The girls usually found doing girl stuff.

Mama Sherry went to school in Sterling, K-4.

For fifth grade mama moved to Gladwin, Michigan.  She says they lived there for a year.

And the summer before 6th grade she moved to West Branch to live with Grandma Pearl and Grandpa Jesse Bohlinger.  She did that year of school (the sixth grade) at East Side School which was a little one room schoolhouse about a mile up the road from Jess and Pearl's farm.

In the 1980's Sherry Lynn Lane went back to Sterling on a visit and reunion with Paul Kughn and her sisters.  Her little East Side grammar school had gone to the cows, quite literally.  But mama still had her memories of that time and a few photographs.

Sherry Lynn Candy in grammar school.

Her father, Grover Candy, in his grammar school days.

Gail and Sherry on the stoop of Grandma Pearl's house.

Easter, holidays, dress up time.

Tap dancing, baton twirling, and singing...

...being fancy.

What I can tell you about this photograph.

That's Betty dressed up "fancy."

She was going to a wedding.

That's my mama on the sofa.

She was worried about Betty going to another wedding.

As the 1950s turned into its own decade, I think, there was a general feeling of...it has to get better.

People who were young adults in the fifties had heard about how hard things were in the thirties AND felt how hard things had been in the forties.

By the fifties, the world was trying to piece itself back together after "the world war," again.  The ending dragged on and on like the injuries and grieving all the losses. 

People wanted to believe in that iconic magazine image of the soldier returning to find his love.  And there were feelings that America could re-build whatever was broken, after all, all through the forties the people hard worked their hearts out and fingers to the bone to recover from whatever had happened in the Great Depression.  People had mustered courage and bravery and every ounce of their always-tired selves into uniforms for factory working and fighting in the War.




People really wanted to make stable homes for their children.

And, people wanted to be a part of whatever "fancy" wasn't the chores and the shifts and the tough stuff that happens in the total real lives going on inside the still shot photographs.


Wherever you've come from, whatever's behind us, we can have faith in the American Dream.


People wanted to believe.


Next to this photograph in my mama's album is a little arrow and a note that says,

"I am here."

That's Sherry Candy dressed up as a Penguin in Michigan.  Most likely in Gladwin.


                                     





































And that's little Edward Lane (on the right) about the same age in Long Island, New York!


































We'll be bringing some of the photographs in this blogspace into the others in our webcluster which is called A QUILT FOR MAMA and NANA'S GOLDEN PHONE.