Hoar Frost

We have had two mornings when we woke up to hoar frost. Here is a link to Wikipedia's explanation of how this happens. HOAR FROST EXPLANATION It is stunningly beautiful! It's so beautiful that Dad even asked me to go outside and take a picture of it to send to Aunt Shirl! Here are the pictures that I took. The first one is when there was no sun and it was sort of foggy. That's where the moisture came from to create the crystals. (That is not snow on the branches of the trees)
The next two are when the sun is shining. The frost is starting to fall off the trees. THEN it looks like it's snowing!

Restored Pictures

Here are three totally faded pictures that I just restored a little bit. Wish I knew how to do a better job of it. Maybe one of you would like to take them and do something with them??? This first one is a picture of Mom holding Laurene and Dad holding Maryann, with Todd in front of Mom and Rob standing in front of Dad
I think this one of Grandma and Grandpa Corbridge was taken at the same time.

This one has same line-up as the one on top except Grandpa Corbridge is standing behind Dad

Grandma and Grandpa Corbridge were so wonderful. If you remember them, leave a remembrance in the comments!

Music in my life

These pictures are right after I had my eyes operated on. Grandma Corbridge got these dresses for Roberta and I.


When I was small my Mother and Father took me to church and I can remember Father coaching me on Sunday School talks. Later, I went to church with Mother or my Grandparents. Mother was the choir director in our ward, Long Beach First Ward, in Long Beach California. I remember going with Mother to choir practice and singing in the choir. We led sort of a nomadic or gypsy life and since my grandparents had been in Long Beach 1st ward forever, going to church there with Mother was very solid and wonderful. Mother played the piano and she taught my sisters and I to sing together. This picture was taken when we lived next door to Grandma and Grandpa Corbridge, about the time that Mother taught us to sing together. I can remember standing around the upright piano in our living room and learning a Christmas song to sing for a church program. We also took piano lessons. I must have had lessons before that but I best remember my lessons, given by Mr. Oland, when I was a teenager and we were living in Los Altos, California. I was always encouraged to practice but when I didn’t practice and lost interest, the lessons ceased. I also took lessons in Cape Girardeau as an adult, with my children but those lessons ceased when we became strapped for money. The last attempt at piano lessons was when I was in St. Louis. I took lessons from Jennifer Eliason and actually performed at a recital that she gave. It was excruciating!
I’ll just slip in here that I took violin lessons in the 6th grade at Lafayette Elementary School in Long Beach. I played in a school orchestra there. Music has always been an important part of my life. I have sung in choirs in all the schools I was ever in, church choirs since I was a little girl, and musicals. I whistle all the time and drive Grandpa crazy. I took harmonica lessons in 2004 in St. Louis and still love to hear the harmonica parts in music on the radio. That was not appreciated by Grandpa either!
You can play any instrument that you want to if you practice. I never became adept at any instrument because I was never devoted enough to practice. The moral of this story is don't be like me. Take the opportunities that are offered to learn music or any other talent and practice until you have mastered it. This is a picture of my sisters and I with our Mother about the time that I was taking piano lessons as a teen. It is taken at Recreation Park, across the street from our church. This is a picture of me in the little theater production of "Little Mary Sunshine". I had no lines but I giggled at almost everything people said. Here we are singing a number
called "Swinging"
Swinging, swinging, up in the air we are winging.
Flying, flying is much too high.
Trying, trying to touch the sky,
While we're swinging, swinging,
SORRY, CAN'T REMEMBER THE REST!

More Christmas Pictures!

Jade has posted pictures and videos of the Christmas Celebration on her blog, that I didn't know she had. Take a look!
http://shearjade.blogspot.com/

Music

Did you ever take any music lessons or sing in a school choir when you were a kid? Did you like to listen to music?

Answers to Questions from Grandpa

Sam asked if we did any other trips with our bikes and why did we go to the beach.
First of all, we did not go to the beach. We went to Laguna Beach, a town on the beach. We just went to the town and then rode home.
Yes, we planned several trips to Silverado Park and rode our bikes there but it was only about 2 ½ miles to the park, so it was only a 5 mile trip. Nothing like the trip to Laguna. When we had our study on pioneers in school, we went across the street to Silverado Park and had an activity there. The boys in 6th grade built small covered wagons and frontier rifles. The girls made sunbonnets. We went to the park and formed a wagon train there. Half the boys played Indians and the other half were Pioneers. We had a cowboy and Indian fight.

Sam asked how fast I could draw in seconds.
I could draw my gun and shoot off one cap in about two seconds.

Blake asked if my Mother cared that I played with guns.
No my Mother did not care if I played with guns. She was the one who sent me to the movies to watch cowboys and Indians fighting with guns.

Blake asked were the icicles real
No, the icicles were made out of thin aluminum foil and we hung them on the tree one at a time. At times when we got fed up with hanging them one at time we would start throwing them at the tree but my Mom put a stop to that abruptly. She was the icicle Nazi. Our kids got the same treatment when they pulled the same trick. Ask your Mom!

