I’ve spent the last few days visiting my Mom in St. Louis. It can scarcely be called a vacation but it was a respite from my usual routine of working, blogging, cooking, dog-walking, and occasionally trying to get our home back into livable condition after adding our addition. We spent the time talking, watching DVD’s (Slum Dog Millionaire), cleaning up her yard a bit, and looking through the old photo albums.
I found some fascinating things in one of the old albums. The houseboat on the banks of the Mississippi in which my great-grandmother lived. For the very first time I saw pictures of my great-grandfather that were clear enough that I could get some sense of what he looked like.
And dozens and dozens of vaudeville pictures. Pictures of my grandfather and grandmother. Pictures of the other members of my grandfather’s troupe. Pictures of Ed Flanagan and his partner, Neely Edwards, clowning around in the backyard on a rare visit home to St. Louis.
Casper, Wyoming. Hutchinson, Oklahoma. Fayetteville, Arkansas. Wichita, Kansas. As my mother put it, they certainly played the high lights. It wasn’t glamorous.
I’ll be scanning a lot of these pictures of the old vaudeville troupe and posting them here. I think they’re a document of a world gone by, a world largely forgotten.
