On these pages, you'll find a miscellaneous assortment of photos that aren't directly related to the history of the family, but are of interest for their historicity - they are authentic records of the times. Some are just fun to look at. All should be of interest to artists, costume and stage set designers, and anyone else with the desire to explore the era represented.

Their greatest value might be in the pleasure we all seem to get from learning about how the world was before we made our entrances into it!

Here's an example of the kind of stuff you'll see in this section. This one my mother labeled "Mamma and the Fruit Peddlar." I have no idea when or where it was taken, though I suspect it might have been Los Angeles (note the palm tree across the street). Even when I was growing up, there were still some of these peddlars around. The Helms Bread man drove his truck down our street and called on the ladies who were his regular customers.

There were plenty of produce peddlars, but I seem to remember them setting up stands on street corners in Fresno and Los Angeles before that. They were local farmers mostly, picking their produce in the morning and selling it fresh in town in the afternoon.

Our primary source of dairy products was the milkman who came by a couple of times a week, checked the order that was left in the little cubby that opened from the outside and the inside of the house, and then deposited in the same little cubbyhole whatever my mother had ordered. That was back in the really olden days, when the cream rose to the top of the bottle, which you were supposed to shake before drinking. A special treat was to drink at least a bit of that pure, fresh cream off the top before shaking to blend the rest of it into the milk.

The Good Humor man came around daily with plenty of good treats for the children in the neighborhood, and every few days (when I was still very, very young), the ice man came by to deliver a fresh block or two of ice for the beautiful wood ice box in our kitchen. By the time I was four or five, we got our first electric refrigerator; my mother was absolutely thrilled!

The photo on the right probably belongs in the Ostrovsky section, but I have no way of knowing (other than by guessing) when it was taken. I also don't know who most of these folks are! According to my mother, in the back row, from left to right, are mom's Uncle Morris and her mother, Ida. My mother had no idea who the others were.

I'm sorry the quality is so bad. No amount of tweaking can put in features that aren't discernible in the original. But I still love the formal poses, the clothing, and the little bit that you can see of the totally fake background!

Below, a photo of my Grandma Ida and her sister Sophie. On the back of the photo, my mother wrote: "Mamma & Aunt Sophia in Dayton - 1913"

It was evidently a nice day in Dayton - nice enough for these two young women to be taking a bit of sun - in their long-sleeved, long, dark dresses, with everything held in place with what I assume were some fairly substantial corsets!

I really prefer jeans or cutoffs!

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