I just thought of something that we used to do that we thought was fun. We would get a roll of toilet paper and put a string through the hole. Then we tied the string leaving about a foot and a half of string. Then we would roll out a length of toilet paper and then swing it out around our head and throw the roll in the air to see who could make the longest length go into the air. Mom says that was a waste of a good tree! We did that about twice and our folks made us quit wasting toilet paper.

My Two Most Memorable Christmas's and More by Grandpa Lewis

My two most memorable Christmas’s were when I was 7 years old and when I was 13 years old.

This is me and my Mom and Dad standing in front of our house on Jeanette Place about the time I got the guns.
When I was 7 years old we had moved from Navy housing the year before and we were living on Jeanette Place in West Long Beach, California. When I got up Christmas morning, I found that Santa Claus had left me a set of twin holsters with matching cap guns! The holsters had fringe on the back of them and there were loops on the belt, in which were inserted wooden replicas of bullets. There were silver rivets around the holsters and along the top and bottom of the belt. They were a really nice set of guns and I liked them so much that I slept with them on for a couple of nights. I played cowboys and Indians with my friends and I became the fastest draw on the block. These were just like the guns that Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and the other western heros that I saw at the movies wore. I would walk a mile up Santa Fe Ave. to the movie theater on Saturday mornings. If I remember correctly, the movies started at 9 AM and you could see 7 cartoons a serial episode and a full length Western. Sometimes the serials were Westerns and sometimes they were Navy shows or something else. Each episode was a continuation of what you saw the week before. Sort of like soap operas today but you had to wait for a week to see the next episode. This was before we had TV. We had to pay the tremendous sum of 9¢ to get into the movies. At the time a quarter a week was my allowance, which meant that I had 16¢ left to buy popcorn, which cost 10¢. I spent the rest of my money on gum or something else. It always burned a hole in my pocket. I had not been taught about the Law of Tithing, so I just spent it all.

My sister Shirl got married the summer of 1954. She was 18y old and John was 20.
A week before Christmas that year, when I was 15 years old, my Mom and Dad and I went to the Schwinn bicycle store. We browsed around and they asked me which bikes I liked best. This surprised me because I knew we didn’t have the money for a bike. Never the less, I told them the ones I liked and forgot all about it. When I got up Christmas morning, there was a new Schwinn bike under the tree! It was blue with 26 inch wheels and had a shock absorber. In those days the bicycles we had were the ones with the balloon tires and fenders. The shock absorber was located over the front wheel above the fender. I probably had the only new bike in the neighborhood. We were still living at the house on Jeanette Place. This is a picture of a Red Phantom bike like I got for Christmas only mine was blue.

Before I got the new bike, I had always had used bikes. I took the wheels of my old bikes off , learned how to adjust the spokes, took the hubs apart and learned how bearings worked and I learned how brakes work. More than once I took everything off the bike and painted the frame. After I had had the new bike for two weeks, I took the handlebars off and turned them upside down. The reason I reversed the handlebars was that the straps on the bag I used for my paper route, worked better with the handlebars down. AND besides that, it made my bike look COOL! I had this bike for several years and when I was 15 years old, my friend Denny Roughton and I rode our bikes from Long Beach to Laguna Beach and back. It was a trip of about 60 miles and took us about 12 hours. We started about 7 AM and got back about 7 PM. We had a flat just outside of Laguna Beach and the guy who fixed our flat at the gas station looked just like my brother-in-law, John Repecko. We used to take our bikes and ride all the way around Palos Verdes and back. That was about 40 miles. My friend Dave Boynton had a small bike and I don’t know how he kept up with us.

We formed a club for bicycle trips and called it the “Pedal Pushers”. There were about 4 of us and we hated that name because it was the name of a style of pants that girls wore in the 1950’s. However it was the only name we could come up with that everyone agreed to. We made a tent in my back yard out of an old blanket that was hung over a rope between two poles. That’s where we planned our bicycle trips.

I had a paper route when I was in Jr. High School. I think it was the 7th and 8th grade that I had my route. You had to have a bicycle to get a route. This is me in Jr. High
Each day after school, I went to a garage where about 10 kids met, folded their papers and put them in the canvas bags that hung over our handlebars. We would fold the papers into a tri-fold, so that they didn’t come apart when we threw them from our bike to our customers front porch. This was a skill that I learned quickly because if I missed the front porch, I had to get off my bike and get the paper and put it on the front porch. I had between 70 and a hundred customers and had to deliver the papers every day and by 8 AM each Sunday morning, rain or shine. If it rained we had to fold waxed paper into the tri-fold so they didn’t get wet. I went to Don Johnson’s house every Sunday morning after we finished our route. His Mom gave me breakfast. I looked forward to that because she made great pancakes and
syrup with eggs and sausage or bacon.

This is a picture of our house, Christmas 1956. Note the tree. We put those icicles on one at a time to make sure they were all even.

That's our dog Tacky. Black as a tack. (Tacks used to be black) You can see the secretary in the foreground. It's the one we now have in our living room. The chair that goes with it is just around the corner in the dining room. When I was about 8 or 9 years old, I stopped sharing a room with my sister and slept in the dining room that the Christmas tree is shown in. I had my bed in the dining room until Shirl moved out when I was 12 years old.