1966 Cross Country Road Trip- Mom and her parents

 Mom had the photo album of this trip in a storage tote for a very long time. I don't remember ever looking at it before the past few years I only had glanced through it a couple of times then.

Recently, I looked at it more closely and decided to scan the photos. They are printed on thick type paper and are in the pages pretty tight so they were hard to get out. It was easier just scanning each page. I did take a few of them out to do so though.

I haven't really talked to Mom about this vacation that much. She did mention the Pikes Peak, Colorado portion of it. There aren't any photos of that, just some footage on home movies which I saw for the first time a couple of months ago. I finally had her 8 mm film reels put onto DVD. She seemed pleased to see these.

I hadn't even realized that they visited her sister out in California as part of this until recently. Maybe Mom did mention it before but I just forgot.

I still have a lot more photos to crop and straighten as best as I can. I completed a handful yesterday. Here are the ones of Oklahoma and New Mexico.

Oklahoma

Grandpa- on left, with a local guy

3 locals and their doggie

New Mexico

June 11, 2015- Music, Stuffed Animals, and Writing-Part 2

   Mom still has all of her records, even the Rosemary Clooney 78s. She doesn’t have her old record player that could play these though. I have my record player only it hasn’t been used in about 10 years. That stereo has been in mom’s room for even longer than that.

    I can’t believe that I used to like listening to her musical soundtracks- Gigi, Gypsy, Oklahoma, South Pacific, The Music Man, Bye- Bye Birdie, Jumbo, and The King and I. We watched these movies together too.

    I wish that I never got rid of all but 3 of my Beatles records. I’m kind of embarrassed about my McCartney crush. I did have a poster of him and a Beatles one on my wall during that late 80’s- early 90s phase. 

    I thought that one of our 8^th grade Communion Breakfast (pre-graduation) songs used Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” with our school name replacing “Rock and Roll”. When I recently looked in that booklet, I saw “Graduation” to the tune of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” which I do remember. But there was also another called “Be Good Eighth Grade” to the tune of “Be Good Johnny” that I definitely don’t recall.

   Why had there even been 2 songs? The former says 1982 with words written by 4 of my classmates and the latter is 1983, with 5 names.  A couple of them sound familiar; they might have been the class of 1984. I am really confused about this.

   Mike mentioned that his class had “The Reflex”. Was it used for this same event or as the main song for his 8^th grade dance- Medieval Times theme? If it was the former, I wonder how they would have changed the words to fit graduation/grade school memories.

   I’m so bad at remembering song lyrics. I do know some Christmas carols still, I think. The songs that I remember most are the ones from my childhood and it’s not like I can recall many of the words. There’s Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane”, Lionel Richie’s “You Are”, Kenny Rogers- “The Gambler”, Wham! – “Careless Whispers”, and McCartney/Wonder-“Ebony and Ivory”.

 

                                                                 Rosemary Clooney

                                                                Rosemary Clooney