Becky, a ScanCafe customer, tells us about getting to know her deceased father through stories as well as a set of old slides that she recently got scanned.
His name was Gary Webley and he was born in Washington State in 1935. He passed away in Washington in a farm accident on Sept. 2, 1966. I was four at the time. I remember just a few things–scattered memories mostly… which get more and more faded as time passes.
My parents met during a grange hall dance that was held for surrounding communities in rural Washington state. Their courtship was fast and they fell in love very quickly. Within thirteen months, they had my older sister and had started a farm of their own. Lots of photos in my order were of family gatherings because they were close with my grandparents and aunts and uncles. My great grandmother even shows up many times–she loved her rose garden and when my parents would come to take her out fishing!
My mother’s stories of him are always happy because he knew how to have fun and he had a wonderful sense of humor (she comes from a rather staid German family). He would telephone her mother and father really early in the morning before going out farming, proclaiming that “If I have to be up, everybody has to be up!!” He teased her by sneaking into the house and unplugging the vacuum cleaner while she was vacuuming and then he would hide when she went to check the cord; and after doing the same thing three times, he would emerge eventually, laughing hard. He’d throw loaves of bread into the air for her to catch in the grocery store.
It’s been difficult as I grow older because I don’t think she found true happiness after that time in her life. I often wonder what her life would have been like if things had been different–but then again, who doesn’t!
Before I sent in those 650 slides for scanning, none of us had really had a chance to view them all together. The bulb for the slide projector went out a long time ago, and then the projector itself stopped working. We hadn’t had access to the images for many years.
There are photos here that no one in my family had seen of my father, so it’s an amazing experience to get to see him again.