Christmas in the 'Teens

I went through more old photos today. The scrapbook I've never looked at too much is the one that covers the era before our house was built. Helen, who we knew for nearly a year prior to her passing away, was born in March 1911. Every Christmas after that her mother, Bess,  took her picture in front of the tree. Since Helen's father was a doctor they were relatively well off. For the first 7 years the pictures presumably are from their home in Waucoma, Iowa. In 1918 they were in El Paso, Texas, at Bess' sister's home. At that time Bess' husband, Walter was a captain in the U.S. Army stationed at Ft. Hood, Tx, prior to going overseas.  So here  is Helen from her first Christmas to her 8th:

 1911, 9 months

1912, almost 2

 1913 almost 3

 1914 almost 4

 1915 almost 5

 1916 almost 6

 1917 almost 7

 

1918 almost 8, taken in El Paso Texas, with a cousin?

A couple notes:

• The morris chair to the left in the 1912 picture is currently in our library. 
• The wicker rocker (1912, 1913) never seems to have been moved to Foxcroft, nor was the "death's head" tabouret table in the 1911 picture. 
• "Bill" was the dog's name.
• I think the number and type of presents indicates the relative wealth of the family. 

Looking at the pictures in full scan is wonderful for details, the wallpaper (1911-13) is phenomenal. I don't know if they moved the tree location or painted?

Also the rug in the 1917 picture is the same from the 1930 Christmas picture, the first one I can find  at Foxcroft, even though they moved in fall of 1928:

I wrote more about this picture here:

Christmas Then and Now December 13, 2005

Merry Christmas 1953

I haven't posted for quite a while due to other facets of my life taking up lots of time, and that actually plays into today's post.

When we were emptying the contents of Foxcroft in 2005 and getting ready to renovate, I put some items in the upstairs storage space at my office and promptly forgot about them. We moved to new offices this fall, and as I was going through things I found several boxes of memorabelia stored away. One box contained a stereo viewer and 2 boxes of stereo slides, the viewer didn't work so I'd never looked at any of the slides.

I brought it home and took it apart and replaced the 2 D batteries and lo and behold it was functional. Then I started to look at the slides.

Apparently Helen and Mick bought a stereo realist camera some time in the late 1940's and began to take and make their own stereo slides. The two boxes have scenes from Foxcroft (when they would have been visiting Helen's mother, Bess prior to their moving in with her in 1955) and from vacations in the South Dakota badlands and Yellowstone National Park.


Here are a few scans from Christmas Day, 1953. They don't begin to do justice to how good the images look in stereo in the viewer, but it is a start. I passed the viewer and slides around to my family on Thanksgiving and we spent a very enjoyable two hours discussing the images!

Here's the companion to the above pic of Helen at the Christmas tree in the living room:


And the stereo view of Christmas dinner, which appears to be two whole chickens for 4 people!

Why the name?

After buying the house last year I discovered that Helen had donated her parents' WWI correspondence, along with her own WWII letters to the special collections department of the UI Library. As I went and started reading I found details Helen had not told me. Bess' husband, Walter Fox, was a 1905 UI Medical School grad. Bess studied for her master's degree in English Literature at UI before they were married. Walter became a small Iowa town doctor after teaching anatomy at UI for 2 years. Helen was born in 1911. At age 39 Walter volunteered for the army at the outbreak of WWI. As a captain and doctor he was sent to France and served in field hospitals. At the conclusion of the war he was sent to Serbia to fight a typhus outbreak, contracted pneumonia, and died in 1920. Bess was widowed at 36, Helen was 7 years old.

I found that Bess, Helen's mother, had built our house when Helen was starting as a freshman at the University of Iowa. Her plan was to move out the small town where she had remained since Walter's death, give up her many civic commitments (school board, lecture series, Daughter's of American Revolution) and retire to her gardening and reading.

Bess bought 2+ lots in the new development just outside Iowa City limits called University Heights. She had enormous vegetable and flower gardens, and according to her letters to Helen when she wasn't reading or gardening she was listening to Chicago Cubs baseball games on the radio.

So given the original family name= Fox, and the old English word for a small farm= Croft I knew exactly that if we had to have a name for our home it would be Foxcroft.