Chicago, and unlike the Prius, the Kia has a very large back window which makes night driving easier too. When I bought the Kia it had 39,000 miles on it. Four years later toay in 2026, it has only 50,000 miles on it. I mainly drive it around on short jaunts in the city and in nearby suburbs. I expect it to be my final car and that it will outlast me.

A last minute addition to the Citroen story  My sister Judy Jacobson found this family photo while we were reminiscing about the time when our father owned the Citroen. It is from 1966. I was 16 years old and I'm sitting with our dog Sandy on the sidewalk posing for the photo, while behind me at the curb is our father and the Citroen. 

So ends my brief story about The Cars in My Life and The Lives of my Cars. There are more stories to tell about my life and my cars and perhaps one day I will write more about us. But not today.