snapshots from the 40s and 50s

When I was small I loved looking at old photos of my mom. I could spend hours poring over family albums with my grandma, asking questions about what our family was like before I was in it. My mom was a dark-haired, porcelain-skinned beauty, and I hoped to look like her some day. The old black and whites could not dim the light behind her eyes. She loved to play with her two brothers and their many cousins, who were too numerous to count. Sledding, building snow forts, screaming and laughing and snowball fights. My favorite photo was of Carol sitting with her brothers on the back of a hayrack during the summer of '45. She is smiling and laughing, looking impish and pleased with herself, with a spark of mischief in her eyes.

The pictures of her in adolescence were different. She was a shy, pudgy-faced girl who didn't like having a camera pointed at her. Plaid skirts, dark sweaters, forced smiles looking awkward and sad. Chipped front tooth from a playground accident when she was in 4th grade. Black frizzy hair pulled back in a barrette, eyes saying, "Please don't look at me". It was around this time that her mother entered her in a "Teen of the Week" contest at the city newspaper. My mom ended up winning the prize, and the paper ran a big photo of her in the Sunday edition. The lively spark was dulled, but not completely gone.

By 1958 the sparks were flying when my mom graduated from high school. She went directly into the local Catholic hospital’s nurse’s training program. The place was a sort of south Iowa boot camp for young women who wanted a life beyond the farm or the meat-packing plant. The school was run by curmudgeony old nuns, who were shameless about exploiting their source of free labor. In the pictures taken of Carol around this time, the spirited and fun-loving girl is back. She was proud to wear her nurse's cap with her white stockings, white shoes and white uniform dress. She was popular and happy and confident about her future. She was the first female in her family to graduate from high school, and the first person to take her education beyond it.