Sometimes to re-create a sight stuck in memory, you have to look around the edges of the photo. I'll use our station as an instance. Nothing remains of the original station, but it's at the back of the following photos.
That wooden garage was the one I grew up with, where I found the bullsnake under the welding stand, where Dad painted the outlines of all his tools and neatly kept them in place. (That didn't last long.) Decades later he put a Quonset building in the same spot, still used by my brother-in-law, Jim Rohrer. The man even looks like Carl Eisenbeiss, from whom he bought the business. That's Dad's own bike, and he took me riding regularly. Two more photos show the two gas pumps, one the old-fashioned cylindrical kind with its fancy crown on top. The first one shows Joe Ballard's house in the background, which had lilac bushes and shrubs later. The second has the old town hall, originally a two-story hotel. The view above is to the northeast, for the garage was set back from the double station unit; the two below are looking north.
I was born in our house, but, for some reason I don't remember, money, I'm sure, we soon moved back to the living quarters in the station for a few years. The two parts are shown here. The business/office portion is to the left/north. We lived in the south section at the right, rather like a shotgun house: front to back, living room, dining room with tiny kitchen, bedroom. Later, after we had moved back into the home across the street, the front part became a parts room, the back sleeping quarters for a hired man.
The roof edges has glorious neon tubing, a magenta pink, a bright blue, and a small section of pale green. The electrical feed to the neon tubing can be seen on the siding. Dad had yellow roses planted across the entire front. You can see how they spread from the early to later photos. To this day yellow roses are special to me. He was always a rose fancier, later planting a horseshow of 30 or so varied roses in our back yard behind our home across the street.
That's Uncle Larry Koftan holding me, with cousin Jimmy Vanness at the door. The right photo shows our box for deliveries, milk, I presume (not mail: that was at the post office). The hat is undoubtedly Dad's. He and I share a hard-to-find 7 5/8.
Below is Jim Glover. The shadow looks as if Mom's taking the picture. When she went to summer school at Wayne for renewing her teaching certificate, my cast iron crib was put in the station part so Dad and Grandpa Luckert could keep track of me. Certain high school kids like Jim would come and play with me. Mom could do a good imitation of my begging out the window, "Jim, come play with me."
While Mom was teaching country school, I had a series of women/girls to babysit me and do light housekeeping, including Dolly Marvin [Frahm] below, Velda Rose [True]--who also did Dad's books--Shirley Sealer. Curtain and roses means this is outside the living room.
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