Friday Family Photo--Spring snow 1975

Today we're supposed to have 8-12" of snow dumped on central Ohio, but because Columbus sits in a trough, our weather is always iffy, and snow and rain easily go north or south, and we stand in an inch or two with cancelled activities and a lot of salt on the roads. But not in the Spring of 1975. We'd had one of those big wet early spring snows, and the kids rushed out to make a fort before it all melted.


I don't have a date on the photo, but it's between the January and Easter 1975 photos in the album. When you look at an old photo, you see a lot you hadn't thought about in years. See the fence? My husband designed, built and painted it and talked a friend into helping with the post holes on the hottest day of the year 1970--the intention was to keep our children, particularly our little, very active, very risk taking little boy where I could see them. The city planners of Upper Arlington had decided (our street was platted around 1938) huge front yards with no sidewalks and tiny back yards would make the community look pastoral. This meant we had a very long drive-way, also very difficult to shovel after a snow storm, which we also gated. You can see if you look closely that there is a gate in that fence--that was so our babysitter, Kristy Mellum, could walk through. She and her 40-something widowed mother, Ruth, and brother Bobby lived behind us. They attended Upper Arlington Lutheran Church, which I knew nothing about and had never seen because it was so well hidden in a neighborhood north of us. Someone told me that Ruth was the first woman president (chair?) of UALC's council/board. (We have been members now since 1976.) Later, all the kids who lived on Brixton Rd. used that gate to cut through. Eventually, we removed it, and new neighbors built a huge privacy fence with no gate--they had no children, nor did most families who lived in that house.

The coats the kids are wearing were in their last season. I tried to be thrifty and get 2 seasons out of winter coats which were expensive. That meant the coats were too big the first season and too small at the end of the second season. Our boy looks taller in this photo, but that's because she is bending over. They are 12 months and 3 days apart in age, and around age 13 he passed her up and has been the biggest in the family after years as the smallest.

You can't see them, but they would have been wearing over-the-shoe boots, which meant stuffing wiggly feet into plastic bags, then into the boot, all the while straddling a squirming, struggling child who was in a hurry to get outside to the snow before it melted. You also can't see the attached garage which was on the left, but around 1979 we converted it to a family room, and built a free standing garage on the other side at the end of the drive-way, further reducing the small backyard. You also can't see all the mud and water puddling on the hall and kitchen tiles after they came inside, wet and cold, ready for snack time.