50-Day Family History Blogging Challenge: Hallowe'en 1982

[Alert:  this post has one mildly naughty word in it.] 

It was the season for trick-or-treating in the neighborhood where we lived when our daughters were in middle school.  This photo was taken 1982 at the home of my older daughter's best friend Kim.  In the photo are Marti, our older daughter; me; and our younger daughter, Elizabeth.

I have to say I'm still impressed that I actually made those uniforms.  If you don't recognize the uniforms, they are my best job of the Starfleet uniforms from Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan.  I don't sew, as a rule.  I am not good at it and it's not really something I enjoy.  But even if I do say so myself, I did a doggone good job with them.

 

Marti is Captain Kirk, though with a much fuller head of hair.  She's reading A Tale of Two Cities, the book Spock gives to Kirk as a birthday present in the movie.  Elizabeth is Lieutenant Saavik, Spock's full-Vulcan protege.  I guess having made the uniforms makes me the Starfleet tailor.

Our family had a lot of fun with Star Trek.  We watched the original series in syndication, and we watched the later series offerings, as well.  We went to all the movies.  We went to conventions and sometimes worked on convention staff.  And we played games based on Star Trek.  It has been a part of the glue that kept this family together all these years.

One game we played was a card game, in which, in our explorations, we got into a combat situation, a part of the game that the rules called The Last-Ditch Battle.  Whoever had the most cards won the game.  I was running the game, with Marti and Elizabeth, by that time, both in high school, playing with me.  We went through all the levels and got to that last end-game part, and I announced it:  "Now it's time for the last-bitch dattle."

I don't think we stopped laughing for ten minutes.   

50-Day Family History Blogging Challenge: Story Time

 Jennifer Jones, whom I follow on Substack, has issued a challenge:  Can we make an entry to our genealogy blogs every day for 50 days?  I'm already over-extended, but that's me.  But I can't resist.

I need a goad to get myself to the keyboard and get some stuff done.  So here we go . . . 

 Story time:

My mother was an intra-family adoption.  Her father, Benjamin Franklin Reed, was killed in a railroad accident when Mom was not quite a year old.  According to her sister, my Aunt Margaret, the Reed family "ganged up" on my widowed grandmother and took her two daughters away from her and had two brothers and their wives adopt them.  Mom's brother, the oldest of the three, was 16, and was left with his mother.

My mother was adopted by her uncle, Perry Wilmer Reed, and his wife, Mary LeSourd.  Perry was, after a career in railroads working with the rules, rates, and regulations as a general freight agent, became the head of the Chamber of Commerce in Pensacola, Florida, in the late 1920s.  And here's a story, as told to me by Mary Reed when I was a teenager in the 1960s:

Mary LeSourd Reed, as the wife of the head of the Chamber of Commerce, had to maintain a certain lifestyle and appearance, as a member of the Pensacola upper crust.  And part of that appearance, among "decent" women in the 1920s, was long hair.  Hers was down to below her waist.  All that heavy hair caused Mary to have awful headaches, as it must have done to most, if not all, the high-society ladies of Pensacola.  Well, Mary was not one to put up with that which she need not endure.  Aware of the fashion trends of the "Roaring Twenties," she went to the beauty salon and had her hair "bobbed," as they called it in those days -- she got it cut.  Short.  

She went to Perry's office to get his opinion of her new "do."  She marched into his office and asked him how he liked the new look.  Perry's secretary was standing nearby.  "Well, Mary," Perry said, "It looks all right."

Mary stormed out of Perry's office, leaving him totally befuddled as to what his offense may have been.  His secretary let him know, as Perry probably told Mary later:  "Mr. Reed," she said, as if admonishing a recalcitrant student on the fine points of proper behavior.  "You never tell a woman that she looks 'all right.'"

That's not the end of the story.

The next day, the other elite women of Pensacola went to the beauty salon -- and what a banner day it must have been for that establishment's bottom line!  They all had their hair bobbed.  If Mary Reed wasn't going to put up with those horrible headaches any more, neither were they!

 

True Confessions: Cranberry Wine

 It's 1976 or thereabouts.  I'm a fairly new Yeoman Third Class in the Coast Guard Reserve.  It's a Saturday of my drill weekend.  I come home, tired from a busy day and a long commute.  I open the refrigerator to see what I might cobble together for dinner.  The fridge is pretty bare, and there's an empty bottle on one of the shelves.

"If you're going to drink the last of the wine," I say to my husband, "don't put the empty bottle back in the fridge."  There was about 1/3 of the bottle left, my husband and I having enjoyed the other 2/3 over the course of a couple weeks.

He denies having had any of the wine, a sparkling cranberry wine made by a friend of my father-in-law, Marshall.  Marshall had gotten a few bottles from his friend, and had given us one.

Just then, our four-year-old daughter Elizabeth comes toddling down the hall from the bedroom she shares with her sister, who is six.  She's happy.  Too happy.  REALLY happy.  We look at each other, then back at our daughter.  That explains the missing 1/3.

She's been into the sparkling cranberry wine, and put the empty bottle back into the fridge.  Keys and I laugh, but I also remind him to keep a better eye on the kids when I'm not home.

When the girls are teenagers, we're swapping family stories, and we tell them about Elizabeth's adventure with the cranberry wine.  We all have a good laugh.

48 years later --

Elizabeth has, about a year before, been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood.  She's achieved remission, and her sister Marti has been her morale officer, coming Saturdays to visit, bring lunch, and play video games or watch silly TV shows with her.  Then Elizabeth is feeling up to short road trips and shopping.  So one day they go to a small town where Marti has heard there's a winery, not too far south of where we live.

When they return, they have a gift for us, that astonishes and amuses us no end . . . 

. . . in repayment of a debt of long standing that Elizabeth owes us . . . 

. . . a bottle of cranberry wine!